Curious, I take it. My shoulder drops with the weight; it’s heavier than I expected.
“What for?” I ask, mollified. If Winny could see me now, she would laugh; I’m soft for surprise gifts.
“Bargaining didn’t work, so I’m trying for bribery instead,” Julian says. He looks left, then right, as if suddenly remembering that we are in a public place. “When are you done with clinic?”
“I just finished,” I say softly. “But I still have to make a few phone calls, and then after that I pick up Onix from doggy daycare, but—”
“Dinner tonight?” Julian interrupts.
I look down at the bag in my hands to hide my surprise.
“Am I so lame that I look like I don’t have any plans on a Friday night?” I say. “Wait. Don’t answer that. I am lame. And fine, I’ll take dinner. No need to pick me up. I’ll make my way there. Just tell me where to go.”
There is a tittering of giggles around us, and behind me, I hear a triumphant“Woop!” from my medical assistant, who’s been spying on us from the clinic door.
Julian grins like he’s the one who’s been handed a prize.
“Great,” he says. “I’ll text you the details. See you at seven.”
And then he squeezes my hand, turns on his heel, and leaves, picking up a fallen cane for an elderly man as he passes him. The ghost of his warmth lingers on my skin for minutes after he’s gone.
It takes me minutes more to realize that he’s taken my exhaustion with him.
Seven
Julian has bought me not one, buttwoespresso machines, as a text from Pamela confirms (OMG this super hot guy just dropped off an ESPRESSO MACHINE at the reading room and said it was from you! Thank you thank you thank you Sean! Don’t tell Haoran but this is why you’re my favorite!), one for the clinic, and another for the cath lab upstairs. They’re not just any espresso machines, either, but ones that cost six hundred dollars (I checked) and come with a milk frother. In the small card he enclosed inside the bag, he writes:You’re someone who I think could be special to me. Sorry for behaving in a way that might have made that hard to believe. In exchange, a way to ensure that you never start your days uncaffeinated again.
This is too much, I text back. I’m already bewildered enough by the fact that I seem to have been cured of the malady that’s been ailing me for the last week, but Julian’s generosity pushes me right over the edge. I don’t like not knowing what’s waiting for me down below.
It’s nothing,he responds.See you tonight.
I meet Julian at the Gundis, a Kurdish restaurant in Lakeview: one of his favorites, he says. It’s cozier than I expected, the kind ofplace that you’d only know about through word of mouth and cavorting with locals. I spot him from the window, speaking enthusiastically to his waiter, who laughs as he places down rolled cutlery. When I open the door, it takes me a moment to realize they are not speaking English.
I settle into the seat across from him, cross my hands on the lacquered table.
“Are you Kurdish?” I ask.
Julian gives me an inscrutable smile.
“Lovely to see you again too, Sean, I had a wonderful rest of my day, thanks for asking,” he says.
“I’ve just been wondering where you’re from,” I ask. “I can’t place you. Ethnically, I mean.”
“Why do you have to?” Julian asks, a twinkle in his eye.
Because I don’t understand you at all, I want to say,and I think a little cultural guidance could point me in the right direction.
“I’m just curious,” I say instead. “I want to know why this place, of all the spots in the city, gets into your top slots. And why you can speak the language.”
Julian takes a hesitant sip of his water.
“I’m neither Kurdish, nor was I speaking it. That was Turkish, which Devram, our waiter, is, and which I only speak conversationally, because I studied abroad in Istanbul a while back.” He clears his throat. “And I like this restaurant because it reminds me of a café in Besiktas I used to frequent. There’s a lot of overlap between Kurdish and Turkish cuisine, and it’s nostalgic.”
Every time Julian opens his mouth, he reveals a piece of history that makes putting him in a box even more impossible. A wealthy orphan with a vaguely British accent whose short twenty-seven years on the globe have taken him across continents and helped him amassmore wealth and experience than people twice his age? Nothing about his story feels quite real, like he’s been plucked out of a fan fiction written by an overenthusiastic horny fandom queen crafting her ideal leading man. I ask him a few more questions and learn that Turkish is actually hiseighthlanguage; he’s also fluent in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Bengali, and Arabic and apparently can get around in Bengali and Tagalog too.
“I’m so confused,” I say out loud. I know that Julian wants me to be impressed, and I am; I know just enough Spanish to get through a clinic visit with a native speaker, but the moment someone asks me about my hobbies, I draw a blank. “You’re so young. How did you learn so many languages?”
Julian smirks.