Twelve Months of Kristal: 50 Loving States Maine

She’s beautiful, too, but in a more wholesome way.

She looks nice. Like a sweet big or little sister. And according to the date I add last in the upper left corner of the portrait, she’ll be dead within three months. Crap.

Ten years I’ve had this gift, and every picture I draw still fills me with sadness. But that’s the point, isn’t it? Santa wants me to remember always that I’m not the only one, that I’m not alone as I was that night when he found me crying over my mother’s body.

I get it. I guess. But my stomach churns because a few days ago, my human mentor, Jae-Hyun, sat me down for a long conversation about committing to my natural talent as a manga artist. He’d asserted quite rightly that he could teach me more if he didn’t only have twelve days a year with me. He even offered me a job in his comic book store, along with the use of the small apartment above the store for free if I agreed to stay on for more than twelve days and seriously commit to my study of the art form. As expensive as San Francisco apartments are, I should have jumped at the opportunity.

I wanted to jump at the opportunity. But instead, I’d told him, “One more year. Just give me one more year at the workshop, and then I’ll come back and be your full-time student.”

That’s how long I figured it would take for me to get my mind right for living in the real world, where things like this would happen, if not every day, enough times to break my heart.

I look at the sharpie portrait I’ve drawn. Then back to the perfect-looking couple on their perfect-looking date. Which I’m about to ruin big time.

Crap.

2

Time to Pretend

HAYATO

Eloa is even better than the agency promised. I hadn’t been expecting much when I contracted with a discreet San Francisco escort agency to satisfy certain needs while I attended the inaugural investors meeting for GoX Aeronautics, the aerospace start-up of one of my business partners, Rodrigo Gutierrez. After all, San Francisco is no Tokyo when it comes to making tasteful arrangements for hot dates. It’s not even London, where I attended university.

But Eloa is as charming and witty as she is beautiful, and she has extensive knowledge of art. She’d been an exact fit for the San Francisco MOMA’s fundraising gala. And now, sitting at Sukiyabashi Daniel, I notice quite a few men sneaking glances at her while their own dates aren’t looking. Admiring and probably wishing that they, like me, got to take this vision of beauty and poise home with them tonight.

Yet, I couldn’t be more bored.

Yes, Eloa is beautiful and charming and sophisticated…just like every woman I’d ever contracted as a date. But I find myself shifting in my seat, wishing I’d just taken her straight back to the hotel after the gala instead of inviting her out for a several-course meal. The first sakizuke course had just arrived, and this hot date already feels…. I struggle for the words to explain it to myself.

It’s like when I discovered “Time to Pretend” by MGMT shortly after finishing business school. I’d liked the song so much, I’d put it on repeat and played it everywhere. On the way to my then-marketing job at Nakamura Worldwide, my family’s multinational automotive company, at the gym—I even set the song as the ringtone on my very first iPhone. Then one day, I could no longer stand it. I’d listened to it over and over again until I’d broken it. To this day, that song does nothing for me. It’s a memory that no longer moves me.

I feel the same about Eloa. All her notes are perfect, her synthesized melody smooth and fluid, but she’s a broken song. One I barely feel like fucking tonight.

However, it’s been weeks since my last hot date, and I do have needs. I weigh whether to push through just for the release of pent-up sexual energy or send her home and take care of myself with my hand back in my hotel room after returning a few business emails.

“Excuse me. I’m so sorry to interrupt…”

I look up from my pondering to see the black woman who’d been sitting on the opposite side of the restaurant now standing over the table Daniel had brought out to accommodate my last-minute reservation.

She’s dressed…if I were spending the night anywhere else but San Francisco, I might have called it odd. Even though Christmas was eleven days ago, she’s wearing an elf hat and a strapless holly green cocktail dress. The dress might have come off as somewhat appropriate if not for the Christmas print biker shorts she wore underneath its short bubble skirt. Her hair hung in long loose waves, but as if afraid such regular hair might get her mistaken for normal, she’d dyed it a brassy yellow.