“No, I’m good. You should sit. You look . . .” He shook his head without finishing, ushered her back into the booth, and took the seat across from her. “What happened?” When she didn’t respond right away, he asked, “Something with Khai? I kind of thought you two would get back together this week. I had a talk with him.”
She pushed a practiced smile onto her lips and shook her head. “No, we are not together.” She fingered the edges of her phone—more accurately Kh?i’s phone, since she was going to give it back to him before she left.
“He hasn’t called you or anything?” Quân asked.
She thinned her lips. “No.” Would she have picked up if he had? She knew he wasn’t going to tell her what she wanted to hear, but then, she couldn’t help worrying about him either. The ceremony on Sunday had shaken him up in a way she’d never seen before. “How is he?”
Quân stretched his head from side to side and rubbed the back of his tattooed neck. “That’s the big question, isn’t it? No one knows. I don’t think he knows.”
She didn’t know what to say to that, so she looked down at her phone.
“Why the tears?” he asked, sounding so nice she almost started crying again.
“Some news. I knew it was bad, but I had the hope anyway, and then . . .” She shrugged.
“News about what?”
“Scholarship, to go to college here. I did not get it.” She tried as hard as she could to keep her tone light and even, but her voice wobbled at the end anyway.
“That was your plan? To get a scholarship and student visa?” he asked.
She nodded and pasted a determined smile on her face, bracing herself in case he laughed at her like the people at the community college probably had.
“Khai loves you, you know,” he said instead.
She stiffened like lightning had struck her, and her heart skipped one beat, two beats. “He told you that?”
“No,” he said with a twist of his lips. “He didn’t tell me that. Well, not with words. But I can tell. You know he’s autistic, right?”
That word. She remembered hearing it before. “Yes, he told me.”
He searched her face. “Do you know what it means?”
She fidgeted with her phone uncomfortably. To be honest, she hadn’t thought about it much. “I thought maybe the touching. There is a way to do it.”
“That’s part of it, but there’s more. His mind is different—no, it’s not a sickness. The way he thinks and also the way he processes emotions are not like most people.”
That gave her pause. Yes, he was different, but his differences weren’t unpassable obstacles. At least, she hadn’t found them to be. To her, Kh?i was just Kh?i, and she accepted him the way he was.
The thing she still hadn’t been able to accept was the fact that he didn’t love her, that he didn’t accept her.
As if he could read her mind, Quân said, “Khai loves you. He just hasn’t figured it out yet.”
She had difficulty believing that. Love wasn’t complicated. You either felt it or you didn’t. There was nothing to “figure out.”
Quân’s gaze turned penetrating, and he asked, “Do you want to find out once and for all if he does? I know how.”
Her pride told her to say no, she’d given him enough chances. But her heart had to know. Feeling vulnerable, she said, “Yes, how?”
He looked her directly in the eyes and said, “If it doesn’t work, you’ll end up married to me. Willing to gamble?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Khai stared at the Evite on his phone in a dazed stupor. He had to be dreaming—no, not dreaming, nightmaring. This couldn’t be real.
YOU’RE CORDIALLY INVITED TO
Esmeralda and Quan’s Wedding