Miles had been trying not to fall asleep since his train left Embarcadero Station heading toward home, but he nodded off almost as soon as the train plummeted into the tunnel under the bay. His commute was more than an hour when he was lucky, nearly two hours if he wasn’t, so he was usually fine to get a little catnap, but the few minutes weren’t ever worth the anxiety he felt when he woke up on a moving train, absolutely certain for a split second that he’d missed his stop. He was certain jerking awake four or five days a week, sometimes twice a day, had to have taken years off his life.
He’d walked straight out of college into a salaried job at an architecture firm making more per year than his granny earned right before she retired after thirty years teaching in Oakland public schools. He was a success story as far as the St. Agnes School of Engineering was concerned. He’d gotten more internships than any other major, won the Young Architect of Promise from the California Society of Civil Engineers, and graduated summa cum laude. Miles had walked into that program as one of two Black men in the highly selective major but was the only one to make it all the way through, another thing his department had made sure to tell potential donors just a few months ago.
Miles and Mei had also moved in together like they wanted, and she’d gotten a paid internship at the California Contemporary Art Museum in Berkeley, so technically, everything was going Miles’s way — he just hated his job. Everything he’d worked for culminated in a job that cut two crucial hours off his sleep schedule, and the sacrifice didn’t feel worth it. Still, the quick naps on trains to and from work were preferable to stewing in his own misgivings at one of the most confusing moments of his young life.
It would have been better if they could have lived in Oakland, but when they went looking for apartments there, they’d either been unable to afford it on the little money they had — even though Miles was only a month away from a real paycheck — or they realized that the police would be in their apartment building more than they would. They’d sublet an apartment in Rockridge from one of Candace’s friends and just made speeding through the Caldecott Tunnel part of their daily commute.
But those long train rides were starting to wear Miles thin on top of all the other confusing and frustrating parts about adulthood.
Most days he woke up just after dawn to go for a run in a nearby park. He did his best not to wake Mei when he left but happily woke her up when he returned home, smiling down at her as she stretched in their bed, half-awake and beautiful. She liked to watch him strip out of his sweat-soaked clothes while she blinked fully awake and then followed him into the bathroom. They usually had time for breakfast together — or a quick fuck in the kitchen instead — before he had to run to the train station and head into The City during rush hour. But on the way back, he didn’t care about how packed the train was as long as there were no delays. He lived for the feeling of stepping out onto the concrete platform. It was always as if he was breathing fresh air for the first time in his life. As if his muscles loosened immediately, except for one. Even though he knew it wasn’t true, in his mind, Mei was always at home. Naked in their messy bed. Naked in their steamy shower. Spreading her legs on the kitchen table for him. Drifting off in his seat with his briefcase resting over his lap just in case, he dreamed about the perfection of his day now that he and Mei lived together — waking up with her in his arms, the taste of the delicate skin in the crook of her neck, her body shifting against his, waiting for him.
“Rockridge,” the train announced in a soft, friendly voice.
Miles turn to the woman next to him. “This is me,” he said, and the woman, nodding off herself, turned her knees toward the aisle but didn’t stand. The train started to slow and Miles seriously considered causing a scene, but he wasn’t going to miss getting home to Mei on time just because someone else was more tired than him. He stepped carefully over her, one leg at a time. His knee bumped into hers and he apologized, but she waved him away and slid into his seat so she could lean against the window.
He jogged down the stairs to the station. There was a man standing next to the turnstiles with an electric guitar and a microphone singing “All My Life” by K-Ci & JoJo in the entirely wrong key. Miles pulled his BART ticket from his front pocket and shoved it into the machine. Street vendors were scattered around the station entrance, offering boxes of chocolate that maybe hadn’t been sitting outside all day but probably had, wilted fresh flowers, hearty silk flowers with embellished raindrops glued to the petals, stuffed animals, cards — literally anything for someone who’d somehow managed to forget that it was Valentine’s Day.
Miles hadn’t forgotten.
Mei and Miles thought of Valentine’s Day as their day. They had their first date on Valentine’s, they said they loved each other for real on Valentine’s, and they were seriously considering getting married on Valentine’s Day…one day. So there was no way Miles could have forgotten the day; the problem was that he’d been too damn tired to plan something special like he always did. He really considered picking up some fresh flowers, thinking he could throw them in bathwater if they didn’t hold up, but when he got close to the dirty bucket, he couldn’t justify spending ten dollars on a dozen roses that didn’t look like they could survive the five-minute walk home.
He turned in the direction of their apartment with a frustrated sigh, trying to convince himself that he still had time to pull something together. He didn’t know what, but something. He jogged across the street from the station and was just about to turn left at the corner when he spotted two people to his left, one man standing in the bed of a pickup truck and one woman on the curb. The man passed a bucket of flowers to the woman. Miles had to squint, but thought their flowers looked like they might live an hour, maybe two, and immediately changed direction to jog toward them.
“Hola, señora,” he called as he jogged, smiling as big as he could.
The man and woman froze and turned to him.
“Cuanto?” he asked, pointing to the bucket of roses that looked downright healthy up close.
She pointed to the roses with her left hand. “Quince.”
He started nodding as he hopped onto the curb, reaching into his jacket pocket to grab his wallet.
“Y, estas on vente cinco,” she called. Miles looked up from his wallet to see the man holding a bucket full of lilies. Mei’s favorite flower. This moment felt like fate.
“Me llevaré,” he said, reaching into his wallet.
* * *
“Ma, I need help,” Mei said, pacing around the kitchen, her blazer and bra still on even though she always preferred to strip as soon as she got home. Her heart was pounding against her rib cage, her breath coming out in gasps.
“Where are you? Are you hurt? What’s going on?” Her mother had clearly been distracted when she answered the phone, but at the sound of Mei’s voice, her attention and motherly instinct snapped into place, which was exactly why Mei called.
It was Valentine’s Day and Miles would be home soon and she was freaking out.
“I need dumplings!”
Valentine’s Day was special, but this was their first Valentine’s Day as college graduates, living together in an apartment where they paid the rent and without Candace and Ezra somewhere in the mix. But it didn’t feel like it. Miles had an early appointment and left before she woke up. They’d texted on and off throughout the day, but it wasn’t the same as waking up in his room and skipping class to have sex all morning while Ezra was in lab. They went from spending all day as relatively carefree students to adults with full-time jobs and responsibilities in a heartbeat, and it was much less fun than they’d anticipated.
A couple of months ago, she’d thought it would be nice to take Miles out to a fancy dinner, but her paid internship didn’t pay nearly enough for her to afford the kind of meal she wanted and, in reality, she hadn’t had time to plan anything anyway. She’d been burdened by work, and so had Miles. This was one of their favorite holidays, but it felt like just a regular Tuesday. This dinner was all they had, and their refrigerator was damn near barren.
Her mother was silent on the other end of the line, but she could feel the glare from Chinatown.
“Ma,” she whined. “Help me. What do I do?”
“Open your refrigerator,” her mother said.
Mei did. “All I’ve got is a head of cabbage, some bell peppers, some ground beef, and a jar of olives. We were going to go grocery shopping on Sunday, but we got tired. What do I do?”
Her mother sighed. “You open your freezer and pull out the dumplings I made last week. Put them in the steamer,” she replied in a monotone. “And then eat them.”
Mei slowly closed the refrigerator before pulling the freezer open. Unlike their refrigerator, the freezer was stuffed. Dumplings from her mom, oxtail from Miles’s, anything they could want and their mothers could freeze was in a freezer bag ready to defrost.
Mei had just forgotten. She wanted to tell her mother that it was an innocent mistake. She was working on her first solo exhibition of teenage artists and the planning had been a nightmare so far. For the past three weeks, she’d walked into work with a knot in her stomach that refused to dislodge until Friday. She wasn’t eating or sleeping enough and apparently, the stress of it all was finally starting to take its toll.
“Ma,” she sighed, licking her lips. Her mind was running as she tried to find the words to explain herself, but she’d just forgotten that freezers existed, so it was taking longer than it should have. “I didn’t know being adult would mean this much cooking,” she offered weakly.
This was, unfortunately, the wrong argument to make to her mother, of all people.
As far as her mother was concerned, most things could be fixed or explained by food. When Mei was sick, her mother asked what she had — or most likely had not — been eating and she started cooking. When Mei was tired, her mother got out the ginger and started cutting fresh fruit. But now that she didn’t live at home, they’d both been struggling with the new boundaries of their relationship — just how much care was enough versus too much — hence the phone call. But the help she called for wasn’t the help she got.
“Have you eaten?” her mother asked, not bothering to hide her annoyance.
Mei opened her mouth but then had to close it to give her some time to think. “I…think so…?” She definitely hadn’t had any snacks because she and Miles were planning to go with her parents to Costco next weekend and the snack drawer in her cubicle was empty. She’d planned to get lunch from Ezra’s favorite taco truck since they’d posted up by a construction site near the museum, but then her boss had called a surprise fundraising meeting. But surely she’d had breakfast; she and Miles almost always had breakfast together before he left for work.
Unless they were otherwise occupied with sex.
“Oooh,” she sighed. “I might not have. I think I forgot.”
The sound her mother made was somewhere between a sigh and an annoyed grunt. When she started speaking again, she was too far away from the receiver. Mei couldn’t hear what her mom was saying, but she could guess, and all she could do was wait.
“Hi, honey,” her dad sighed when he picked up the phone. “Why didn’t you eat today?”
“I was busy. I just forgot.”
“Of course. Why don’t you and Miles stop by for dinner this weekend?”
“Dad.”
“Bring a bag for leftovers.”
“We have food in the house, dad,” Mei said.
“I believe you,” he said, then dropped his voice to a whisper. “Shoulda lied to your mother about lunch, then. See you in a couple days.”
Mei sighed, knowing it was futile to fight her mom via her dad right now. She and Miles were just going to have to make time to go to Oakland this weekend. “Bye, dad. Love you.”
“Love you too, Mei Mei.”
She disconnected the call and closed her eyes. Now that her mother had brought it to her attention, she saw the signs of her hunger quite clearly. First was the freezer debacle, of course. Secondly, when she opened her eyes, she kind of swayed a little. “Fuck,” she said, not just because she was woozy but because her mother was right.
She walked the two steps to their tiny kitchen and looked around, trying to order her next movements by necessity. She grabbed the last tangerine from the fruit bowl and started to peel it, ready to tackle that at least.
She popped a piece of fruit into her mouth and then pulled the freezer back open. “Dumplings, check,” she muttered under her breath, grabbing the first bag she saw. She rifled around in the freezer for some other options and spied some frozen soup stock her mom made — by the gallon, it seemed — and sent over every couple of months. She plopped another slice into her mouth and opened the fridge, trying to think of something, anything she could make and quickly.
She was reaching for the oxtail when she heard Miles’s key in the door.
“Why does my mom think we don’t have any food?” he yelled before he was even fully inside their apartment.
“Come on,” Mei sighed to herself, peeling off another piece of tangerine to pop into her mouth.
He appeared around the wall that separated the kitchen from the front door. He dropped his briefcase on the couch, his socks making a familiar brushing sound on the carpet they both hated.
The sun was starting to set. Bright orange light reflected through their patio door, framing his head in a shadowed ring.
“What’d I miss?”
Mei sighed again. “We never should have let our moms meet,” she grumbled.
He started laughing immediately. “You don’t mean that. Anyway, mom said we can come by her house and pick up some food after we go to your parents on Saturday.”
“Who decided on Saturday?” she asked when she technically hadn’t even agreed.
“Oh… I did,” Miles replied sheepishly. “Was I not supposed to?”
Mei put a hand on her hip and glared in his direction. Miles put his hands up in defeat. “Okay, before you bite my head off…”
He rushed back to the door, and when he returned, he was holding a bouquet of lilies in his hands. “Okay, I’m ready.”
Mei was not. The sun had dipped a little bit more, and now it was framing the length of his body so Mei could see his face clearly. He looked tired and beautiful, and she’d forgotten about Valentine’s Day. She didn’t mean to start crying; it just happened.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, what’s going on?” He dropped his hand to inspect the flowers.
“I forgot to eat lunch,” Mei cried. “And now our parents think we’re too poor to afford food.”
Miles put the flowers on the counter and carefully took the tangerine from her hands. He shuffled her out of the way to close the freezer door. He put his hands on her shoulders and gently pressed her against the wall before sliding his hands down to her waist. “Mei,” he whispered.
“I freaked out and forgot that the fridge has a freezer,” she said in stuttering hiccups, tears falling down her cheeks.
“How do you—”
She glared up at him.
“Never mind. We’re busy. We’ve both got a lot on our plates, and if our parents want to treat us like kids—”
“We’re adults,” Mei cried.
“Yeah, and being an adult is so much damn work—”
“It is!”
Miles moved his hands to her cheeks and wiped at her wet skin. She stepped into him and pressed her cheek to his chest. He wrapped his arms around her and placed a firm kiss to the top of her head.
“I didn’t have time to plan something for today,” she said, her words muffled by his coat.
“Is that what you’re really crying about?” he asked.
“That and I really didn’t eat anything today.”
She could feel him nodding. “Makes sense. I bought those flowers at the BART station like ten minutes ago,” he admitted.
She sighed dramatically. “Last year, we were getting drunk in Cancun, and now I’m pulling frozen soup out of the freezer.”
“Maybe next year, we’ll be doing something like looking at paint samples in our own house.” Miles laughed.
“How romantic.” She wrapped her arms around his waist.
He kissed her head again. “As long as I’m with you, it will be.”
She smiled and buried her face in his chest.
“My mom said she’ll make that apple bread thing you like.”
Mei lifted her head to look him in the eyes. “Really?”
Miles smiled and bent down to brush his mouth against her lips. “Seriously. She’ll probably bake us every bread she can think of, and your mom is probably calling the butcher now for bones so we can make every soup possible. We probably won’t even have to cook for at least a week.”
That really lifted Mei’s mood because, “We are not good cooks.”
“At all,” Miles agreed. “Maybe we should take some classes or something because outside of eggs, rice, and barbecue, what are we even doing?”
“I can’t even do the barbecue,” she frowned.
“I know,” he said, softening his agreement with a firm squeeze.
“So until we learn how to make something more complex, let’s just let our parents help us. We were probably going to see them on Saturday anyway.”
“True,” Mei sighed. “You wanna go grab some burritos for dinner?”
His stomach growled. “What he said,” Miles joked.
Mei laughed while lifting her arms from his waist to grab his head, but he was already on the same wavelength and bending forward to kiss her again, this time deeper and harder, but only for a second.
“Wait,” Mei sighed.
“No,” Miles shot back with a laugh, pulling her toward the front door. “We’re both hungry. Eat. Sex. Sleep.”
They slipped back into their shoes. “Simple but poignant,” Mei sighed.
“And the best carne asada on this side of the Caldecott.”
“They really should pay us for all the free marketing we do.”
Miles grabbed his keys from the hooks they’d installed on the wall and pulled the front door open. “You laughed at me the first time I said that, but you get it now,” he said, putting a hand on her back and ushering her out the door.
Mei felt woozy again, but this time from something that wasn’t about her missed meals.