Leave the Night On Pt. 03

My greeting is the same old welcoming smile. On the other hand, the open arms are an invitation forever foreign to me. I stand aside myself to watch my mother hug me. My parents were never the kind of people to show much physical affection to their children. I'd never seen any of them hug anyone before Hannah was born. My father gave me a total of three hugs my entire life: the first when I graduated as a vet; the second when Hannah was born; and the last when he knew he was out of time. Now, in adulthood, my mother's hugs are plenty, although I still treat them like rare and precious opportunities I enjoy like she too might leave tomorrow.

"Are you hungry?" My mother asks me, in Korean. She insists on speaking Korean only when Hannah is around. She's constantly shaming me for not doing it myself. It's a father's duty. Who else is going to teach it to her? She says. What can I say? Hannah and I were both born in this country. I also believe it's important she knows the language of her ancestors, even if I'm not the most reliable teacher. I'm a little rusty these days, anyway.

"I had pancakes this morning." I say, with more of an accent than my 6-year-old has.

"Pancakes are not healthy."

"Whole wheat banana pancakes, Umma." It comes out in English.

My mother hates it when she starts a conversation in Korean and I answer her in English. I hear her disapproving hmph! at my back as I turn to open the fridge. Inside, there are three containers labelled with my name. "Umma, I have food in my house." Hannah and I alone can't possibly eat as much food as my mother sends us.

"You can eat my food too. You are a big man. Han-Han is growing. A growing girl needs food." Her answer is as much a reproach on my diet as it is on my language of choice. "Jae-Woo and Soo-hyun are big like Appa was."

"Yeah, yeah. You married Dad because he was tall and handsome. We know, Umma." I give Hannah a conspiratorial wink. She giggles. A ritual has been established; we hear this story every time we come over, and we leave with at least two Tupperware full of leftovers.

"When are you going to marry too?" My mother drops her inappropriate question like a brick.

The apple I just bit into scrapes its way down my throat like sandpaper. Fuck me. Here it comes. I brace myself for the incoming familiar tale. My mother keeps a list of every single woman in town she considers eligible to be my next wife. She dutifully renews it every season, since I'm always denying to meet the women she selects for me.

"Daddy can't get married. He was already married," Hannah says, fast as a whip. Tonight, I should give her an extra serving of dessert for that comment. She is, in a way, correct. I can, but I don't think I want to retry marriage anytime soon.

"When will he marry again?" My mother insists.

"Never," I say wryly.

"Mr. Kang daughter back in town. She's doctor." She goes as far as saying it in English. That's a statement to her desperation.

"Umma, I don't need you to find me a girlfriend. I can find one by myself." I don't say what I'm actually thinking to my mother's face because she's not above whooping my grown ass if I dare be disrespectful to my elders.

"If you could, you would have already."

"Umma." I'm brave enough for a single exasperated breath. This isn't the kind of talk I like to have with Hannah around.

She goes on, relentless as always. "Jae-Woo, time is not your friend. One day, you'll grow old and bald, like Appa. Your belly will swell like a pregnant woman's." The image makes Hannah chuckle and I cringe.

"The right person won't care if I'm fat and bold." Oh, well. I sound so damn romantic.

"No woman wants a fat, bald man."

"Well, I guess I'm lucky I still have my hair."

There's a moment of alien silence that slides in scaring the shit out of me. Umma never does silent. I glance up from my apple to meet her narrowed shrewd eyes on me.

I even use the mother tongue to ask, "What?"

"Do you have a secret woman?"

I almost choke on my fruit. "Jesus, Mom! Will you quit it!" I run a hand down my face to hide it from her. Somehow, saying yes feels wrong and saying no it's even worse.

She shuffles closer until she's all I can see. Her eyes are studious slits. "Han-Han says you're happy. Always smiling."

Nonchalantly, I say, "I usually do. Smiling is very healthy."

She uses the silence as a weapon again. She knows it unnerves me. It gets under my skin how she seems to know things about me I don't think I'm showing. "Okay, I'm going," I say, rising from the stool abruptly. I can't give this time to develop into a more serious conversation. "I have a sick cat in my car that needs immediate care. I'll be back later, for lunch. Bye, Han. Love you." I kiss both of my girls quickly and leave.

The relief I feel inside my car would make anyone believe I've only just escaped the Spanish Inquisition's fire. I drive back to the farm with nagging thoughts in my head. I love my mother. She's a strong woman who I admire immensely. I know she only wants me happy. I could easily have told her there's someone as a potentially strong candidate to fill this position she wants to see occupied in my life and be done with her list of eligible bachelorettes.

Instead, I said nothing. I never do.

She knows where I go and what I do those Saturday nights I leave Hannah with her. She doesn't oppose my fleeting, and very private, affairs so long as they remain discreet and contained to Saturday nights. Lately though, my mother's list is brought up with alarming frequency. There's always a Mr. Kang's daughter, Mr. Bae's daughter, Mr. Kim's daughter...There is always a daughter who is one of us. Every mention of a name from that list bothers me to a numbing degree. My mother wouldn't understand what's wrong with it. I can't explain to her what's wrong with it because I understand why she keeps it homogenized.

She doesn't want to see my history with Karen repeated.

I know how my immigrant mother would react if she saw the woman making me smile so effortlessly lately. As much as I love and respect Umma, there is an unbridgeable gap between our generations. There are oceans, continents, cultures and the aftermath of war between what resonates as home to her and what's home to my daughter and me. Someone who suffered as my mother did, who experienced the bleak emptiness of hunger, cannot conceive of a world where someone with the privileges she gave me could be allowed to prioritize their love life based on personal feelings instead of family values. This is the main reason why my father never fully accepted Karen. It wasn't an issue of her being white, as I'm sure my mother wouldn't have a problem with Pearl being black. It was an issue of not being like us.

With Karen, I was willing to fight my family. I was young, in love. Blinded by my callowness. My father said we weren't right for each other, and in the end, his concerns were proved right by Karen herself. I didn't understand then. Now, with Hannah, I do.

My parents had a hard life in Korea. Before they came here, all they knew was poverty and work. They left all that penury behind so my brother and I would never know how merciless life can be. Appa wanted his sons to have a good, easier life. In his conception of the world, to marry a Korean woman would be right as the day is clear and the night is dark. We would understand each other, we would share the same values and traditions.

The marriage I entered against my family wishes ended brutally, with my love for Karen being slowly corroded by an increasing awareness that, to the world around us, I was inferior to her. Karen herself had a role in cementing that notion. With every dinner, Thanksgiving, Christmas, family reunions and anniversaries in which her cousins would make bad jokes disguised as camaraderie, I expected Karen to have my back. I waited for her to say something. My expectations were that she would, eventually, confront the veiled insults thrown at me that would, one day, be used as weapons against her own daughter. She stood by, laughing alongside them, and never said a word on my behalf. The paucity of her love and care for me was what ended us.

From my own wife's family, I endured disrespect for a culture they neither wanted nor cared to understand. A culture that belonged to a people whose blood ran in their granddaughter's veins. All these reasons are why we went our separate ways. Why Hannah stayed with me. She is her mother's daughter, but when the world sees her, they see me.

For all the bullshit Hannah will be told in her life, I must be the one to teach her how to sift through it. I can't afford to be naive enough to believe the woman I choose to be with won't impact more heavily on Hannah's life than on my own. Because it will.

Pearl was a conquest, a weekly distraction from my responsibilities as a man, as a single Dad. She was an attractive woman I met one Saturday night. An almost arbitrary choice. Had she not been at that club that night, I might've found myself interested in someone else. She was just another girl until the sex was over. Until we talked and I was hit with a sense of the extraordinary. The next weekend, when I purposely returned to the club, I hadn't acknowledged that pulsing hope in my subconscious that longed to see her again until she found me by the bar. A few Saturdays after that, I surprised myself by suggesting we meet someplace quieter, where we could talk, get to know each other for real.

It snuck up on me, this knowledge that I like Pearl. I like her enough not to care much about the consequences, even knowing those as intimately as I do. I don't ignore our circumstances. She's already intimately involved in Hannah's life. We were supposed to have a strictly professional relationship. We are, both of us, minorities. I might not understand the implications of being a black woman in this world, but I have a slight notion of what those might be. And I'm an Asian man, with a 6-year-old mixed-race daughter, romantically involved with a black woman.

As a young man, I might have thought it was possible to turn a blind eye to these matters. In my case, I used to think dating would be simple, that feelings would overcome the complexities of racial issues between Karen and me. There was no space for reality in my naivety. A few mistakes later, I know exactly how Pearl and I, together, will be seen by the eyes of the world.

***

PEARL'S LEGS ARE UP, both feet resting on the dashboard. Her toenails are painted a cornflower blue. It's a detail so uniquely Pearl, it opens a door to understanding how she is. Colorful, vibrant and bold. It gets me smiling.She gets me smiling. It's a skill she's acquired. She's fumbling with the radio, tuning in and out of stations. When she finally finds one befitting her mood, she turns to me with a smile. It's wide and incandescent. That type of smile a man could create fantasies around.

A month into this and, unsurprisingly, I enjoy being around this woman. She's fun, clever, kind, a little crazy. She goes around telling my kid she's a smart and beautiful girl. In different circumstances, if she weren't Hannah's teacher maybe, I would be bothered by her presumption. Things being as they are, Pearl's reassuring words to my daughter have only increased my admiration towards her.

There is the one thing that's got my head warped like barbed wire. Those intrusive thoughts, enmeshed in my wet fantasies, in which I get flashes of Pearl in that world of two I inhabit. She is there, comfortably in a space of her own. Even as the idea scares me, I give myself allowance to say she looks damn fine enlarging my world. She is a good reminder that, as much as I love my daughter, a father isn't all that I am.

"Thanks for bringing Mal back to us safe and sound," Pearl says, diverting my attention to her.

"You're welcome. I'm glad I could help."

"You were amazing," she says. "Lil's your new biggest fan." She casts a longing look out the window before turning her eyes back to me. "So, what's for dinner tonight?"

"KFC, as in Korean Fried Chicken. Or, as I like to call it, the best damned fried chicken you'll ever eat."

"I feel really bad I can't cook anything for you," she says. She wraps her arms around the back of her thighs and rests her cheek on her knees. I resent the imminence of winter and the cold that's forced Pearl to wear jeans and a knitted sweater. Too much of her is hidden.

"I can think of other ways you can make up for your lack of culinary skills, My Pearl," I tease, damping the impulse to ask her to, please, sit up straight.

"I bet you can," she says, pouting. Pearl's lips have that lusciousness intended solely for the purpose of giving men like me fantasies. I catch myself wishing her mouth around my dick, making a mess. Filthy and hungry for it. Lipstick all over our skins, the way it was once.

She catches me ogling her. "Stop eye fucking me and watch the road, Julian."

I tear my eyes from her mouth with a smirk. "You're distracting."

"I know."

The sun is coming down, painting the horizon orange and purple, beginning to settle for the day right in my line of sight. "Hey. Could you grab my sunglasses, please? They're in the glove compartment."

"Yeah. Of course."

Suddenly, she cries out. "Oh my God!"

The discharge of adrenaline she triggers in my bloodstream causes the car to swerve on the unpaved road. A wave of dust rises behind us. "What?!" Heart pounding, I glare at Pearl to find her eyes are shining with an almost manic excitement.

"That's a lot of lube, Julian." She holds up the 30 oz bottle of lubricant gel I shouldn't have left where she found it. "Why do you have this much lube in your glove compartment again?"

Even experiencing mild tachycardia, I grin at her, tasting the incoming fun. "It's for the cows."

She draws back, brown eyes bulging. "For the what now?"

"For rectal palpation of cows," I say in a feigned explanatory tone.

"Rectal palpation...?"

I can't help laughing at the confusion scrunching up her face. "Yeah. You see, it's for when I have to stick my arm inside their- "

"Wow, too much technical information," she shrieks. Fascinated, she glances at my arms. I love the way she ogles my forearms. I've never considered that such a body part could be so appealing to her. "But like, the whole length of your arm?"

"Sometimes, yeah."

She winces. "Ouch. Poor cows."

"Hey, you should know I'm always gentle with the girls," I say with a meaningful look at her jeans-clad thighs.

"Oh, please. The circumference of your arm is almost equal to the one of my thighs! How do you gently stick your huge arm inside a vagina?"

It's a good thing I'm sitting down, because I'm starting to have bellyaches from constraining the laughter threatening to burst out of me. Hannah's the only other person alive that can do this to me. "Actually, cows have huge vaginas. And most times it's not their vaginas. It's their assho-"

"Augh!" She covers her ears with her hands in an infantile gesture. "Too much information!"

"You've asked!"

"I don't want to hear about you fisting cows!"

I have to take one hand off the wheel to wipe tears from the corner of my eyes. "It's not fisting!"

She crosses her eyes, that ironic turn to her mouth. "Then what is it?"

"It's-"

In another crazy, impulsive interruption, she shrieks again. "Oooh! I love this song!" She turns up the volume on the radio and the introducing chords to a The Cure's song fill up the car. Her reaction is nothing I'd ever have expected to see. She hits me with the brightest smile; then she starts singing. Very, very badly.

"I don't care if Monday's blue

Tuesday's grey and Wednesday too!

Thursday, I don't care about you

It's Friday, I'm in love!"

"My ears are bleeding," I shout over the loud music, and her even louder singing.

She sings along, ignoring me. "It's Friday, I'm in love!"

Divided between the road ahead and Pearl, she wins my exclusive attention for a few seconds. I'm stupefied by what a simple 90's song has caused. Trapped in this car, with Pearl singing to the full capacity of her lungs and being this uninhibited and ridiculous in front of me, I have that feeling again. That feeling that creeps up on me and makes me wonder what else this woman can do to surprise me into liking her more by the day. I feel the privilege of this moment. Because I'm getting to know her intimately, I know she can be, at times, a little insecure. And yet she's showing me this side of herself with no fear of exposure. I'm flattered as I recognize what this means. It's trust.

She shakes her head back and forth. A few curls escape her bun and go flying around her face. With seemingly not a care in the world, she goes on singing and smiling. I can't remember anyone I've ever dated being so unapologetically themselves in my presence. An insane burst of laughter roars out of me. I throw my head back and guffaw, unable to fight it any longer. A hand clutches my stomach because I think I might go out of breath any second. I'm so intoxicated by the feeling, I don't even mind that Pearl is tone-death and her singing is the worst thing I've ever heard.

"Am I going to have to stick something in your mouth to make you stop?!" I shout, loud enough that she can hear me over singing about eating in the middle of the night.

She starts laughing so hard she drops the song mid-verse. Panting, she reaches for the radio and turns the volume down. "Depends on what you're going to stick in my mouth," she says, out of breath. She raises a suggestive brow and drops her eyes to my crotch.

"Well, you've got two options," I say through a gigantic smile.

"Which are?"

I'm paying less attention to driving every passing second. "Well, one is my tongue."

She bites down on her bottom lip too deliberately slowly for it to be an unconscious quirk. "Do I dare know the other?"

My smile drops as my eyes dally over her mouth. She licks her lips, knowing the fantasy playing in my head. She leans in, closer to me, buries her nose in my neck and inhales deeply. "Goodness Julian, you smell so good I want to eat you up."

"Darling, for you, I'm an open buffet. All you can eat."

She slides on her seat until our thighs are touching. She looks up at me with eyes almost naïve in their maliciousness. "Don't mind if I do," she says right before ducking under my arm and getting right on to unbuttoning my jeans.

My fingers tighten on the steering wheel when my brain understands what's about to go down. I'm semi-hard by the idea already. Pearl pulls my zippers down. She's clumsy, yet steady, as she wraps a warm hand around the base of my dick and pulls it out of my boxers. Instantly, driving becomes a secondary concern.

"Hello, beautiful," she whispers and my dick feels the blow of warm wind from her breath. She presses one feather light kiss to the tip, then her tongue darts out and licks a perfect slow line down my length, from tip to base. My blood heats up, adrenaline rushes through my veins again. That is all it takes for me to get full-on hard.

"Fuck."

I thank all the Gods in the Universe for the straight as an arrow road that leads to the farm. Keeping the car going straight ahead is about all I can do when I have Pearl's hot and generous mouth taking the entire head of my dick in. She sucks applying suction with the preciseness I love. She is sure to make it slippery as she goes down half my length, slowly and careless, then up again. When she gets to the top she licks. Tasting. Lingering.

On a sudden move, she goes down for it. All of it. I throw my head back, groaning so loudly I feel my own chest rumbling. I miss a bump in the road and, when the car jolts a little, my tip hits the back of her throat. She swallows, clamping her mouth around me to keep my dick from sliding out. The sensation flares inside me, blurring my vision.