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“Sure,” she said uncertainly, exchanging a look with Thomas and it struck Seong how normal the two of them looked next to each other. They both had a quirk in their brows like they were exchanging a silent conversation then she pulled out a few more napkins from her apron to set on the table. “Uh, caramel hot chocolate, right?”
“Right,” Thomas said softly. “Thank you.”
“Sure thing,” she said, smiling a dazzling smile, “let me know if you anything else.”
Thomas looked down as the girl walked back to the counter and Seong took a careful drink of his coffee to clear his windpipe. “I’m sorry,” he muttered, his eyes downcast towards his hot chocolate.
He doesn’t even drink coffee yet, Seong realized, groaning internally at how very young Thomas was. “No, I’m sorry,” he said sighing. He was reminded of Tiger. The age gap was smaller, but Tiger had that similar jarring ability to go back and forth between seeming older than he was and so much younger. Brutus had once said that Seong used to do the same thing, but Seong thought the man was exaggerating. He took a breath in, his throat still hurting but at least cleared. “To your question… yes, and that was wrong of me. One of the risks of prying into people’s lives behind a screen all day and night is sometimes you forget that information is people’s lives. Usually, that’s a good thing considering the things I do for a living, but that doesn’t make it okay to go digging into your life without permission.”
Green eyes darted up towards Seong then away again, his fingers tapping rhythmically against the table. “It’s fine-”
“No, Thomas, it’s not,” Seong said firmly, then sighed when Thomas flinched and looked up at him. “It’s not okay for someone to look into your private information without your permission like that. It’s not okay for them to go behind your back and know things about you. It’s invasive. It’s wrong. I should have allowed you to tell me about your grades if you wanted me to know about them. Not look into it myself.” Particularly not last night while I waited for my video editors to finish scrubbing a murder, he thought privately.
“But- I don’t,” Thomas started then paused. He frowned, the tapping seeming to focus on one finger. “I don’t care that you looked. I’m just confused why you would be interested in them.”
Seong sighed, sitting back as he rubbed at his forehead. Of course he doesn’t care, he thought. Finnegan probably convinced him he doesn’t deserve to have that sort of privacy. Somehow that was worse. Seong was used to people being offended and upset with him for prying into their lives. It was expected. But he couldn’t tell Thomas the real reason he had looked— couldn’t tell this eighteen year old high school senior that he couldn’t get him out of his head for the last two months since he met him. Perhaps he could manage vague? “You sparked my interest,” he said, folding his arms over his chest. “I honestly had been wondering when you would contact me. I was starting to think you had changed your mind about computer careers when your email came in. I was pulling an all-nighter anyway so… I took a peek at how you were doing.” A stretch of the truth: he had been monitoring Thomas’s progress long before last night, anxiously watching his grades tick higher at the end of each week, silently rooting for him to catch up before the break. “In any case,” he continued when he saw that Thomas wasn’t going to become righteously outraged, “what is it that you think you want to do with computers?”
“Oh- I- um,” Thomas flushed and Seong couldn’t help but think how good he looked. If Thomas smiled and flushed at the same time, the young woman was going to need to bring a mop to clean Seong off her floor. “I-I think- I want to do video game programming. Not the art design or graphics,” he added quickly, all of his fingers moving against his cup. “I’m not much of an artist and I don’t think I’d like to be one. But making it… do the things? Getting those images to move and interact. To make the events trigger and respond to the commands the player does-” The tapping stopped. “What?”
Seong realized he was smiling as Thomas talked. He hadn’t expected so much passion so quickly from the nervous and awkward teen. But those green eyes had sparked with a burning desire to get his hands on something and figure it out as his fingers twitched on the table next to his hot chocolate. “I’m just glad to see you excited about it.” He pulled out a small notebook from his jacket. “Sounds like you’re leaning more towards coding.” He wrote down a website and his number then crossed out the number. “This is a website that is more or less a free game that teaches the basics of coding.” He held out the paper. “Give it a try. Get to level twenty. If you are still interested in learning more, send me an email and I’ll get you more specific information. If you end up not liking it, then let me know and we can puzzle out what might be more enjoyable. ‘Computers’ is a broad term so you are really only limited by what actually interests you.”
Thomas looked at the paper in his fingers, frowning at it. “O-okay. I’ll do that.”
“Depending on what type of computer you have, you’ll probably have to upgrade eventually,” Seong said, pulling his mask up. “But the game is very friendly to most home computers. I can help you find the next step up when you get to that point but it’ll be pricey. Do you used a laptop or a desktop now?”
“A laptop,” Thomas said, turning red again. “But- well, it’s older and the battery doesn’t last long off the charger. My Aunt Ceri calls it an immovable brick. It used to be hers.”
Seong laughed at that. Both of Thomas’s aunts seemed like they had good sense of humor when they weren’t protecting their country or their nephew. “Well, that’s fine,” he reassured him. “If it goes out completely, let me know and I’ll help you find something to replace it.” He rolled to his feet, stretching and picking up his things from the table.
“Y-you’re leaving?”
Seong paused, immediately feeling guilty for reasons he didn’t fully understand. He had half a mind to sit right back down and talk to Thomas until his aunt or the staff threw them out. But he couldn’t do that. He needed sleep and he didn’t trust himself to maintain the distance they needed to keep. “Sorry,” he offered, smiling through his mask. “I have other things I need to get done today. But I’m just an email away if you need anything.”
“I-I-” Thomas’s stuttering seemed to radiate out, as did the twitching in his fingers and Seong realized far too late that what he had mistaken as a nervous movement was something else as Thomas’s entire body seemed to spasm. His eyes, now bright with sudden tears, dropped to the table, his stem still aggressively trying to make its way out. “S-s-s-sorry. N-n-n-never-m-m-mind.”
Seong stared down at him, the desire to hold Thomas, to reassure him that he hadn’t done anything wrong and there was no reason to cry threatening to overwhelm him too. His fingers twitched on the snake wrapped around his fingers, his thumb finding its head to flick it back and forth as he glanced towards Jessi.
She was standing up, frowning as she focused on Thomas.
The snake coiled on the table as he set it down next to Thomas’s hand. He had more of them stashed away in his office. “Any time you want to talk,” he told him quietly, already knowing he was nearly crossing the line but unable to leave it like this, “about anything. Just reach out, alright? Next time, I’ll make sure I have more time so we can talk longer. I promise.”
Thomas didn’t look up but he did nod and start to reach for the snake like it might rise up to strike him.
Walking away, Seong reminded himself that the person who needed to comfort and care for the young man was on her way over. It was never going to be his place to offer that comfort no matter how much he wanted it to be.
Jessi glanced at him as they past and they shared a small nod. That gave him some relief. He didn’t want her to think he was abandoning Thomas or had purposefully upset him. She seemed to understand and that was all Seong could hope for. That and that Thomas would reach out again.
* * *
Thomas stared at himself in the fogged glass of the bathroom mirror. A trail of water dripped from where he had swiped his hand across it, the image still distorted. His eyes were still bloodshot, but at least his nose wasn’t red anymore. He hadn’t been able to tell Jessi why he had started sobbing once they had gotten into the car. He didn’t even know why he was so upset.
No, that was a lie.
He had been excited to see Seong again. It was all he had been able to think about all day. But he hadn’t expected how… good it would feel. It wasn’t as if he had no one to talk to. Besides the therapist once a week, Issac had made a point to text him every day after school and they usually had a phone call every two weeks or so to talk. But Seong’s comment about having peers and friends that knew what he was talking about had hit a deeper chord than Thomas had expected.
For some reason, he just knew that Seong understood him better than anyone else. Logically, he knew he had no reason to think something like that. That his feelings could very well be hormones and the loneliness that had always been there, but was now strangling him without Jake’s solid presence in his life imprinting onto Seong. Thomas was self aware enough to realize that he was never going to be a match for someone like Seong. They would never be more than whatever Seong was offering.
He looked down at the snake that Seong had put on the table before he left. It was a fidget toy. His aunts had gotten him a few over the years to try to help his stimming, but he had gotten rid of them all after Jake took one away before they picked up other Clovers on his way to take Thomas home. The men had been drunk and when one found the toy, he had mocked Jake for playing with “little girl toys.” Jake made no effort to correct anyone that it wasn’t his. He just waited until he and Thomas were alone and told him it would be better to not bring any more toys around. It was one of the many small ways Jake had tried to look out for him despite everything.
