He looked younger than he really was. He was twenty-five now– no… twenty-six… Yes, twenty-six.
He was twenty-six and he still had the face of a teenager who didn’t get enough sleep or sun. His chin and his jaw hadn’t really elongated in the way that he’d thought they’d meant to. Like his older brother’s had done by the time he was twenty. And his shoulders hadn’t really broadened all that much either. And he was still so… short. He was barely an inch taller than Cass.
It was a weird disconnect. He looked like he’d barely even made his twenties but he felt like he was in forties. On bad days, in his eighties. He was always tired. It didn’t matter whether he got two hours sleep or twelve hours. It didn’t matter whether he’d spent the previous day on his feet from five till nine, or if he’d spent it on the couch watching blockbuster films. He was always tired. He was always sore. If he didn’t have a headache, his back hurt. If he didn’t have a stomach bug, his throat was inflamed.
Some days everything hurt, all at once, like an awful cacophonous symphony of pain. But that was what drugs were for.
That was what a lot of drugs were for.
He got sick a lot. Once, many years ago now, Hiro could remember suspecting her of poisoning him– to keep him weak, to keep him vulnerable and dependent. So that she could coo over him and pull blankets around him and make her special honey, lemon, and ginger drinks for him. But he watched her. He hid behind a wall and watched her prepare soups and hot drinks for him, and she never added anything extra. She didn’t pull something out from under the sink and slip a little in without his notice. Even the pain relief and the cold medication he was supposed to take; she would always make him take the pills and the drinks together, never blend them beforehand. But he still didn’t understand.
If she wasn’t poisoning him, then why did he get so sick all of the time?
He was sick of being sick.
He didn’t have a real job. He worked for Cass. In her café, where there was always work to be done and more and more opportunities for helping hands. Every morning he got up at five and had a shower and opened up downstairs while she started up the coffee machines and began preparing fresh bread. He would throw on an apron and take down all the chairs from the tables and write up the specials for the day and water the plants both in and outside of the café. He would flip the open sign over dead on seven o’clock and then customers would flow right in.
He took orders, mostly. He ran food and drinks to and from tables. He had little responsibilities, here and there. He was in charge of packing and unloading the industrial dish washer. He was in charge of refilling the salt shakers. Occasionally he would stand at the register and hand over cabinet food and take payments and give receipts, but he didn’t always like doing that. He would rather always be moving around. He got too antsy, spending all his time in one spot.
He took late breakfasts and late lunches right in the café. Cass usually reminded him, or else she set a timer on his watch for him, because there was always someone to serve and if he didn’t have someone or something to tell him when to eat, he would just keep working until the café closed for the day. He took unpopular food from the cabinet, or a meal a disgruntled customer had sent back to the kitchen untouched, and he would sit at a table next to the window and watch pedestrians and passengers go by. He watched the people of San Fransokyo actually do something with their lives, while he just…
Lived his own.
And then he got up exactly twenty minutes later and went back to work.
Customers making small talk often mistook him for a student. They called him son and asked him if he was still in school or if he was at university already. Hiro got these kinds of questions almost each day, and each and every time he just smiled patiently and said that this was a family business. He worked under his aunt. He never got any higher education and he didn’t have any qualifications.
He didn’t need them.
Cass told him he didn’t need them.
“Besides,” he sometimes said, taking up plates and walking away. “It’s expensive.”
He said that about a lot of things.
Serving girls who only thought they were his age got tiring. They flirted with him, and he was too polite not to humour them. They always bought more drinks when he played nice anyway. But sometimes they called him ‘stud’ or ‘cutie’ or other names that made him want to switch places with Cass in the kitchen. He lost count of how many napkins he had to throw out with girls’ names and numbers written on them.
It was the apron, the girls said, pointing to him. It was the way he dressed. It was the fitted button-up shirt and the shorts and the apparently adorable white apron over it. It was the socks and the lace-up shoes. It made him look like a cute little boy who’d come straight from school to work in his aunt’s café. It was precious.
Sometimes he acted flattered, because it was just easier. Other times he turned away without even smiling and went to put on a long-sleeved shirt and pants, because he didn’t want to look like a little boy anymore. He’d grown out of that phase ages ago.
Or at least he should have.
It was the apron, he knew. There was just something about it that women found… sexy.
Sometimes Cass would make him work in the kitchen, late at night after the café had closed for the day. She’d make him bake cupcakes and squeeze pastel-coloured, lemon-flavoured icing onto their tops. She put the heat right up so that he wouldn’t complain. She’d make him wear the apron. And nothing else.
She took photos of him on her camera. He didn’t like it when she took photos, even though she promised him again and again that she would never show anyone else, or even think of uploading them onto the internet. They were for her eyes only. She promised him, and he believed her, though he was still shy for the camera, and he just tried to ignore it as he iced the cupcakes and licked crumbs off his fingers.
Even after he’d turned eighteen, it still made him feel uneasy.
He often felt… insecure. Low. On a sick day – he had a bad cough and couldn’t afford to pass it onto anyone else – he approached Cass while she was skimming the newspaper and finishing off a buttered scone. She was so good at reading at him, like there were already tears in his eyes even though they’d been dry for a long, long time now. She turned her chair a little and coaxed him onto her lap and wrapped her arms around his waist. She pressed little kisses all along his cheek, and warmth broke out and twisted up inside of him. She asked what was up and he asked her…
“Do you still love me? Even though I’m bigger now than I used to be?”
Her first response was to smirk. “You certainly have gotten bigger,” she told him, and he thought that she was moving her hand to grab his stomach but she grabbed something else instead.
No, he tried to say, he didn’t mean it like that. He’s bigger now. He’s older. He’s twenty-six and he’s not fourteen anymore– he’s not even close.
She kissed him. “You’re closer than you think,” she whispered.
Cass put a lot of pride and also a lot of effort into her appearance. She could spend up to two hours in the bathroom doing only God knows what. But Hiro knew at least that she dyed her hair a lot, at the roots. And she used a lot of expensive moisturisers on her face. She went to the gym down the road three times a week for an hour or two, to stay in shape. She went out sometimes in the weekends to shop for new clothes and jewellery and products. He looked at her– really looked at her sometimes, and she didn’t look like she’d aged all that much in the past eleven years.
It was easy to forget sometimes that she was over fifty.
It didn’t just worry him, when he thought about it. It terrified him, and hardly anything terrified him anymore. Customers could yell in his face and throw plates to the floor and threaten him with violence, and he would barely react. But whenever he thought about it, he went from stoic to bawling with uncontrolled tears in a matter of seconds. He got out of the café area and gasped into his hand and slid down whatever was stable and solid enough to let him do that and he fell to the floor and wept.
He didn’t want to be alone. Above anything– everything else, he didn’t want to be alone. He couldn’t be alone.
She couldn’t have done everything that she had done to him, only to leave him alone.
They avoided talking about many things, and the future was one of them. The future was uncertain. It was vague and murky and he didn’t want to think about it. He didn’t want to think about what would happen when she went into hospital one day. He didn’t want to think about what would happen when she wanted to retire and stop her business. He didn’t want to think about what would happen when she couldn’t drive anymore or couldn’t climb the stairs and had to sell the house. He didn’t want to think about what would happen when she couldn’t feed herself anymore, let alone him. He didn’t want to think about it– about any of it, and still his mind rebelled against him.
He knew it was a selfish way to think, but he didn’t care. He wished and he wished and he wished that he would be dead and gone– like his brother, like his parents, long before Cass was.
He’d happily leave her all alone.
As long as it meant that he wasn’t left all alone.
After Tadashi had died, the attic space stopped being a bedroom and became a shrine almost overnight. After the news– after the shock wore off and gave way to something much, much more confronting, much more inescapable and harsh – Hiro spent that night with his teeth in Tadashi’s pillow and his hands balled tight and fierce around his brother’s baseball cap. The only part of him that survived the fire.
She had been just as traumatised as he was. She sat on his bed and she was snivelling too as she laid a hand on his back and whispered his name helplessly, over and over again, like it was the only word she knew.
He actually turned to her and hugged her for the first time in months.
There was no one else now.
No one else but the two of them.
He was all she had.
She was all he had.
He started sleeping in her bed the next night. Within a few days, she had cleared out some of her drawers and a section of her wardrobe. She moved his clothes and other personals in for him.
So he didn’t have to see his brother’s empty bed every day.
It was unfair. It was so unfair.
Tadashi died before Hiro could even tell his brother was what was going on with Cass. He didn’t even know how Tadashi would’ve reacted. What he would’ve said. What he would’ve done. If he would’ve helped his little victimised brother get out. If he would’ve made her stop.
Hiro didn’t know how things could’ve been.
What both their lives could’ve been like.
He didn’t always remember having sex with her. Which he supposed was a good thing. But also maybe a bad one.
He wasn’t a good match for her. She always wanted sex and he hardly ever did. He didn’t even watch porn, not even on his own. The videos Cass tried to play for him, in her attempts to get him in the mood, just made him feel embarrassed to watch and his gaze more often than not fell away to the side. He’d kiss her and touch her just to make her turn that awful stuff off.
Cass always had to be the one to initiate sex, otherwise it just wouldn’t happen. He couldn’t recall a single time he’d ever initiated it or even asked for it, though she insisted that he sometimes did.
Hiro didn’t know. Maybe she was right.
God knows his memory wasn’t what it used to be.
Over the years, she’d accumulated a lot of drugs and other sex aids for him. Sometime after he’d hit fifteen, light brushes over his crotch and dirty whispers in his ear didn’t do it for him anymore. He needed more stimulation.
She made jokes. She teased him. “Honestly, hon,” she said, laughing. “You act like you’ve been chemically castrated.”
She was experienced, unlike him. She knew his body inside out by now, and she was good at foreplay. Even if it sometimes took the better half of an hour, she didn’t seem to mind. She didn’t get bored of it in the same way that he did.
Honestly, sometimes he wished he was still an excitable teenager and could still get hard at the slightest touch.
So it would all be over and done with sooner.
She told him one day that her computer had stopped turning on all of a sudden, and she ordered him to stop whatever it was he was doing and fix it. He didn’t really use computers anymore, except to play a few games and watch a few videos. He hadn’t tried to upgrade his specs or modify or tinker with anything like this in years, much less fix a problem. He spent hours trying to do something he could’ve done in just ten minutes– without constantly consulting the internet - back in his youth.
He couldn’t do the things he used to be able to do. It was times like these that he felt completely useless, and he often wondered what happened to him. He used to be a technological, engineering genius. He used to be a child prodigy.
Now he couldn’t even fix a computer.
Cass rubbed his back and eventually took him away from the computer before he smashed it. “We’ll call an expert instead,” she assured him, running fingers through his hair. “It’s OK, sweetie. I know you tried.”
It didn’t assure him.
If he wasn’t a genius anymore, then…
What the hell was he?
He felt bad a lot of the time. Like everything was all so backwards. Like he wasn’t a real man. Wasn’t he supposed to be providing for her? Shouldn’t it have been his money putting food on the table, not hers? But he didn’t even get paid. He didn’t really need the money. Whenever he did, he would appeal to Cass and she would either approve his purchase and give him an allowance, or else she would just go out and buy it for him herself. Because she was the one with the private transport after all.
It all felt so wrong. Like he was still a kid. He was twenty-six years old and he was still a kid.
He voiced his concerns to her. He didn’t feel his age. He was older now, but he still couldn’t drive, he’d never had a real job, he didn’t have any money, he didn’t have a social network, he didn’t… he didn’t have anything a normal adult should have.
“Well, no,” she replied after a pause. She didn’t deny it. But still she smiled, like it was all OK and none of that had ever really mattered anyway. “You have me, my darling. And I take care of you. Don’t I?”
Hiro didn’t deny it.
Every now and again the day would get too slow, and he would creep up to the attic, on his own, when he was supposed to be in bed resting. It was dusty in there. It was dark and musty and cold and quiet. He pulled up the blinds and shoved open the windows and he appraised the room he used to share with his brother like he would a bombsite. Or a tomb.
He sat on Tadashi’s bed and held his brother’s old baseball cap. He went through Tadashi’s things. He went through his music and clothes and toys and books and comics, and creations he couldn’t repair anymore, and photos of their mum and dad and him and family, and he went through them until he just couldn’t hold anything anymore. Until he was a wreck. Until he was just another thing Tadashi had left behind, discarded and forgotten on the floor.
He missed his brother. He missed his brother like nothing else hurt more.
He noticed a number of wedding catalogues in the lounge one day. He leafed through a few of them, staring more at the pictures than he did read any of the text. There were a lot of white dresses. And flowers and outdoor garden venues and arches and canapés and lanterns and other wedding… things.
He knew that she wanted to be a wife. His wife. She often sighed and lamented, whenever they were curled up on the couch to watch one of her rom-coms, or they lay awake together in bed, and she would tell him how much she wanted to be married to him. She made jokes that Hiro didn’t know if they were really jokes. She said that they’d have to forge documents and change their names and obscure their identities, and maybe travel to some faraway country where they couldn’t care less whether you wanted to wed a toadstool or a mountain goat or a sports car.
But it was risky, she told him. It was too risky.
There weren’t many places where incest wasn’t illegal.
She took him by surprise one evening. A pleasant surprise, she told him. He came upstairs after closing up the café for the day and she was standing there in the lounge, with her hair done up and her face full of make-up and a milky-white dress falling in waves to her feet, shimmering in the light of the little candles she’d planted around the room. She smiled and clutched the bouquet of red roses a little tighter. There were tears in her eyes.
She didn’t have a proper tuxedo for him. All she had was a white dress shirt and black dress pants, which she made him change into right then and there. She helped him do up his buttons because his fingers were trembling a little too much.
He told her she was crazy. She laughed like it was a joke. Or a compliment.
The officiant was the cat. The cat sat on a pedestal that was just a Bible on an end table. It was a short service. There were no friends gathered. There was no family.
Of course there was no family.
She slipped a band of gold onto his ring finger and ‘married’ him, unofficially. She cut a cake and feed him a piece that he struggled to keep down. She chimed her glass of cheap champagne against his, and he had almost double what she had that night.
She played soft pop and slow rock music from her own years as she danced with him for the rest of the night. It wasn’t really a dance. It was just a long embrace, where they occasionally swayed and stepped from side to side in time to the music. She rested the side of her face against his shoulder. She breathed in the scent of his neck and his collar and told him that she loved him– she loved him so, so much.
He sobbed. He swallowed hard.
“Love you too,” he got out.
He used to say, shortly after Tadashi had died, that he would leave this place and leave Cass. That he would just pack up his clothes and what money he had and grab what food was in the cupboards, and then just walk out the door and never look back.
But he failed to do that, on the very first day he said he would. Outside it just poured down. He talked himself out of it. No sense in leaving when it was too wet and all his food and clothes would just end up soggy and gross. No – tomorrow, he promised himself. Tomorrow, first thing. He would leave forever.
But he failed to leave the next day too.
For the next few months the pattern continued. He would find any excuse he could to put it off until tomorrow. Tomorrow, tomorrow, he said. Because today wasn’t right. The time just wasn’t right. There were chores to do, or his clothes needed washing, or he wanted to wait until Cass had filled the cupboards with more food, or it was too stormy, or…
Or he got sick. Or he couldn’t get the money.
Or he was too scared.
Or the reality that his only brother was dead bore down on him all over again, and the guilt caught up to him that he just couldn’t do that to her– not after everything she’d done for him– not after he had no family left and Tadashi would’ve…
Things just came up.
A whole year passed. He still told himself at least once a week that he was going to get himself out of there. He was going to get away. He was going to escape– because she was normalising this unhealthy relationship, and this just wasn’t right.
But he didn’t leave.
And another year passed.
He was still there.
Another year passed.
He couldn’t get out.
And another.
Why hadn’t he left yet?
And another.
Did he like it there?
And another.
Did he love Cass?
And another.
Cass took care of him.
And another.
Cass loved him.
And another.
He couldn’t make it on his own now.
And another.
Even if he wanted to.
And another.
He knew now that he wasn’t going anywhere.
If he was going to leave, he would’ve done it years ago.