He went to sit down at the table but there was nowhere to put his dish. The surface was piled high with everything from Mimi’s sketch pads to her electronics to her sewing machine. She rushed over to make room, stacking things on one of the chairs and the sofa bed. “Sorry.”
The coffee table had been moved aside in order to open the sofa bed, which was not yet folded up for the day. Mimi’s clothes and shoes and whatnot were also spilling out of two suitcases in the middle of the floor. There were fabric swatches and sewing tools everywhere, and even a pair of slippers on the end table. In short, Mimi’s life lay in front of them.
“Honestly, Mimi, I don’t know how much longer I can live like this. You know, Jin asked me again if you’d want to stay with him. He’s got the huge flat all to himself now and there’s plenty of room.”
“No, I, no…” Mimi tripped over her words.
It was true that the whole third floor of Jin’s Chinatown building was living space. The showroom was at street level and the second floor was the studio. Shun had bought the building when he’d started to make some money with LilyZ and it had never been occupied by anyone other than the Zhang family ever since.
When Bai finally couldn’t stand Wei’s disrespectful ways one minute longer and divorced him, she moved to the Upper East Side to be near her sister. No one knew where Wei had stayed before he died. Jin had lived in the Chinatown flat by himself until Helene moved in, and was now alone there again.
However, Mimi staying with Jin would be intolerable. How could she ever tell him or her brother that just the proximity she typically had with Jin was, and always had been, enough of a struggle? Seeing him several times a week, sharing meals, hovering together over a garment, confiding their joys and sorrows.
Feeling his sparks.
It was all already too much.
If Jin was behind her in a room, even if she didn’t see him she’d know he was there. She could recognize the sound of his breathing. Knew what size shirt he wore. His favorite movie. Song. Flavor of ice cream.
But while they’d shared cottages in the woods and summer beach shacks, moving into his flat would be another matter entirely. Going to sleep under the same roof, waking up to each other day after day, night after night.
That would be skidding too close to thoughts that were only allowed out in the wee hours.
Aaron and Mimi finally sat down at the cleared table with their breakfast. Changing the subject, she reminisced, “Remember how Dad used to snip fresh chives onto eggs?”
“I like that you always put cheese in them. But yeah, he’d bring the little potted plant from the windowsill over to the table.”
The siblings had grown up in a happy home full of warmth. Delia and Benjamin Stewart walked arm in arm together down the street just as they did through everything in their lives.
Until the death do us part bit came too soon.
“Mom and Dad had something very special.” Which is what Mimi longed for. That kind of union, a friendship and a romance all mixed into one.
“Unlike Wei with Bai.”
“It must have been so hard for Shun, to have an alcoholic son he didn’t know how to help.”
The siblings forked up their eggs.
Shun had only recently died when Aaron first met Jin. The two teenaged boys played together on the high school basketball team. Their moms got to know each other while cheering on their sons during games.
Mimi was two years younger, fifteen at the time, and not that involved in her brother’s life. When she’d come home from her after-school babysitting job, her pulse would pound to see dark, handsome Jin sitting at their kitchen table eating her mother’s food.
Little did she know at the time that the Stewarts’ apartment had become a refuge for Jin, a place to escape the negativity of the Zhang home. Nor did young Mimi understand how to interpret the intense stares Jin always gave her. Over the years, she’d come to learn that the look in his teenaged expressive eyes was pain and emotional fatigue.
Aaron put his fork down. “I wish there was a way we could help Jin.”
“That’s what I keep thinking.”
“Can I show you something?” Jin asked Mimi while she was sitting at a sewing machine in his studio a little later. “Just a couple of new things I was playing around with.”
“Sure, just let me finish up this seam,” Mimi said as she turned her head toward him and then back to the dress she was doing in muslin as a prototype. She’d come in after her interview to use one of Jin’s industrial machines, as she had been doing for years.
He kept a few machines near his office in the back, along with a cutting table, tools and shelves with fabric set aside for special projects. Now with his grandfather and father gone, nobody but Jin used the office.
Employees busied about in front creating virtual models on the computers, fulfilling back orders and doing alterations for the customers who had bought pieces from the showroom downstairs. While the major manufacturing was handled by his uncle Fu in Hong Kong, there was always plenty of activity at Jin’s building.
He pulled out some drawings he’d done.
“I was toying with this,” he explained as she got up from the machine to join him. Pointing to details on the sketch he explained, “Wouldn’t this be kind of a practical look? Comfortable separates but with fine tailoring so that a woman can wear them anywhere? Business casual. With this maybe,” he said as he pulled over some fabric swatches.
He handed Mimi a twill he was considering. Their fingers brushed in the process. The Jin sizzles that were as familiar to her as her own heartbeat crackled up her spine.
A smirk she fought to hide reminded her of Aaron’s suggestion of her moving in with Jin. Living with this man, who occupied her dreams day and night, was out of the question.
Although, really, she’d have nothing to worry about because in all the years she’d known him, he’d never done anything to encourage her secret feelings. There was no reason to think he ever would. The big brotherly hugs, chaste kisses on the cheek and the professional cheering on was the way they were with each other. For so long now it was set in stone.
She rubbed the fabric between her fingers. “This would be wrinkly by the end of the day. Can you go with something stiffer?”
“Will you work it through with me? I can’t meet my retailers with nothing to show.”
“And you have no designer.”
“I haven’t found anyone suitable to hire.”
“You’re thinking of doing your own collection?”
Jin slowly nodded as he looked over his drawings.
“Was I wrong to fire Javier so hastily? Right before Fashion Week?”
“Once you found out about him and Helene, how could you be expected to work with him every day?”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
Mimi lifted one sketch off Jin’s desk and inspected it carefully. Then she reviewed another. She trailed her finger along the drawing of a blazer jacket, commenting, “You could run a curved seam here, and here, and give it a little flare at the hem.”
Maybe this was how she might help Jin. Offer what assistance she could in pulling together some pieces without a designer.
“I like that,” he said, understanding