Chapter Text
Tonight was the night I realized I deserved better. Tonight, I’m sitting alone at Au Pied de Cochon, a name I butchered so many times trying to convince my boyfriend to settle on the reservation before the trip. Tonight I’m alone, having oysters at a fancy ass french restaurant, trying to see how he even finds these good. Tonight is my fucking birthday.
To be fair, I don’t know what I expected. On June 23rd, 2001 my parents named me Mei-Ling Yang in Kaohsiung, Taiwan before having two other boys years down the line and leaving it at that. Every year, I always thought my birthday was going to be this big event where everyone was finally going to listen to the little hints at what I wanted. The showing of screenshots and downloaded videos of cats, the pointing at keyboards in music-store displays; maybe this year was the year the people I loved would possibly care enough to pay attention. But alas, just like every year, it was always the same. A book to help me with my studies, a new backpack to go to tutoring, new shoes for school and only for school. Nothing I genuinely found interesting. But what was I to say? No, thank you? Absolutely not. So I smiled and giggled and squealed seeing the plethora of things to help me for the future but nothing that helped me in the present.
I couldn’t believe I expected anything different from a boyfriend. While getting ready, I see him laying down on the raggedy hotel bed and start to think: Is this fucker seriously not getting ready 20 minutes before our reservation?
Obviously I don’t say that so instead I say, “Honey, when do you plan on getting ready? I don’t want to be late for the reservation.” Sweet, unsuspecting.
“Oh,” Oh? “I didn’t see the time, I’ll get ready in a second.”
“Well, remember you said you wanted to take a shower after the walk today so, I just want you to give yourself enough time to-”
“Jesus, would you stop bitching me around?”
Silence.
What? “What?”
“Seriously, you’re always trying to make me do this, make me do that. It’s honestly pissing me off at this point. You know I didn’t even want to go to this stupid restaurant.”
I could feel the tears starting in my eyes already because is this man seriously calling this occasion stupid ?
“How could you say that? It’s my birthday, I just wanted it to be special.”
“God, see you always make these things seem way bigger than they actually are-”
“Hun, it’s literally my birth-”
“That too! Stop calling-”
You get the point. I ended up walking out of the hotel room half yelling and half realizing that other people stay here but at that point, I couldn’t care less. Somehow, checking in the huge mirrors in the hotel lobby, I managed to get out of there looking half-decent. You know what , I thought to myself, I’m going to walk my pretty-ass-self to that restaurant and eat my goddamn birthday dinner .
And here we are. When I first sat down, I thought he’d have the decency to show up and reconcile so I kept his plate and glass but at some point, I just told the waiter to take them away. Now it really did look sad. Luckily, this is France so they allow smoking indoors and I’m near a window anyway so I pull out a cigarette, light it, and decide to people watch.
Looking around some more and swishing around my glass of wine I hear the chair in front of me scrape against the floor. No way, I think, but as I look up, a very tall woman is now sitting across from me, waving the waiter over.
“Do you know what’s good here?” She says as she’s swiping through the menu just given to her.
“Um,” I mumble. “Well, I heard the steak is good,” I quietly say, putting out my cigarette.
She looks up at the food I had ordered, oysters, and moves her eyes up at me with a raised eyebrow. “You got the oysters though?”
I awkwardly laugh at that because, well, true that suggestion didn’t match with the evidence in front of us. “Yeah, well, I thought they’d be good.”
“Are they?”
“No- no, not really.”
“Well,” she decides suddenly slapping shut the menu, “Let’s get you that steak.”
“Wait- what?” I can’t get much of anything out before this stranger is now ordering what seems to be 2 steaks - one medium, one medium-well - and another bottle of wine.
During that my brain has somehow seemed to calm down enough in order to actually register the specimen in front of me. She’s clearly super tall, even while sitting, and she has gorgeous dark skin that somehow glows under the candle light that emits inside the restaurant. She wears her hair in long, dark braids with shorter ones framing her face. And her face, wow, she’s flashing a smile that just shows how much power she has behind her words and the confidence she has in herself. The kind of smile that if you walked past it on the sidewalk you’d have to pause and look back to make sure it was actually real. My eyes drag down to her quite formal outfit. She has a button-down dark red shirt on with some of the top buttons undone, with a light pink vest over it. Her wide-legged pants are the same color pink and she has darkest pair of mary-janes I’ve ever seen. As she turns to look back at me I realize the two silver rings on her bottom lip.
“Are you checking me out?”
I choke on air loud enough to receive some strange looks from a mom and her child passing by. “Sorry? No, no I wasn’t.”
She lets out a slight chuckle, “I’m only joking,” another chuckle, “don’t worry.” The look in her eyes tells me she sort of wasn’t. “What’s your name?”
At this point, I’ve taken all lessons of stranger-danger out the window because fuck it, why not? “Mei-Ling,” I pause, “Yang.”
“Hm,” she hums, “now that’s pretty.” She takes a sip out of her glass of the new wine and gives it a look before taking another.
We sit in a mix of comfortable and uncomfortable silence that I can’t seem to make out. Why is she still sitting here? Did I really just tell her my full name? Also what about that food, am I about to pay for it? What is going on?
A few more seconds. “And you?” Nice, Mei, smooth .
“Oh,” she says, as if that isn’t how conversations typically go, “I didn’t think you cared. It’s Thea.” Pause. “Barbier.”
Putting aside the obvious nudge at my initial pause when introducing myself, I notice an unexpected tinge of a French accent in her voice. Initially, I had thought she was a foreigner, like me.
“Are you from here?” I ask with a new sense of curiosity.
“You could say so,” another sip and a glance behind me.
Wow, I say in my head, way to keep a conversation alive. “What are you here for?”
This seems to spark a sudden fire in her because her response is immediate: “For my stupid cousin’s wedding- and- you may be saying, ‘Oh, Thea, why would you call your poor cousin stupid?’ Well I’ll tell you why.”
This leads to a subjectively short story on how her cousin, Eloise, and her had never been on good terms and their entire family was well aware.
“Yet!” She exclaims, “I’m still forced to go even though everyone there knows I am hating every burning second of it. I mean- would you want someone who you know will bring a bad vibe at your wedding?”
She points a crouton at me, insinuating I should answer, but before I can get anything out she continues.
“No! Nobody would! But even with that, I still have to go.” She ends her rant with a large sigh and something about her grandma but to be honest I am just absolutely starstruck at the sudden familiarity she is showing to a complete stranger.
We end up chatting more by her asking what I was here for and me explaining my whole boyfriend drama. The moment I start talking about my situation, I see her eyes darken into a slightly darker grey, a thing no one except someone who was staring into her eyes would notice, but immediately they go back to their mischievous state.
As the night drags out, I realize the time and that I have a train towards England to catch the next morning.
After getting the bill and looking through my purse for my card I turn to see Thea has already paid with a full 20% tip.
“Wait,” I say surprised. “I was supposed to pay for this.”
“Huh?” she looks back at me with a face full of surprise and- why does it seem she’s a little offended? “Why would you? I ordered some random food you didn’t even know the price of. That’d be a dick move of me to just leave you here to pay for it.”
I suppose she has a point but I still felt a little guilty and she continued to reassure me it was all fine as we walked out of the restaurant.
As we opened the doors, a burst of wind hit us both and I remembered how fervently I had left the hotel, forgetting my jacket in the process. On the way, I hadn’t thought of it a big deal with it being the middle of the summer but this wasn’t Taiwan, and it was chilly. As I’m starting to wrap my arms around myself, quickly looking around for a taxi, I feel a heaviness on my shoulders.
I turn rapidly to see Thea at my side, draping her leather jacket over me.
“What are you doing?” I say as I look into her eyes with an obvious shock.
“What does it look like?” She responds, not stepping back. “You’re cold and I’ve just had a bunch of wine. I’ll be fine.”
“No, seriously it’s freezing you should have it.” I go to take the jacket off of me but Thea places her hand atop mine, stopping me.
“Trust me. I’m French, I’ve lived through worse.” And it seems like that’s that as Thea starts to walk towards the road scanning for a taxi.
Truthfully, I have no clue what is going on. At one point, I was sitting like a lost kitten at a table eating some soggy-ass oysters - seriously they were so bad how do people eat those things? - and in the next, I’m sitting inside a taxi with a woman I have never met, who has decided on paying for everything.
It seemed as though the whole night had taken a toll on me because as I continue to spiral I feel my eyes droop and my head drop onto something soft.
“...Ing.”
“Ling…”
Ugh.
“Mei-Ling…”
What?
“Mei-Ling, we’re here…”
I shoot up, hitting something hard and hearing a groan.
“Oh my god, I am so sorry.”
I see Thea holding the bottom of her face with a slight wince but somehow still smiling. “It’s alright.” she chuckles. “You’re lucky you’re a cute sleeper.”
I feel my cheeks heat up and I’m not sure if it’s from the comment or the assault I have just committed. Either way, I go to pick my things up in order to quickly leave possibly the most awkward situation I have ever put myself in. As I step out of the car, the window rolls down and I see Thea wave me goodbye. I wave back and speed-walk into the hotel lobby, hearing a louder chuckle behind me.
As I’m standing in the elevator, slightly panting, I look into the mirror and see an unfamiliar leather jacket wrapped around my shoulders.
Fuck.