HOLD ME CLOSER

Chapter 10: An Acceptable Arrangement

The Chatchawan dinner took place in a private room at a hotel restaurant that smelled, faintly and expensively, of orchids and old money, the kind of room designed to make every conversation feel like it mattered more than it actually did.

Narin arrived on time, in the navy suit his father had specified, and greeted the Chatchawan family with the particular ease of someone who had been trained since childhood to make strangers feel important, a skill he had never once been taught directly and had absorbed instead simply by watching his father work a room for twenty-five years.

Their daughter, Ploy, turned out to be perfectly pleasant. Sharp witted, well-travelled, entirely uninterested in Narin beyond the transaction her parents clearly hoped this dinner represented, her eyes carrying the particular knowingness of someone who had attended enough of these dinners herself to recognize exactly what was happening at all times.

"My father thinks this is a merger," she said dryly, halfway through the appetizer course, once the two families had drifted into separate conversations at either end of the long table, their fathers already deep into some discussion of shipping tariffs. "I think he is not wrong, honestly. Nothing personal."

"None taken," Narin said, grateful, in a strange way, for her honesty, a rare enough commodity in rooms like this. "For what it is worth, my father sees it the same way."

"Do you want to be here?" she asked, not unkindly, just curious, setting down her fork to give him her full attention.

Narin considered his answer carefully. "I want my father to stop asking, eventually. Whether that happens through you or someone else does not much matter to me."

Ploy laughed, surprised into it, a real laugh rather than the polite version she had likely been performing all evening. "That is the most honest thing anyone has said to me at one of these dinners in a year."

"Do you want to be here?" he returned the question, curious despite himself.

"About as much as you do. My mother has a list, did you know that? An actual list. You are number three."

"Should I be flattered or insulted?"

"Both, probably. Number one had a gambling problem, so you are doing better than you think."

They spent the rest of the evening in easy, undemanding conversation, two people who understood exactly what was expected of them and had silently agreed to perform it well enough to satisfy their respective fathers without either of them having to pretend at feelings that were not there, trading dry observations about the other guests, about the absurdity of the orchid centerpieces, about anything that let them avoid the actual weight of the evening's purpose.

At one point, over the fish course, Ploy's mother leaned across the table with the particular bright attentiveness of a woman cataloging a potential son in law, asking Narin about his plans for the new headquarters, about whether he saw himself settling into the role his father had built for him or whether he harbored some other ambition entirely, the question delivered with a smile that did not quite reach her eyes.

"I see myself doing what is asked of me," Narin answered, which was true enough, and vague enough, that it seemed to satisfy her, her attention already drifting toward the next item on whatever mental checklist she carried into evenings like this one.

Ploy caught his eye across the table once the conversation moved on, the barest flicker of shared amusement passing between them, an understanding neither needed to voice aloud. It was, Narin thought, the easiest part of the whole evening, this small conspiracy of two people equally unwilling to be anywhere else and equally committed to making sure nobody noticed.

"You could do worse," she told him at the end of the night, only half joking, as their families said their overlong goodbyes near the hotel's entrance, the fathers shaking hands with the particular vigor of men who believed they had accomplished something significant. "I could do worse too, for what it is worth."

"I will tell my father the dinner went well," Narin said. "That should buy me a few weeks of peace, at least."

"Send him my regards." She smiled, and it was a genuinely warm smile, the smile of someone who might, under other circumstances, have become an actual friend. "See you at the next one, I am sure."

He came home late, tie loosened in the back of the car, watching the city lights slide past the window, and found his father still awake in the study, a rare enough occurrence that Narin braced himself before knocking.

"How was it," Sompong asked, not looking up from his papers, reading glasses perched low on his nose, the desk lamp casting the only light in the otherwise dark room.

"It went well. She is smart. Easy to talk to."

"Good." A pause, the closest thing to warmth Narin's father ever produced, his pen pausing over whatever document he had been reviewing. "Keep it going. A family like the Chatchawans, it would not hurt the company to have that connection formalized. Their shipping contacts alone would be worth the arrangement."

"Of course, Por."

"You will need to move faster than this, though. A man your age, unattached, it starts to look strange after a while. People talk." He said it without any particular cruelty, simply another fact to be managed, another variable in whatever equation governed his understanding of his son's life.

"I understand."

His father returned to his papers, conversation apparently concluded, and Narin let himself out of the study and climbed the stairs slowly, past the locked third floor room he did not visit that night, too tired, or perhaps too unwilling to sit with whatever he might have played, the weight of his father's words settling somewhere behind his ribs where it would sit, uncomfortable, for days.

He found Nira awake still, curled in the window seat of her room with the door ajar, and he knocked lightly on the frame before letting himself in.

"How was the dinner," she asked, not looking up from the book she was not really reading.

"Bearable. She is sharp. We understood each other, at least." He sat on the edge of her bed, the way he had since they were children, whenever one of them needed the other's quiet company more than actual conversation. "How is the Anantasak situation?"

Nira closed the book fully this time, setting it aside. "Mother wants me to meet him properly next week. Alone, this time, not just a family dinner. She thinks it will help if we get to know each other before the wedding planning starts in earnest."

"Does that help?"

"I do not know yet. I have barely spoken two full sentences to him." She pulled her knees up to her chest, an old habit from childhood that she still fell into when she was working through something difficult. "Do you think it is possible, Phi Narin? To end up caring about someone you did not choose?"

Narin thought of a gold lit hallway, of a hand held a beat too long, of every reasonable instinct telling him not to examine any of it too closely, and found himself, for once, without a tidy answer to offer his sister.

"I think," he said slowly, "that the people we do not choose sometimes surprise us. And the people we do choose do not always turn out the way we hoped, either. I do not know if that is comforting."

"It is something," she said, and managed a small smile, tired but real. "At least you are not lying to me and saying it will definitely work out."

"I would not do that to you."

"I know." She reached out and squeezed his hand, the same gesture their mother had used on him earlier that week, passed down, it seemed, through the women of the family like a small inherited kindness.

"Do you ever wonder," she added, after a moment, quieter now, "what Por would have wanted for himself, if anyone had ever asked him? Before all this. Before he had a company and two children he was busy deciding futures for."

Narin considered the question longer than he expected to. "I do not think anyone ever did ask him. I think that might be most of the problem, honestly. He learned that wanting things was dangerous long before either of us came along to make it worse."

"That is a very generous way of putting it."

"I am trying. It does not come naturally."

She laughed at that, soft and real, and for a moment the weight of the evening, the Chatchawans and the Anantasaks and every arrangement neither of them had asked for, seemed to lift just slightly, replaced by the simpler, older comfort of two siblings who had survived the same house together.

"Get some sleep. You look like Por has been working you too hard again."

"He has, but so has your book, apparently, since you are not reading it."

She threw a pillow at him on his way out, and he let it hit him without complaint, grateful, in the quiet aftermath, for at least one person in the house who understood exactly what it cost to smile through an arrangement neither of them had asked for.

He lay awake a long while after that, running through the evening's conversation, Ploy's easy honesty, the total absence of anything resembling the particular unsettled warmth he had felt standing in a gold lit hallway a few days earlier, talking to a mover about a piano that only needed checking because he wanted an excuse to keep talking.

He did not examine that comparison very closely either. There was not room in his life right now for anything that complicated, not with a father counting down the months until an arrangement was formalized, not with a company waiting to swallow the next forty years of his life. He turned onto his side, staring at the thin line of streetlight seeping in beneath the curtain, and told himself, the way he told himself most nights lately, that whatever this was would settle on its own soon enough, given time and a reasonable amount of willpower, both of which he had always considered himself to possess in fair supply.

He fell asleep anyway, eventually, and if he dreamed of hallways instead of hotel restaurants, he did not remember it clearly enough by morning to have to explain it to anyone, least of all himself.

Downstairs, before the household properly woke, Wimon stood alone in the kitchen doorway a moment, watching the staff begin their morning preparations, and thought, not for the first time, that her son had looked tired again at breakfast the day before, tired in a way that sleep alone never seemed to fix, though she could not have said, if pressed, exactly what it was she thought might be missing from his life instead. She had learned, over twenty-six years in this house, which questions were worth asking and which were better left to answer themselves in their own time, and so she said nothing, only poured an extra measure of tea into the pot that morning, the way she always did on days when she suspected someone in her family might need a little more comfort than usual, whether or not they ever thought to ask for it.