HOLD ME CLOSER

Chapter 4: New Beginnings, Same Old Ache

The interview lasted eleven minutes and consisted mostly of a tired but kind-looking man named Boss Wichai looking over Krit’s few references, asking if he could lift eighty kilos without complaint, and telling him to start Monday, his pen tapping once against the clipboard as though the matter had never really been in question.

“Big contract coming up,” Wichai said, signing something on a clipboard without much ceremony, not once raising his voice the entire conversation, a detail Krit noted with something like disbelief, the way a person notices the absence of pain only once it has already stopped. “New office building. Months of steady work if you do not screw around. You screw around?”

“No, sir.”

“Good. Uniform is in the back. Welcome aboard.”

He walked out of the little office trailer into the yard feeling something loosen in his chest that he had not realized was clenched, a tightness he had carried so long he had stopped registering it as separate from simply being alive, the way a person forgets the weight of a bag they have carried all day until someone finally takes it from their shoulder.

Add was waiting by the gate, practically vibrating with satisfaction, rocking slightly on the balls of his feet. “Well?”

“Start Monday.”

“I told you!” Add threw an arm around his shoulder, steering him toward the bus stop with the particular triumphant energy of a man who has just been proven right about something he cared deeply about being right about. “See, this is why you listen to me. I have never once led you astray.”

“You led me into that mango tree when we were nine and got us both grounded for a week.”

“That does not count. That was character building.”

The crew at the new company turned out to be, against all his expectations, mostly decent. There was Tum, broad shouldered and big muscles, who had been there six years and treated the newer guys like younger cousins, always first to grab the heavy end of anything without being asked, his presence alone seeming to settle the mood of whatever room he happened to be standing in.

There was Ning, the only woman on the crew, sharp tongued and stronger than half the men, who informed Krit within his first hour that she had bet Tum a hundred baht he would not last the week, delivering the news with the flat confidence of someone entirely prepared to be wrong and entirely unbothered by the possibility.

“No offense,” she said, hauling a box onto her shoulder like it weighed nothing, not even breaking stride. “You have got that soft look. Like someone who is used to being yelled at, not lifting.”

“I have both those things going on, actually,” Krit said, and she laughed loud enough that Tum came over to see what was funny, wiping his hands on his trousers as he approached.

“Do not scare him off already, Ning,” Tum said. “We are short handed as it is.”

“I am not scaring him. I am assessing him. There is a difference.”

His first real test came on day two, hauling a wardrobe up a narrow stairwell not unlike the one that had ended his time at Anan’s, the memory of the marble table rising unbidden as his grip found the corner, his pulse ticking up a notch before he could stop it, some old animal part of him already bracing for a voice to c***k across the yard the way it always had, some new humiliation waiting to land.

Instead, Tum simply said, “Left a little, watch your knee,” in the same even tone he would use to comment on the weather, and when the wardrobe cleared the last step without incident, nobody said anything else about it at all, no lecture, no docked pay, no reminder of what it would have cost him if it had gone wrong.

Krit stood there a moment longer than necessary, oddly unsteadied by the absence of consequence, one hand still braced against the wardrobe’s frame as though checking that the moment was real.

“You alright?” Ning asked, noticing his hesitation, tilting her head.

“Yeah,” Krit said, and found, somewhat to his own surprise, that he meant it. “Yeah, I am good.”

By his third day they had folded him into the easy rhythm of the crew, lunch breaks spent arguing about football. It was, Krit realized somewhere around day three, the first workplace in over a year where he did not spend half his energy simply bracing himself, where his shoulders could sit low the whole day instead of creeping up toward his ears by mid-morning.

Add, working alongside him now too, kept catching his eye across a truck bed with a look that said, see, I told you, without needing words, a grin tugging at the corner of his mouth every time their eyes met.

“Big project starts next week,” Tum told him over lunch on the fourth day, gesturing vaguely toward a glossy render pinned up in the office trailer, an enormous glass and steel building still mid-construction, all sharp angles and reflective surfaces against a rendered blue sky, the kind of image that looked more like a promise than a photograph. “New headquarters for Sriwattana Motors. You know, the car company. Whole crew is on it for months. Good money, if the client does not turn out to be a nightmare.”

“They usually are,” Ning said, mouth full of rice, not even looking up.

“This one might be different,” Wichai said, passing by with a stack of paperwork, pausing just long enough to add his own two cents the way he always did, unhurried, unbothered, as though he had all the time in the world despite the stack under his arm. “Old man Sriwattana is particular, but he pays on time and does not haggle. His son is the one who will actually be around most days, though. Heir. Taking over the company soon, I hear. Younger fella, keeps to himself from what I have heard.”

“You are up for the office job, right?” Tum asked him. “Wichai is putting most of the crew on it.”

“Would not miss it,” Krit said, and meant it, mostly for the paycheck, though some small, stubborn part of him was almost looking forward to seeing what a building like that even looked like from the inside, having only ever glimpsed places like it from the outside, from a bus window, from a distance that had always felt less like geography and more like a permanent fact of the world, a line drawn somewhere he had never once been invited to cross.

That night he told his mother about the new job over a bowl of her own congee, watching her face brighten in a way that made the whole exhausting week feel, for a moment, entirely worth it, the spoon pausing halfway to her mouth as she took in the news.

“Double the pay,” she repeated, delighted, as if she needed to hear it twice to believe it. “See? I told you something better would come along.”

“You did not tell me that. I do not think you have ever said that sentence in your life.”

“I was thinking it very loudly,” she said, and swatted his arm when he laughed at her, the sound of her own laughter following close behind his.

“I still owe Anan, though,” he admitted, quieter now, watching her ladle out a second bowl for herself, the steam curling up between them. “The new pay helps, but it is not gone. Not yet.”

Her face sobered a fraction, though she kept her voice light. “One thing at a time, luk. You have carried worse than this before.”

“I know.”

“And this new boss, he sounds decent.”

“Seems to be. Have not seen him yell once.”

“Well.” She reached over and patted his hand, the same gesture she had used since he was small enough to need reassuring about far smaller things than debt and hospital bills. “Keep your head down, work hard, and let the good thing be good for a while before you start worrying about what might go wrong with it. You have a habit of doing that.”

“I do not.”

“Krit.”

“...Maybe a little.”

She smiled at that, satisfied, and they finished the rest of dinner talking about nothing in particular, the ordinary comfortable nothing of two people who loved each other and had, for one evening at least, more reason to hope than to worry. The small apartment filled with the soft clatter of spoons against ceramic and the low hum of the fan turning overhead, a sound Krit would remember, without quite realizing it yet, as one of the last easy evenings before everything in his life quietly began to shift.

He walked past the building itself on his way home that night, a small detour that added ten minutes to his usual route, though he told himself it was only curiosity, only wanting to see the thing Wichai had described before he actually had to move boxes into it come Monday.

It rose up out of a row of older, shorter buildings the way a single tall stalk of rice sometimes rose above the rest of the paddy, catching light the others could not reach, its unfinished upper floors still dark and unglazed in places, scaffolding clinging to one side like a splint on a broken bone. Somewhere behind all that glass, Krit thought, people were already deciding things that would eventually reach all the way down to men like him, contracts and schedules and prices negotiated in rooms he would never see the inside of except to carry furniture through them.

He did not linger long. There did not seem to be much point in staring up at a building that had no particular interest in being stared at, and his feet were sore enough from the day’s work that standing still for too long only made the ache worse once he started walking again. Still, he found himself glancing back once over his shoulder before he turned the corner toward his own street, the tower catching the last of the sunset in a long orange smear across its glass, and something about the sight of it, indifferent and enormous and lit up like that, stayed with him the rest of the walk home, though he could not have said exactly why.

Monday came faster than he expected, the way the good days in his life always seemed to arrive faster than the bad ones lingered. He stood at the base of the building that morning with the rest of the crew, hard hat in hand, waiting for the site foreman to sort out badges and assignments, and felt, despite every reasonable instinct telling him not to get ahead of himself, a small unfamiliar flicker of something like hope settle into his chest alongside the usual nerves. Add elbowed him once, grinning, and said nothing, and together they filed in through the wide glass doors with the rest of the crew, into a lobby brighter and colder and stranger than anywhere either of them had ever been asked to work before.