HOLD ME CLOSER

Chapter 1: Porridge and Promises

The alarm went off at four forty, but Krit was already awake.He lay there for a moment in the grey almost light, listening to the ceiling fan tick around on its bent axis, and to the small, sturdy sound of his mother moving in the kitchen... the scrape of a ladle, the clink of a lid. Some things in his life had changed more times than he could count. That sound had not.

He got up before the second alarm could ring, pulled on an old T-shirt gone soft and thin at the collar, and padded out to find her already elbow deep in the rice porridge, stirring slowly so it would not catch at the bottom of the pot.

“You did not have to get up yet,” she said, not looking up. “I told you, I can start alone.”

“And let you carry the water jugs by yourself? Mae, I am not that lazy.” He kissed the top of her head on his way past, stealing a sliver of century egg from the cutting board before she could swat his hand.

She swatted his hand anyway. Old habits. Her wrist still moved fast for a woman who had spent the last few months looking thinner every time he really looked at her, and he chose, the way he chose most mornings, to be grateful for the reflex instead of frightened by what it cost her.

By five thirty the cart was loaded and rolling down toward the corner where it had stood every morning for as long as Krit could remember, past the noodle stall that never opened before six, past the shuttered pharmacy with its faded red cross, past the little temple gate where the monks were already out for alms, their saffron robes catching the first thin light like something lit from within.

His mother’s congee was not fancy. It did not need to be. People came for the pickled ginger she made herself, sharp and bright against the mild rice, for the way she always asked about their children by name and actually remembered the answers, for the fact that a bowl here cost less than anywhere else in the neighborhood and somehow tasted like more. She had a gift for making people feel accounted for, a gift Krit suspected she had never once thought to call a gift, since to her it was simply what a person did for their neighbors.

Krit liked mornings like this. Liked the heat before it turned ugly at noon, liked the particular tiredness of physical work that asked nothing of his mind, only his body. By seven, he had flagged down enough regulars and refilled enough bowls that his mother waved him off toward his job.

“Go, go. I have Auntie Somsri today,” she said, nodding at the neighbor already settling in at the second folding stool, fanning herself with a paper menu that had not changed prices in six years, its corners soft and rounded from years of the same fanning motion.

“Text me if you need anything.”

“Go to work, Krit.”

The moving company’s warehouse sat at the edge of an industrial road that smelled permanently of diesel and hot asphalt, corrugated roofing throwing long stripes of shade across a parking lot full of dented trucks, their paint peeling in patches like something molting. Krit clocked in with the rest of the crew, pulled his work gloves out of his bag, the leather cracked at the knuckles from months of use, and was midway through checking the day’s job sheet when Boss Anan’s voice cracked across the yard like a whip.

“Kritsada!”

He did not even flinch anymore. That was the worst part. You could get used to almost anything, even a boss who found joy in making people flinch, who seemed to collect the small startled reactions of his workers the way other men collected stamps or coins.

“Yes, Boss.”

“The Sathorn job. You are on the move again. Do not tell me you need help this time.” Anan said it loud enough for the rest of the crew to hear, the way he always did, like humiliation was a training method he had read about somewhere and taken too seriously. A couple of the younger guys glanced over, then quickly looked away, the way people do when they are relieved it is not them today and ashamed of the relief, the shame passing over their faces so fast it was almost invisible.

“I do not need help, Boss.”

“Good. Because last time...” Anan did not finish the sentence. He did not need to. Everyone in the yard already knew about the vase. The very expensive, very irreplaceable vase, and the client’s threat of a lawsuit, and the way Anan had stood there and let Krit take the blame in front of the man’s whole household staff rather than admit his own crew had rushed the job on his own orders, because the client had been complaining about the schedule and Anan cared more about looking efficient than about who ended up paying for his mistake.

Krit had said nothing then, either.

He shouldered his gear and went to load the truck.

The Sathorn job went fine, all six brutal hours of it, up four flights of an old building with no working elevator, down a hallway too narrow for the dolly, past a client who complained about everything and tipped nothing, who told them twice that “the last company we used was much more careful,” as if any of them had chosen to work for him rather than simply needing a paycheck. The client’s wife trailed behind them the whole time, pointing out scuff marks on the wall that Krit was fairly sure had been there since before they had arrived, her voice carrying the particular pitch of someone who enjoyed having something to complain about. By the time Krit clocked out his shirt was soaked through and his shoulders felt like two separate injuries filed under the same name.

He checked his phone on the walk to the bus stop.

Add (Best friend): oi are you off yet

Add: call me when you can, got something good

Add had been his best friend since they were nine years old and had gotten into regular fights, then decided afterward that being friends was easier than being enemies, a decision neither of them had ever regretted in the twenty years since. Twenty years later, Add was still the one person who could get Krit to actually sit still and listen when it mattered, mostly because he never let Krit deflect for very long.

He called on the bus, phone pressed to his ear, forehead against the hot window glass, watching the city smear past in tired orange light, motorbikes weaving between cars, street vendors packing up their carts for the evening rush.

“What is good,” Krit said.

“There is an opening at a different moving company. Bigger contracts, better clients, construction sites, new office buildings, that kind of thing. Pay is almost double what Anan gives you.”

Krit huffed out something like a laugh. “Double? What, do I have to move a whole building myself?”

“I am serious, Krit. My cousin works there, he vouched for me, and I told them about you too. They are hiring a full crew for some huge project. New headquarters for one of those big car companies. Months of steady work, good pay, no lawsuit threats hanging over your head every time you sneeze near a lamp.”

Krit was quiet for a second, watching the city blur by the window, the same streets he had walked his whole life, the same crumbling curbs, the same rooftops he could probably draw from memory if anyone ever asked him to, though nobody ever had.

“You already gave them my number, did not you.”

“...Maybe.”

“Add.”

“Just go talk to them! What do you have to lose? You hate it there. You have hated it there for a year. Your mom needs the money more now than ever, and Anan has never once given you a raise that was not an apology for something worse.”

Krit closed his eyes. He thought of the hospital corridor smell that never quite left his clothes on the days he visited his mother’s doctor with her, of the growing folder of bills he kept in a drawer and did not let himself open more than once a week, of the vase, the yelling, the four flights with no elevator, and the particular exhaustion of a job where every day carried the same low hum of dread underneath it, waiting for whatever new way Anan would find to make him small.

“Fine,” he said. “Set it up.”

“Yes! I will text you the address. Interview is Thursday. Wear something clean, for once.”

“I always wear something clean.”

“You wear something that used to be clean. There is a difference, my friend.”

Krit laughed properly this time, the first real laugh of the day, and felt some of the tightness in his chest ease loose, just slightly, at the thought of something new on the horizon.

After a long day, the cat was already waiting in his room when he slid the door open, a thin grey and white stray with one torn ear and no name Krit had ever managed to make stick. However, he had tried several: chai, ploy, nong, none of which she had ever answered to, because she was, in the end, a cat, and cats answered to nothing. She did not belong to him, not officially. She simply came when she pleased, ate what he left out, and allowed herself to be scratched behind the ears exactly twice before deciding that was enough affection for one evening.

“Long day,” Krit told her, setting down a small plate of leftover fish. “You would not believe it.”

She did not answer, obviously, but she did deign to sit near his foot while he ate his own dinner cross-legged on the floor, the ceiling fan ticking the same uneven rhythm as the one at his mother’s house, as the whole city ran on the same tired heartbeat.

He thought about the interview. About double the pay. About an office building so big it needed a whole crew for months. About whether a place like that would even want someone like him, someone whose hands were rougher than his age should allow, someone who had never finished more than a year of technical college before his mother’s first hospital bills had made the choice for him.

He washed his one bowl in the small sink, checked the lock on the balcony door out of habit, though the cat would find her own way in regardless, and lay down on the thin mattress with his phone still in hand, scrolling without really seeing anything, until his eyes grew too heavy to keep open.

He scratched the cat behind the ears exactly twice before turning off the light. Outside the window, the city dimmed into another ordinary night, indistinguishable from a hundred nights before it, though something in Krit, some small and unexamined part of him, felt for the first time in a while like tomorrow might carry something.