The Trouble with Belonging by Magdalena Stanhoff

Author:Magdalena Stanhoff [Stanhoff, Magdalena]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Independent
Published: 2021-11-18T00:00:00+00:00

III

Part Three

9

In a Haze

Kehuan had never thought living together with the person you were in love with could be so problematic.

In the past, he’d never imagined any particular details of the transformation his relationship with Niki would need to undergo to change from this precious but undefined thing it used to be, where people commonly mistook them for close-knit siblings, to a real couple. He’d just always assumed, rather ingenuously, that with time everything would naturally fall into place. But it didn’t happen like that at all because what he’d somehow failed to predict were two critically overlapping problems: his own overwhelming reaction to Niki turning into a young woman and her still being fifteen when it happened.

It was the end of spring when she returned from Finland, and in just a couple of weeks, the temperatures soared to above thirty degrees. This meant she was now moving around the apartment in shorts and tank tops, with hair in a ponytail and arms and legs bare, lithe and slender and unbearably lovely. Kehuan sometimes thought with no small amount of self-pity mixed with black humor that the weather was obviously in cahoots with the cat, current fashion, and his own hormones, all of them blithely conspiring to drive him utterly crazy because he really couldn’t let himself forget this one itty-bitty detail. She. Was. Still. Fifteen.

In the beginning, he felt at sea about how to treat Niki now; there was such a giant gap between what he wanted and what was acceptable. It didn’t help at all that they were alone at home most of the time, or as good as alone. Chen Liang spent much more time in Taipei than in Warsaw these days, and he was absent all summer, and Anna was like a specter, present but nearly undetectable.

Last winter his father had talked with him about their family situation.

“The Warsaw business has been running well without much interference from me for a long time already,” he told Kehuan. “We’ve got good people here. And you’re an adult now, and don’t need me all the time, do you?”

Kehuan bit his tongue before he said the acidic words that had sprung to his lips.

“I’ve got shares in the Taiwan company as well,” Chen Liang went on, unaware, “and I prefer to spend more time at home now. I’m not getting younger.”

Kehuan was astonished his father still considered Taiwan home, after traipsing all over the world for decades, but whatever.

“I’m not going to move to Taipei,” he felt obliged to state. “Just so you know.”

“I don’t expect you to,” his father told him tiredly. “I know your life is here for now. We’ll see what happens when you finish college.”

Kehuan was tempted to say it was him who’d see what happened then, but decided to let it go. “What about Anna?” he asked instead.

“We’re going to divorce,” Chen Liang said. “But she’ll live here at least until Niki becomes an adult. Chen Xiao wants someone to keep an eye on

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