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In Rumi’s mind, every action is a learned behavior.
The things that you’ve learned to do are products of someone else’s example. It made sense—at least to her. If you did something, it’s because someone showed you how. It made people a little bit predictable, maybe, but no less fascinating.
Zoey disagrees.
“It’s just—it’s so simplistic to boil it all down to that!” She argues, trying to get into her sweatpants, one turtle-print-sock-covered-foot after the other.
“I’m not saying that’s all there is to it,” Rumi pulls her hoodie over her head. “I’m just saying I think it’s a pretty reliable way to see why people are the way they are, I mean, let’s look at Mira—”
“Let’s not,” Mira’s still laying facedown on Rumi’s bed, halfway out of her pajamas. “It’s too early for this.”
“There’s no way you think she was just born with all that sarcasm pre-installed, do you?”
Zoey grins. “Honest answer?”
Mira finally turns over onto her back, if only to send a flat stare with an eyebrow raised Zoey’s way. Rumi laughs.
“Just kidding!” Zoey joins in Rumi’s laughter, stretching her arms and hands out for Mira to grab. “Come on, love, time to get up!”
Mira shakes her head in exaggerated despair, but takes Zoey’s hands anyway. Rumi, who had been cleaning Mira’s glasses with a little piece of cloth, leans forward to gently fit them onto her face. She smiles while Mira blinks to adjust, and takes a minute to watch her slowly wake up in full.
“I’ll give you a kiss if you can be ready in five,” Rumi grins, fangs and all.
“Whose idea was it to get groceries first thing in the morning anyway?” Mira grumbles, “Right. Fuck my life. It was mine.”
Rumi tries not to chew on her pencil.
Her homework, a spread of multiplication tables, lay untouched on the table and it feels impossible to even think about it when the smell of sizzling beef and garlic is dancing in their kitchen.
“Rumi,” Celine doesn’t even turn to look over her shoulder, still tall and watchful over her clay pot on the stove. “Do your homework.”
Rumi pouts. She’s trying but fifth grade so far has been the hardest thing she’s ever had to do in her life—ever!
She looks around their kitchen: the wide, open windows that let the afternoon sun through, filtered by the shade of the small trees out in their garden. She loves the birds, loves how the view opened up to their sacred shrine—up on a hill, crowned with an even bigger, grander tree that spread its branches outwards with grace.
It’s scary to think about fifth grade ending. What was next? Sixth grade? High school?
Leaving?
“You’re thinking loud enough for me to hear,” Celine says softly. She pours water into the pot, covers it, and leaves the beef to simmer. She wipes her hands down her apron when she turns to face Rumi—and Rumi doesn’t miss the little smile on her lip when she sees that Rumi’s homework remains remarkably empty. She pulls back a chair and sits next to Rumi, and then turns towards her with studious eyes. Rumi almost wants to pull away—but she’s fascinated by the feeling of being seen like this. Celine looks across her methodically: her face, then her hands, then checking for scrapes on her knees. She’s satisfied to spot no injuries, her shoulders relax—almost imperceptible but Rumi is observant—and then she asks: “Is something wrong?”
Rumi chews on her lip. "Is it scary, being older?”
Celine blinks. Like she wasn’t expecting that.
Rumi catches the ghost of an expression, sad and fleeting and gone in the next moment—replaced by something else that she doesn’t understand quite yet.
(Rumi learns, years later, that the feeling is resolve.)
Celine reaches forward to fix the messy collar of Rumi’s shirt. She smoothes it out, hands large and heavy on her slight shoulders, and all she says is:
“I’ll do my best so it won’t be for you.”
The pot starts to boil.
Mira gets her kiss as promised.
Rumi stretches up to her tip toes, presses her lips onto Mira’s, and then threads their hands together so she can pull Mira into the store before she changes her mind.
The sun’s only just crawling up from the horizon, lulled into complacency in the middle of winter, and all she wants to do is huddle up close to Zoey and Mira, to laze around indoors and make soup and curl up on the couch.
And that’s exactly what they’re planning to do today.
It puts Rumi in such a good mood that she tugs on Mira’s arm and steals another kiss as soon as she turns to face her.
“That was two kisses,” Mira says, her deadpan voice betrayed by the blush blooming on her cheeks. “Feeling generous?”
“The second one was for driving us here,” Rumi laughs.
“No fair,” Zoey hooks her arm around Mira’s from the other side. “I was going to pay the driving tax this time around!”
“You still can,” Mira smirks.
Zoey bumps her shoulder into Mira’s. “Don’t get greedy.”
Rumi fishes out her phone from her pocket and looks through their grocery list as they walk. “Beef, garlic, potatoes, onions, zucchini, tofu—”
“We still have some tofu,” Mira leans over to look at the phone too. “We also still have jalapeños.”
“Probably need to get new ones though,” Zoey wrinkles her nose. “I think ours have gone all sad and wrinkly! What are you planning to make anyway?”
“I thought it would be a nice day for soup,” Rumi smiles. “Some beef doenjang-jjigae.”
They enter the store and Zoey immediately makes a run for a shopping cart. She is absolutely thrilled that they’ve gone so early, and that she gets to take her pick from the bunch. She finds one that isn’t squeaky, and doesn’t veer right or left when pushed, and doesn’t have a strange and loosely-spinning fourth wheel.
Rumi only ever lets Mira’s hand go to hold Zoey’s, and holds onto both of them whenever she can. Rumi pulls at the back of Zoey’s jacket when she skips ahead too far and then presses her cheek against Mira’s shoulder as they look through a shelf of cereal.
Rumi realizes—quite suddenly—that she's being really, really clingy.
When she feels a pair of arms circle around her from behind—with a giggle, a kiss on the cheek—she realizes exactly who she got the habit from.
“Zoey,” Rumi laughs.
She’s reminded of their little debate earlier that morning and almost wants to use the pair of them as a prime example of the point she was trying to make—but Zoey’s smiling so sweetly at her that she probably shouldn’t pick an argument, even a lighthearted one.
She’s just happy that she knows how to be this way now.
Grateful that Zoey’s extended her unyielding affection so consistently through the years that Rumi’s learned how to crave it from the both of them.
Rumi watches as the pot lid starts moving, little puffs of steam and bubbles escaping.
“Did you have a good day at school?” Celine asks while she finishes cutting the vegetables into cubes.
“I think so,” Rumi hums in thought. “We had someone new start in our class.”
“I see.” Celine replies. “We also have someone new at work today. An intern, his name is Bobby.”
“That’s a funny name.”
Celine smiles. It’s a rare one. “Isn’t it?”
“Oh!” Rumi perks up, having just remembered exciting news. “They said we’re going to be having a play!”
Celine hums, urging Rumi to continue on while she slides the vegetables—potatoes, onions, zucchini—from the cutting board down into the pot of boiling broth.
The jalapeños get left out despite them being Celine’s favorite.
(Rumi’s glad, she never liked them in her soup.)
“Our class will do Frozen, and my teacher said, if—if you would be okay with it—I could sing?”
“When did they say it will be?” Celine turns the fire low.
“The, uh, last Friday of this month I think?”
Celine just gives her a quiet nod, and then puts the lid back on top of the pot. It’s at that moment that Rumi realizes she has a long wait ahead of her before dinner is ready.
Celine sits back at the table. “The minutes will go by faster when you’re doing something,” she taps on the blank page of Rumi’s homework.
Rumi pouts.
Celine raises an eyebrow.
And then she sighs, picking up her glasses from where they lay folded on top of her laptop on the dining table, and starts looking over the paper. Celine’s eyebrow inches ever so slightly higher when she sees just how much math homework they had given her.
“Go on,” Celine prods for Rumi to begin. “We’ll do it together.”
Rumi, with no other choice, finally starts. She notices Celine open up her computer and navigate to the calendar app.
She checks the last Friday of the month and then cancels every single meeting.
It makes Rumi smile.
“I was about to ask if you were trying out a new recipe, but it looks like it’s an old one?”
Mira says it while rinsing out the vegetables for chopping.
Rumi’s going over the instructions for the recipe, written at the back of an old, worn receipt she’s kept in her wallet for longer than HUNTR/X had existed as a group. It was folded, nearly falling apart at the creases. Rumi held it close and carefully.
Zoey, standing quietly nearby, is slicing the beef into remarkably thin strips. She’s just listening. Her silence is telling, and so is Mira’s careful line of questioning.
Rumi knows that they both recognize the handwriting on the paper.
They’re just graceful enough not to prod. Their kitchen settles into comfortable silence, just the sound of Zoey’s knife on the chopping board. Rumi starts making the sauce. Sunlight filters in from their wide, kitchen window, and the sprawling view of Seoul almost reminds her of a garden, with trees, and a hill out in the distance.
She misses the sound of the birds.
She misses being ten.
She misses—
Rumi’s pulled out of her thoughts when Zoey tells her the beef is done.
“Did I do it right?” She asks lightly.
“Oh,” Rumi blinks. Zoey hands her a bowl, and the slices of beef were perfect and paper-thin. “Yeah, thank you.”
She gets to work. The beef and garlic sizzle together when she drops it into the pan to sauté—the smell hits home and it fills her with a strange sense of yearning. Rumi squeezes Mira’s hand when she offers to chop the vegetables, insisting she’d like to do it herself.
“Will you watch the beef for me instead?” Rumi asks.
“Sure,” Mira dries her hands with a dish towel. She walks over to Zoey, who's already on her tip toes and looking into the pot, and hugs her from behind. Mira settles her chin on Zoey’s shoulder. “Smells amazing.”
“It’s beef and garlic sautéing together.” Zoey laughs. “Rumi would be doing something horribly wrong if it didn’t.”
Rumi chops the vegetables into cubes—watching the loves of her life sway side to side as the beef slowly turns brown—and it washes away the little string that started spooling around her heart. The onions go first, sliced small and fine. The potato goes next, and she remembers to add a little bit more for Zoey. She opts for a little less zucchini than she’d typically put—Mira hates the texture, bless her—and soon the batch is ready for the pot.
Rumi walks over to the stove, Zoey and Mira move aside to give her space. “Could you—”
She gestures vaguely towards a pitcher of water. Zoey hands it over, and Rumi pours it into the pot. Once it boils, the vegetables will go in next.
All that’s left to do is wait.
Rumi picks up her mug of tea, still warm on the counter, and leans back against it.
She looks at Mira, muttering something sweet into Zoey’s ear.
Mira, who has never wavered from wearing her heart on her sleeve, has never minced words, has never held back on speaking her mind—even if the words have to claw up and out of her throat uncomfortably.
Rumi decides to take a page from her book.
She licks her lips, tries to string together the words, and tries to do what Mira has shown her time and time again: vulnerability.
“Celine gave me that recipe,” Rumi mutters quietly, looking down into her mug and cradling it close. “When I was a lot younger.”.
Mira and Zoey both turn around.
“It was my favorite.” Rumi smiles wryly. “Or is. I haven’t had it in a while.”
“I bet it’s going to taste so good,” Zoey giggles, disentangling herself from Mira to step closer towards Rumi. Zoey takes her mug and sets it on the countertop. Rumi’s arms find their way around Zoey’s waist. Zoey leans up to kiss her—soft, firm. Grounding.
Just what she needed, because Mira presses ever onwards. “Have you two spoken lately?”
“Not at all,” Rumi admits. “We haven’t—I haven’t—”
She hasn’t figured it out yet. It’s all so nebulous and confusing, the gargantuan complexity of how Celine makes her feel. Or, how Celine feels about her. The bridge between them feels frail and tenuous—if it’s even still there at all—and crossing it feels scary. Terrifying.
And yet,
“I missed her today.”
What if there’s no warmth left on the other side?
“It’s okay,” Zoey says the words, rubbing soothing circles where her hands have settled on Rumi’s waist—and Rumi believes her. It keeps her steady like an anchor, her feelings so close to being caught in stormy waters.
“I don’t know how to fix it,”
She looks up at Zoey, and then at Mira, and quietly admits:
“I don’t even know if I want to.”
“Be careful,” Celine chides, holding the piping hot bowl away from Rumi’s impatient hands. “It’s hot.”
Celine blows the steam away, and Rumi watches as it curls into thin wisps before disappearing. Her homework, only halfway finished, has been pushed aside to make way for plates and cutlery—and a glass of Rumi’s favorite juice.
Rumi’s too hungry to wait for the soup to cool and starts attacking the kimchi served on the side. She makes a bit of a mess of herself, and Celine can only sigh before picking up a napkin.
“Rumi-ya,” she nags before wiping a bit of the sauce away from the corner of Rumi’s mouth. “Don’t shove the food in your mouth.”
“Sorry,” Rumi just grins up at her—wide and toothy and silly. “M’hungry!”
Celine places the back of her hand against Rumi’s bowl. Satisfied of its temperature, she finally brings it closer to Rumi, and chuckles when Rumi immediately bears down with vigor.
She starts eating from her own bowl, observant of the fact that Rumi was blatantly ignoring her zucchini slices.
Celine picks one slice out of Rumi’s bowl with her chopsticks and eats it.
“How about this,” Celine proposes. “Have at least three slices of the vegetable, and I’ll eat the rest?”
Rumi wrinkles her nose. “The texture, though!”
“It’s good for you.”
“Two?”
“No bargaining,” Celine gives her a firm look. “Three.”
Rumi pouts. “Fine.”
Celine just gives her a small, amused quirk of the eyebrow.
“Celine?” Rumi calls, her voice small and warm and fragile.
Celine puts down her spoon and turns to look towards her. “Yes?”
“I think this my favorite dish now,” Rumi says, her aversion to the texture of boiled zucchini notwithstanding.
“Is it?”
“Yeah!” Rumi smiles. “The beef is really good. Maybe one day I’ll learn to like vegetables.”
Somehow, Celine looks delighted.
“Here,” she shuffles around the clutter on the table and finds a pen and the receipt for her grocery run earlier that day. “I’ll write down the recipe on the back.”
“So I was thinking, it’s been a while since we went on a holiday,” Rumi starts, setting down plates and cutlery around their table while Mira brings over the pot of soup.
“Careful, careful, hot—hot!” Mira warned.
“Thank you, jagi,” Rumi moves behind Mira to get their drinks, her hands landing briefly on Mira’s waist.
“Rumi, you were saying something?” Zoey prompts, already sitting down on her chair at the table, arranging their bowls of rice, kimchi, and some left-over japchae they heated up.
“Oh yeah!” Rumi goes on her tiptoes to try to reach the water glasses at the top shelf, but she comes up short. Mira is there soon after, kissing her on the temple while she grabs a set of three glasses with ease. “We should go on a holiday! If you want, Zoey, we could visit your parents again?”
“They’d love that,” she laughed. “It might age me though. But sure, why not.”
Mira brings over a pitcher of water while Rumi puts down the coasters and glasses.
“Or we could go somewhere we haven’t before,” Mira suggests, finally slipping into her dining chair.
“Tough, considering we tour.” Rumi hums.
“We don’t ever get to see anything though,” Zoey groans, already picking at the kimchi. “It’s just in and out, no sightseeing!”
“I’ll make a list then,” Rumi suggests. “Some places we might want to see and maybe a column for main attractions—”
(It amuses Mira to no end that Rumi wants to make another Excel spreadsheet.)
Zoey cuts Rumi’s muttering off with a wink. “I’m mainly attracted to the both of you.”
Rumi feels herself flush to the tip of her ears.
Mira sighs and shakes her head. “Don’t blush, Rumi, that was low-hanging fruit.”
“Shut up,” Zoey laughs. “You’re blushing too!”
God.
She loves them so much.
“Let’s eat,” Rumi laughs.
Rumi opens the pot—and it smells immaculate. The broth is rich and thick, and the vegetables have cooked all the way through, soft at the center. There’s a heartier serving of beef than they would usually make, given their appetites, and enough cuts of tofu that the pot almost looks crowded. She could tell from smell alone that the flavor profile was going to be perfect—and that was enough to get Rumi’s mouth watering.
Rumi starts off by serving Zoey, picking up her bowl and ladling heaps of meat, vegetable, and soup into it. Rumi’s careful to strain out the floating green onions though—Zoey likes the taste it gives the broth, but hates when she bites into them.
She blows on the surface, stirring Zoey’s bowl slightly and watching the steam curl upwards and away.
“It’s still hot,” Rumi explains. “I remember when you got too impatient when we had clam soup one time and you killed all your tastebuds.”
“It was kind of worth it, in the moment,” Zoey holds up a finger. “A little.”
Rumi pours out all the captured green onions into Mira’s bowl, and Mira grins up at her in thanks.
“That reminds me,” Mira tuts. “I might have to work over the weekend. I haven’t read my new contract for Hyundai—”
“I’ll help,” Rumi says around a mouthful of japchae. “We can do it together.”
“Thank you,” Mira says earnestly.
Rumi’s about to reassure her that it’s fine, but then her phone start buzzing it’s 8:30AM alarm, which means it’s time for—
“‘Watch Zoey’s Reels’?” Zoey laughs at her, looking at Rumi’s phone face-up on the table. Her eyes are crinkled in sheer delight. “Oh my god, Rumi, you are such a sweetheart.”
“I mean,” Rumi flushes. “It’s just time management! You send an average of like, thirty a day,”
“Twenty-seven,” Mira adds. Zoey and Mira stare at her. “I got bored one time and took an average for a month.” Then she laughs. “One time Rumi canceled a meeting to watch your reels instead.”
“You guys are so weird,” Zoey sighs. “Never change. But also, can we please eat the soup?”
“You’re right, you’re right,” Rumi laughs. “It should be cool enough.”
They all take a spoonful each.
(And suddenly she’s ten again, without the weight of the world on her shoulders, trying to finish her multiplication tables, the birds are chirping outside their window—)
“Rumi?”
Mira’s voice cuts through the haze of her memories.
“Yeah?” Rumi whispers out.
“Where’d you learn to cook like that?” Mira says it with a sly little smile, but her expression is genuine: full of wonder, soft and loving.
“Holy shit, Rumi.” Zoey has to put her spoon down. “It’s amazing. Is it weird if I cry? Like, genuinely? Okay, lowkey, I think I’m going to—” she rubs her eyes with the back of her hand.
Rumi is flattered, but a little confused. “I mean—thank you? Don’t cry though! But it’s okay if you do—I think?”
“It’s just,” Zoey furrows her brow after another sip. She’s thinking. “Watching you make it, set the table, filter away my green-onions,” Zoey laughs a little. “It’s like I can tell how much you thought of us. How much care you put into it—”
Mira gingerly takes another bite. She closes her eyes, reverent like she’s praying. And then she says something so sweet, it makes Rumi’s chest feel heavy with the weight of how much they mean to her.
“It’s like I can feel… how much you love us.”
Oh.
Rumi looks down to her bowl of soup.
Then it all clicks into place for Rumi.
A solid, unassailable realization that almost takes her breath away. She inhales, slow and shaky.
There are tears on the exhale. Everything happens quickly after that—she doubles over right there at the dining table—sobbing, because she finally understands now, she finally hears what she was trying to say, all this time, all those years ago—
“Rumi?” Mira and Zoey are on their feet in record time.
They’re worried. They look worried—and they shouldn’t be.
Because Rumi loves them.
She loves them so much. She reaches out blindly with both her hands, just to feel the warmth of their nearness, and she smiles, because she loves them–
They know it, because they feel it—because Rumi’s able to show them just how much she does.
And in Rumi’s mind, every action is a learned behavior.
Rumi gets herself a second serving of the soup. It’s still hot, since Celine kept the pot simmering on the stove. She once again has an exercise in patience while Celine stirs the bowl, the steam wafting up as it cools.
Rumi decides to help, and blows on the soup too.
It makes Celine’s glasses fog up.
She looks so disoriented by it that she leans back and blinks in confusion, and Rumi—
Rumi starts laughing.
It starts off as a little giggle, something that spreads outwards and brighter until she grins and breaks into a full-bellied laugh. She’s laughing hard enough to hiccup, tears at the corner of her eyes, her little hands reaching out to grab at the cloth of Celine’s sleeves, and Celine—
Her shoulders start shaking as her own giggles threaten to burst.
The things that you’ve learned to do are products of someone else’s example.
Celine gives in and starts laughing too.
“Your glasses!” Rumi says between her snorts and hiccups, barely able to speak, and Celine has now had to brush back Rumi’s unraveling hair to keep it from falling into her bowl of soup.
Celine moves her glasses up to the crown of her head. She’s just watching Rumi, smiling at the sheer joy the young girl was radiating—
She’s so wonderful.
So full of life.
Smiling, beautiful, happy.
“Rumi-ya,”
Celine sighs. She holds Rumi’s face, cradles her gently in her hands, and just looks. She looks at her eyes, at her nose that reminds her of her mother, at her smile—still there, still wide, still glowing.
“My darling girl.”
It made sense—at least to her. If you did something, it’s because someone showed you how.
Celine presses a kiss onto Rumi’s forehead. “I love you,” she says with a laugh in her voice, a smile crinkling the corner of her eyes.
Rumi beams when Celine pulls back. “I love you too!”
Rumi takes that holiday—but to somewhere much closer than they were planning.
She’s standing outside a door she hasn’t come home to in years. The garden is still there. The birds are still singing. The trees are much taller now, though.
She’s holding a pot in her hands, still warm.
Rumi made sure to put jalapeños this time—her favorite.