"I don't share," he growled right into my ear, his heavy breath hitting the base of my throat.
"I'm not yours." I hissed back.
He stepped closer, a smirk appearing on his face like all he was feeling at this moment was amusement. My patience was thi...
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"Happy Birthday!" I cheered as I tugged Rai into a big hug and he engulfed me in it.
Wow, how much time had passed since I last saw him?
"Thank you." He was smiling as we pulled back.
Today was Rai's eighteenth birthday. An important age when you were young because it was the first step into adulthood. It was the first step because no one magically matured in their mind overnight.
Adulthood meant much more, and I knew that despite my twenty-six years of life experience, I had only seen a fraction of what I had yet to see if I still had a long life ahead of me.
But I saw in Rai's eyes and his demeanor how much he had matured over the past few months. He now towered a head above me, which was actually quite a lot, considering that East Asian men barely managed over six feet. He must have gotten good genes.
It played a significant factor at his school, which made me happy because I knew how much he enjoyed playing basketball. But he had made it clear from the beginning to my father and me that it was not the path he wanted to take professionally.
His dream was to study computer science and become an engineer.
Rai and I sat down at the table at the restaurant we had chosen for our lunch. A quiet spot for this time of day on the corner of the 78th. And now that I hadn't seen him in almost two months, I couldn't take my eyes off him, a big smile written on my lips.
"You're making me insecure." He laughed, lifting the menu card in front of his face.
I laughed back. "I just noticed you don't have that baby fat in your cheeks anymore."
"Thank God." He groaned, placing the menu card on the table and shuddering.
Instead of his chubby cheeks, he now had nicely sculpted cheekbones and a sharp jaw. You could still tell he was young and a fresh-faced boy, but he was no longer the kid who jumped up from his bed at night crying for his parents.
It was hard the first two years after their deaths to accustom him to the fact that he would never see them again. A four-year-old needed the closeness of their mother, the strength of their father, and even how hard my father and I tried to fill that void, we had known it would never work.
It was fair to say that I had raised Rai and maybe that was why I had such a strong desire to make sure he was doing well. I had been a child myself, but I had learned to put my twelve-year-old self aside and helped my preschooler cousin grow up.
I didn't have a mother either and could sympathize with him, but it was certainly easier to have never met a person than to lose the most important people in your life at such a young age, I guessed.
