This Crazy Rich Boy - Chapter 128
Miguel listens to Claire’s voice on the phone, and despite everything else, his heart jumps. She always makes him excited, as though she’s not human. Divine, probably. Or maybe he’s just getting crazier and crazier about her. Who knows? With what’s happening with him these days, it’s getting harder to know which is which.
“Hello?” Claire’s voice is raspy, like she’s been crying. “Mi—Miguel?”
Hearing her mention his name gives him a warm feeling, as though she cares about him. He watches even the slightest inflection, of how she pronounces his name. Did she just say “Miguel” with that trace of longing, like she missed him? He sighs.
“Is he there?” Miguel says.
She hesitates; she looks at Gabriel, who nods. After all, it’s useless to lie. Miguel probably already knows. “Yes. Where are you?”
“Everywhere,” he says. “And nowhere.”
Claire again looks at Gabriel, hoping for some wordless guidance. Gab makes a gesture that says, “The floor is yours, Claire. Slay.”
“Can we talk?” she finally says. “Somewhere private. I want to understand what you’re doing.”
“Really?” Miguel couldn’t help but be cynical about her offer; after all, she did kick him in the groin when he tried to “beg” her to speak to him. Or that’s how he remembers it. “How do you think would that go?”
“It would be a conversation between two level-headed, mȧturė individuals,” she says. “I’m willing to forget what happened yesterday morning. I…I can forget about that.”
Miguel says nothing for a while. Then he says, “He’s hearing what you’re saying to me now, right?”
“Uhhh, yes.”
“Then he’s directing this little show of yours.”
“No, but…”
“Listen, Claire,” Miguel says. “I don’t know what’s my end game for this. I don’t know how this will be finished. I started something that I’m afraid I don’t know how to conclude. Maybe I’m totally [email protected]”
“I don’t think that’s true,” she says, although her heart feels the truth of what he’s saying. “We need to talk.”
“Funny how you’re the one who’s saying that now.”
She says nothing.
Gabriel gestures to her: “Give me the phone.”
She nods. “Gab wants to speak with you.”
“Migs, what in hell is it you think you’re doing?” Gabriel couldn’t hide the anger in his voice. “Migs? Miguel?” His jaw drops. “He hung up on me.”
“Jesus.” Claire says. “What now?”
Gabriel says nothing. Quietly, he puts the receiver back on its cradle and looks around; Claire’s penthouse suite is expansive and luxuriously spaced, but somehow, Gabriel feels like the walls are closing in on him.
—-
Now that what he’s been doing is out in the open, Miguel feels he couldn’t face Gabriel, not with this thing going on. He’s not an idiot; there’s a part of him that knows what he’s been doing is wrong. And yet. Here he is. Sitting in the darkness of some obscure little bar in the outskirts of the city, having just pressed the “end call” buŧŧon to avoid having to speak to his brother. Gabriel’s voice jarred him out of his senses; it’s weird, it’s strange, and it’s making him feel so utterly guilty.
Much earlier, Miguel had watched Gabriel arrive at The Grille with that familiar scowl. He was alone; Claire was nowhere in sight. For some reason, Gabriel even commandeered the table near him, so Miguel lifted up the newspaper to cover his face: this was perfect as his brother was within earshot, and he could hear whatever he said, but the smallest mistake and he could blow his cover. So patiently, Miguel sat there, unmoving, pretending to be someone who was so intently reading his newspaper, holding it so close to his face.
Gabriel was restless. He’s looking around, glancing at the time on his wristwatch. At one point a server approached and asked him if he needed anything. Gabriel was so distracted it took him a long moment to realize the server had been waiting for his response. In the end, he ordered just a glass of water, but it came with appetizers in the form of a basketful of bread sticks, the restaurant’s specialty. Gabriel never touched the water, nor the food; he just kept looking at the door, most probably waiting for Miguel.
Miguel was not surprised that Claire wouldn’t be there; it would take extraordinary balls, a stomach made of iron, to be able to stand the sight of the man who had ȧssaulted you. But he wanted so much to tell her, confess to his beloved brother, that he only meant well; that he was desperately in love, and he no longer knew what to do. Getting rejected was quite alien territory for someone like him—and so he’d been behaving erratically. In his head, a single line flashes in fever pitch each time he’d see Claire: “Why can’t you love me?” And the more the answer he was getting was completely not what he dėsɨrėd, the worse he’d become.
The trouble was simple: he’d been walking around with an un-asked question he’d been dying to offer Gabriel; a question that was based more on unspoken things than on clear rules. And the question is this: “I gave you Michelle many years ago; can you return the favor this time and let me have Claire?”
Miguel actually said the question out loud as he drove to visit Gabriel a few nights ago, when he was alone in the car and no one else would hear him. And to his shame, the question, once uttered out plainly in the open, sounded incredibly ridiculous. It was vastly different from how it sounded in his head. That and the fact that even his sacrifice—giving away Michelle, if that made sense, was ultimately an aggravation, given what Michelle had eventually done.
And still, he felt like begging his brother to give Claire away. Half of his mind prods him on, telling him it’s Gabriel, after all, and he would understand. Gabriel could have a battalion of other women he could like and love and marry; heck, he could have celebrities or supermodels. However, half of his mind, coming from that dark place he hated facing, told him to stop the bullsh1t. Don’t be an idiot. Your unspoken question should remain unspoken for as long as you live.
“I don’t know my end game for this,” Miguel had told Claire over the phone, because it’s true: he has no idea. He’s just a big bleeding mass of illegitimate feelings, throwing himself into one awkward situation after another. He has lost his cool. His “muchness.” He’s no longer Miguel Tan, the Great Conqueror; he’s just some boy, hiding in this little bar, nursing his festering wounds.
Miguel picks up the shot glass in front of him, and throws its contents down his throat. The bartender, who knew him from way back and had an enormous respect for Miguel, is quick to ask if he needs anything else. Miguel mulls over the question. “Do you have a bottle of Yamazaki?”
“Single malt whisky?” the bartender says, trying to be certain if he’d heard it correctly, that Miguel Tan’s asking for a bottle of one of his priciest bottles in the cellar. “I guess I still have a few bottles of eighteen-year-olds and at least one thirty-five-year-old out back.”
“If I ask you to bring out all those, will you join me in drinking them all?”
“My God, of course!” the bartender stammers; in his mind, he’s already calculating the enormous profit from the sale of those few precious bottles. “But did you say you want to drink them all? Here, tonight?”
“Yes,” Miguel says. “Right here, right now. I just want to do a little experiment.”
“Experiment?” the bartender polishes his last crystal; his eye is already on the cellar door behind him.
“I want to see if it’s true what they say,” Miguel says, his eyes distant. “That you can drown all your sorrows if you try hard enough.”