This Crazy Rich Boy - Chapter 168

“It’s not much, but it’s comfortable,” Claire says as she stands by the door of Gabriel’s temporary room. It is spartan and neat, by all means, but so far from the luxury Gabriel is used to.

He shrugs. “Don’t worry, this is perfect. I’m out in the country, I’ve met your family. What can I ask for?”

“I can’t sleep here with you, you know. My parents would freak out. It’s not like we’re already married and…”

“That’s fine. We’ve never slept together, anyway. If you know what I mean,” he says.

Claire laughs. “Someday we’ll come to that. Maybe soon.”

Gabriel smiles at looks at her. “I look forward to that.”

“So…goodnight, then?”

“Good—”

Claire gives him a kiss on the lips so fast that it’s over before he realizes it.

“See you tomorrow,” she says, walking away, toward her own room.

“Okay,” he mutters, more to himself than to anyone else.

This is wonderful, Gabriel thinks. The bed is a simple wooden bed, with a soft but not luxuriously soft mattress. Sure, it’s far from the Sealy mattress he used to enjoy, but there’s something about the simplicity, the no-frills vibe of Claire’s place that makes him feel so deeply calm and contented. Like he feels as though he has finally come home.

And it’s uncanny, too, the quietude of the place. Gabriel walks up to the open window and surveys the moonlit landscape. Claire’s family’s farm seems to extend beyond what he can see, and all around them are structures he could only ȧssume to be the barn, the stables, or wherever they keep all the animals and farming equipment. This is where Claire grew up, and for him, it feels like homecoming, too. He feels that funny, delicious feeling in his stomach, like he’s a teenaged boy again and he just found out that his long-time crush—a girl whose footprints he worshipped—was endearingly human, too.

He looks at himself in the mirror and sees how David’s old sleepwear—old pajama bottoms and a t-shirt that says, “I Heart New York”—look perfectly on him. The clothes were from many years ago, when perhaps David was his age. Yet, it smells clean and new-ish. When he’d come out of the bathroom wearing it, Claire’s mom stopped and stared—she must have had a vision of her husband from a long time ago.

“He kinda looks like Dad, right?” Claire had elbowed her mom.

Her dad had overheard. “I looked much handsomer when I was that age,” David protested, and everyone laughed.

Gabriel sits on the bed and tests how it feels. Then as soon as his back touches the mattress, all weariness seems to descend on him like a thick blanket. He fights it off initially, wondering how he’d proceed in the coming days. He’s seduced into thinking of calling up Mrs. Gomez and having all his clothes flown in, but that would be the opposite of the whole point of being here, right? He had asked Claire to drop everything and travel back all the way to her hometown for a reason, and that’s to cut all their ties to the emotional baggage of their former lives. He will return to that life in due time, when it is necessary or when he finally feels he has fulfilled his goal here, but for the meantime, this feels good, being a nobody, not even having his own clothes. Jesus, he doesn’t even have a change of undėrwėȧr. Alright, maybe he really should send a message to Mrs. Gomez, but just for the necessities, as he realizes it would be too much to even ask Claire’s dad for his old undėrwėȧr, wouldn’t it?

He’s excited about tomorrow. What would they do? What farm-related things would he dip his arm into? Claire had described to him what basically is the scope of the family’s work on the farm: they produce a local brand of cottage cheese, using carabao’s milk (water buffalo). They also have a plot of dragon fruit, which happens to be among the priciest fruits anywhere in the country. “When you say ‘plot’, how big is it actually?” he had asked her. “Maybe around ten hectares, give or take a hectare?” Then there are the fields of vegetables, the mango orchard, and the hordes and hordes of free-range chicken, which their family supplies to the local market.

“How are the four of you able to run this farm? There seems to be a lot going on.”

Claire merely smiled. “You’ll see tomorrow,” she said, and you can tell how excited she was, too.

He had looked at her for a long time, before asking, “You have all these wonderful things. Why go to the city to look for a job? You could have just stayed here and helped run the business, right?”

She shrugged. “I wanted to see the world out there. And if I hadn’t, then I wouldn’t have met you.”

He hasn’t met Claire’s sister, Mariya, yet. Based on the pictures in the living room, she must be one sweet girl, even sweeter than Claire. Mariya’s room is right across the room he’s in now, and Gabriel wonders if she could take a prank—what if she knocks on her door and surprises the bejesus out of her? He laughs inwardly, but then, maybe not a good idea—maybe that would piss off the over-protective dad. Maybe some other time, then.

Gabriel sort of closes his eyes just to rest for a bit. But for some reason, his mind tumbles into an abyss and in no time, he’s in dreamland.

“Hey!” He hears a girl’s voice, similar to Claire’s but higher-pitched, seemingly from far away. “Hey, get up.” Then somebody’s kicking him in the feet. “Hey, get up, mister. Are you going to sleep all day?”

Gabriel reluctantly opens his eyes. Is it morning already? He feels as if he’d just closed his eyes five minutes ago! He had a long and tiring day yesterday, what with all the trouble of trying to find Claire and emotionally managing the very existence of his mother, so much that, yes, somehow he intended to sleep all day. He would have just ordered his people to bring in his breakfast and what-have-you. Except he’s not at home, not at his lavishly appointed suite back in his residential tower in the city. As he gazes around the room, trying to make sense of the time and place and moment, slowly the facts become clearer, and the memory of the previous day crystallizes in his mind.

“You’re too lazy for such a big man,” the voice chirps.

He bolts up on the bed and discovers the owner of the voice, and his jaw drops: there’s a cuter, younger, even boyish version of Claire standing at the foot of his bed, her hands on her hɨps. And now this cuter “version” of Claire folds her arms on her ċhėst and declares, “If you don’t get up, I will drag you down the stairs myself.”