Chapter Three - Any Color But Black

How could I show up empty-handed?

I had been pacing in front of my refrigerator since seven in the morning. In the corporate world, showing up unprepared was tactical suicide. But Nikau's text from last night had been absolute: Literally nothing, Sei. Just yourself.

I closed the fridge and faced my open wardrobe. The dotted, burnt amber calf-length dress with flutter sleeves was already on my body, and it felt entirely unnatural. Three times I had almost torn it off to retreat into my standard armor — sharp black linen, navy. This dress had languished in the dark corner of my closet for two years. Too soft. Too... feminine for a woman who had to project ironclad authority.

Just as I was weighing a black blazer to bury it under, my phone vibrated. Video call. My son, Arga — still awake at his hour, of course.

"Ma, seriously? What's with the blazer?" His eyes narrowed through the screen. "Put the blazer back... to wherever it came from! Your dress is enough. Jakarta panas!" He leaned closer, spotting my wrist. "Wait, is that a new rose gold bracelet? Neat. So... when do I get to meet the new boyfriend?"

Warmth flushed my cheeks. Sialan. At fifty-one, being teased about a man by my own son in the UK was the last thing I had predicted for my life.

"He'll be here in ten minutes," I said quickly, grabbing a rattan bag.

"Okaaaay. Have fun, Ma. Call me when you're back!" He waved and disconnected.

I took a breath. Arga was right. I couldn't let my rigid logic send me running back into a black shroud.

He was exactly on time.

I had barely locked my front door when a black Land Rover Defender pulled up. Nikau stepped out — sunglasses, olive linen shirt with sleeves carelessly rolled to his elbows, off-white trousers. Effortless.

The moment his eyes found me, his stride hitched. "The color looks great on you," he said warmly, opening the passenger door.

Not you look great. The color looks great on you. The first time anyone had complimented how a color lived on me.

The forty-minute drive to Kebon Jeruk was a seamless blur. In the crawling traffic, his left hand enveloped my fingers over the console, the conversation fluid without a single mention of work.

Intercon Lake Park was a lush, open green haven. Parked under a shaded canopy, Nikau unloaded a massive haul: a woven picnic basket, a premium cooler bag, a thick rolled mat.

I stood with my hands on my hips. "You told me not to bring anything."

"You don't have to." He closed the trunk with his elbow. "I brought everything. Your only job today is to enjoy being with me. Come on."

He laid the blanket under a sprawling tree by the lake. When the basket opened, I fell silent. Precisely sliced golden brioche sandwiches, their buttery aroma betraying the fact that they had left an oven this morning.

Tucked in the deepest corner, wrapped in linen, was a glass jar: a sleek, perfectly set vanilla bean panna cotta under a shimmering citrus-berry compote.

"Where did you buy this, Nik?"

"I made it." He settled onto the mat. "The kawakawa one from the card, I'm saving — that one needs a story first. This is the experiment. I don't know yet how you like your panna cotta. I wanted to understand your palate before we eventually make desserts together."

Before we make desserts together. The phrase slid from his lips with terrifying casualness, as if our future were already a scheduled reality on his agenda. A sweeping warmth hushed the old panic before it could speak.

"Today, there is no question of the day," Nikau said, closing the distance between us. "Today, there is only a statement. You told me you wanted a day where no one needs anything from you. This isn't quite the N*****x day — I still owe you that one. But today, there is not a single thing I need from you, Sekar. Nothing to decide. Nothing to manage. Just be here, with me."

My throat constricted.

And then — because he'd made it so there was nothing to do, no task to complete, no way to earn my place on the blanket — I didn't know what to do with my hands.

That was the first thing I noticed. I reached for something to manage and found nothing there. No deck to review, no fire to put out, no one's comfort to arrange but my own, which I had no practice arranging. My thumb went, out of pure habit, to my phone in the rattan bag.

Nikau didn't tell me to put it away. He just watched me notice myself reaching for it, and something in his patient expression made me set the bag down on the far corner of the mat, out of easy reach. A small mutiny against thirty years of reflex.

"There's nothing on it that can't wait two hours," I said — to myself, testing whether it was true.

"Nothing," he agreed, unbothered, tearing a corner off a brioche sandwich and handing it to me like it was the most important transaction of the afternoon.

So I let myself do nothing.

It was harder than any meeting. For the first ten minutes my mind kept generating tasks the way a phantom limb keeps generating pain — I should check the KL follow-up, I should confirm Arga's flights, I should— and each time, there was Nikau, unhurried beside me, asking me something with no agenda behind it. Whether I'd ever caught a fish. What I'd wanted to be at seven, before the world handed me a company. Which of the ducks paddling past the reeds I thought was clearly the ringleader.

I heard myself laugh at the duck question. A real one, from somewhere I'd stopped visiting.

Slowly, the tasks stopped arriving. I lay back on the mat and watched the leaves shift the light around, and Nikau talked when there was something to say and let the quiet sit when there wasn't, and I realized I could not remember the last time I had been in the presence of another person without performing something for them — competence, or reassurance, or the appearance of being fine.

Across the water, a father chased three shrieking children along the shoreline, scooping the smallest one up mid-run. Their laughter carried to us on the wind. I watched them for a while, and for once the sight didn't summon the old checklist — did I give Arga enough of that, was I ever the parent doing the chasing or only the one funding the chase — it just landed as what it was. A nice afternoon. Other people's joy, borrowed for a second, costing me nothing.

For two hours, I was no one's CEO. No one's provider, no one's safe pair of hands, no one's anything.

Just Sekar.

And the astonishing part wasn't that Nikau had given me the day. It was that, somewhere in the second hour, I had finally stopped waiting for the bill.

By midday, a sharp gust swept across the grass and my loose half-bun collapsed, hair spilling across my face.

"I lost my hair tie," I muttered, patting the blanket.

Without a word, Nikau stood and walked briskly toward his car.

"Nik! Don't bo—"

"—Dalem, sayang."

The word carried back from a distance, deep and heavy with care. The Javanese answer landed like a hand on the small of my back, an exquisite shiver running down my spine. He rummaged through the glove compartment and returned with a small box filled entirely with neutral-toned hair ties.

I stared at it. "Why do you have this?"

"Just in case a moment like this happened. Just in case you needed something but forgot to prepare it — because you were too busy taking care of everyone else."

I accepted the box, fingertips trembling slightly, and tied my hair in silence.

The drive back was intentionally slow. At a quiet intersection, my left hand disappeared into his.

"This morning," I murmured, "you said 'the color looks great on you.' Not 'you look great in that color.' Why?"

"Because you'd look extraordinary in any color, Sei." He gave my hand a gentle squeeze. "But every photo of you in existence is black, navy, or grey. I didn't want to claim the beauty of something I haven't fully seen yet. After today, though... I'm certain. Any color."

I snapped my head toward the window to hide a wild, uncontrollable smile.

At my gates, Nikau stepped out and opened my door. He took my left hand, turned it palm-up, and pressed his lips for a long, unhurried moment against the inside of my wrist — directly over my leaping pulse, just beneath the bracelet.

His fingers lingered, snapping a third charm into place. A miniature golden picnic basket.

"For today," he whispered.

"We'll add more charms later," I murmured, quoting his card.

"Have a great rest of your day. Talk soon, Sei." A casual wave, and the SUV reversed into the night... no — into the late-afternoon light.

I stood on the pavement until the car vanished. Inside, I sat at my cold marble kitchen island, the three charms chiming softly against the stone. For the first time in over a decade, I had gone an entire day without being anyone's leader.

Today, I was just Sekar. And in front of Nikau, that was more than enough.