Chapter Two - Flip-flops at Terminal 3

Six days until Saturday.

Sunday night. Once the house fell quiet again, I sat at the kitchen island nursing a glass of water, the compass charm spinning slowly with every movement of my fingers. My phone lay beside it, the drafted message still open. I retyped it a fourth time — shorter now, stripped of corporate padding — and before I could delete it again, hit send. 22:11.

Good night, Nikau. Thank you for the card and the bracelet. — Sekar

A minute later:

Good night, Sekar. I've been waiting for your text. I hope your trip goes smoothly this week. Rest well. Sleep well, talk soon.

Sleep well, talk soon. I stared at the screen far longer than a text message warranted. That night, for the first time in ages, I fell asleep before midnight.

Monday. 05:47.

My phone vibrated against the nightstand. Not an alarm — a voice message and a twenty-three-second video. I tapped play with bleary eyes.

"Good morning, Sekar. Just got back from a run. Excuse the messy hair."

His baritone was raspy and slightly out of breath. On screen, he sat in his kitchen in a plain t-shirt, sweat dampening the hair at his temples. Effortlessly fresh — not a man performing a flawless impression.

"Breakfast is waiting for you at the airport lounge. Just give them your name. And let me know when you land. Have a good flight, Sekar."

I sat upright, finger automatically hitting replay. Three times.

He knew my flight, of course. The agency's intake form had asked for my travel calendar, and I had — after a full week of deliberation — told Wiwin to share it. I had signed off on this. Somehow that made the breakfast feel less like surveillance and more like a promise being kept.

And the breakfast was genuinely there. Cheese omelette, sausages, hot teh tarik, fresh fruit, appearing the moment I said my name. For twenty minutes of that chaotic morning, my head held no Kuala Lumpur meetings at all. Only the video.

Before boarding at 08:12 I typed: Boarding. Thank you for breakfast. Instant reply: Hope you enjoyed it. Safe flight. Let me know the second you land.

The second you land. I closed my eyes as the plane taxied, suddenly disoriented. When was the last time someone considered my safety important enough to demand proof I'd made solid ground?

Kuala Lumpur greeted me with clear skies. In my hotel room overlooking KLCC, my eyes went straight to a vase of fresh peonies and white roses on the desk. A card leaned against it.

Sekar, question of the day: if you could have breakfast anywhere in the world tomorrow morning, where would it be, and what would you order? Call me when you're finished with work. — Nik

I slipped off my heels, stretched my legs across the king-size bed, and typed the absolute truth: My own kitchen. Fried rice I cooked myself. No meetings, no schedules. Just sitting at the kitchen island eating in total peace.

A long pause. Then: Interesting.

It felt as though he were staring directly at me — finding the rigid, steel-plated woman behind the screen completely captivating. Sialan. Why was I falling into my feelings this quickly? Too soon.

Somewhere around noon, mid-negotiation, my throat closed up — that dry, scraping tickle that always ambushed me in over-air-conditioned Malaysian boardrooms. I reached for the water pitcher on the credenza and found it empty, and there was no graceful way to stop a live term-sheet discussion to hunt for more.

I typed one line to Nikau under the table, barely thinking, the way you'd mutter to yourself: KL air-con is trying to kill me. No water in this entire building apparently.

I put the phone face-down and went back to fighting about indemnity clauses.

Forty minutes later a hotel runner knocked on the conference room door and, with an apologetic bow to the room, set down a tray: a jug of warm water, a smaller one of hot water, sliced ginger and lemon in a dish, and a jar of manuka honey. No note. None needed.

Across the table, my counterpart raised an eyebrow. "Someone takes good care of you, Bu Sekar."

I looked at the ginger — the exact remedy my late mother used to make — and did not trust my voice to answer him. I just smiled, poured a cup, and let it soothe the thing in my throat that had nothing to do with air conditioning.

He'd made two calls, minimum, to a hotel he wasn't staying in, in a city he wasn't in, over a throat tickle I'd mentioned as a joke. I filed it away — not the way I file things to survive them, but the way you keep something you want to look at again later.

The afternoon board meeting stretched three hours overtime. Walking out of the conference hall on aching feet, my screen lit up: How was the meeting? Not a generic how-was-your-day. He remembered my specific agenda.

Sekar: Three hours overtime. My feet are absolutely killing me.

Nikau: Call me when you get back and settled in?

That night, purely because I wanted to hear his voice, I cut dinner with my team short. On the phone, the conversation flowed from my childhood memories of KL to his own — how at eleven he nearly burned down his grandfather's backyard attempting a traditional hāngī.

At five past ten, his tone deepened.

"Sekar. It's past ten over there. Go to sleep."

Not a question. A firm, protective directive that sent a strange flutter through my chest.

Nikau: What are you comfortable with me calling you?

Sekar: Sei. You?

Nikau: Nik. Though we can explore other names later... kangmas, mas sayang, sayang? My grandmother's words. She'd be delighted I finally have use for them.

A breathless laugh escaped me — awkwardness and warmth in one exhale.

Sekar: Sure. 'Kangmas' has a real backbone to it. Haha.

Nikau: Right? Okay, for real now. Sleep well, Sei. Talk soon.

Tuesday. Singapore.

At Changi, a uniformed courier met me at arrivals with a luxury paper bag: a high-capacity power bank. You mentioned you forgot yours last night. Don't let your phone die before we talk tonight. — Nik

A passing remark, made somewhere between stories of nasi lemak and Maui. He'd kept it.

In my hotel room: Vosges chocolates on the pillow, a sleep kit on the nightstand — herbal sleep aids, lavender pillow mist, premium earplugs. Underneath, the question of the day: Sei, what's something you're really good at that has nothing to do with work? — Nik

Sekar: Cooking. I make a mean soto tangkar and sop buntut.

Nikau: So I heard. I'm intrigued.

At exactly ten, the command repeated: "Sei. Sleep." I complied, spraying lavender onto my pillow, letting myself be gently directed by his voice.

Wednesday.

A wake-up call at six, directly from him.

"Good morning." Warm amusement in his voice. "Are you awake?"

"Just now."

"Breakfast in bed is on its way. Don't open the door until you're ready."

Twenty minutes later, a hotel attendant wheeled in warm chicken porridge, fresh orange juice, black coffee, and a single white magnolia in a small vase. Tucked underneath: Sekar, when was the last time someone truly took good care of you? And what did it feel like? — Nik

The words sent a cold wave through me, and I set the card down harder than I meant to — hard enough that the magnolia in its little vase trembled.

Because I didn't have an answer. That was the problem. I turned the question over while I showered and found nothing. Turned it over again drying my hair and found a marriage in which I had been, from the first month to the last, the sole provider of care — the one who remembered Vino's mother's birthday, who rebooked the flights when his assistant failed, who sat up with a feverish Arga and woke at six to run a company, while the man in the house slept the clean, untroubled sleep of someone who has outsourced his conscience. Care, in my life, had always flowed one direction. Outward. From me.

I put the card in my bag so I wouldn't have to keep seeing it, and I went to work.

But the question came with me.

It sat in the corner of the day's first meeting while I nodded at revenue projections. It surfaced again over a lunch I don't remember eating. Twice I opened my phone to answer it and twice I closed it again, because every honest answer that came to me was some version of I don't know, and I did not want to type those three words to a man who kept warm water sent to boardrooms.

By the afternoon it had changed shape. It was no longer when was the last time someone took care of you — it had curdled into the uglier cousin underneath it: what makes you think you're the kind of woman anyone takes care of? I had built a life on being the one who carries. Being carried wasn't a gift I'd been denied. It was a category I had quietly filed myself out of, decades ago, because wanting it and not getting it had hurt too much to keep wanting.

I left the card unanswered all day.

When he called at nine, he didn't ask about it. He never pushed — that was becoming the most disarming thing about him. Instead he told me he'd lost three straight rounds of chess to a new client that afternoon, "a genuinely humbling reality check," delivered with such theatrical wounded pride that my laugh burst out of me, raw and too loud for a hotel room.

And as the laugh faded — before my corporate defenses could reassemble, before the careful woman came back online — I heard myself say it into the phone, quietly.

"Today's question. I don't remember, Nik. It's been so long I genuinely can't give you an answer."

A brief silence. Not an awkward one. The kind that makes room.

"Oh — wait." Flustered by the quiet, I scrambled to fill it, to make the confession smaller than it was. "I remember. Late 2020. When I caught COVID and got isolated in the hospital. The nurses were lovely."

His laugh was rich and easy, and it melted the tension out of the line instantly. "That doesn't count, Sei. Strangers doing their job is not the same thing, and you know it."

"It's the best I've got."

"I know," he said. Not poor you. Not the condescending coddling I'd spent a lifetime despising. Just — I know. Two words that took the answer exactly as it was, no heavier and no lighter, and set it down gently between us. "We're going to fix that. Not tonight. But we're going to."

I didn't say anything. On the nightstand, the eye mask he'd sent that afternoon sat waiting for the woman whose eyes are ambushed by morning sun. I looked at it for a long moment, and understood that the fixing had, in fact, already started — I just hadn't had a category to file it under.

Thursday. Home.

The plane landed in Jakarta at six in the evening. At baggage claim, my temper flared — neither Wiwin nor my driver had answered in an hour. My head throbbed, my body was spent, my feet pulsed with sharp pain from a full day trapped in heels. And I had foolishly packed no flats in my carry-on.

As I braced for the taxi queue and two hours of gridlock to Kemang, my phone buzzed.

Nikau: Don't go to the taxi line. Someone is waiting for you at arrivals.

I froze mid-corridor. Who? No reply.

Stepping out into the humid evening air, my eyes locked onto a tall, broad-shouldered man standing without a placard. He waved casually. Nikau.

In his right hand: a pair of thick, cushioned flip-flops.

"You said your feet were killing you in those heels," he said, the moment I stopped dead in front of him.

I stared at the flip-flops, dazed, then sank onto a metal bench to put them on. A perfect fit. Without a word, Nikau took the handle of my suitcase, absorbing the weight with practiced ease.

I stood. Before my brain could argue protocol, professionalism, or the fine print of a retainer contract, he slowly opened his arms. No pressure. Just an offer of harbor.

I stepped forward and let myself be held. Our first embrace, in the chaotic pulse of Terminal 3.

In the car, the city was a river of red brake lights. Two hours to Kemang, easily. Before pulling out of the parking structure, he reached into the back seat and set a warm banana-leaf parcel and a small thermos in my lap.

"Lemper. Uti's recipe — my grandmother." He merged into the crawl. "And STMJ. Still warm. She swore by it."

STMJ. Susu, telur, madu, jahe — milk, egg, honey, ginger. Exactly what a body wrung out by four days of airports needed. Also, famously, the drink every bapak in Java swore by for his stamina. I hid my smile in the first warm sip and decided not to tease him. Yet.

I ate in the slow-moving dark, headlights sliding across the dashboard, and something in my shoulders came down an inch at a time.

"Question of the day," he murmured eventually, eyes on the road. "One thing you've desperately wanted for a long time, but never told another living soul."

He switched off the audio system, leaving us in a heavy, safe silence. Four days of travel, a warm meal, and the dark did the rest.

"I want to do absolutely nothing for an entire day. No work, no schedules, no being anyone's boss. Just sleeping, watching N*****x, where not a single person needs a single decision from me."

He nodded slowly. One word.

"Saturday."

My head snapped toward him.

"Saturday," he repeated, with unyielding certainty. "No agendas. No schedules. Just us."

My throat constricted. I looked out at the city lights, desperate to hide the sudden tremble of tears.

At my gates, he stepped out to open my door and retrieve my luggage. I stood awkwardly, work bag on my shoulder, under the warm glow of the streetlamp.

He took my left hand, turned it palm-up — his fingers moved over the rose gold chain and snapped a tiny new charm into place.

A miniature airplane, beside the compass.

"Our first meeting," he murmured. "Ahead of schedule. Saturday is still Saturday." He stepped back. "It's late. Sleep well, talk soon. Until Saturday, Sei."

"Until Saturday, Nik."