Free The Thing I Didn't Know I Didn't Know (Russel Middlebrook: The Futon Years Book 1) by Brent Hartinger

in the bathroom ."
    "I'll go!" I said, louder.
    Jack and Amanda both looked at me.
    "To Uwajimaya," I said. "I mean, if you need someone to go, I don't mind. I'd just need to borrow your car."
    In the end, they decided that, yes, having me go was best, even if it meant another fifteen-minute fight between Jake and Amanda over whether or not I was covered by their insurance.
     
    *   *   *
     
    Uwajimaya is just fantastic. If you take a quick scan, it mostly looks just like any other American supermarket—big and bright and colorful. But if you look closer, you realize that everything is actually different. Some things are very different. For example, the seafood section has a big tank full of live octopi. And there are fish heads, and massive geoduck clams, and a zillion different kinds of live crab. Elsewhere in the store, there's a whole aisle devoted to nothing but dried noodles. And they must stock forty different kinds of soy sauce, and at least twenty kinds of nori.
    Best of all, most of the food is shipped directly from Asia, so the labels don't bother with English at all. Want to know what's in your miso soup mix and you don't read Japanese? Then you're in the wrong store. And if you're grossed out by things like boiled silkworm larvae, well, you really need to get out more.
    I'd been to Uwajimaya a million times, so it didn't take me long to find the dried lychee nuts. But Jake and Amanda didn't know that, so I took my own sweet time.
    I explored the produce. With a name like dragon fruit, it had to be good, right?
    I examined the electric tea pots. It reminded me how Min was always saying her parents are total snobs about tea, even though she's a total tea snob herself. Snobbery, like beauty, is totally in the eye of the beholder.
    Finally, I considered going upstairs to check out the cookbooks, despite the fact that none of them are written in English.
    And then, standing in the middle of the massive fresh sushi section, I saw Kevin.
    I literally caught my breath. I'd never done that before, so I didn't even know what it felt like (a cross between a gulp and a choke).
    He wasn't riding in a white limousine like Richard Gere in Pretty Woman , but it didn't matter. I was flooded with feelings of affection—I was drowning in a whole goddamn lake of them.
    I was watching him, but he didn't see me, just like before. But this time he was barely ten feet away, and there was no crowd for him to get lost into. In other words, there was no chance of him getting away.
    Do I even have time to talk to him? I actually had to think about that. With iPhone technology constantly changing, I had to seriously consider: were there any possible apps that Jake and Amanda could use to track me and realize I was goofing off?
    More importantly, do I want to talk to him? Once we talked, I'd have to accept whatever came next. Like, if his reappearance in my life didn't make everything wonderful again.
    Truthfully, that kind of nonsense was a lot easier to accept when Kevin was mostly in the abstract, not when he was standing right in front of me with his neatly trimmed black beard. That was something new—he hadn't had a beard before. He filled out his shirt more now, and his pants too, but both in very good ways. And he hadn't worn glasses before either.
    But even so, I couldn't make myself walk over to him. My pulse was pounding, but the blood didn't seem to be going anywhere. The warm feeling suddenly turned cold. I was remembering our break-up, how petty it was, what a dick I'd been. Would he remember that? Would he hold it against me?
    I turned to leave.
    At the same time, he turned toward me.
    "Russel?" he said.
    I looked back.
    His face was warm and friendly and open. He was drowning in all the same feelings I'd been having only a few seconds earlier—I could just tell. He hadn't remembered why or how we'd broken up, what a dick I'd been. Or maybe he did, but it paled compared to everything else he felt about me.
    "Kevin?" I