Confessions of a Cat-holic (125)

He paid a lot of attention to details. My details, specifically. I could tell that he cared for me enough to notice those small changes that others might have overlooked. But he would not say it out loud. He just showed me that he knew all about me.

I stopped asking my mom to drive me to school in the morning. Shortly after we started dating, Rex started taking over my mother's role as my guardian. He would wait for me at Admiralty every morning to take 12A to MacDonnell Road and walk me to the bus stop from school in the evening.

One day, he got a sunburn mark on his nose and I could see that clearly because he was not wearing glasses that day. He usually wore glasses. He asked me if I could see his sunburn mark on his face. I said yes. I also said that his skin was rather flawless, as a guy. He never had any acnes. He didn't have wrinkles either, unlike many guys in my class. He didn't have eczema. He was not an albino. He didn't have shredding skin. He didn't have pus all over his body. He didn't have any scars. He didn't have any tattoos, not that I was aware of at least. He didn't have dandruff. He didn't have any grey hair. He didn't have any obvious defects. I asked him what skin product brand he used. I might consider switching. He smiled and said that was from Kiehl's. I said I had a green tea moisturizer from H2O+. I gave it to him as a gift the next day.

Apart from the usual arcade outings, Rex also liked to take me to different places on the dark side. Sometimes, it was Kowloon. But most of the times, it would be somewhere nearby where he lived, Causeway Bay. Usually, those places were rather secretive with age restrictions. Prior to our dating relationship, I had never been to a snooker club. But he really liked it there.

From what I knew, as well as from other reliable public sources, Rex was a champion in snooker. He was on the news a couple of times for that. And when I said champion, it was not just a small scale local tournament. I believed he had won a few international championships, in Hong Kong, Asia and in Canada, North America. I was rather impressed.

He liked to call it snooker. I sometimes called it pool. Either one was American while the other was the British version. I had no idea how to play snooker. I tried it many times but it just was not my thing. I used to play a lot of pool, on my computer though. I had never played it in real life. But I liked to watch him play anyways. I liked to watch sports game, it could be NBA, the American football, or less so, the soccer and the snooker. I just liked to watch people play. Obviously, I was not skilled enough to be playing it so I guessed watching itself was fun enough. To be honest, I had always been more interested in watching a story as it developed than, say, being in the story itself. Just personal preference.

Wherever he went, he was usually surrounded by a few people and sometimes a crowd even. He had friends, many friends from school and also outside of school. They all seemed to know Rex fairly well, be it the waiters, the cashiers or the owners of the places on the dark side. He was greeted with welcomes every time. I rarely saw him get into fights with strangers. And of course everyone knew that I was his one and only girlfriend.

Hanging out with Rex kind of felt like immersing myself in the underworld. A world where I did not know could have existed. How should I describe it? It was like Harry Potter's 9 3/4 platform. It was just right there and many people could have walked past it every day but only a handful noticed that it existed. Once you entered the world of dark wizardry, it was a brave new world and you might never want to return to your normal life again.

I obviously would not have had access to these places on the dark side, had he not taken me there. I would not attempt to try visiting anyways, as a teenage girl who just turned 18. But I felt safe with his company. I felt safe no matter where he took me.