"Baby, I like it!"
This next piece is weird. I was trying to convey what these two people are and what they will be. Feed back would be nice. In fact, it is encouraged.
HERE AND NOW
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There are times when Josh really hates his job. Like now, when he’s walking downtown with the self-proclaimed Princess of Organized Crime, daughter of Bai Fengliang. Bai is the leader of one the top crime families in Hong Kong-although for the rest of the world, he is merely an influential business man-therefore, his daughter had informed him with a haughty lift of her chin, she is a princess.
Josh thinks she’s a pain in his ass, but refrains from telling her. For the moment.
As a favor to Bai, Lionel Falconeri has graciously offered that one of his own men watch over Bai’s daughter when she comes over to the states to do God only knows what. And by some cruel twist of fate, Lionel has chosen Josh to look after her, be her bodyguard for however long she’ll be here. Josh is sure that this is some form of payback from when he was a rookie and he had botched a hit, causing a whole nasty cover-up; Lionel’s official statement is that Josh is young and attractive, amiable, and will make a good companion for her.
“Besides,” he had reasoned, leaning back in his chair and smiling, smiling like he was remembering his own youth, “you’re close to her age.”
Hardly, Josh had wanted to say. There is gap of about six years between them, a gap that includes shoes and clothes, and cooing over small, fluffy animals. Her world consists of shopping, people waiting on her hand and foot, and getting what she wants whenever she wants. His world consists of making sure that Lionel doesn’t end up dead in the street and getting rid of anyone who becomes an inconvenience. Her concerns are trivial, her life superficial and glittering like jewels. His concerns are essential, his life precarious and always on the line.
Silk brocade and blood.
Not to mention the fact that she is annoying as hell. Her voice is annoyingly high-pitch, almost reaching another frequency entirely when she is excited or upset-both of which have happened far too many time for Josh’s liking and they have only known one another for less than two weeks. She flits around from place to place, distracted by everything she sees. She is the ultimate tourist and given that he has to follow her around, Josh is at the mercy of her whims.
“I want to go in there,” she declares, stopping suddenly in the middle of the sidewalk, heedless to the people milling around her. Bai Jie is all of 5’2”-5’3” in the black heels she has insisted on wearing despite the fact that she is going to be walked around downtown-dressed in resin washed jeans that cling to her legs and a cowl-neck grey sweater that she has belted at the waist; Josh is fairly certain she’s wearing the clothes she bought yesterday. She stomps her foot slightly to punctuate her point, arm jutting straight out and pointing in the direction of the some boutique filled with mile-high, glossy heels and over-priced and hideous handbags.
Josh suppresses the shudder and ignores her. He stuff s his hands in the pocket of his black coat and thinks about how much he really, really hates his job.
“Didn’t you hear me? I said that I want to go in that store over there. I-want-to-go-in-that-store,” Jie says slowly, deliberately, loudly as if English is her first language and he is the foreigner. She raises her eyebrows at him. “Well?”
“Look, Jie,” he begins, mispronouncing her name as Jee.
She wrinkles her nose in distaste, pursing her lips. “It’s Jie,” she tells him, sounding deeply offended. “Jie,” she repeats, pronouncing it Jyeh. “Jie, Jie, Jie, Jie, Jie. Say it with me now, until you can get it right.”
One day he’ll cup her face in his hands and whisper her name correctly, the name falling from his lips like a prayer. Today though, he pinches the bridge of his nose, feeling a headache coming on. “Bai,” he says, knowing that it will piss her off because she hates being called by her surname; she has a name thank you very much. “I really don’t think that the best way to spend your day is to Americanize your wardrobe.”
“Well, I don’t really care what you think.” She doesn’t say it, but it’s heavily implied that his opinion means next to nothing to her; he’s just a bodyguard, little more than a servant in her mind. Her opinion of him will change one day, and she’ll find that she really does care what he thinks, a little too much. One day she’ll worry about what he thinks of her, spend hours mulling over it. But now he is little more than an annoyance.
She’s a brat. It’s in the way she walks, the way she looks at other people, the dismissive way that she talks to people who aren’t her father. When Josh had introduced himself to her, he had tried to be polite. He had smiled-albeit a bit forced, but it was still a smile-and extended his hand. Jie had glanced at the hand, then back up at his face, and scoffed. She said something in Chinese as she brushed past him, dropping her bags and expecting him to pick them up and follow.
The others in the organization have been giving him sympathetic looks ever since, offering to buy him drinks as soon as he’s off duty. Flynn Mathers had caught him that morning before he had a left and given him a salute. “You’re a saint,” he’d told him with a smirk. He’ll tell Josh that almost every day, marveling at how he can put up with such a whiny, selfish brat-although sometimes he will exchange “brat” for “bitch.” And for a while Josh will laugh and agree, but things will change. Jie will cease to be a brat in his mind-let alone anything resembling a bitch-and when Flynn says something that Josh feels crosses the line, he’ll shove him up against a wall and tell him to shut his fucking mouth.
Josh has to bite his tongue to keep from saying anything that he’ll regret later-nothing, no matter how satisfying it is now, is worth having Bai Fengliang on your ass. He instead turns his attention to a pair of women walking by, both graced with curves in all the right places. One is a brunette with her hair done in a French braid that reaches the middle of her back and a couple inches below the tips of that braid is an ass so fine that it’s almost criminal. The other has black hair and dark eyes, an infectious smile and an admirable bust line. Neither one is flaunting their looks and that makes them all the more appealing to Josh, both being a nice departure from the brat he’s stuck with.
She notices the way Josh looks at the two women, how his head turns and how he smirks appreciatively after them. It annoys her. Greatly. It’s not that she really cares whether or not if he looks at her with that gleam in his eyes, but she feels that she should be eliciting that same response from him. She’s slender and small in stature, delicate. Men love delicate looking women. And she’s pretty, what with her long lashes that she can flutter when the occasion calls for it and her perfect, bow-shaped lips. And on top of everything she’s Asian-didn’t every Western man want an Asian woman? She’s a delicate, pretty, Asian woman and he should be looking at her, not at random women walking down the street.
She crosses her arms over her chest and huffs. “Are you done? Because if I remember correctly you’re supposed to be watching me, not drooling after anything with a pair of breasts.” She doesn’t realize that she’s pouting and that she looks like a child who’s been told no.
He swivels his head back towards her and raises an eyebrow. “Oh, so you need a babysitter?”
Her mouth opens and closes, slightly reminiscent of the koi that she used to feed in her garden back home. Jie’s face flushes so quickly and in such a startling shade of scarlet that Josh is reminded of a tea kettle-he almost expects steam to be coming out of her ears. “I-I- you-!” If there’s one thing that Jie absolutely hates-and the list is quite extensive-it’s being called a child.
Josh smirks, walks away from her, leaving her to splutter in the middle of the sidewalk. His smirk is growing into a full-fledged shit-eating grin when he hears her let out several angry strings of Chinese curse words, laughs when he takes in the looks of the people who are watching her throw a fit.
“Wong ba!” she cries, and starts off after him, her heels clicking incessantly, angrily, on the sidewalk. She takes a hold of his arm and pulls him backward. He stumbles, startled by the amount of force she put behind it, and she takes the opportunity to stand directly in front of him. “I hate you forever,” she seethes.
It’s a lie, actually. A little more than a year from now they’ll be sitting in the coffee shop that is about a block ahead of where they stand now, and she’ll keep looking from her coffee to him. She’ll gnaw on her bottom lip and twist her fingers into knots before he asks her what’s wrong. “I love you,” she’ll say in a rush, in Chinese because she’ll be too scared to say it in English.
For now though, she really does plan on hating him forever. “Forever,” she promises, and despite how childish it all seems, there’s enough venom dripping in her voice to convince him. She sneers, the expression especially ugly on her youthful face.
“What. The fuck. Ever,” he grinds out, temper getting the better of him. He could care less whether or not she likes him or not, but he can’t take much more of her attitude.
“What did you just say?” Her voice shoots up at least three octaves, and the unlucky people passing by her wince in agony.
Josh will ask that same question much later as they sit in the coffee shop, although much gentler. He’ll take her hands-fingers twisting into continuous knots-and squeeze. “Jie, what did you just say? In English this time.” He won’t let go of her hands, nor will he quit asking her until finally she looks him full in the face with an almost apologetic expression. “I love you,” she’ll answer finally.
“You heard me,” Josh snarls. Bai be damned, this brat is driving him up the wall, pushing all the wrong buttons. Apparently Jie is aware of this because she takes a slight step back, her eyes widening for a moment. She’s startled by his tone, and despite everything, he has to admit that she’s kind of cute when startled. He shakes his head. “Now, stop acting like a brat and let’s s go.”
Jie would never admit it-although, one day when she rests against his chest she will-but she is obsessed with his eyes. She hasn’t had much experience with foreigners and their color and shape fascinate her. She’s so used to various shades of brown that the vibrant blue of his seem unbelievable. How can anyone have color like that? They can’t be real. But they are, and Jie finds herself staring more than she would like to admit. Especially now, when Josh is pissed off and his eyes almost glow. It’s unnerving and beautiful all at the same time.
Jie is not sure what makes her more uncomfortable: how angry he is or how obsessed she is with his eyes at the moment. Still, she’s too proud to let him see how unnerved she is, so she jabs him hard in the chest. “You can’t order me around! Do you know who I am?”
“You only remind me every minute of every single fucking day,” he huffs and pushes her back. He puts a little more force behind the push than he realizes and she stumbles backwards, one of her heels getting caught in a crack in the sidewalk, falling on her ass.
A couple people gasp when she falls, murmur in scandalized tones, but no one makes any move to help her up or to reprimand him.
Josh can only blink, mouth hanging open, because he didn’t mean for her to fall; all he wanted was her out of his face. He’s a little worried because Jie hasn’t moved, and even worse she hasn’t said anything. He expects her to start screeching at him, telling him that once her father hears about this, it’s going to be the end of him. But she doesn’t. Instead, she sits there, one leg bent-heel still wedged in the crack-the other laid out straight before her, hands braced behind her. Jie’s head is angled downward, and even with her short, boyish haircut he can’t see her face through her bangs. He has no idea what is going on until he hears the sniffle.
“H-hey,” he begins uncertainly because he’s starting to feel like an ass. Especially when she finally looks up at him. Her eyes glitter like baleful stars, and her bottom lip quivers. She’s embarrassed and angry and homesick and it’s all written on her face. She looks like she’s going to cry but because she’s Bai Jie, she scrunches up her nose and sets her jaw, looks away.
He realizes then she’s only nineteen and that there is half the world between her and everything she’s ever known. And in that moment he begins to understand her. If only a little. He blows out a sigh and extends his hand. “Come on, Jie,” he says softly.
She regards his hand suspiciously before batting it away. She stands up awkwardly-her heels not really designed for getting up off of the ground gracefully-and she almost falls backwards again before regaining her composure. Jie busies herself with smoothing out her sweater, once again returning to her immaculate appearance. A tear runs down her face and she brushes it away quickly with her sleeve. She starts to reach down to grab her purse, but Josh has already bent down and is holding it out to her.
“Here.”
One day, Josh will discover that while she drives him absolutely insane, it’s not such a bad thing. When they walk down the street together his eyes will be only for her, and he’ll be the one to take her hand for the first time to entwine their fingers because she’s too shy. He’ll lean across the coffee table after her confession and kiss her soundly. When they break apart he’ll tell that it’s a good thing she loves him, because he’s head over heels in love with her.
One day, Jie will find that she can’t breathe when he’s in the same room as her. When he looks at her, she’ll understand what people mean when they talk about butterflies in their stomachs. Jie’s favourite thing to do will be to thread her fingers through his black hair and angle his head down so that she can kiss him, having to rise up on her toes even in her tallest heels to do so. She’ll take to buttoning up his shirts for him when they are getting ready to go out, smoothing out his tie while she smiles up at him adoringly.
Jie will become his reason for being, a thought that will scare him as much as it will exhilarate him. He will be her first kiss, her first everything; her only love. He won’t able to sleep at night if she’s not next to him, and he’ll become her favourite pillow. They’ll lie together tangled in the sheets and listen to the sound of the rain. Josh will find that his heart is full just thinking about her, and he’ll start looking at rings in his spare time. He’ll stand before her father and announce his attentions, ask for her hand; and his biggest fear is not that Bai will kill him, but that he’ll say no.
For now though, they stand on the sidewalk with Josh holding out her purse. Before the kisses and the whispered adorations of love, there will be glares and sarcastic comments. They will bicker back and forth, and Jie will think about going back to China while Josh considers ripping out his hair. The bickering will give way to a tentative friendship; Jie will begin to confide in Josh about everything, and Josh will find that complaining about his job to Jie is very therapeutic They will fall in love slowly, but neither one will realize it until it’s already happened. And it starts now.
Jie takes the purse from him. “Thanks,” she murmurs, and heads off in the direction of boutique. Josh sighs heavily and follows behind her.