contest entry #8 [1]
Title: Sway (1/3)
Pairing: Han Geng/Amber (f(x)), Heechul/Eunhyuk, Heechul/Hankyung
Rating: R
Summary: Collisions, and the vehicles that carry them there.
At the time if you’d asked him, very casually, what it was like, and he trusted you not to laugh, judge, or kill him, he might’ve said-if I could compare it to anything-and he’d stop and think about it, resting his chin on his thumb, absurdly-well I guess if I had to compare it to anything, it’d be like, like you know babies? When they’re sleeping, and you touch them with your hand which is four times the size of theirs, and you poke at their little fists?-and you nod, I mean, what else can you do?-you know how if you touch your finger to their little hand, they instantly wrap theirs around yours, it’s like a gut instinct or something. The moment you reach out to them, even if it’s experimentally, they reach out back to you, and the difference is, it’s so intuitive to them, and they won’t let you go now; you literally have to sit there for hours until they wake up, or you’re an insensitive baby-hating bastard. You know that?
That’s what it’s like, I guess, to be in love.
________________________________________
I. DESSERT OR DISASTER?
Because she couldn’t be bothered to wait for the elevator in the lobby, because she did cross-country all through high school, because she was already five minutes late - and what if something snapped while going up the elevator? Free fall? Zero gravity? Crashing to death, without ever having had a real job. Dying as a mass of crushed bones before your first Real Interview was pretty sad. For any and all of these reasons Amber chose to take the tiny detour around the corner of the hall and into the narrow staircase, smiling charmingly at the sullen-faced security guard behind the desk, and up, up the seventeen fucking flights of never-ending steps.
Foundation: crumbling. Mascara: possibly staining the skin under her lower lashes-raccoon effect most definitely in progress. Shoes? Let’s not even go there. Even the little white buzzer that’s supposed to signal her arrival feels just out of reaching range of her arm cramped under the Louis Vuitton handbag-borrowed from Victoria, who subsists on ramen but owns an entire closet full of designer items-but the reception sees her at the door, smiles, and rings her in. She looks like she’s never had a bad hair day in her life. Well, part and parcel of the job, Amber thinks wistfully. That’s the entertainment industry for you.
“The one o’clock? Ms. Liu?”
“Yes,” Amber nods, but she left her windpipe outside the door so it sounds unintelligible and entirely unprofessional. The girl keeps up the knowing smile, though.
“Go right in, third door to your left.”
Amber gives her a look of unadulterated gratitude.
Third, left, Amber recites to herself as she pushes the glass door leading into the office, still trying to catch her breath and ignoring the parade of chicken legs belonging to equally thin girls who stop to stare at her in just the right way to inspire self-doubt. She recognizes the bright patterns wrapped around one with the body of a fifth grader and gratefully cites Victoria as the reason she even knows Diane von Furstenburg isn’t just an old lady with a stylish haircut.
Third to your left, which means this one-she thinks as she trips on her own heel and into the room.
“I’m so sorry I’m late-the train was stopped for ten minutes-you know how the subway workers get when they’re looking to get a raise? We can expect a strike any one of these days, I mean, that’s just my theory… um, I’m Amber, and I’m, here is my resume.”
She fidgets with the zipper on the bag, something she should’ve learned to work before leaving the house, perhaps, but it’s too late for regrets now. The manila folder comes out with a tug, and she’s in the process of wrestling her resume with as little physical contact as possible, because her hand’s way too sweaty already and there’s nothing that screams Don’t hire this nervous wreck like moist fingerprints on recycled rice paper… which, speaking of, whose idea was this anyway? “It’ll give your credentials some personality! You need that if you’re gonna go into entertainment,” Krystal had said, and Amber had, unsuspecting fool that she was, believed her. Rice paper! She could eat it if he didn’t give her the job-
“Amber Liu?” the guy asks incredulously. “Like Amber Liu who used to hang out with Song Qian and-no, it can’t be, right? Tell me I’ve got the wrong person.”
He’s looking at her with an open curiosity, and she’s afraid to look back, before she processes what he just said. It takes a while, because the first thing that clicked was his saying “like.” And then Victoria’s Chinese name, and then, wait.
Slowly she raises her head.
There was no doubt now. The guy who always looked too old for his age. The one who smoked with the other one and always wore the most generic-looking fashionable t-shirts and sometimes drove them to malls because he had a license. That guy. “Oh my God!” Amber says, dropping pretenses. “It’s you.”
It takes his grin faltering a bit for her to realize how bad that sounded. “I mean, I remember you!” She revises quickly. “You were, like, always attached to that Korean dude, Jin Xi Ch-”
“Ah, yeah. And you were, what, thirteen?” He laughs. “I can’t believe it’s been that long.”
“Me neither,” she agrees, backing into a swivel chair. “You don’t mind if I sit, right? Um . . .” She glances towards the nameplate. “Mr. Han?”
He laughs harder. “Of course not. And just call me Han Geng. I feel old enough as it is.”
Sinking into the cushy chair is pure bliss. But then she remembers where she is and straightens her spine. “You’re not old,” she protests belatedly, half out of a need to get on his good side now that she’s got one foot in the door. (“Connections can go a long way,” Krystal had advised. To which Amber had lamented, “But I don’t have any!”) “You’re like, okay, I’m twenty-one, and you were . . . twenty-one when I was thirteen, so eight plus twenty-one . . . Oh, you’re not even thirty yet. I wouldn’t worry if I were you,” she finishes triumphantly.
He’s smiling. In fact he hasn’t stopped smiling since she looked at him earlier for the first time in eight years. “You’re lucky your job doesn’t require math,” he ahems. “Now let’s talk business. Your resume . . .”
Right. She’s had this speech rehearsed for a month now, from before someone even responded to her ad. She’s got it down to an art: her aspirations, desire to help kids live out their dreams of becoming a somebody, the whole spiel that summarizes exactly what she wants to do with her life at the moment even if it sounds like thinly-veiled bullshit to anyone else. Thing is, it’s all true. Someone’s got to believe in it if you’re earnest enough, right?
“Is this . . . edible?”
He’s pointing at the paper. She looks at him, and he looks at her-it’s a moment-and then she just cannot stop laughing.
***
“So tell me about the boss.” Victoria settles on the bean bag.
Amber thinks. “He’s nice. Charming? He remembers you.”
“‘Remembers’ as in, I know him? Why didn’t you--”
“I didn’t want to freak you out-” Amber says, and it’s true. Victoria’s been on edge all week about her next audition on Thursday because she isn’t the best at interpretive dance. It’s never been her forte, though she still likes it better than swing. “Or maybe I forgot. I can’t remember anymore. I’m tired and old.” She flops down onto Victoria’s lap without warning and ignores the squirming that ensues.
“Don’t say the word ‘old’ around me,” Victoria warns after she resumes breathing. She’d officially passed the 25 mark and begun her ascent towards the much-feared three-oh.
“Anyway. His name is Han Geng. He’s nice.”
“I think I remember him. Was he the one who always hung out with the showy guy-”
“Yeah. That was my first thought, too.”
Victoria frowns. “I can’t recall much beyond that, to be honest.”
“Me neither,” Amber admits. “He’s nice though,” she adds as an afterthought.
Victoria crosses her arms over her chest. “You’ve said that three times. Do I suspect . . .”
“No! He’s got . . . he’s just got kind eyes or something.”
“Like bedroom eyes . . .”
“Tori! Think of the children!”
The children are scattered over the living room floor-Christian, Stuart, Manolo One, Manolo Two, Manolo . . .
“Right, right, I won’t say any more,” Victoria promises, hugging her shoes to her chest. There’s an ominous glint in her eye that Amber chooses to ignore.
***
For the first week they make her man the phones and fax machine. Meng Jia, the girl Amber mistook for a fifth grader the first day, gives her a tutorial of the usual spiel they deal out to all their callers, usually asking if they’ll accept demo CDs and when their auditions will be held. Paper always gets stuck in the fax, so you have to press down the tray and hold it there when you hear the ring. Amber flies back and forth between collecting faxes and refilling the machine and delivering cheery Hi! You have reached HG Entertainment’s Hotline. My name is Amber Liu; how may I help you today?s, the rehearsed lines stretching her cheeks apart.
“My son loves to sing, but I want to tell him to concentrate on his studies . . . If a boy named Li Hong with a high-pitched voice that sounds like a little girl-he is a late bloomer, but his voice really is very sweet-really, I’m not saying this just because I am his mother, please believe me-calls in, could you please discourage him from auditioning?”
“I am twelve years old from Nanjing I love old school Zhou Jie Lun and Fei Lun Hai and Four Heavenly Kings and Disney I love singing in the shower please let me show you thank you, Can you feel the looooveee toniiiightttt.”
“Hey, I’d like a small with pepperoni and extra cheese-wait, no cheese-oh yeah, are you still giving away those Toy Story 5 figurines or is that promotion over?”
“Uh,” Amber says.
She eats lunch alone for the first three days. On the fourth, she’s on her way to the park again with a soggy bento she tried to make the night before from an online bento addicts site and failed. At the red light she stops, and is one of the few to stop, and spies her boss on the other side of the street. Amber briefly considers walking the other way, but realizes it’s not high school anymore, and also, that’s a totally irrational impulse. She looks blankly in his direction like she isn’t looking at anything in particular, but he notices and waves. They meet halfway crossing the street, and he says cheerfully, “What’d you get?”
“Um, I brought a sucky lunch box,” she says, gesturing towards the plastic bag in her other hand.
He squints. “Is that one of those bags you buy for five yuan in the supermarket? When you forget to bring your own shopping bag?”
It takes her by surprise, and then she nods, embarrassed. “Hey, I’m still paying off some student loans.”
He blinks. “Oh, right, you just got out of school. I keep forgetting.”
“C’mon, you’re really not that old,” she grins, nudging him, a bad habit. She needs to remember not to be so chummy with guys.
He dodges it instinctively. “Not that old, huh.”
“Yup.”
“We really shouldn’t be having this conversation in the middle of the street,” he says, pulling her close as a car veers by, just about scraping the skin on her nose. She gets a whiff of his cologne, something she doesn’t recognize. Not Calvin Klein.
“Right,” she says, a little dazed. “I usually eat at the park.”
He doesn’t raise an eyebrow or anything, and she kind of adores him for not thinking that’s really pathetic.
They don’t really have anything to talk about, so he asks her about Victoria, about school days she hasn’t given thought to in ages, but they come back to her with increasing clarity the more she talks, and soon she’s relating stories about people he’s never even met.
“So then Krystal said, you won’t believe this, ‘I didn’t think it’d stain!’ Like puking on someone else’s bedsheets is ever a good idea, God, and she’d had spinach for dinner . . .” She stops upon seeing his eyes in the process of glazing over. “Uh, I mean. Tell me about you?”
“Me?” He asks, like she just woke him up. Not even glazing. Glazed.
“I’m a pretty boring guy,” he half-yawns. A little teardrop forms at the corner of his eye. “What do you want to know?”
How about everything, she doesn’t say. “Hm,” she thinks aloud. “How about . . . favorite Korean cuss word?” Something they can bond over.
Ten seconds later, she’s still staring at him in horror. “Oh my God, you’re . . . you’re dirty!”
“I learned from the best,” he confides with an enigmatic smile.
It’s practically a hundred degrees out today, and even sitting under the shade of a thousand elm trees Amber’s still sweating bullets. Her bra is uncomfortably damp, and her thighs chafing against each other underneath her new skirt. They’ll sting later when she tries to take a shower and then Victoria will scold her for not wearing those secret nude leggings she advertises every chance she gets, the tummy-shrinking ones that also stop right above the knee. “Infomercials,” Victoria’d said once, “are the one pleasure I must have in my life. Do not take them from me.” It was a bad sign when she waxed hyperbolic, so Amber’d said nothing and pulled up the spandex over her stomach obediently.
But she’s not the only one suffering from a heat stroke. A fresh sheen of sweat paints Han Geng’s collarbone slippery under his stiff suit collar. His neck, his forehead. His jaw clenches and relaxes with every bite of his lunch. She chews idly, watching perspiration trickle down the side of his face over his ear.
There’s something about the male body that renders her momentarily awed and speechless. Even then-it’s not every body. She has standards, too.
“Fridays are themed.” Apparently he’s explaining a company tradition or something. “ You have to wear an article of clothing that incorporates the theme somehow.”
Her brain makes a click as she tunes back into the conversation. “What’s this week’s?”
“Goth.”
The half-chewed octopus ball in her mouth just barely stops short of launching itself into his face.
***
Friday morning starts with a small feel-good seed: she doesn’t forget her keys, her shoes aren’t killing her, and her face is not drenched in sweat by the time she reaches the door.
And then it takes all of five seconds for Amber to realize she’s the only one in the office wearing a spiked collar.
***
“Forget EVERYTHING I said about him. He’s the most dishonest, vulgar, disgusting-”
Victoria’s mouth forms the shape of a perfect O. “Oh no, did he squeeze your butt?”
“No-”
“Did he leer?”
“Well, not really, but he was definitely checking me out when I walked out of the office after yelling at him. I saw his reflection in the glass. And by the way? He totally laughed at me! I can’t believe the bastard-” She stuffs a fry into her mouth and chews violently.
Victoria watches her closely. It’s not encouraging or discouraging, so Amber continues.
“And it’s not like being dressed as Marilyn Manson is the most dignifying thing to a woman ever, you know?” She trips over the word “woman” because she still feels like a girl, like all the time, but it’s the principle of the matter- “Like I’m having a hard enough time trying to make myself the modern female model or whatever, steamrolling down the path towards my dream career, and he’s just sitting there laughing at me and telling me that he didn’t think I’d actually believe him-like who was I supposed to believe? The girls in the cubicles who walk like their legs might give out under them at any moment? Ugh, and, ugh.” She pauses, takes a breath. “The worst part is-oh God-he said I looked good.”
It comes out whinier than she’d planned, and that look on Victoria’s face is awfully familiar. Like she’s about to break out the confetti and streamers and start singing the Wedding March. Oh no.
“No, no, no-good,” she stammers in a panic. “Like how condescending is that?”
“He said you looked good! YOU DO LOOK GOOD.”
“Oh my GOD, what is wrong with you? This guy, my BOSS, played a prank on me my first week at work, and you’re stuck on that one word, which I knew I shouldn’t have mentioned because-”
“Amber!!!”
Amber sinks deeper into the beanbag. Even as that sentence had spilled out of her mouth, she could hear herself saying the words in slow motion, and this voice in her head had bellowed NOOOO because it was just like Victoria to dwell on pointless details and blow things out of proportion. Sure, Amber had felt something like a tingle up the nape of her neck as Han Geng had said that, and her cheeks had gotten really hot, predictably, but that doesn’t mean she’ll forgive him for essentially making an ass out of her.
It also doesn’t change the fact that she remembers with startling lucidity his reflection in the glass window as she stomped out. The way his eyes clouded over, like he wanted to hold in the sight of her and keep it there.
***
“I’m not usually a jerk, I swear.”
Amber busies herself with a notepad. A couple of the girls slide discreetly out of their cubicles to watch, resting their chins on the plastic dividers. Actually, their audience consists of basically everyone in the office except Henry, the tech guy, who inhabits his own corner by the water cooler.
Han Geng clears his throat. “It’s an initiation sort of thing. I should’ve explained that to you on Friday but you’d looked so-enraged,” clearly holding back a smirk, which isn’t helping his case.
“What is this, like a frat?”
He pulls at his tie, pale baby blue with silver polka dots. Like he’s going on an Easter egg hunt or something. Maybe that’s this week’s theme. Maybe he should wear a furry bunny costume with ears or something. And a fluffy tail. Yeah, that’s about right.
She indulges the thought for a second and smiles to herself.
Which he catches. “It’s something left over from my high school days, yeah. An idea a friend had about-” he cuts himself short before his eyes take on that dreamy faraway quality people get when they embark on an epic storytelling adventure. “You probably don’t care.”
She shrugs, her notes blooming flower petals, which she tries to shield from his eyes. It’s not like she doesn’t have work to do. She just can’t do it with him . . . hanging around.
“We put all our employees through this when they first join,” he continues with an earnest touch. “People laugh, and then we’re closer for it afterwards.” She catches herself staring at the way his eyes light up when he talks about the employees. The ballpoint pen falls from her hand-gone limp-and rolls across the desk, stops precariously over the edge.
Han Geng peeks over to her notes. “Tulips, huh.”
“My favorite,” she admits, blushing furiously. So much for keeping the upper hand.
“C’mon. Don’t be mad. At least you didn’t join in March.”
She vaguely remembers hearing that that was when Henry joined. “What was March’s?”
“Hello Kitty.”
***
“I’m shit at bowling,” she admits over the counter while they’re waiting for the teenager to find their shoes. “I mean, I’m really bad at it,” she corrects. Bad words just kind of spill out of her mouth sometimes. She forgets that he’s not just anybody.
“You swear like a Chinese person.” Han Geng unfolds the sunglasses hooked onto the V-shaped collar of his t-shirt and rubs the lenses with the hem.
“Well, I kinda am!” She protests, then adds. “Taiwanese if that makes a difference.” She cocks her head, thinking. “Does it?”
He laughs nervously. “I’m not too well-versed in politics.”
“Oh, me neither. I just fake it sometimes back home.”
The teenager comes back with a pair of 35s for Amber. She’s 37 in the winter-summer feet expand with the heat. His nametag reads Xiao Ji, like “little chicken.” That’s gotta be a joke.
“Those are definitely not gonna fit, sorry,” she says, and Little Chicken grunts like this is so not worth thirty yuan an hour and disappears back into the little storage room behind the reception desk.
Han Geng taps his knuckles against the countertop. The sunglasses sit perched on his nose, right above a faint smirk. “I’ll go easy on you.”
“Are you good?”
“You’ll see,” he nods enigmatically with something of a hand flourish.
She laughs, feeling awkward. Then she remembers. “But you know, I meant to say earlier-”
Like weeks ago, she thinks but doesn’t say because that’s just pathetic, waiting until the company’s monthly bowling outing to say something you’d noticed the first day you met is like-like telling someone years later that they’ve had your name wrong this whole time. It’s embarrassing that you waited because waiting implies deliberation and caring, both of which are unattractive options for, well, obvious reasons.
“-You sound way different in Chinese. Like there’s a lilt to your voice.”
“Oh yeah?” He leans forward, interested. “Like I know what I’m talking about, right? I get that a lot.”
“Yeah.” She wets her lips unconsciously. And you sound douchier, too, she doesn’t say. But that must be a natural consequence of confidence. He’s in his element here. His company-and his country. With its poverty and problems, but still. His.
Maybe hers in a few. How long?
She opens her mouth just as Xiao Ji comes back with the right sizes-for both of them. Han Geng pushes her pair towards her and says, “Talk later. Tonight-we bowl.”
Oh man, she thinks, but bends down to put on the smelly shoes.
***
Two hours later: stalemate. Whoever loses is going to pay for karaoke, but at this point Amber isn’t sure she can make it there. She sits on the floor and watches one of the Wang sisters blow on her fingers dramatically before she rolls the ball down the aisle. Her knees are shot from all the bending.
Wang bowls a hook, Amber learns from Henry’s urgent whispering. Proof of his urgency can be found in the form of spit on her left ear. Amber wipes it away as discreetly as she can, careful not to hurt his feelings, but his eyes are steady on the ball in Wang’s hand. Through the luck of straws they both ended up on Team Blue. Henry takes bowling very seriously, she found out earlier, from the string of curses he’d let loose after Meng Jia’s had gone down the gutter. Not to mention the pounding against the floor was a bit dramatic. He’d apologized profusely afterwards, but Meng Jia had clucked her tongue and rolled her eyes at him, then turned around to mutter something to Fei Fei.
A couple aisles down, Han Geng’s standing with arms crossed over his chest. Smug, like he knows Wang’s going to unleash a dragon down the lane.
Henry’s up. He winks at Amber, but one of his fingers slips out of a hole and . . . it’s a gutter ball.
“I think Henry was a trucker in his past life,” Fei Fei whispers to Amber over the ensuing swears. It’s the first time they’ve spoken, really, so it takes her by surprise.
“Game over, Blue,” Han Geng yells over Henry’s prostrate body. “Get ready to sing.”
***
Xing Xing is probably the seediest karaoke place this side of Beijing, but somehow all twenty of them that are left manage to fit into their biggest room, and it’s sheer luck and not at all sly maneuvering that gets Amber stuck elbow-to-elbow with her boss. Even their thighs are touching.
One thing Amber’s never understood is how every Chinese person manages to rock karaoke even if they sound perpetually phlegmy in everyday conversation. Han Geng, it turns out, doesn’t suck as badly as he looks like he should. In fact, he’s pretty good at the songs that don’t require much vocal acrobatics, like Savage Garden’s “Truly Madly Deeply” and Wu Yue Tian’s “Wen Rou.”
Everyone from Team Red orders cocktails and finger foods but by midnight everyone on Blue is too drunk to groan. The glow-in-the-dark patterns in the wallpaper start resembling neon chicken scratch and Amber gurgles into her maybe-Moscow Mule-it’s hard to tell at this point. Also whether or not it’s even hers is up for debate-something about cavemen paintings when Han Geng thrusts the microphone in her hand and says, “Your song.”
“Wha?” She blinks at him just as Meng Jia’s head lands with a thud on her shoulder. Ouch. Amber giggles.
Han Geng holds his liquor awfully well for someone who’s not gigantic. “Hollaback Girl. You entered it, right?”
Across the room Henry jumps up and fistpumps the air. “Fuck yeah! My girl Amber Liu!” Suddenly he’s Fred Durst. Wait, nineties reference in the wrong country.
Her head hurts.
After about a thousand Oooh, this my shit this my shits she collapses onto the couch and conks out.
***
She wakes up three times. Once in a taxi, with street lights blaring by fantasy mist-like, and then she falls back-her head vaguely thumping against a ribcage-asleep, dimming orange behind her eyelids.
Second time she’s in the middle of a Justin Bieber-who knew the kid had longevity in him? well, no longer a kid, really-fanmeeting, bumps into Alanis Morrisette, whose longass hair falls strategically over her nipples-oh yeah, she’s naked-and before this dream can get even more Canadian, Henry shows up with a maple leaf and starts belting Avril Lavigne-and then a toilet flushes. Amber blinks an eye open as the truth settles in, that she is not really a Justin Bieber fan and this is just the stuff that nightmares are made of, and thinks if she squints she might be able to see a penis in the distant glow of the bathroom light but instead she turns on her other side and falls asleep again.
The next time she wakes up, it’s morning. The bed is hard, which is a sign it’s not hers. She sleeps with a futon on the floor. The futon’s got Amber-shaped dents in it. It takes a minute for her to remember her last functioning memory-B-A-N-A-N-A-S!-and she shakes the mortification away only to uncover the jackhammer pounding away at her forehead. “Fuck,” she says, and rolls over to find a familiar lump sprawled across an air mattress on the floor.
Han Geng looks good sleeping. His normally stiff-gelled hair falls flat over his forehead, a few tendrils scraping his eyelashes, and he’s resting on his back, one arm bent over the head, the other draped across his stomach. Amber examines his hands, the fingernails cut neatly to the quick, and the small threads of hair under the knuckles. Crow’s feet dragging his eyes downwards. A face born sad, she thinks, smiling through the hangover.
And that’s when it hits her what she’s doing.
***
He calls later that night and it takes Victoria threatening to answer the phone in her place for Amber to pick up. “Um, hello?”
The first noise he makes sounds a lot like a snort, so the warmth from her stomach immediately creeps up her back. “You doing okay?”
“Yeah . . . thanks,” she mumbles into her sleeve.
“What?”
“I’m so embarrassed,” she blurts out. “I’m so sorry. I think-I think I fell asleep?”
His laugh is even subtler over the phone than in real life. She can visualize the magical eye crinkle with such clarity she could puke.
Or maybe she actually needs to puke. It’s hard to tell.
“Wastebasket,” she mouths to Victoria, who’s been resting her face in her hands on the kitchen table, listening intently.
“You fell asleep, yeah. At first you were walking-” he laughs like he just remembered something funny. “-oh yeah, you told me to leave you alone because you could walk fine by yourself, okay? You didn’t need a man to hold you up-inflection’s yours, not mine, to be clear-even if he is pretty fucking attractive-once again, your words, not mine-and then you said oops, I didn’t mean that, and burped.”
Amber is silent for five seconds and then mouths to Victoria, “I want to die.” Victoria doesn’t understand.
“I’ve got really weak knees from doing cross-country in high school,” Amber says calmly. “And I think everyone’s hot when I drink. You know how people get beer goggles? Like that but times infinity.”
“I’m heart-broken,” he says. “You’ve got a cute snore, too.”
She winces. “Don’t plan on hearing it again.”
“Aw. Wish I’d recorded it then.”
“Creeper!” she gasps into the phone, and he starts wheezing in delight. It’s sadistic, really, how much he enjoys teasing her in her pathetic hung-over state. She tells him so and he just keeps laughing.
“Eggs. They work miracles,” he tells her seriously.
“I’d rather have morphine.” She pauses. “Or like, a really big hug.”
Victoria stretches her arms wide apart and makes embarrassing kissy faces. If there were a way to headdesk subtly while holding a cell phone, Amber would be doing it right now.
There’s a brief silence, and then he says, “Hey, did you get that?”
“What?”
“My air hug.”
Amber screams for ten seconds after hanging up. Victoria pretends she has no idea what just happened and smugly eats her banana.
***
Ask Amber about her childhood, about high school, about growing up skinny and gangly--bandaid-ed scraped knees from climbing the tree in the backyard and falling down halfway every single goddamn time--and she’ll tell you that she’s always gotten along with the boys fine, but that, weirdly, she actually spent most of her life surrounded by girls.
Third grade, for instance. It’s recess; she and Rahul Choudhary are clawing at the courtyard ground. She finds a pearly white rock that she convinces Rahul is a snail. Rahul runs around screaming that Amber Liu eats snails and Chinese people are weird, and Amber decides he is no longer cool enough to be her best friend.
Then just before Spanish, Francesca, the tallest and prettiest girl in class notices the shiny stone on Amber’s desk and says loudly, “Oh my God, that looks like something I saw at Claire’s!” Claire’s is a big deal among all the girls that year. Francesca grabs the rock without asking and starts passing it around. It takes a minute for her to remember the owner, so she turns back to Amber and tells her in her sweetest voice, “That’s awesome. Where did you get it?”
“I found it on the ground,” Amber says, and kicks the back of her chair. Francesca’s got really curly brown hair that frizzes up in the summer, but her freckles remind Amber of constellations.
Francesca shares her lunch with Amber for the rest of the school year. She’s invited to slumber parties and hair-brushing get-togethers. The girls who used to laugh at her overalls start asking her where she shops. (She doesn’t. Her mom buys everything, or receives them from family friends whose children have already grown up.) She’s inducted into a brand new world, in which giggling is a mode of communication and bimonthly trips to the mall are not only coordinated but compulsory.
Rahul Choudhary never gets a second look.
Years later, Amber thinks maybe Rahul was her first real crush, and Francesca, maybe her second.
***
She figures she’s got a plan; in two words, Act Normal. Just because you’ve seen him in a Snoopy t-shirt and wrinkled boxers and how pale the skin on his wrist looks when he isn’t wearing a watch, and just because you felt something when you did, doesn’t mean--well, it doesn’t mean anything. So Amber slips into her desk, chirps a round of hellos to the girls, and acts normal.
Problem is, it takes two for this to work. He emails her within five minutes. Lunch? My bento is better than yours, promise. From where she sits she can peek over the cubicle divider and catch his silhouette through the window. He’s resting his chin against the knuckles on one hand, keeping the other on the laptop touchpad. And then, with the inaudible ding of incoming mail, he jolts and leans toward the screen, smiles.
You’re on, Charlie Brown.
***
“So I hate to be all, ‘I’mma put my foot down now’ but--well, that’s kind of what I’m doing. But the question is, where are we going?”
Three weeks later, they’ve hit every restaurant within a ten-block radius of the office. Amber can honestly say she’s memorized at least twenty types of curry. Han Geng never gets sick of curry. He is a curry fanatic. There is something wrong with this man.
They’ve arrived at a corner. It’s a green light, but he’s stopped walking. They’ve been walking for ten minutes and still haven’t decided on a place. She probably should’ve cooked last night. All this spending-money-before-you have-it isn’t really working in her favor, although half the time he secretly pays for both of them while she’s in the bathroom. Because half the time they’re eating curry that burns its way down her throat. She suspects it might figure into his grand plan of chivalry, to lure her into the bathroom with the power of spice while he sneaks off to the cashier and gives them his credit card to swipe. Point is--that’s not what she wants, either.
“Where do you want to go?” he asks slowly.
She laughs, sort of frustrated because this question got old maybe five minutes ago, and then opens her mouth to say, “I don’t know,” but he stops and goes, “No, I mean. Go on a date with me.”
It catches her by surprise.
“Uh,” she says, panicking. “I thought we were talking about food.”
“I mean,” he says, apparently flustered, like she just broke the mood. (Fuck.) “I want to get to know you better.”
Finally, she thinks, but her mind is racing. “I’m pretty sure this is it, but okay,” she says, holding the grin steady until he turns away.
***
It’s a tossup between his gigantic forehead when it isn’t covered by hair and those awful passé aviators he won’t stop wearing, sometimes even indoors. “I’ve got sensitive eyes,” he says, but she knows he actually thinks they look good. “It’s the first sign of old-man syndrome,” she warns, “when you stop being able to tell what’s cool.” It comes out more ominous-sounding than she intended, and she feels a little apologetic, but that’s how they have their first kiss, him letting her know, hey, here’s one thing I still fucking own.
His thumb strokes against her cheek, and she realizes it’s also the fact that they’ve both been in the same position, fish out of water, except she’s doing it again and he’s finally found his niche. Does it count as using if hanging out with him makes her feel like she’ll get there too, eventually?
And is this really just hanging out if she’s trying to take his belt off with her teeth?
Afterwards they lie facing the ceiling, breathing hard, and an eternity before Hankyung says, “That was wonderful.”
He squeezes her hand over the bed covers, and she can smell him without turning her head, like they share a part of each other now. It frightens her.
“Duh,” she says to him with the most convincing act of nonchalance she can muster up in the moment. Reaches over to tickle an earlobe.
***
He doesn’t fall asleep instantly, like so many of her exes that she’s come to expect it: the heavy snoring, all the works. He waits for her to doze off first. It’s sweet but makes her paranoid. What does this mean? Is he not tired? Is he holding himself back? Why is he trying so hard? Why does he have to try? Shouldn’t they be natural? Shouldn’t they-?
“He’s a gentleman,” Vic says. “Accept that there are a few good guys left in the world, and he’s one of them.”
“How do you know?” Amber asks seriously.
Victoria looks at her in a way that betrays their age difference. “I mean, there’s no way you really know. But you find out.”
She knows Vic did. They never talk about her past lovers, especially not the ones that mattered. She changes the channel when there’s news about Thailand. It’s been a year since she’s had her heart broken, but Vic’s a slow healer. She smiles a lot, though. There was a psych study about fake happiness inducing real happiness-Victoria just eats those articles up. She’s got them bookmarked under her “Health & Wellness” tab, right between “Love & Marriage” and “Money, Celebrity, & the Dangers of Fame.” Lindsay Lohan makes frequent cameos in the latter.
“I need to get drunk,” Amber decides.
They put on Joan Jett and that Tibetan singer Victoria really likes whose name Amber always gets wrong, pop a bottle of really cheap funny-tasting red wine, and gurgle through A girl can do what she wants to do and that’s what I’m gonna do! Amber pulls Victoria’s hair up to the top of her head, biting on an elastic as she combs in a couple loose strands before sweeping it all together into a gigantic bun. Vic takes one look in the bathroom mirror and doubles over the sink cracking up. “I look like I’m six and waiting for my mom to take me to school.”
Amber balances the wine glass on her head. “You’re too beautiful to age, okay?”
They do the frug, because Rilo Kiley deems it so. Victoria never recognizes any of Amber’s music, but she always dances along. “Showoff,” Amber sticks out her tongue, and the wine-red on Victoria’s teeth resembles lipstick stains.
Two hours and three soundtracks later, Amber feels sentimental enough to kiss her best friend, and drunk enough to do it unabashedly on the mouth. Victoria’s eyes turn dark, but then the cloud passes. She tastes nothing like Han Geng.
“Amber-”
“Fuck,” Amber hiccups, because she’s crying a little. “I think I really like him.”
***
“He’s old,” is the first thing Krystal says, before they’ve even been seated.
“No, listen to me, Amber,” she continues in English. The little “er” syllable bends in her mouth like it’s overcompensating for a mostly Korean tongue. “Men die earlier, and this guy is old.”
“He’s not even thirty!”
“For what? Another couple months?” Krystal pulls her arm to shake her. “Listen to me. Momma knows best.”
“That’s Vic,” Amber says, laughing. The waiter motions for them to follow him up the stairs. Krystal looks wistfully towards the window seats. They’re halfway up the steps when she stops him.
“We’ll wait for those people to leave,” she says, gesturing towards the couple in the corner. Their faces glow under the light, and the white tablecloth nearly blinds. The girl is clearly a fan of bb cream. So in love, Amber thinks with a tinge of yearning. But for what? It’s too early to be daydreaming.
“Are you always so picky when you go to restaurants?”
They’ve been relegated back to the doorway. Krystal is careful not to lean on the greasy hinges, only the glass, which appears immaculate. It’s a well-kept “French” restaurant run by mixed Chinese-Koreans.
Krystal crosses her arms smugly. “When I know my company will tolerate it, yeah. And you, company, are the definition of easygoing.” She reaches over and ruffles Amber’s hair, despite the fact that it is no longer just a couple inches from her scalp and therefore not of rufflable length. Not to mention that Amber is in fact the older of the two and deserves to be treated with respect. Like the . . . respectable woman that she has become.
“Hey!” she tries frowning. “I won’t stand for that anymore.” She pinches Krystal’s cheek and gets a brief touch of skin as the other dodges. Krystal sticks out her tongue, and they’re back in middle school, their desks adjacent to one another-
“Jung? Take a seat by Liu”-
matching brown melting loafers-
Krystal pickpocketing tourists at the planetarium and only getting a toy watch and some lint-
-Krystal’s braids, parted with a comb down the middle so cleanly you could’ve walked a line on it. She dressed up as Wednesday for Halloween that year and Amber as Cousin Itt. She suffered a bad case of hair-in-the-mouth for the next week, but it was so worth seeing those little kids jump, Tootsie Rolls spilling out of their jack-o-lantern baskets.
Oh man, she didn’t want to grow up. How did this happen?
“Don’t ever change,” Amber says, playing with the salt shaker.
“Don’t date a man who was smoking before you even got your period.”
“You don’t even know that he smokes.”
Krystal waves off the question with a knowledgeable shrug. “Guys always smoke. Even if they say they don’t-kiss them, and you can tell. They don’t make Camel-flavored Wrigleys.” She’s reverted back to Korean.
“He used to dance,” Amber thinks aloud. “Do dancers smoke?”
“The reckless ones,” Krystal says absentmindedly, thumbing the menu. “Do you want duck? We can split it.”
“I can probably eat one by myself right now. I’m starved.” Amber casts her an accusing look, and Krystal immediately turns apologetic.
“I swear I left the hotel on time! But then I saw this really cute hat on display while I was walking down, um, that road, and-”
“Yeah, it’s okay. I’ve gotten used to waiting for you. It’d be weird if you showed up on time.”
Krystal grins, and it’s as dazzling as Amber remembers. Lee Taemin in Krystal’s class with the regally good looks (even Amber admitted that, even though he was too young and skinny to be her type) fell for this grin, despite how they only lasted until Christmas, and then Krystal got bored and started watching Prince of Tennis instead of chasing after boys. That only lasted another three months, but not before Amber got dragged to an anime convention dressed up in a bandana and an obviously poached jersey. She had to wear shorts while there was still snow on the ground. “Why do you get to wear pants?” She’d whined, and Krystal had explained, exasperatedly, like this was the hundredth time she’d asked, “Because we’re trying to stay true to the characters. Kaido never wears pants.”
Amber had shivered through the convention, posed for some pictures, got groped by a couple different hairy-legged Sailor Scouts, and snored the way home on Krystal’s shoulder, just as bony then as it is now, peeking out from under the thin material of her graphic t-shirt. Looks plucked from Urban Outfitters. Love me when I’m GONE. Everlasting teenage angst; that’s her style. Amber digs it. She’s pretty fucking square in comparison.
“Okay, so tell me about the geezer.”
“He’s not old. Well, hairline aside, he’s really-”
Krystal looks at her expectantly.
“I don’t know.” Amber exhales, defeated. “I like him. He has a gentle aura, but there’s a sexiness to it. And he makes me feel safe, if that makes any sense.”
She realizes she’s been talking with her eyes on the tablecloth, so she turns them back to Krystal, who’s now sitting there sort of dazed.
“Wow. Vic wasn’t kidding when she said you were in trouble.”
Amber’s about to protest when the waiter comes over and asks if they’re done deciding.
________________________________________
II. STARE DOWN THE SUN
Amber’s waiting in line to buy a donut. She has a thing for the plain glazed ones. She doesn’t care if she gains weight. She’s unlike any girl he’s ever dated. He’s glad he can reach around her and squeeze the little jiggle of fat around her waist. There’s hardly anything, but more than nothing.
“When I was little, I thought sprinkles looked like worms from far away. Funny, how that can turn someone off them for life. I fucking hate sprinkles,” she says to him while they’re waiting in line. The expletive rolls off her tongue naturally, like she’s never had to censor herself. He feels vicariously American through her sometimes. It’s not only in her speech patterns, the rushed Mandarin. Her bangs fall in pieces before her eyes and she tosses her head to the side without moving them away. She’s the kind of person who’d survive in the desert. She’d talk enthusiastically with sand in her mouth even as it filled the grooves of her teeth.
He drags his mind away from her mouth to say something about worms and regeneration.
She places her order-“Um, the shiny ones? How do you say ‘glazed,’ Han Geng? Yeah, one of those. To go. Thanks!”-and turns to him. “Wouldn’t it be great if people could do that, too? Regrow an arm or leg. So many people get into accidents these days, but if we could just heal that easily, wouldn’t that be amazing?”
“Yeah,” he says. “That would.” He moves his arm around her waist and places the slightest pressure there. It’s instinctive to him; his body naturally behaves like that of an overprotective boyfriend. It requires less thought than saying the words, or trying to figuring out her favorite type of flower without asking.
Tulips.
The best part is she leans into him now. Her eyes don’t go wide like before. This is all smooth-paved road. Highway for their taking. Easy as.
“And this is going to sound totally corny, and you’re going to laugh at me-don’t laugh-but wouldn’t it be great if, if people could do that with, like, heartbreak? Hey, I said don’t laugh.”
He wasn’t laughing. “What? Okay, go on.”
“Like, you break up with someone, and you’re, you know, sad for a while. You go finish your roommate’s carton of Haagen Daz in the freezer (she hid it behind the frozen mixed veggies or something, Vic did that once)”-she stops, dazed at the memory, and he feels something twist in his chest: jealousy?-”so you eat your ice cream and watch, I don’t know, whatever people watch when they’re sad. I Love Lucy, or Friends, or-”
“I don’t know any of these shows.”
“You’re kidding me.” She lets out a gasp full of drama. “So no one told you life was gonna be this way? Your job’s a joke you’re broke your love life’s DOA?”
“Okay. Okay, Amber. Confession time.” He takes both of her hands in his, but it’s unfortunately the most inopportune moment ever because they’re handing her her donut on a tray, so he releases them, and she kind of side-squints at him in this irritatingly cocky way, like she just knows he needs every excuse to touch her.
Oh God, she knows.
“What were you going to say?” she asks when they’re sitting. She’s looking the donut head-on, calculating the angle of attack.
“Um,” he says. “It’s not funny anymore.”
“C’mon!”
“No, it’s really lame. I don’t know what possessed me to even think it’d be funny. It’s a good thing that guy interrupted me in time. You would’ve been horrified. This would’ve been our last date.”
She’s got her mouth hanging open, ready for the first bite, but now just staring at him dumbfounded. “That’s like the longest preface to a non-joke ever. And how is this a real date? Do you take all your foreign lovers to Dunkin Donuts? Is that how they do it here?”
Here is Beijing, and Amber talks like they aren’t already sleeping together, like she doesn’t already belong to this city and its smog and dust and vibrancy. But once upon a time he did the same, only elsewhere. It made people soften their voices and treat him more kindly, like it was okay to be different if you acknowledged it self-deprecatingly.
“Are you a foreigner? I didn’t notice,” he says, conjuring up a twinkle in his eye.
“You were too distracted by the boobs,” she returns the twinkle effortlessly. Her hand brushes his over the table. He can’t stop looking at her mouth. A part of him would like to press her up against the plastic decor and feel her warm and irreverent underneath him. He’d cup her face with one hand and deftly unbutton her jeans with the other, slide under the thin elastic of her panties, over the coarse patch of hair, and watch her face contort with a shade of violence, seesawing between pleasure and restraint, as she let him touch her there, and there, and there.
Fuck, he is hard under the table, and she is-still licking away at that donut.
“What can I say? I’ve always wanted a pair of my own-” he starts off cheekily, but is interrupted by a rustle, and a corner of today’s paper held up by the guy one table over catches his eye.
Young writer-
New novel-
Beijing-
Landed yesterday-
’Gold’ ‘Hope’-
Oh.
It’s like the air suddenly constricts and expands at the same time. It feels like a joke, a cruel one of cosmic proportions, but one that surprises nobody, like something that shows up at your doorstep to say, I’m back.
“I wouldn’t be opposed to Geng-tits,” Amber is saying, with the kind of squinty gaze that just five seconds ago would’ve brought him to his knees, but now.
“Oh God,” he says without thinking.
She frowns, but it hasn’t hit her. She won’t know-she can’t know. “Oh God what?”
It’s okay. That was years and years ago. Let’s just forget it. Focus. Look, an interesting stain in the shape of Africa on the wall. Look, the beautiful woman sitting across from you. The one who’s pretty much yours, if you asked.
He blinks everything into place. A strand of her hair is stuck to crumbs of donut glaze collecting at the corner of her mouth, which hangs slightly open to show him exactly what stage of chewed-up the former donut now inhabits. Pleasantly Mauled.
“I’m just-visualizing them,” he finishes and forces a laugh up his throat. She pauses for a minute, and then her eyes roll over, and she’s, he knows it, charmed. It’s easy with her.
He files the ache away and watches her ravage the entire pastry in two bites.
***
The first thing he’d noticed, when she’d tripped into the room, was her hair, too dark to be natural. She had dyed it-and redyed it black. It glinted in the light. She found her balance and smiled at him.
And then, the second piercing, and the third. A tiny cross in the hole. A tinier hole in the cartilage, when she turned her head to ponder over a question he asked. He wondered what usually filled it. A black stone, maybe.
There was something sexy about the way she moved. Awkward grace. Then the name struck a chord, and he remembered Song Qian and her little tomboy friend.
“Amber Liu?”
She’d looked surprised, then laughed, yep, that was her, and they’d chatted for the sake of old times, and the whole while he thought, Has it really been that long?
So much could change in eight years. His gaze stopped on the swell of her upper lip, the curve of her cheek, the smooth slope of her neck. She vibrated nerves and thrumming tension, the way you did on a new conquest. China-the open frontier. She was used to foreign lands. She’d survived Korea, too. She was familiar.
He looked away, ashamed.
***
Pairing: Han Geng/Amber (f(x)), Heechul/Eunhyuk, Heechul/Hankyung
Rating: R
Summary: Collisions, and the vehicles that carry them there.
At the time if you’d asked him, very casually, what it was like, and he trusted you not to laugh, judge, or kill him, he might’ve said-if I could compare it to anything-and he’d stop and think about it, resting his chin on his thumb, absurdly-well I guess if I had to compare it to anything, it’d be like, like you know babies? When they’re sleeping, and you touch them with your hand which is four times the size of theirs, and you poke at their little fists?-and you nod, I mean, what else can you do?-you know how if you touch your finger to their little hand, they instantly wrap theirs around yours, it’s like a gut instinct or something. The moment you reach out to them, even if it’s experimentally, they reach out back to you, and the difference is, it’s so intuitive to them, and they won’t let you go now; you literally have to sit there for hours until they wake up, or you’re an insensitive baby-hating bastard. You know that?
That’s what it’s like, I guess, to be in love.
________________________________________
I. DESSERT OR DISASTER?
Because she couldn’t be bothered to wait for the elevator in the lobby, because she did cross-country all through high school, because she was already five minutes late - and what if something snapped while going up the elevator? Free fall? Zero gravity? Crashing to death, without ever having had a real job. Dying as a mass of crushed bones before your first Real Interview was pretty sad. For any and all of these reasons Amber chose to take the tiny detour around the corner of the hall and into the narrow staircase, smiling charmingly at the sullen-faced security guard behind the desk, and up, up the seventeen fucking flights of never-ending steps.
Foundation: crumbling. Mascara: possibly staining the skin under her lower lashes-raccoon effect most definitely in progress. Shoes? Let’s not even go there. Even the little white buzzer that’s supposed to signal her arrival feels just out of reaching range of her arm cramped under the Louis Vuitton handbag-borrowed from Victoria, who subsists on ramen but owns an entire closet full of designer items-but the reception sees her at the door, smiles, and rings her in. She looks like she’s never had a bad hair day in her life. Well, part and parcel of the job, Amber thinks wistfully. That’s the entertainment industry for you.
“The one o’clock? Ms. Liu?”
“Yes,” Amber nods, but she left her windpipe outside the door so it sounds unintelligible and entirely unprofessional. The girl keeps up the knowing smile, though.
“Go right in, third door to your left.”
Amber gives her a look of unadulterated gratitude.
Third, left, Amber recites to herself as she pushes the glass door leading into the office, still trying to catch her breath and ignoring the parade of chicken legs belonging to equally thin girls who stop to stare at her in just the right way to inspire self-doubt. She recognizes the bright patterns wrapped around one with the body of a fifth grader and gratefully cites Victoria as the reason she even knows Diane von Furstenburg isn’t just an old lady with a stylish haircut.
Third to your left, which means this one-she thinks as she trips on her own heel and into the room.
“I’m so sorry I’m late-the train was stopped for ten minutes-you know how the subway workers get when they’re looking to get a raise? We can expect a strike any one of these days, I mean, that’s just my theory… um, I’m Amber, and I’m, here is my resume.”
She fidgets with the zipper on the bag, something she should’ve learned to work before leaving the house, perhaps, but it’s too late for regrets now. The manila folder comes out with a tug, and she’s in the process of wrestling her resume with as little physical contact as possible, because her hand’s way too sweaty already and there’s nothing that screams Don’t hire this nervous wreck like moist fingerprints on recycled rice paper… which, speaking of, whose idea was this anyway? “It’ll give your credentials some personality! You need that if you’re gonna go into entertainment,” Krystal had said, and Amber had, unsuspecting fool that she was, believed her. Rice paper! She could eat it if he didn’t give her the job-
“Amber Liu?” the guy asks incredulously. “Like Amber Liu who used to hang out with Song Qian and-no, it can’t be, right? Tell me I’ve got the wrong person.”
He’s looking at her with an open curiosity, and she’s afraid to look back, before she processes what he just said. It takes a while, because the first thing that clicked was his saying “like.” And then Victoria’s Chinese name, and then, wait.
Slowly she raises her head.
There was no doubt now. The guy who always looked too old for his age. The one who smoked with the other one and always wore the most generic-looking fashionable t-shirts and sometimes drove them to malls because he had a license. That guy. “Oh my God!” Amber says, dropping pretenses. “It’s you.”
It takes his grin faltering a bit for her to realize how bad that sounded. “I mean, I remember you!” She revises quickly. “You were, like, always attached to that Korean dude, Jin Xi Ch-”
“Ah, yeah. And you were, what, thirteen?” He laughs. “I can’t believe it’s been that long.”
“Me neither,” she agrees, backing into a swivel chair. “You don’t mind if I sit, right? Um . . .” She glances towards the nameplate. “Mr. Han?”
He laughs harder. “Of course not. And just call me Han Geng. I feel old enough as it is.”
Sinking into the cushy chair is pure bliss. But then she remembers where she is and straightens her spine. “You’re not old,” she protests belatedly, half out of a need to get on his good side now that she’s got one foot in the door. (“Connections can go a long way,” Krystal had advised. To which Amber had lamented, “But I don’t have any!”) “You’re like, okay, I’m twenty-one, and you were . . . twenty-one when I was thirteen, so eight plus twenty-one . . . Oh, you’re not even thirty yet. I wouldn’t worry if I were you,” she finishes triumphantly.
He’s smiling. In fact he hasn’t stopped smiling since she looked at him earlier for the first time in eight years. “You’re lucky your job doesn’t require math,” he ahems. “Now let’s talk business. Your resume . . .”
Right. She’s had this speech rehearsed for a month now, from before someone even responded to her ad. She’s got it down to an art: her aspirations, desire to help kids live out their dreams of becoming a somebody, the whole spiel that summarizes exactly what she wants to do with her life at the moment even if it sounds like thinly-veiled bullshit to anyone else. Thing is, it’s all true. Someone’s got to believe in it if you’re earnest enough, right?
“Is this . . . edible?”
He’s pointing at the paper. She looks at him, and he looks at her-it’s a moment-and then she just cannot stop laughing.
***
“So tell me about the boss.” Victoria settles on the bean bag.
Amber thinks. “He’s nice. Charming? He remembers you.”
“‘Remembers’ as in, I know him? Why didn’t you--”
“I didn’t want to freak you out-” Amber says, and it’s true. Victoria’s been on edge all week about her next audition on Thursday because she isn’t the best at interpretive dance. It’s never been her forte, though she still likes it better than swing. “Or maybe I forgot. I can’t remember anymore. I’m tired and old.” She flops down onto Victoria’s lap without warning and ignores the squirming that ensues.
“Don’t say the word ‘old’ around me,” Victoria warns after she resumes breathing. She’d officially passed the 25 mark and begun her ascent towards the much-feared three-oh.
“Anyway. His name is Han Geng. He’s nice.”
“I think I remember him. Was he the one who always hung out with the showy guy-”
“Yeah. That was my first thought, too.”
Victoria frowns. “I can’t recall much beyond that, to be honest.”
“Me neither,” Amber admits. “He’s nice though,” she adds as an afterthought.
Victoria crosses her arms over her chest. “You’ve said that three times. Do I suspect . . .”
“No! He’s got . . . he’s just got kind eyes or something.”
“Like bedroom eyes . . .”
“Tori! Think of the children!”
The children are scattered over the living room floor-Christian, Stuart, Manolo One, Manolo Two, Manolo . . .
“Right, right, I won’t say any more,” Victoria promises, hugging her shoes to her chest. There’s an ominous glint in her eye that Amber chooses to ignore.
***
For the first week they make her man the phones and fax machine. Meng Jia, the girl Amber mistook for a fifth grader the first day, gives her a tutorial of the usual spiel they deal out to all their callers, usually asking if they’ll accept demo CDs and when their auditions will be held. Paper always gets stuck in the fax, so you have to press down the tray and hold it there when you hear the ring. Amber flies back and forth between collecting faxes and refilling the machine and delivering cheery Hi! You have reached HG Entertainment’s Hotline. My name is Amber Liu; how may I help you today?s, the rehearsed lines stretching her cheeks apart.
“My son loves to sing, but I want to tell him to concentrate on his studies . . . If a boy named Li Hong with a high-pitched voice that sounds like a little girl-he is a late bloomer, but his voice really is very sweet-really, I’m not saying this just because I am his mother, please believe me-calls in, could you please discourage him from auditioning?”
“I am twelve years old from Nanjing I love old school Zhou Jie Lun and Fei Lun Hai and Four Heavenly Kings and Disney I love singing in the shower please let me show you thank you, Can you feel the looooveee toniiiightttt.”
“Hey, I’d like a small with pepperoni and extra cheese-wait, no cheese-oh yeah, are you still giving away those Toy Story 5 figurines or is that promotion over?”
“Uh,” Amber says.
She eats lunch alone for the first three days. On the fourth, she’s on her way to the park again with a soggy bento she tried to make the night before from an online bento addicts site and failed. At the red light she stops, and is one of the few to stop, and spies her boss on the other side of the street. Amber briefly considers walking the other way, but realizes it’s not high school anymore, and also, that’s a totally irrational impulse. She looks blankly in his direction like she isn’t looking at anything in particular, but he notices and waves. They meet halfway crossing the street, and he says cheerfully, “What’d you get?”
“Um, I brought a sucky lunch box,” she says, gesturing towards the plastic bag in her other hand.
He squints. “Is that one of those bags you buy for five yuan in the supermarket? When you forget to bring your own shopping bag?”
It takes her by surprise, and then she nods, embarrassed. “Hey, I’m still paying off some student loans.”
He blinks. “Oh, right, you just got out of school. I keep forgetting.”
“C’mon, you’re really not that old,” she grins, nudging him, a bad habit. She needs to remember not to be so chummy with guys.
He dodges it instinctively. “Not that old, huh.”
“Yup.”
“We really shouldn’t be having this conversation in the middle of the street,” he says, pulling her close as a car veers by, just about scraping the skin on her nose. She gets a whiff of his cologne, something she doesn’t recognize. Not Calvin Klein.
“Right,” she says, a little dazed. “I usually eat at the park.”
He doesn’t raise an eyebrow or anything, and she kind of adores him for not thinking that’s really pathetic.
They don’t really have anything to talk about, so he asks her about Victoria, about school days she hasn’t given thought to in ages, but they come back to her with increasing clarity the more she talks, and soon she’s relating stories about people he’s never even met.
“So then Krystal said, you won’t believe this, ‘I didn’t think it’d stain!’ Like puking on someone else’s bedsheets is ever a good idea, God, and she’d had spinach for dinner . . .” She stops upon seeing his eyes in the process of glazing over. “Uh, I mean. Tell me about you?”
“Me?” He asks, like she just woke him up. Not even glazing. Glazed.
“I’m a pretty boring guy,” he half-yawns. A little teardrop forms at the corner of his eye. “What do you want to know?”
How about everything, she doesn’t say. “Hm,” she thinks aloud. “How about . . . favorite Korean cuss word?” Something they can bond over.
Ten seconds later, she’s still staring at him in horror. “Oh my God, you’re . . . you’re dirty!”
“I learned from the best,” he confides with an enigmatic smile.
It’s practically a hundred degrees out today, and even sitting under the shade of a thousand elm trees Amber’s still sweating bullets. Her bra is uncomfortably damp, and her thighs chafing against each other underneath her new skirt. They’ll sting later when she tries to take a shower and then Victoria will scold her for not wearing those secret nude leggings she advertises every chance she gets, the tummy-shrinking ones that also stop right above the knee. “Infomercials,” Victoria’d said once, “are the one pleasure I must have in my life. Do not take them from me.” It was a bad sign when she waxed hyperbolic, so Amber’d said nothing and pulled up the spandex over her stomach obediently.
But she’s not the only one suffering from a heat stroke. A fresh sheen of sweat paints Han Geng’s collarbone slippery under his stiff suit collar. His neck, his forehead. His jaw clenches and relaxes with every bite of his lunch. She chews idly, watching perspiration trickle down the side of his face over his ear.
There’s something about the male body that renders her momentarily awed and speechless. Even then-it’s not every body. She has standards, too.
“Fridays are themed.” Apparently he’s explaining a company tradition or something. “ You have to wear an article of clothing that incorporates the theme somehow.”
Her brain makes a click as she tunes back into the conversation. “What’s this week’s?”
“Goth.”
The half-chewed octopus ball in her mouth just barely stops short of launching itself into his face.
***
Friday morning starts with a small feel-good seed: she doesn’t forget her keys, her shoes aren’t killing her, and her face is not drenched in sweat by the time she reaches the door.
And then it takes all of five seconds for Amber to realize she’s the only one in the office wearing a spiked collar.
***
“Forget EVERYTHING I said about him. He’s the most dishonest, vulgar, disgusting-”
Victoria’s mouth forms the shape of a perfect O. “Oh no, did he squeeze your butt?”
“No-”
“Did he leer?”
“Well, not really, but he was definitely checking me out when I walked out of the office after yelling at him. I saw his reflection in the glass. And by the way? He totally laughed at me! I can’t believe the bastard-” She stuffs a fry into her mouth and chews violently.
Victoria watches her closely. It’s not encouraging or discouraging, so Amber continues.
“And it’s not like being dressed as Marilyn Manson is the most dignifying thing to a woman ever, you know?” She trips over the word “woman” because she still feels like a girl, like all the time, but it’s the principle of the matter- “Like I’m having a hard enough time trying to make myself the modern female model or whatever, steamrolling down the path towards my dream career, and he’s just sitting there laughing at me and telling me that he didn’t think I’d actually believe him-like who was I supposed to believe? The girls in the cubicles who walk like their legs might give out under them at any moment? Ugh, and, ugh.” She pauses, takes a breath. “The worst part is-oh God-he said I looked good.”
It comes out whinier than she’d planned, and that look on Victoria’s face is awfully familiar. Like she’s about to break out the confetti and streamers and start singing the Wedding March. Oh no.
“No, no, no-good,” she stammers in a panic. “Like how condescending is that?”
“He said you looked good! YOU DO LOOK GOOD.”
“Oh my GOD, what is wrong with you? This guy, my BOSS, played a prank on me my first week at work, and you’re stuck on that one word, which I knew I shouldn’t have mentioned because-”
“Amber!!!”
Amber sinks deeper into the beanbag. Even as that sentence had spilled out of her mouth, she could hear herself saying the words in slow motion, and this voice in her head had bellowed NOOOO because it was just like Victoria to dwell on pointless details and blow things out of proportion. Sure, Amber had felt something like a tingle up the nape of her neck as Han Geng had said that, and her cheeks had gotten really hot, predictably, but that doesn’t mean she’ll forgive him for essentially making an ass out of her.
It also doesn’t change the fact that she remembers with startling lucidity his reflection in the glass window as she stomped out. The way his eyes clouded over, like he wanted to hold in the sight of her and keep it there.
***
“I’m not usually a jerk, I swear.”
Amber busies herself with a notepad. A couple of the girls slide discreetly out of their cubicles to watch, resting their chins on the plastic dividers. Actually, their audience consists of basically everyone in the office except Henry, the tech guy, who inhabits his own corner by the water cooler.
Han Geng clears his throat. “It’s an initiation sort of thing. I should’ve explained that to you on Friday but you’d looked so-enraged,” clearly holding back a smirk, which isn’t helping his case.
“What is this, like a frat?”
He pulls at his tie, pale baby blue with silver polka dots. Like he’s going on an Easter egg hunt or something. Maybe that’s this week’s theme. Maybe he should wear a furry bunny costume with ears or something. And a fluffy tail. Yeah, that’s about right.
She indulges the thought for a second and smiles to herself.
Which he catches. “It’s something left over from my high school days, yeah. An idea a friend had about-” he cuts himself short before his eyes take on that dreamy faraway quality people get when they embark on an epic storytelling adventure. “You probably don’t care.”
She shrugs, her notes blooming flower petals, which she tries to shield from his eyes. It’s not like she doesn’t have work to do. She just can’t do it with him . . . hanging around.
“We put all our employees through this when they first join,” he continues with an earnest touch. “People laugh, and then we’re closer for it afterwards.” She catches herself staring at the way his eyes light up when he talks about the employees. The ballpoint pen falls from her hand-gone limp-and rolls across the desk, stops precariously over the edge.
Han Geng peeks over to her notes. “Tulips, huh.”
“My favorite,” she admits, blushing furiously. So much for keeping the upper hand.
“C’mon. Don’t be mad. At least you didn’t join in March.”
She vaguely remembers hearing that that was when Henry joined. “What was March’s?”
“Hello Kitty.”
***
“I’m shit at bowling,” she admits over the counter while they’re waiting for the teenager to find their shoes. “I mean, I’m really bad at it,” she corrects. Bad words just kind of spill out of her mouth sometimes. She forgets that he’s not just anybody.
“You swear like a Chinese person.” Han Geng unfolds the sunglasses hooked onto the V-shaped collar of his t-shirt and rubs the lenses with the hem.
“Well, I kinda am!” She protests, then adds. “Taiwanese if that makes a difference.” She cocks her head, thinking. “Does it?”
He laughs nervously. “I’m not too well-versed in politics.”
“Oh, me neither. I just fake it sometimes back home.”
The teenager comes back with a pair of 35s for Amber. She’s 37 in the winter-summer feet expand with the heat. His nametag reads Xiao Ji, like “little chicken.” That’s gotta be a joke.
“Those are definitely not gonna fit, sorry,” she says, and Little Chicken grunts like this is so not worth thirty yuan an hour and disappears back into the little storage room behind the reception desk.
Han Geng taps his knuckles against the countertop. The sunglasses sit perched on his nose, right above a faint smirk. “I’ll go easy on you.”
“Are you good?”
“You’ll see,” he nods enigmatically with something of a hand flourish.
She laughs, feeling awkward. Then she remembers. “But you know, I meant to say earlier-”
Like weeks ago, she thinks but doesn’t say because that’s just pathetic, waiting until the company’s monthly bowling outing to say something you’d noticed the first day you met is like-like telling someone years later that they’ve had your name wrong this whole time. It’s embarrassing that you waited because waiting implies deliberation and caring, both of which are unattractive options for, well, obvious reasons.
“-You sound way different in Chinese. Like there’s a lilt to your voice.”
“Oh yeah?” He leans forward, interested. “Like I know what I’m talking about, right? I get that a lot.”
“Yeah.” She wets her lips unconsciously. And you sound douchier, too, she doesn’t say. But that must be a natural consequence of confidence. He’s in his element here. His company-and his country. With its poverty and problems, but still. His.
Maybe hers in a few. How long?
She opens her mouth just as Xiao Ji comes back with the right sizes-for both of them. Han Geng pushes her pair towards her and says, “Talk later. Tonight-we bowl.”
Oh man, she thinks, but bends down to put on the smelly shoes.
***
Two hours later: stalemate. Whoever loses is going to pay for karaoke, but at this point Amber isn’t sure she can make it there. She sits on the floor and watches one of the Wang sisters blow on her fingers dramatically before she rolls the ball down the aisle. Her knees are shot from all the bending.
Wang bowls a hook, Amber learns from Henry’s urgent whispering. Proof of his urgency can be found in the form of spit on her left ear. Amber wipes it away as discreetly as she can, careful not to hurt his feelings, but his eyes are steady on the ball in Wang’s hand. Through the luck of straws they both ended up on Team Blue. Henry takes bowling very seriously, she found out earlier, from the string of curses he’d let loose after Meng Jia’s had gone down the gutter. Not to mention the pounding against the floor was a bit dramatic. He’d apologized profusely afterwards, but Meng Jia had clucked her tongue and rolled her eyes at him, then turned around to mutter something to Fei Fei.
A couple aisles down, Han Geng’s standing with arms crossed over his chest. Smug, like he knows Wang’s going to unleash a dragon down the lane.
Henry’s up. He winks at Amber, but one of his fingers slips out of a hole and . . . it’s a gutter ball.
“I think Henry was a trucker in his past life,” Fei Fei whispers to Amber over the ensuing swears. It’s the first time they’ve spoken, really, so it takes her by surprise.
“Game over, Blue,” Han Geng yells over Henry’s prostrate body. “Get ready to sing.”
***
Xing Xing is probably the seediest karaoke place this side of Beijing, but somehow all twenty of them that are left manage to fit into their biggest room, and it’s sheer luck and not at all sly maneuvering that gets Amber stuck elbow-to-elbow with her boss. Even their thighs are touching.
One thing Amber’s never understood is how every Chinese person manages to rock karaoke even if they sound perpetually phlegmy in everyday conversation. Han Geng, it turns out, doesn’t suck as badly as he looks like he should. In fact, he’s pretty good at the songs that don’t require much vocal acrobatics, like Savage Garden’s “Truly Madly Deeply” and Wu Yue Tian’s “Wen Rou.”
Everyone from Team Red orders cocktails and finger foods but by midnight everyone on Blue is too drunk to groan. The glow-in-the-dark patterns in the wallpaper start resembling neon chicken scratch and Amber gurgles into her maybe-Moscow Mule-it’s hard to tell at this point. Also whether or not it’s even hers is up for debate-something about cavemen paintings when Han Geng thrusts the microphone in her hand and says, “Your song.”
“Wha?” She blinks at him just as Meng Jia’s head lands with a thud on her shoulder. Ouch. Amber giggles.
Han Geng holds his liquor awfully well for someone who’s not gigantic. “Hollaback Girl. You entered it, right?”
Across the room Henry jumps up and fistpumps the air. “Fuck yeah! My girl Amber Liu!” Suddenly he’s Fred Durst. Wait, nineties reference in the wrong country.
Her head hurts.
After about a thousand Oooh, this my shit this my shits she collapses onto the couch and conks out.
***
She wakes up three times. Once in a taxi, with street lights blaring by fantasy mist-like, and then she falls back-her head vaguely thumping against a ribcage-asleep, dimming orange behind her eyelids.
Second time she’s in the middle of a Justin Bieber-who knew the kid had longevity in him? well, no longer a kid, really-fanmeeting, bumps into Alanis Morrisette, whose longass hair falls strategically over her nipples-oh yeah, she’s naked-and before this dream can get even more Canadian, Henry shows up with a maple leaf and starts belting Avril Lavigne-and then a toilet flushes. Amber blinks an eye open as the truth settles in, that she is not really a Justin Bieber fan and this is just the stuff that nightmares are made of, and thinks if she squints she might be able to see a penis in the distant glow of the bathroom light but instead she turns on her other side and falls asleep again.
The next time she wakes up, it’s morning. The bed is hard, which is a sign it’s not hers. She sleeps with a futon on the floor. The futon’s got Amber-shaped dents in it. It takes a minute for her to remember her last functioning memory-B-A-N-A-N-A-S!-and she shakes the mortification away only to uncover the jackhammer pounding away at her forehead. “Fuck,” she says, and rolls over to find a familiar lump sprawled across an air mattress on the floor.
Han Geng looks good sleeping. His normally stiff-gelled hair falls flat over his forehead, a few tendrils scraping his eyelashes, and he’s resting on his back, one arm bent over the head, the other draped across his stomach. Amber examines his hands, the fingernails cut neatly to the quick, and the small threads of hair under the knuckles. Crow’s feet dragging his eyes downwards. A face born sad, she thinks, smiling through the hangover.
And that’s when it hits her what she’s doing.
***
He calls later that night and it takes Victoria threatening to answer the phone in her place for Amber to pick up. “Um, hello?”
The first noise he makes sounds a lot like a snort, so the warmth from her stomach immediately creeps up her back. “You doing okay?”
“Yeah . . . thanks,” she mumbles into her sleeve.
“What?”
“I’m so embarrassed,” she blurts out. “I’m so sorry. I think-I think I fell asleep?”
His laugh is even subtler over the phone than in real life. She can visualize the magical eye crinkle with such clarity she could puke.
Or maybe she actually needs to puke. It’s hard to tell.
“Wastebasket,” she mouths to Victoria, who’s been resting her face in her hands on the kitchen table, listening intently.
“You fell asleep, yeah. At first you were walking-” he laughs like he just remembered something funny. “-oh yeah, you told me to leave you alone because you could walk fine by yourself, okay? You didn’t need a man to hold you up-inflection’s yours, not mine, to be clear-even if he is pretty fucking attractive-once again, your words, not mine-and then you said oops, I didn’t mean that, and burped.”
Amber is silent for five seconds and then mouths to Victoria, “I want to die.” Victoria doesn’t understand.
“I’ve got really weak knees from doing cross-country in high school,” Amber says calmly. “And I think everyone’s hot when I drink. You know how people get beer goggles? Like that but times infinity.”
“I’m heart-broken,” he says. “You’ve got a cute snore, too.”
She winces. “Don’t plan on hearing it again.”
“Aw. Wish I’d recorded it then.”
“Creeper!” she gasps into the phone, and he starts wheezing in delight. It’s sadistic, really, how much he enjoys teasing her in her pathetic hung-over state. She tells him so and he just keeps laughing.
“Eggs. They work miracles,” he tells her seriously.
“I’d rather have morphine.” She pauses. “Or like, a really big hug.”
Victoria stretches her arms wide apart and makes embarrassing kissy faces. If there were a way to headdesk subtly while holding a cell phone, Amber would be doing it right now.
There’s a brief silence, and then he says, “Hey, did you get that?”
“What?”
“My air hug.”
Amber screams for ten seconds after hanging up. Victoria pretends she has no idea what just happened and smugly eats her banana.
***
Ask Amber about her childhood, about high school, about growing up skinny and gangly--bandaid-ed scraped knees from climbing the tree in the backyard and falling down halfway every single goddamn time--and she’ll tell you that she’s always gotten along with the boys fine, but that, weirdly, she actually spent most of her life surrounded by girls.
Third grade, for instance. It’s recess; she and Rahul Choudhary are clawing at the courtyard ground. She finds a pearly white rock that she convinces Rahul is a snail. Rahul runs around screaming that Amber Liu eats snails and Chinese people are weird, and Amber decides he is no longer cool enough to be her best friend.
Then just before Spanish, Francesca, the tallest and prettiest girl in class notices the shiny stone on Amber’s desk and says loudly, “Oh my God, that looks like something I saw at Claire’s!” Claire’s is a big deal among all the girls that year. Francesca grabs the rock without asking and starts passing it around. It takes a minute for her to remember the owner, so she turns back to Amber and tells her in her sweetest voice, “That’s awesome. Where did you get it?”
“I found it on the ground,” Amber says, and kicks the back of her chair. Francesca’s got really curly brown hair that frizzes up in the summer, but her freckles remind Amber of constellations.
Francesca shares her lunch with Amber for the rest of the school year. She’s invited to slumber parties and hair-brushing get-togethers. The girls who used to laugh at her overalls start asking her where she shops. (She doesn’t. Her mom buys everything, or receives them from family friends whose children have already grown up.) She’s inducted into a brand new world, in which giggling is a mode of communication and bimonthly trips to the mall are not only coordinated but compulsory.
Rahul Choudhary never gets a second look.
Years later, Amber thinks maybe Rahul was her first real crush, and Francesca, maybe her second.
***
She figures she’s got a plan; in two words, Act Normal. Just because you’ve seen him in a Snoopy t-shirt and wrinkled boxers and how pale the skin on his wrist looks when he isn’t wearing a watch, and just because you felt something when you did, doesn’t mean--well, it doesn’t mean anything. So Amber slips into her desk, chirps a round of hellos to the girls, and acts normal.
Problem is, it takes two for this to work. He emails her within five minutes. Lunch? My bento is better than yours, promise. From where she sits she can peek over the cubicle divider and catch his silhouette through the window. He’s resting his chin against the knuckles on one hand, keeping the other on the laptop touchpad. And then, with the inaudible ding of incoming mail, he jolts and leans toward the screen, smiles.
You’re on, Charlie Brown.
***
“So I hate to be all, ‘I’mma put my foot down now’ but--well, that’s kind of what I’m doing. But the question is, where are we going?”
Three weeks later, they’ve hit every restaurant within a ten-block radius of the office. Amber can honestly say she’s memorized at least twenty types of curry. Han Geng never gets sick of curry. He is a curry fanatic. There is something wrong with this man.
They’ve arrived at a corner. It’s a green light, but he’s stopped walking. They’ve been walking for ten minutes and still haven’t decided on a place. She probably should’ve cooked last night. All this spending-money-before-you have-it isn’t really working in her favor, although half the time he secretly pays for both of them while she’s in the bathroom. Because half the time they’re eating curry that burns its way down her throat. She suspects it might figure into his grand plan of chivalry, to lure her into the bathroom with the power of spice while he sneaks off to the cashier and gives them his credit card to swipe. Point is--that’s not what she wants, either.
“Where do you want to go?” he asks slowly.
She laughs, sort of frustrated because this question got old maybe five minutes ago, and then opens her mouth to say, “I don’t know,” but he stops and goes, “No, I mean. Go on a date with me.”
It catches her by surprise.
“Uh,” she says, panicking. “I thought we were talking about food.”
“I mean,” he says, apparently flustered, like she just broke the mood. (Fuck.) “I want to get to know you better.”
Finally, she thinks, but her mind is racing. “I’m pretty sure this is it, but okay,” she says, holding the grin steady until he turns away.
***
It’s a tossup between his gigantic forehead when it isn’t covered by hair and those awful passé aviators he won’t stop wearing, sometimes even indoors. “I’ve got sensitive eyes,” he says, but she knows he actually thinks they look good. “It’s the first sign of old-man syndrome,” she warns, “when you stop being able to tell what’s cool.” It comes out more ominous-sounding than she intended, and she feels a little apologetic, but that’s how they have their first kiss, him letting her know, hey, here’s one thing I still fucking own.
His thumb strokes against her cheek, and she realizes it’s also the fact that they’ve both been in the same position, fish out of water, except she’s doing it again and he’s finally found his niche. Does it count as using if hanging out with him makes her feel like she’ll get there too, eventually?
And is this really just hanging out if she’s trying to take his belt off with her teeth?
Afterwards they lie facing the ceiling, breathing hard, and an eternity before Hankyung says, “That was wonderful.”
He squeezes her hand over the bed covers, and she can smell him without turning her head, like they share a part of each other now. It frightens her.
“Duh,” she says to him with the most convincing act of nonchalance she can muster up in the moment. Reaches over to tickle an earlobe.
***
He doesn’t fall asleep instantly, like so many of her exes that she’s come to expect it: the heavy snoring, all the works. He waits for her to doze off first. It’s sweet but makes her paranoid. What does this mean? Is he not tired? Is he holding himself back? Why is he trying so hard? Why does he have to try? Shouldn’t they be natural? Shouldn’t they-?
“He’s a gentleman,” Vic says. “Accept that there are a few good guys left in the world, and he’s one of them.”
“How do you know?” Amber asks seriously.
Victoria looks at her in a way that betrays their age difference. “I mean, there’s no way you really know. But you find out.”
She knows Vic did. They never talk about her past lovers, especially not the ones that mattered. She changes the channel when there’s news about Thailand. It’s been a year since she’s had her heart broken, but Vic’s a slow healer. She smiles a lot, though. There was a psych study about fake happiness inducing real happiness-Victoria just eats those articles up. She’s got them bookmarked under her “Health & Wellness” tab, right between “Love & Marriage” and “Money, Celebrity, & the Dangers of Fame.” Lindsay Lohan makes frequent cameos in the latter.
“I need to get drunk,” Amber decides.
They put on Joan Jett and that Tibetan singer Victoria really likes whose name Amber always gets wrong, pop a bottle of really cheap funny-tasting red wine, and gurgle through A girl can do what she wants to do and that’s what I’m gonna do! Amber pulls Victoria’s hair up to the top of her head, biting on an elastic as she combs in a couple loose strands before sweeping it all together into a gigantic bun. Vic takes one look in the bathroom mirror and doubles over the sink cracking up. “I look like I’m six and waiting for my mom to take me to school.”
Amber balances the wine glass on her head. “You’re too beautiful to age, okay?”
They do the frug, because Rilo Kiley deems it so. Victoria never recognizes any of Amber’s music, but she always dances along. “Showoff,” Amber sticks out her tongue, and the wine-red on Victoria’s teeth resembles lipstick stains.
Two hours and three soundtracks later, Amber feels sentimental enough to kiss her best friend, and drunk enough to do it unabashedly on the mouth. Victoria’s eyes turn dark, but then the cloud passes. She tastes nothing like Han Geng.
“Amber-”
“Fuck,” Amber hiccups, because she’s crying a little. “I think I really like him.”
***
“He’s old,” is the first thing Krystal says, before they’ve even been seated.
“No, listen to me, Amber,” she continues in English. The little “er” syllable bends in her mouth like it’s overcompensating for a mostly Korean tongue. “Men die earlier, and this guy is old.”
“He’s not even thirty!”
“For what? Another couple months?” Krystal pulls her arm to shake her. “Listen to me. Momma knows best.”
“That’s Vic,” Amber says, laughing. The waiter motions for them to follow him up the stairs. Krystal looks wistfully towards the window seats. They’re halfway up the steps when she stops him.
“We’ll wait for those people to leave,” she says, gesturing towards the couple in the corner. Their faces glow under the light, and the white tablecloth nearly blinds. The girl is clearly a fan of bb cream. So in love, Amber thinks with a tinge of yearning. But for what? It’s too early to be daydreaming.
“Are you always so picky when you go to restaurants?”
They’ve been relegated back to the doorway. Krystal is careful not to lean on the greasy hinges, only the glass, which appears immaculate. It’s a well-kept “French” restaurant run by mixed Chinese-Koreans.
Krystal crosses her arms smugly. “When I know my company will tolerate it, yeah. And you, company, are the definition of easygoing.” She reaches over and ruffles Amber’s hair, despite the fact that it is no longer just a couple inches from her scalp and therefore not of rufflable length. Not to mention that Amber is in fact the older of the two and deserves to be treated with respect. Like the . . . respectable woman that she has become.
“Hey!” she tries frowning. “I won’t stand for that anymore.” She pinches Krystal’s cheek and gets a brief touch of skin as the other dodges. Krystal sticks out her tongue, and they’re back in middle school, their desks adjacent to one another-
“Jung? Take a seat by Liu”-
matching brown melting loafers-
Krystal pickpocketing tourists at the planetarium and only getting a toy watch and some lint-
-Krystal’s braids, parted with a comb down the middle so cleanly you could’ve walked a line on it. She dressed up as Wednesday for Halloween that year and Amber as Cousin Itt. She suffered a bad case of hair-in-the-mouth for the next week, but it was so worth seeing those little kids jump, Tootsie Rolls spilling out of their jack-o-lantern baskets.
Oh man, she didn’t want to grow up. How did this happen?
“Don’t ever change,” Amber says, playing with the salt shaker.
“Don’t date a man who was smoking before you even got your period.”
“You don’t even know that he smokes.”
Krystal waves off the question with a knowledgeable shrug. “Guys always smoke. Even if they say they don’t-kiss them, and you can tell. They don’t make Camel-flavored Wrigleys.” She’s reverted back to Korean.
“He used to dance,” Amber thinks aloud. “Do dancers smoke?”
“The reckless ones,” Krystal says absentmindedly, thumbing the menu. “Do you want duck? We can split it.”
“I can probably eat one by myself right now. I’m starved.” Amber casts her an accusing look, and Krystal immediately turns apologetic.
“I swear I left the hotel on time! But then I saw this really cute hat on display while I was walking down, um, that road, and-”
“Yeah, it’s okay. I’ve gotten used to waiting for you. It’d be weird if you showed up on time.”
Krystal grins, and it’s as dazzling as Amber remembers. Lee Taemin in Krystal’s class with the regally good looks (even Amber admitted that, even though he was too young and skinny to be her type) fell for this grin, despite how they only lasted until Christmas, and then Krystal got bored and started watching Prince of Tennis instead of chasing after boys. That only lasted another three months, but not before Amber got dragged to an anime convention dressed up in a bandana and an obviously poached jersey. She had to wear shorts while there was still snow on the ground. “Why do you get to wear pants?” She’d whined, and Krystal had explained, exasperatedly, like this was the hundredth time she’d asked, “Because we’re trying to stay true to the characters. Kaido never wears pants.”
Amber had shivered through the convention, posed for some pictures, got groped by a couple different hairy-legged Sailor Scouts, and snored the way home on Krystal’s shoulder, just as bony then as it is now, peeking out from under the thin material of her graphic t-shirt. Looks plucked from Urban Outfitters. Love me when I’m GONE. Everlasting teenage angst; that’s her style. Amber digs it. She’s pretty fucking square in comparison.
“Okay, so tell me about the geezer.”
“He’s not old. Well, hairline aside, he’s really-”
Krystal looks at her expectantly.
“I don’t know.” Amber exhales, defeated. “I like him. He has a gentle aura, but there’s a sexiness to it. And he makes me feel safe, if that makes any sense.”
She realizes she’s been talking with her eyes on the tablecloth, so she turns them back to Krystal, who’s now sitting there sort of dazed.
“Wow. Vic wasn’t kidding when she said you were in trouble.”
Amber’s about to protest when the waiter comes over and asks if they’re done deciding.
________________________________________
II. STARE DOWN THE SUN
Amber’s waiting in line to buy a donut. She has a thing for the plain glazed ones. She doesn’t care if she gains weight. She’s unlike any girl he’s ever dated. He’s glad he can reach around her and squeeze the little jiggle of fat around her waist. There’s hardly anything, but more than nothing.
“When I was little, I thought sprinkles looked like worms from far away. Funny, how that can turn someone off them for life. I fucking hate sprinkles,” she says to him while they’re waiting in line. The expletive rolls off her tongue naturally, like she’s never had to censor herself. He feels vicariously American through her sometimes. It’s not only in her speech patterns, the rushed Mandarin. Her bangs fall in pieces before her eyes and she tosses her head to the side without moving them away. She’s the kind of person who’d survive in the desert. She’d talk enthusiastically with sand in her mouth even as it filled the grooves of her teeth.
He drags his mind away from her mouth to say something about worms and regeneration.
She places her order-“Um, the shiny ones? How do you say ‘glazed,’ Han Geng? Yeah, one of those. To go. Thanks!”-and turns to him. “Wouldn’t it be great if people could do that, too? Regrow an arm or leg. So many people get into accidents these days, but if we could just heal that easily, wouldn’t that be amazing?”
“Yeah,” he says. “That would.” He moves his arm around her waist and places the slightest pressure there. It’s instinctive to him; his body naturally behaves like that of an overprotective boyfriend. It requires less thought than saying the words, or trying to figuring out her favorite type of flower without asking.
Tulips.
The best part is she leans into him now. Her eyes don’t go wide like before. This is all smooth-paved road. Highway for their taking. Easy as.
“And this is going to sound totally corny, and you’re going to laugh at me-don’t laugh-but wouldn’t it be great if, if people could do that with, like, heartbreak? Hey, I said don’t laugh.”
He wasn’t laughing. “What? Okay, go on.”
“Like, you break up with someone, and you’re, you know, sad for a while. You go finish your roommate’s carton of Haagen Daz in the freezer (she hid it behind the frozen mixed veggies or something, Vic did that once)”-she stops, dazed at the memory, and he feels something twist in his chest: jealousy?-”so you eat your ice cream and watch, I don’t know, whatever people watch when they’re sad. I Love Lucy, or Friends, or-”
“I don’t know any of these shows.”
“You’re kidding me.” She lets out a gasp full of drama. “So no one told you life was gonna be this way? Your job’s a joke you’re broke your love life’s DOA?”
“Okay. Okay, Amber. Confession time.” He takes both of her hands in his, but it’s unfortunately the most inopportune moment ever because they’re handing her her donut on a tray, so he releases them, and she kind of side-squints at him in this irritatingly cocky way, like she just knows he needs every excuse to touch her.
Oh God, she knows.
“What were you going to say?” she asks when they’re sitting. She’s looking the donut head-on, calculating the angle of attack.
“Um,” he says. “It’s not funny anymore.”
“C’mon!”
“No, it’s really lame. I don’t know what possessed me to even think it’d be funny. It’s a good thing that guy interrupted me in time. You would’ve been horrified. This would’ve been our last date.”
She’s got her mouth hanging open, ready for the first bite, but now just staring at him dumbfounded. “That’s like the longest preface to a non-joke ever. And how is this a real date? Do you take all your foreign lovers to Dunkin Donuts? Is that how they do it here?”
Here is Beijing, and Amber talks like they aren’t already sleeping together, like she doesn’t already belong to this city and its smog and dust and vibrancy. But once upon a time he did the same, only elsewhere. It made people soften their voices and treat him more kindly, like it was okay to be different if you acknowledged it self-deprecatingly.
“Are you a foreigner? I didn’t notice,” he says, conjuring up a twinkle in his eye.
“You were too distracted by the boobs,” she returns the twinkle effortlessly. Her hand brushes his over the table. He can’t stop looking at her mouth. A part of him would like to press her up against the plastic decor and feel her warm and irreverent underneath him. He’d cup her face with one hand and deftly unbutton her jeans with the other, slide under the thin elastic of her panties, over the coarse patch of hair, and watch her face contort with a shade of violence, seesawing between pleasure and restraint, as she let him touch her there, and there, and there.
Fuck, he is hard under the table, and she is-still licking away at that donut.
“What can I say? I’ve always wanted a pair of my own-” he starts off cheekily, but is interrupted by a rustle, and a corner of today’s paper held up by the guy one table over catches his eye.
Young writer-
New novel-
Beijing-
Landed yesterday-
’Gold’ ‘Hope’-
Oh.
It’s like the air suddenly constricts and expands at the same time. It feels like a joke, a cruel one of cosmic proportions, but one that surprises nobody, like something that shows up at your doorstep to say, I’m back.
“I wouldn’t be opposed to Geng-tits,” Amber is saying, with the kind of squinty gaze that just five seconds ago would’ve brought him to his knees, but now.
“Oh God,” he says without thinking.
She frowns, but it hasn’t hit her. She won’t know-she can’t know. “Oh God what?”
It’s okay. That was years and years ago. Let’s just forget it. Focus. Look, an interesting stain in the shape of Africa on the wall. Look, the beautiful woman sitting across from you. The one who’s pretty much yours, if you asked.
He blinks everything into place. A strand of her hair is stuck to crumbs of donut glaze collecting at the corner of her mouth, which hangs slightly open to show him exactly what stage of chewed-up the former donut now inhabits. Pleasantly Mauled.
“I’m just-visualizing them,” he finishes and forces a laugh up his throat. She pauses for a minute, and then her eyes roll over, and she’s, he knows it, charmed. It’s easy with her.
He files the ache away and watches her ravage the entire pastry in two bites.
***
The first thing he’d noticed, when she’d tripped into the room, was her hair, too dark to be natural. She had dyed it-and redyed it black. It glinted in the light. She found her balance and smiled at him.
And then, the second piercing, and the third. A tiny cross in the hole. A tinier hole in the cartilage, when she turned her head to ponder over a question he asked. He wondered what usually filled it. A black stone, maybe.
There was something sexy about the way she moved. Awkward grace. Then the name struck a chord, and he remembered Song Qian and her little tomboy friend.
“Amber Liu?”
She’d looked surprised, then laughed, yep, that was her, and they’d chatted for the sake of old times, and the whole while he thought, Has it really been that long?
So much could change in eight years. His gaze stopped on the swell of her upper lip, the curve of her cheek, the smooth slope of her neck. She vibrated nerves and thrumming tension, the way you did on a new conquest. China-the open frontier. She was used to foreign lands. She’d survived Korea, too. She was familiar.
He looked away, ashamed.
***