Chapter 17 Chanel #2
Long Ge. My mom. Of course she’s had her share of admirers, men consumed by their love for her, sick in the head with it.
Like that stalker who’d broken into our holiday house in Sanya last summer and was sitting right there on our couch when we
came in. Or the one who had gotten a photo of my mom’s face tattooed on his back.
But this level of obsession is unlike anything I’ve seen before.
“Xiao meimei, did you get lost on your way to the nail salon or something?”
I startle and hurriedly drop the letters back into the drawer before I spin around, coming face-to-face with two leering men.
I take in their bruised knuckles, their rough features and week-old stubbles, and instinctively reach into my purse, my heart
pounding.
Still, I make myself smile at them. Try to keep my cool. “I was just waiting for a friend.”
“Ah, you got a friend here?” One of the men laughs and steps forward. He’s three heads taller than I am, perfectly blocking
the doorway. “We can also be friends.”
My clammy fingers close around the glass of my perfume bottle. “No, thanks,” I say mildly. “My friend might get jealous, you see. I’ll wait for him outside.”
But the man only steps closer. He smells like the train station—like cigarettes and ramen powder and unwashed clothes. “Why
don’t you stay a bit longer?”
“That’s fine,” I say as firmly as I can.
He acts as if he hasn’t heard me. He looks me up and down in a way that’s as familiar as it is nauseating. Then he reaches
for me, and I pull out the perfume bottle and spray it wildly, my eyes squeezed shut, knowing I’ve aimed in the right place
only when I hear his grunt of pain. I open my eyes to find him doubled over, clawing at his face and coughing—
But his friend is still standing, and his eyes narrow at me.
“That wasn’t very nice,” he says.
I hold my perfume up like a gun and press down again, but nothing happens. I try one more time, my throat tight with desperation,
my fingers trembling so hard that I almost drop the perfume bottle. Shit. The nozzle is jammed.
All my thoughts are lost in the sound of my own scream as the man corners me, seizing me by the wrist. I try to squirm away,
but it’s futile. I don’t stand a chance, and he knows this. He yanks me to his side with such callous force that I fear he’s
dislocated a bone, and I’ve never been so terrified, never been so mad at myself for getting into this situation in the first
place, and I’m so fucking screwed—
There’s a flash of shadow, the heavy thud of a collision.
Ares slams the man down, pinning his squirming body in place as if he’s nothing but a worm in the dirt.
There shouldn’t be anything graceful about this, the crunch of bone and the splash of blood and gasps of pain, but Ares moves with all the streamlined grace of a natural fighter, a wolf determined to clamp its jaws down on its prey.
Then he lifts his head, his blazing eyes locking on mine. “Go,” he says. “Run.”
I do. I turn on my heel and run and run and I don’t stop until the stitch in my side makes it physically impossible to keep
going. I’m halfway down the block, panting, my head spinning, the stench of blood in my nostrils, when Ares comes to find
me.
His pale skin is flecked with red, the color as vivid as new paint. A few loose strands of hair, come undone during the fight,
tumble over his eyes. He looks ready to tear down the building back there with his bare hands. Ready, and capable of it.
I’m struck by a sudden sense of déjà vu so intense it almost knocks the breath out of me. I’ve witnessed this before—this
very moment, the alley I’m standing in, the way he’s walking toward me. The vision. Between the news about my parents and Long Ge, I’d forgotten about it.
But before I can flee from the scene, Ares corners me.
“What were you doing in there?” he demands, his eyes pitch-black, blazing with some emotion I can’t parse. Something darker
and more complicated than anger. “Did you follow me?”
This seems like a better, easier explanation than revealing what I’ve found out about Long Ge, so I nod. “I’m sorry, I was
just curious—”
“What were you thinking? Do you know how dangerous that was? Do you know what would’ve happened if I hadn’t come in time, if they had—” He cuts himself off, breathing fast. “This isn’t a fucking game, Chanel.
These men won’t hesitate to run a knife through a living person; it doesn’t matter how rich or famous or well-connected you are.
Your name won’t protect you in a place like this.
If anything, it only makes you more vulnerable.
Honestly, it’s a miracle you’re not dead. ”
“But I’m fine,” I say, dazed, almost dizzy. “I’m not hurt or anything.”
“You’re not hurt,” he repeats. Without another word, he moves so fast that I gasp, reaching for my arm. But despite the rage
simmering through his frame, the knife’s edge of his words, his grip is surprisingly gentle as he lifts my arm up, turning
it over. “If you’re not hurt, then what the fuck is this?”
It’s only then that I notice the purplish marks around my wrist, stark as ink. They must be from when the man grabbed me earlier.
“Not badly hurt,” I amend weakly, pulling my arm away from him. The new bruises have already started to throb, but I barely
even register the pain. It feels like the sky and ground have been reversed, like everything’s upside down. In the vision,
I would have sworn that Ares was the one who’d hurt me. But then, the vision had never shown him attacking me, only the bruises on my wrist, the anger
on his face. So has the vision changed, because I’ve managed to actually change Ares’s feelings toward me? Or had I simply
interpreted the vision wrong in the first place? “Really.”
He stares at me, long and hard. A drop of blood trickles down his neck, staining his shirt collar, but he doesn’t seem to notice it, or maybe he doesn’t care.
“You should be more worried about yourself,” I tell him.
“Who said I was worried about you?” he says flatly.
I’m almost tempted to roll my eyes. “Okay then, you should only be worried about yourself. Let’s go get you cleaned up. Where’s your house?”
“I don’t need you to—”
“I’m actually not offering, I’m asking. I’ll call the car now,” I say, holding out my phone for him to enter his address,
which he does, albeit reluctantly, jaw clenched. “Oh, and . . . Ares?”
“What?”
“Thank you,” I whisper.
His face softens, and even with all that blood on his cheeks, the immediate change it makes is stunning. Like watching ice
thaw in a sudden blaze of heat.
I flick the light switch on inside Ares’s apartment, illuminating an almost empty living room. There are only the bare necessities:
a muted gray couch, a single dining table with two side chairs. No houseplants or decorations or pictures in frames. I’ve
been inside hotel rooms that felt homier than this.
After I help Ares down onto the couch, I head over to the kitchen, find a towel hanging over the dishwasher, and wet it under
the tap. Then I pass it wordlessly to him.
“Do I look too scary like this?” he asks, his mouth curving with grim amusement.
“You don’t scare me,” I lie, unable to stop myself from staring as he runs the towel over his cheeks, his collarbones, the hard line of his jaw, wiping off the dried blood splatters. The white fabric comes away a dark, dirty red.
Then he lifts his shirt up over his head.
“Oh my god,” I whisper, horror lurching to my throat so fast I think I might be sick. “Oh my god.”
“Thanks. That’s how most girls react when I take off my shirt,” he says dryly.
I’m too stunned to even respond to that. I’d seen the fresh bruises on his knuckles, the flashes of split skin. But it’s so
much worse than I thought. Half his side is mottled deep purple and yellow, new wounds acquired faster than old wounds could
heal. Long gashes snake down his torso, and even the spaces beneath his collarbones are marked by angry red crescents that
look awfully like human nails. There seems to be no inch of muscle that’s been left unscathed. I can’t imagine how it feels.
Can’t imagine how he’s managed to get up in the morning and go to school every day like everything’s normal when it must hurt
to even breathe. It hurts just to look at him.
The back of my nose prickles, a sharp, sore pressure that builds up to my eyes. “Oh my god, Ares,” I say again, my voice breaking.
Ares stares at me, more confused than I’ve ever seen him. “What are you doing?”
“What do you think I’m doing?” I sniff.
“You’re . . . crying? But . . . why?” He studies me a moment longer, then pulls me down to the couch next to him.
Softer, quieter, he says, “Is it because of what happened earlier? I know that must’ve been scary.
. . . I promise it won’t happen again. I won’t let them hurt you.
” He strokes my hair as he speaks, his touch so gentle that it’s disorienting.
It doesn’t seem possible that those same hands had broken a grown man’s nose tonight, had ripped two people away from me and thrown them to the concrete. “You’re safe now.”
And despite everything the vision had warned me of, I do feel safe. Safer than I should reasonably feel. “That’s not . . .
It’s not because of that,” I whisper, dabbing my tears with the corner of my sleeve. I motion toward the cuts across his torso,
all that raw and ruined flesh. “It’s . . . this. I don’t like it. I don’t like—I don’t want you to be—I can’t stop picturing . . .
I mean, doesn’t it hurt?”
He freezes.
Something flickers across his eyes, which are almost pitch-black in the low light, his pupils dilated. “My pain,” he says
slowly, like he’s struggling to understand a new, abstract concept in class, “means something to you?”
The answer is a given, but the problem is that I don’t know what exactly it means.
“Of course it does,” I say.
“Of course it does,” he repeats, like he still can’t quite believe it.