CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Friendship is the last thing on my mind when I hop off the bus.
Cyrus is waiting there on the stone pavement, and as our gazes meet for the first time since I snuck out of his hotel room this morning, he smiles at me, sincere and almost shy. It’s the kind of smile that makes you forget everything. The sun. The sky. Gravity. Every major and minor hurt I’ve ever endured. Every name that isn’t his.
At least for a second.
Because in the daylight, it’s easier to pretend the intimacy of last night was only a spell, an embarrassing mistake made in the moment. Easier for the old doubts to creep in, to remember the Incident and all the years of pain that preceded this, why I owe it to my younger self to at least keep my revenge plan on the table. Even if my heart can’t quite make up its mind about Cyrus, I shouldn’t let myself weaken.
But something is going to happen between us today—of this, I’m entirely certain. There’s a rhythm to these things, like the melody leading into a chorus.
I’m just not certain if it’s a blessing or a curse that we’re given half an hour to explore the village we’re visiting on our own. Right now, it might actually be easier to have a contest to win, something to focus on, anything that could distract me from the hot, jittery feeling inside me. If there are butterflies in my stomach, their wings must be on fire.
Revenge or desire? Since when did the two feel so similar?
“Should we go?” Cyrus asks me.
I glance around us. The others have started to split off down the bridges and canals and winding streets, where red lanterns swing from the eaves. “Okay,” I say. I don’t ask where to; I don’t really care.
We walk without talking for an impressively long period of time, past the houses with golden ‘fu’ characters pasted over the front doors, the bikes resting against gray tile walls, the wooden planks propped up by uneven stone steps, the floral dresses left out to dry in the warm breeze. But Cyrus doesn’t even seem to register his surroundings. His expression has retreated inward, his shoulders tight. A few times, he sucks in a breath, as if on the verge of saying something, but then he snaps his mouth shut again.
He could be getting ready to confess that he’s a vampire , my brain volunteers. Or he could have caught you looking at him like you want to lick his neck—
I do not want to lick his neck , I argue, kicking an innocent pebble in protest.
I’m your brain , my brain reminds me. You can’t hide anything from me. And it’s painfully obvious how attracted you are to Cyrus, even though you should really cut that out and refocus on the part where you reject him in the most humiliating fashion—of course, you’d need him to actually say that he likes you first—
I tell my brain to shut up.
But just when I think I can’t take the silence anymore, Cyrus says quietly, “I didn’t mean it, you know.”
“What?”
We turn into an empty alley, and he slows down, the sunlight spilling soft over his skin, illuminating every subtle detail. The way he pauses to swallow, his throat pulsing. The nervous shift of his fingers before he slides his hands into his pockets. The intensity in his gaze, his beautiful features entirely serious. “I never meant to lie about you pushing me,” he says, his voice very soft, just audible over the calls of birds in the distance. “Much less get you kicked out of the school. It was all my fault. I was concussed and everything happened so fast, I wasn’t thinking properly—when the teacher asked if someone had hurt me, my first instinct was to say that you did, because I was hurt, but it had nothing to do with the fall itself. I just— It’s so mortifying, but when you told me you never wanted to see me again, I was at a complete loss. I’d never experienced such pain before in my life. And I knew I had screwed up, and I was the only person to blame for the whole mess.”
“What?” I say again, like we’re back at my cousin’s wedding, and he’s speaking in Mandarin faster than I can understand. I might be able to recognize a few words here and there, but strung together, none of them make any sense.
“I never wanted you to hate me,” he whispers. “I never wanted you to leave. I only meant to tease you until you truly noticed me. I would wait every day for the moment you walked into class with your polka-dot socks and your cute sweaters and pigtails—it was like my day didn’t even begin until I saw you. I loved the games you invented and the stories you came up with and your laugh, how it bubbled out of you and you could hear it from down the corridor. All I could think about was you, all the time, and how funny and sweet and beautiful you were—”
“Beautiful?” I repeat, staring at him. “Are you sure you’re not remembering someone else?” He has to be—he can’t possibly be describing the version of me I hate the most, the version I’ve tried to kill off, the one I’m so embarrassed of I can’t even bring myself to look at old photos without wincing.
“I thought you were the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen,” he says, somehow without an ounce of sarcasm. “You’ve always been beautiful—beautiful like the stars are, like Shanghai is. I could never get sick of looking at you. But back then I just … I didn’t know what I could possibly do to make you so much as look my way, and again, it’s awful, but I thought—I thought that was simply how it worked. My own father had told me that being in love meant fighting with each other all the time, and I was foolish and naive enough to believe him. Only later did I realize how completely, utterly wrong he was—and how wrong I was to have resorted to tricks and childish teasing when I should’ve just gone for it. Treated you like you were precious and perfect because you always have been.”
“There’s no way,” I say, shaking my head fast. I would actually be less stunned if he revealed that he’s a vampire. “There’s— I mean, how? Literally, how? I don’t even know what you’re talking about—”
“I tried to tell you in other ways,” he says, a pleading edge to his words. “I wanted to leave flowers in your locker for Valentine’s Day, but I was so allergic to them that I never got to properly place them inside, and all I’d managed to achieve was attracting bees. I would make up these ridiculous excuses just to talk to you, and I’d deliberately leave my homework unfinished so I could ask to look at yours. I would join in on your games, thinking I could impress you if I won them all. But I kept messing up, like always. Everything I did to pull you closer only ended up pushing you further away. And then you were gone—” He takes a deep breath, resting one shoulder against the gray-tiled wall, like it’s costing him everything to stand here and keep speaking. “I swear, I begged the teachers to change their minds. I did everything I could to convince them that it had been a huge mistake, but they thought I was only lying to cover for you because I felt bad. And everybody else was so certain they had seen you push me …”
I stare at him. I stare and stare and attempt to wrestle my thoughts into order but I can’t, everything’s changed irrevocably, and I don’t even know what to say except: “You never apologized.”
Now it’s his turn to blink in rapid confusion. “I did. I must have apologized thirty, forty times over in my letter … I wrote it so many times I ran out of ink.”
“Letter?” The ground seems to wobble beneath my feet, my mind racing faster and faster like a bullet train, threatening to throw me right off its tracks. “What letter?”
“I wrote you a letter,” he says.
“You did what ? It’s the twenty-first century, Cyrus. The human race is alarmingly close to developing literal mind-reading technology. You couldn’t have just gotten out your phone and texted me?”
“You blocked my number,” he points out.
A very good point. I clamp my teeth together.
“Besides, I—I thought a letter would be more sincere than sending a simple text. I begged you to give me a chance to explain everything, but then you never replied, and I figured you just didn’t want to hear from me at all, which would have been entirely fair …” Understanding trickles into his expression the same time I feel it wash over me. “You never received it.”
“No,” I whisper. “It must have gotten lost in the mail or something—I had no idea—”
“I was deeply, truly sorry then, and I’m sorry now,” he says, and I can see it written like a confession in his eyes, their darkness as lucid as a cloudless night, clear enough for you to map out every constellation. “I know I won’t ever be able to make it up to you, no matter what I do, but I needed to tell you. I needed you to understand how I felt. How I feel.”
“But what about the wedding?” I demand. “You didn’t apologize then. You weren’t even being nice to me when you saw me there.”
He huffs out a self-mocking laugh. “Do you know how nervous I was that day? It was all I could do to look you in the eye, Leah. I was so scared—scared you’d simply take one glance at me and leave before I had the chance to talk to you. Scared that if I came across as too nice all of a sudden, you’d assume I had some kind of evil plan or that I was playing another prank. I mean, at that point, we hadn’t seen each other in two whole years. Imagine if I confessed to you then what I’m confessing to you now. You wouldn’t have believed me for a second and I’d have ruined any hopes of ever being your friend or—or something more.”
I’m stunned. He knows me in ways I wouldn’t have thought anyone ever could, or would ever even bother to. It’s like he’s reached into my brain and peered at the mess there and gently untangled everything.
He knows me so well. And I don’t know him nearly as well as I thought.
“I—” There are too many emotions crashing through my chest. I nearly expect my rib cage to crack open from the force of them: anger and relief and disbelief and giddy joy and, finally, a snap back to anger. “ Seriously , Cyrus. What the actual hell? How could you— I don’t even— Why would you tell me and then—just—” I twist around on my heel, breathing hard, and march away from him down the alley before I can do something stupid. Like throttle him. Or kiss him.
Within seconds, I hear his footsteps chasing after me, echoing over the cobbled stones. “Leah. Wait—”
I don’t plan to, but my feet resist all executive orders and slow down on their own, letting him catch up to me. I fold my arms across my chest and make the mistake of lifting my head to meet his achingly earnest gaze.
“Are you mad at me?” he asks, his brows drawing together.
“No,” I snap. “Not at all.”
“You very clearly are,” he says.
“I’m not. There’s nothing to be mad about.”
“Leah—”
“Look, you can’t just say things like that, Cyrus.” The words burst out of my mouth before I can stop them. I wave my hands about in the air, my composure shattering. “You can’t, unless you’re absolutely certain you want to be with someone and you’re in love with them—”
“I am.”
The world freezes.
My heart, the willow trees, the green waters in the canals, the sparrows perched on the tiled roofs. All of it stops right there and then, and the only thing that restarts is the fierce, uneven pulse in my ears, thudding harder and harder, building into a deafening roar.
“You’re in love with me?” I whisper. “Since when?”
His smile is wry. “Only the past seven years.”
And I think about the people who first discovered that the earth was not at the center of the universe, that you would not fall off if you sailed too far across the ocean, that fires could be built from kindling to give us light and warmth, that stars would live and die just as we do. The initial shock of the revelation, and the aftershock as everything they’d once thought to be true was destroyed and rearranged. “I … This whole time?” I ask him, almost afraid to believe it.
“Of course,” he says, watching me intently, his dark eyes serious, his hair tousled and soft around the sharp lines of his face. “There’s never been anybody else for me. There never will be.”
I’m not sure how any of this is happening. I’m not even sure I’m breathing.
“I can stop talking about it if that’s what you want,” he goes on. “I can promise to never bring this up again. But I meant it when I said that I can be whatever you want me to be: whether that’s an enemy for you to curse and hold a grudge against for the rest of your life; a friend you can trust to accompany you anywhere and drive you safely back home, the one you can call at any hour of the night and tell all your secrets to; or the person you fall for, who will always wear a jacket so you don’t have to bring yours, who will be the first to find you when you’re lost and alone, who will remind you how heart-wrenchingly, unfathomably beautiful you are even on days when you don’t feel it. The only thing I ask is that we don’t ever become strangers, because I really—” He breaks off. Clenches his jaw, fighting against some ineffable emotion. “I don’t think I could bear it, Leah. I don’t think my heart would be able to survive it.”
He’s gazing at me, waiting, hoping, imploring, and this should be the perfect chance to execute the final step of my plan. It’s our last full day here, my last opportunity to do so before the trip comes to an end. He’s at my mercy, just like I always wanted. If I reject him right now, tell him that I hate him, that I’ll never forgive him for what he did, the consequences will be devastating. He’ll suffer terribly, and the image of it—the inevitable hurt on his face, like an open wound, his cheeks tinged red with humiliation—should send a thrill of satisfaction racing through me, but when I open my mouth to deliver the fatal blow, nothing comes out.
Nothing comes out, because his lips are on mine, crushing the distance between us, and instead of pushing him away like I should, like I’d planned to, I pull him closer, one hand guiding him forward by the nape of his neck, the other cupping his face, letting my fingertips linger against the hot shell of his ear, teasing, tapping a faint beat in rhythm with his pounding heart. I can always break it later , I reassure myself, a half thought that crumbles when his mouth parts, soft and slow and slightly stunned, and I can sense his disbelief when he inhales. And even though he’s far from the first boy I’ve kissed, it feels as if he is; the others simply don’t count compared to him. He kisses me not like he wants to own me, but like he’s mine, and he’s desperate to prove it.
“You have to know how much I wanted this,” he whispers, his breathing unsteady, his voice thick and hoarse the way it is when you’ve just woken from sleeping too long. “Qin ai de.”
I recognize the words. “Did you just call me your worst enemy?”
He smiles against my lips. “I was lying.”
“What?”
“Qin ai de doesn’t mean my worst enemy ,” he says. “It means my love .”
I barely let him finish speaking. I kiss him harder, my thoughts all tangled up like lace ribbons in the collar of his shirt, in the feel of his arms, and the shadowed corner of the alley just a few yards away, where we would be free to do whatever we wanted—
“Oh damn.”
Oliver’s voice cuts through the air, snipping the ribbons of my thoughts in half, and I release Cyrus reluctantly, my eyes opening to the sight of his swollen lips and dark glare.
“I swear that guy is everywhere,” Cyrus mutters to me, adjusting his clothes.
“I know,” I whisper back as I turn around. “He’s basically omnipresent.”
“Sorry,” Oliver calls out to us as he walks over, his grin only half-sheepish. “I didn’t mean to interrupt. We should be heading back to the group now though. If you want to continue later, then by all means, go for it. Since I just won two hundred dollars, I’ll even be extra generous and steer clear of our hotel room tonight until curfew.”
“Two hundred dollars?” I repeat with a frown. “For what?”
“Yeah, so, um, there’s kind of a running bet in the group about whether you two would get together,” he says cheerily, following us back down the alley. “And, you know, being the genius that I am, I figured early on that it was a win-win situation if I bet on it happening. If you didn’t like Cyrus, then maybe I’d have a shot with you. And if you did like him, then I’d make some extra money.”
“Why are those the only two possibilities?” Cyrus demands, sidestepping a manhole that Oliver marches right over.
Oliver throws him an incredulous glance. “Let’s face it, bro, it’s not as if there was any chance you didn’t like her . Like, you can barely stand up when you’re in her presence. You look at her like you’re seeing the moon for the first time or some shit. It’s kind of disgustingly obvious.”
“Thanks for that,” Cyrus says, but despite the self-consciousness creeping into his voice, he doesn’t deny any of it.
“Anytime, bro.”
I have to bite the inside of my cheek to stop from smiling too wide.
***
The most memorable conversation I’ve ever had with Cate Addison took place shortly after I kissed Adam, the popular quarterback.
We were lounging across the chairs in the cafeteria with her friends—because in my mind they were always first and foremost her friends, even if we all went out to brunch and the movies and parties together on a regular basis—when I told her.
“We kissed before lunch,” I said. “Or, well, he kissed me, and I went along with it.” And then I waited eagerly for her reaction. It was ridiculous, but that was the main reason I’d let Adam kiss me in the first place—so I could talk about it with Cate afterward. In those early days, I kept hoping for a breakthrough, something that would allow us to really, truly bond and giggle and whisper together like best friends in movies. Sometimes I just wanted proof that she actually liked me, and wasn’t keeping me around because I made for a nice prop in her social circle.
Cate had glanced up briefly from her blueberry bagel. “Um, who?”
This was after Adam had been texting me for weeks on end—they were mostly emojis, which I had mixed feelings about—and had delivered a bouquet of doughnuts straight to my doorstep. “Adam,” I clarified anyway.
“Oh. Cool,” she replied, then held up her phone to show me something in her shopping cart. “Hey, do you think this dress looks cheap?”
It was all very anticlimactic, and I’m sure Cate had forgotten what we were talking about by the end of lunch. But I remember every detail from that exchange because it was from then on that I vowed to stop getting my hopes up. To stop wanting more— from others, for myself . I had people to sit with at lunch, people who were nice to me, a relatively secure position on the social ladder, and that was enough.
So I’m not expecting much when I tell Daisy in a restaurant bathroom that I kissed Cyrus.
She almost drops the paper towel in her hand. “You did what ?” she asks, whirling around to face me, eyes wide. “Oh my god, when? Are you guys together now?”
And maybe I hadn’t managed to throw my hope away completely, because when I start talking, every unimportant detail spilling from me in an excited rush, Daisy nodding fast and clapping a hand over her mouth at all the right parts, I feel it rising up beneath my ribs. The delight of finding a real, true friend, someone you can talk to about anything, no matter how serious or silly.
“I’m so happy for you,” Daisy gushes, then pauses, scanning my face like a bridesmaid seeing the bride in her wedding gown for the very first time. “Are you happy it happened?”
“I … don’t know,” I confess. Now that the initial giddiness from the kiss has had time to settle, and my brain cells aren’t being compromised by my hormones, more questions have popped up. Do I still go through with my revenge plan? Do I make him my boyfriend? Are we dating now, or are we something else?
“What do you mean, you don’t know?” Daisy asks.
“There’s just a lot for me to process,” I say. “It happened so suddenly and it wasn’t what I expected and … I’m still not sure where to go from here.”
She doesn’t push me for details, but she does offer me a gentle smile in the mirror. “Well, if you ever want to talk about it—I’m here.”
“Thank you,” I tell her, which feels too light, insufficient. It means more than she could possibly know.
As Daisy finishes drying her hands, I unzip my makeup bag and start gently dusting powder around my nose and cheeks. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice her watching.
“Where did you learn to do that?” she asks.
“What? This?” I swish the brush I’m holding in midair.
“Yeah. Your makeup is perfect all the time,” she says, her voice half-curious, half-admiring, which takes me by surprise. I’ve only ever seen her barefaced, and I’d figured from our first night in Shanghai that she simply wasn’t interested in makeup.
“I’ve had a ton of practice,” I tell her, then hesitate, unsure how to word my next offer without sounding like I’m making a rude suggestion or pushing her into something she isn’t comfortable with. “Do you want me to do your makeup for you? Just for fun?”
She flushes. “Oh, I was just curious. You don’t have to— I mean, it’s probably a lot of trouble, and your products look pretty expensive—”
“I literally dream of doing my sister’s makeup,” I assure her, pulling her closer to the mirror and angling her face toward the vanity lights with my free hand.
“You have a sister?” she says.
“Not at all. Which is why this is a dream come true for me,” I say as I examine her features up close. They’re softer than mine, doll-like and sweet, so I go for a more natural look, dipping my brush into the warm browns and baby pinks in my palette.
“I’ve attempted to do my own makeup before,” Daisy tells me, closing her eyes to let me dab concealer below her brow bone. “Emphasis on attempt . But I swear it just made me look even worse, and I almost poked my eye out with the mascara wand. I just … I don’t know how to do the things that others girls seem to do so effortlessly,” she says, her voice small. “I don’t know how to pose for photos, or curl my hair, or walk in high heels. I’ve asked my mom before, but she’s very practical—not in a bad way or anything, but she’d tell me to just go read or study instead of wasting time trying to look nice.”
“Well, you do already look nice, and you don’t need to know how to do this,” I say, smudging blush in a circular motion over her cheeks. “But if you want to, I can teach you. Also, for what it’s worth …” I hesitate. Do I break the illusion? Ditch the false image I’ve crafted of being naturally confident, naturally beautiful? It feels safe, is the thing. It’s something I can hide behind, so nobody can ever mock me like they did at my old schools. But how can I ever be truly loved and known if I’m always hiding? So before I can lose my nerve, I push myself to go on. “I didn’t know how to do those things either. It took a lot of trial and error—if you’d met me two years ago, you wouldn’t even think I was the same person.”
She blinks, stunned, like she hadn’t even thought it possible, but there’s no trace of mockery in her features. “Really?”
“Really.”
A brief beat of silence.
“Leah?” she says, meeting my eyes in the mirror.
“Yeah?”
“When I first saw you, I thought you would hate me,” she admits.
“I get that a lot,” I say with a snort. “It’s just my face, unfortunately.”
“No, no,” she says quickly. “It’s my problem; I tend to assume that everyone hates me. There might be some deep-seated childhood trauma there, but what I’m getting at is, you have this … this cold, unapproachable aura—”
“Like an icicle,” I put in. “Or an abandoned house.”
“Like the green-tongue Popsicles I’ve always loved.”
I set the blush back down by the sink and cast her a bemused look. “The what?”
“Lü she tou,” she says. “It looks like a regular green Popsicle, but it’s made of jelly, so when it melts, it turns soft. Sorry, I know that doesn’t sound super appealing, but I promise it’s amazing. Anyone who’s ever given it a try ends up coming back for more.”
“That was probably the strangest and nicest compliment I’ve ever gotten,” I say, my laughter bouncing off the gilded bathroom walls, all my discarded hopes finding their way back to me. “Thank you.”
“Anytime.”