Chapter Two #2
Ah, there it is. But also: Yawn. I look at his outfit, remember his sleek suitcase. “Let me guess: business development at a new streaming service?”
He laughs and lifts his glass to his lips. “Nope.”
“Contracts attorney?”
“God, no.”
I study him, eyes narrowed. “BBC exec coming here for meetings with American networks about a show?”
Alec pauses with his glass halfway back down to the table. “That’s shockingly close, actually.”
“Really? That’s wild. My roommate, Eden, lives and breathes BBC.”
A tiny grin as he sets his glass down. “Does she?”
“I realize how shameful it is in this day and age to not watch TV,” I admit, “but I’ve been so wrapped up in work that I’ve missed most of what everyone has been obsessed with the past couple years.
Tell me what you’ve worked on so I can remedy this.
Eden tells me this is where creativity lives and breathes these days and I’m missing out. ”
He waves this off. “Television isn’t for everyone.”
“If you work for the BBC,” I say, “she’ll lose her mind.” Alec laughs. “Which show? I’m going to text her. I’m sure she’s seen it.”
He gives me a wry smile. “It’s called The West Midlands.”
I type a quick text. The old friend I ran into? Yeah he said he works on The West Midlands for BBC. You like that one right?
Eden replies immediately with a string of unintelligible all caps. I turn my phone around to show him. “See? She knows that one. How cool.” I tuck my phone back into my purse and sip my wine. “I bet that’s a fun job.”
“It is.” He pauses. “What’s the story you’re writing? Two weeks is a long time to go to London on assignment, I’d imagine.”
“The original plan was a week, but it took an intense turn, I guess. I asked to stay.”
In fact, I begged to stay.
“Intense how?”
I do the internal calculation. I could tell him about the story, gauge whether he might be useful after all.
He’s a businessman, clearly well connected.
It’s a long shot, but wouldn’t it be wild if this inconvenient layover actually broke the story open for me somehow?
The prospect makes me feel more alert. “Okay, let me ask you: Have you heard anything about a club called Jupiter?”
I watch him closely, searching for signs of a mask slipping into place. I get only a tiny thoughtful frown and, after a beat, a little shake of his head. “A nightclub, right?” he says carefully, and I nod. “There was something in the news about it recently.”
“Right.” I take another sip of my wine. “You probably heard about the bouncer who was beat up in an alley behind the club the same night he’d reported incidents of workplace harassment to his superior. He tweeted all about it and detailed how the police did nothing.”
Alec nods. “Okay, yeah, I think I saw something about that.”
“So, that’s all the London news outlets reported about it.
Everyone moved on. No one seemed to notice that, about a week later, the same bouncer shared screen caps that someone sent him of a few of the club owners sharing sexually explicit videos in an online forum.
” I pause, gauging his reaction. “Videos, allegedly, of those owners having sex with women in the club VIP rooms. But next day, the screen caps were gone. He deleted his entire Twitter account.”
No overt reaction passes over his features.
So, Alec isn’t aware of all of this and…
actually, I’m relieved. The story isn’t being talked about very much in London, and if he’d heard any of this about Jupiter, it likely wouldn’t reflect well on him.
“So, I went over there to cover a really dry international meeting on pharma law, but I volunteered to be the one to go because of this Jupiter story. After I saw those tweets, the whole thing had been hovering in my thoughts for a couple weeks. I thought there was a chance this bouncer knew about some shady stuff happening at the club and got beat up for reporting it to his boss. It felt like he was trying to alert the mainstream media.”
“Right,” he says carefully. “But… you don’t think that anymore?”
Setting my glass down, I work to keep the anger from my voice, remembering the way the bouncer, Jamil, staunchly refused to speak to us once we tracked him down.
“Oh, I still believe it. In fact, I know in my bones that someone is threatening him now. It’s why my boss let me stay longer.
And the more I learn about what happens in those VIP rooms—the more terrible it becomes—the more I can’t seem to stop digging. ”
Alec looks at me for a long, quiet beat.
I expect him to ask what I mean, to explain what “terrible” looks like in this context, but either his manners prohibit him from pushing, or he sees the exhaustion ripple through me, because he says only, “Well, then it’s good that you’re working hard on this. ”
I need a track change. “We never finished talking about Sunny.”
His expression flickers. Apparently, sex-scandal-to-sister-update is an abrupt transition. I need to get my social skills back in place. “How—?” he starts, and then frowns. “Oh. Yeah. She’s good. You should have looked her up when you were visiting in London.”
I pull my wineglass closer. “Would she even remember me?”
“Of course she would. You two were inseparable.”
“We were.” I frown a little in memory. “It’s true.”
He leans forward, picking up his glass to take with him as he settles back into the couch. “I remember when you two cut up her clothes for the talent show and Umma lost her mind.”
I laugh, wincing at the memory. “She was… not happy with us. But she could have called my parents and didn’t. We had to pull weeds for a month in her garden every day after school.”
“That was a minor punishment,” he says, smiling wryly. “I took the car without permission once and had to rebuild our back deck out of my own savings. We moved only a week after I finished it.”
Grimacing, I manage only, “Oof.”
“The transition to the UK was hard for Sunny,” he says.
“I bet.” This presses against a bruise I didn’t know I still had. “It was hard for me, too. Turns out making a new friend group in ninth grade is rough.”
He laughs. “Who knew?”
I grin at him, taking another sip. “Everyone?”
This makes him laugh again. I love the sound. His voice is deep and smooth; I bet he’s never yelled a day in his life—his laugh has that same calm resonance.
“She’s doing okay, though?”
He swallows, nodding. “She’s modeling. It’s a hard career, and I swear, fashion in London is brutal, but she’s doing well. You may have seen her in some print advertisements?”
“I wish I’d known to look for them.” I shake my head. “She’s working under her name? I should look her up.”
“Her given name, yes. Kim Min-sun.”
“And your parents?”
“They’re retired, just outside of London.
They’re doing well.” Alec’s smile comes in so many forms, and this one is sweetly polite.
It’s the one he would give when I’d pass him something at the dinner table, when he was instructed to say good night as I was leaving. “I’ll relay that you asked after them.”
“Thanks. Tell your mom I’m a great weed puller thanks to her.” We fall into a few beats of silence where we both stare into our glasses. “What did you do after you moved?” I ask.
He takes another sip of his drink before answering. “I moved to Seoul after graduating and returned to London…” He pauses, thinking. “Let’s see, a bit over three years ago now.”
I realize that’s what I’m hearing in his accent; it’s beautiful. “Oh, wow. You lived in Korea?”
“I did.” He smiles, and then it dies away.
It’s the death of small talk: inquiring about family, doing the easy update, reaching the end of our knowledge about each other’s lives.
Sexual innuendos have been awkwardly played out.
I dig around for something more engaging to ask, but everything that comes to mind seems deeply inappropriate.
Are you married?
Are those hands as strong as they look?
What do you look like naked?
Finally, I string words together. Unfortunately, he’s doing the same thing and our questions burst out in overlapping awkwardness:
“How long will you be in LA?” / “How are your parents?”
“Sorry,” we say in unison.
“Go ahead,” also in unison.
I clap a hand over my mouth and point to him with the other. “You,” I mumble against my palm.
“I’m in LA for a couple weeks,” he says, laughing. “Actually, some of my colleagues left for Los Angeles two days ago. I was delayed but will meet them there.” He sips his drink. “And now your turn. How are your parents?”
“They’re fine,” I say. “They’re in Europe until next week.”
He narrows his eyes, nodding. “They traveled a lot? Wasn’t your dad a diplomat? Am I remembering that right?”
“Close. He works for the State Department. Mom travels with him as much as she can.” I don’t add that this is Mom’s first trip since Spence and I broke up, that she basically put her life on hold to help me pick up my pieces.
I wash the weird catch in my throat down with a sip of wine. “Did you ever meet them?”
“Once or twice when I was picking Sunny up at your house. If I recall, your father is very tall, and your mother is—”
“Very not tall?” I nod, laughing. My father is six-foot-four. My mother is well over a foot shorter. “I was always hoping to get his height, but…” I gesture to myself. “I’m the person who always makes sure the doctor writes down five-foot-three and a half on my chart.”
He smiles at me and licks his lips distractingly. So distractingly, in fact, that it takes me a second to process his next question. And then my heart takes a nosedive off a cliff.
“No,” I finally manage. “I’m not married.…”
The way I’ve said it—trailing off, with a grimace—clearly leaves the impression that there’s a story there. Shit. Why did I do that? The last thing I want to do is talk about Spence tonight, not with Alec sitting across from me looking the way he does.