When people say they have a “gut feeling” about something, it’s because our brains are constantly being fed information by our bodies. Our noses smell smoke, and then our brain tells us to get the heck out of the house. And at that moment, my body was telling me to stop, drop, and roll. It just took my slowpoke brain a few extra moments to realize why.
“This is the night-shift van driver,” Melinda informed me as he approached. “Daniel Aoki, meet Birdie. She’s the new night clerk.”
When the driver lifted his head, his eyes widened, and he murmured, “Oh, fuuuuuuuu...”
Every muscle in my body turned to stone.
I knew that face. And lots more of him too.
This was the boy I’d met in the diner.
“Men. Can’t live without them. You can’t hit them with an ax.”
—Phryne Fisher,Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries(2015)
3
Son of a beekeeper!
I tried to process what was happening, but all I could do was stare and wonder if all of this was a bad dream. Just to be sure, I stealthily counted my fingers—a trick I learned from my grandpa. Looking at your hands is a good way to test wakefulness, because if you’re dreaming, they sometimes morph into extra-long space-alien hands or the number of digits will be wrong. At the moment everything was as it should be. Five fingers. Nothing extraterrestrial.
I was awake, and all of this was really happening.
Okay. Deep breath. Maybe I was confused. This could be someone else who looked like him. A twin? I looked harder. Wide silver ring on middle finger. Tiny V-shaped scar on cheek. And on his head, one stray lock of hair hung loose around his face: it spilled over his shoulder and stopped in the middle of his chest, a million times longer than mine.
It was him, all right.
And the way his face lit up with joy when he recognized me made it allso muchworse. Oh, that smile—so effortless and sincere. So big and wide, it lifted the keen angles of his cheeks and made his brown eyes squint. That was the thing that had attracted me in the diner, his easygoing, open manner. I’d never met anyone so comfortable with both himself and other people, so honestly cheerful.
This couldn’t be happening. He was standing in front of me, and he had a full name: Daniel Aoki. I didn’t want to know that. He was supposed to be my private, forgettable mistake, not my coworker!
“We call him Jesus,” Chuck said. “If you saw him with his hair down, you’d understand. He does magic tricks for the guests that are probably just as good as turning water into wine.” Chuck turned to Daniel and asked, “Hey, what’s the Japanese word for Jesus?”
“No idea,” Daniel said. “Don’t speak it.”
“But your mom does, right?” Chuck said.
“Isn’t your mom from Spokane?” Joseph asked Daniel.
“Born and raised,” Daniel said, unaffected by Chuck’s boorish observations. Maybe he’d become numb to them. Maybe, like me, he was too busy trying to compute the chances of us ending up being coworkers, and how was this even possible? I wished he’d quit looking at me like that.
“You two know each other, or something?” Chuck asked after an awkward silence.
“No,” I said at the same time Daniel replied, “Yes.”
“Or maybe not?” he corrected as everyone stared at us. “Sort of? I mean, we...”
“Have seen each other around town,” I said quickly.
Joseph glanced at the lily tucked behind my ear. “Dude. The flower girl?” he murmured to Daniel, slapping the back of his hand against Daniel’s chest, making him flinch.
The breath in my lungs disappeared.
Oh God, oh God, oh God.This couldn’t be happening.
Was I blushing? I think this was blushing. Or I was about to have a stroke. Inside my frantic brain, a dozen scenarios flashed. Of Daniel, bragging bro-style to Joseph and Chuck, talking me up as a laughable conquest. Or as the weird girl who freaked out and ran away.Do I already have a reputation here? DO I?
Things were being whispered. I think Daniel told Joseph to “shut the hell up, man,” and then Joseph, grimacing, responded, “Oh shit.”
