Two: She takes over an hour to get ready before heading out anywhere.Kind of tied in to point one, but he could see this seriously impacting their schedule if they were ever to start dating, not that he’s imagined dating her or anything like that.
“Next in line, please.”
As the customer in front of him finishes scanning the WeChat pay code on his phone, he takes another half step forward, eyeing the glass displays around him. The pastries have been carefully laid out on shelves and lit up so you can see the shine of sugar, neat white plaques printed beneath them like they’re priceless works of art in a museum.
He doesn’t usually stop by Holiland, but he’s seen the photos trending across the internet: the futuristic setup, the soft swirls of fresh-baked bread tucked in paper bags, the pastel pink walls and pastel pink trays and pastel pink uniforms. The bakery is even brighter in real life, and though he’s personally indifferent to this kind of aesthetic, he can imagine Chanel loving it here.
But back to his list.
Three: She’s too good at dodging questions.He has to press to get an answer, and even then, he can never tell if she’s saying something because she means it, or because she knows it’s what he wants to hear.
Four: She’s also too good at kissing.So good it feels like he’s losing his mind whenever her lips brush his.That could be a dangerous weapon, if she ever decided to use it against him.
Five: She loses things easily.In the time he’s known her, he’s already witnessed her misplace her phone, forget her keys, forget her pursecontainingher keys, search around for a claw clip that was in her hair minutes before and somehow vanished into thin air, and drop two different rings and a ruby earring that could probably cover someone’s rent for six months. He finds himself fighting the constant, irritating urge to remind her to check that she has everything, or to simply carry her purse for her.
Six: She seems determined to remain unknowable.
Yet he’s addicted to the process of trying to know her anyway, to decoding her words, remembering her little habits—or maybe he’s simply addicted to her. Even if they must exist in separate galaxies, every detail he picks up on feels like taking one small step closer to her planet, and the closer he is, themore beautiful she looks. He likes knowing the way she draws her hair back over her shoulder to spray her signature scent—Chanel No. 5, which she’s been using religiously ever since she received a bottle of it for her fourteenth birthday—or that she secretly hates when people call her by her Chinese name, or that she only becomes irritable when she’s feeling guilty, which is usually connected to how much she ate for lunch, even though she’s never eating enough.
“Next.”
He can feel the bakery worker’s curious gaze on him, taking in his new tattoo—still raw red around the edges—and piercings and dark jeans, entirely at odds with all the surrounding pink. Or maybe it’s more wariness than curiosity; every time he walks into a store, people act like they expect him to try and rob the place. “I’ll just have that,” he says, pointing at the lychee cream cake behind the counter.
The girl relaxes slightly and spins around to slide the glass panel open. “Is it for your girlfriend?”
He makes a noncommittal sound, though he can’t stop thinking about it. Getting to call Chanel Cao his girlfriend.His.He hates how much he likes the idea of it.
“Thanks,” he says. His mind manages to assemble three more reasons—never cleans out her camera roll, can’t pass a stray dog in the street without trying to feed it or adopt it, perfume is so strong that you keep smelling it hours after she’s gone—before he pays for the cake, holding the pastel box carefully in both hands.
His phone buzzes as he heads out the door, and he tries to balance the cake while he picks up. “Hello?”
“Are you free right now?” It’s Chanel’s voice, but she doesn’t quite sound like herself. She sounds scared. Shaken.
“What’s wrong?” he asks immediately. “Are you hurt? Did something happen to you?”
“I... I’m fine.”
She’s such a liar. “Where are you? I’ll find you right now,” he tells her.
A pause, and he hears the faint rush of water in the background before she replies, “I’m at the lake.”
“Okay. Wait there.”
The most important reason he should not fall for Chanel Cao: She’s the only other person who’s seen the vision, the root of all his hopes for the future, but he’s increasingly starting to suspect that she doesn’t want the vision to happen. Which should, by all accounts, make her his enemy.
Yet he runs to her anyway.
23
Chanel
I don’t expect Ares to find me so fast.
But within ten minutes of hanging up, he’s here, panting, eyes wild and worried. He crosses the grass in three long strides. The air between us tightens into nothing, our breaths intermingling like ghosts in the darkness. “Are you okay?”
“I saw him,” I say. This was the decision I’d reached as I left the party; I know it’s risky, telling Ares about it, but I can’t bear not knowing. I’ll offer up the information I have in return for the information he has. It’ll even the playing field between us, and then—and then it’ll simply be a matter of who can be smarter, crueler, faster. “The man in the vision. Long Ge.”
Ares stares at me. “How do you know who he is?”
