Page 17 of From Beijing, With Love

It seemed both logical and obvious when Daniel explained it. Yang would have been embarrassed for not spotting the problem himself if he weren’t too busy being mortified.

“How would this have happened?” Yang asked, his whole body tensing.

“If I had to guess, a chunk of code got deleted somehow. Do you have an older version that we can compare to?”

“No,” Yang answered, more grumpily than he should’ve. If he’d had an older version, he wouldn’t have spent the past day wanting to rip his own hair out. Now what?

“I could probably rewrite it.” Daniel paused, his eyes fixed on the screen. “To break it down, the code imports the data, does some calculations, and puts out a graph. If you know that math bit in the middle, I can do the rest.”

“I know it,” Yang said too quickly, like he had something to prove. “But we are not really doing this … You are on vacation. Surely you have other plans?”

“I have no plans,” Daniel said, a blush spreading across his fair skin. “Wow, that sounded sad. Pretend I didn’t just say that. To be honest, I was bored out of my mind in the hotel all day, and you’re the first person I’ve talked to. Wait, that also sounded sad … Anyway, this won’t take long, a couple of hours tops.”

Gratitude and guilt flooded Yang’s chest in equal measure.

“I can’t ask you to do this.”

“You really don’t like people helping you, huh?” Daniel said with a laugh. “How about this? Remember how I was a teensy bit late to our tour yesterday?”

“Two hours is not a teensy—” Yang snapped his mouth shut.

“Think about this as me paying you back the two hours.” Daniel’s brows lifted just a touch as something that read like hope flickered across his face.

How could anyone look this hopeful about free labor? After a beat, Yang nodded. What did he have to lose?

As it turned out, it didn’t take two hours. Daniel popped on his oversized headphones and fell into a trance, only coming up for air when he needed input from Yang. At first, Yang practically perched over Daniel’s shoulder, watching every keystroke until his brain gave up from sheer exhaustion. When he stopped staring at the screen, he realized how close he was sitting to Daniel.

Heat radiated off Daniel’s body, together with a bright citrus scent. His eyes traced the sharp line of Daniel’s jaw.

Stop it, he admonished himself.

“Done.” Daniel let out a breath as he slid off his headphones. He pointed to the screen, where the thermal tolerance curve sat. “How does this look?”

Leaning in, Yang traced his finger across the curvature on the screen, the way it arched with rising temperature before dipping back down at the end. This was exactly it.

“It’s perfect.” He grabbed Daniel’s arm, feeling like they’d just leapt across the finish line of a marathon together.

When their eyes met, there was something in the air between them that sparkled like a live wire. He was close enough to make out the faint stubble on Daniel’s jaw and the nick on his chin. He didn’t need the image of Daniel leaning over the sink shaving with a towel wrapped around his waist, yet that was what persisted in his mind.

Yang needed to break free from this moment. He wasn’t doing this. Not again. His hand bounced away from Daniel’s arm, leaving behind a handprint.

“I need … I have to go.” He grabbed his laptop and stepped away, putting a healthy amount of distance between them. “Thanks for this.”

“Well, I kind of owed you the time.” Daniel smiled, heat blooming across his cheeks.

Yang really needed to get out of there.

“Consider us even, then,” he said, cringing at the harshness in his voice and how it reflected on Daniel’s open-book face. Before he could do something worse, he turned on his heels and walked away.

CHAPTER EIGHTDaniel

“It’s one thousand percent your fault.” Daniel did his best to emote stern disappointment through the phone screen while donning a sheet mask with an offensively adorable cartoon bear on one cheek. He wasn’t going to let Poppy off easy for ambushing him with the tour, even though they both knew she’d done the right thing. Only she could’ve known what it’d mean to Daniel to be on the Great Wall. And only she could’ve known he couldn’t get there on his own without a big shove.

“I’m nine hundred and ninety-nine percent sorry.” Poppy smoothed a finger over her own mask, her tone not at all contrite. Knowing Poppy, this was a sorry-not-sorry type of situation. And she’d already more than made up for it with the care package she’d sent—sheet masks (Korean), wine (Italian), and a SIM card (Chinese). “It was a small miscommunication. Tiny.” She pinched her fingers together. “But look at what that got you.”

“A long, hot day with the grumpiest man alive,” Daniel said, leaving out how Yang had come to his rescue at the bar and how he’d repaid the favor (or debt, depending on one’s outlook) with free IT work.

To be honest, it had felt good to help Yang. Daniel’s work fuckup had been living rent-free in his head, and it had a lot to say to him: He was bad at the first and only job he’d ever had, he’d never work again after this, and UvA should totally revoke his degree. It was hard to argue with that nagging voice after a while, but being able to solve Yang’s Python problem had helped. Feeling useful got him out of his head just a bit.