Page 3 of From Beijing, With Love

His phone vibrated in his pocket then, as if reading his mind. Taylor’s name lit up the screen—finally, a reaction to Daniel’s declaration of spontaneity.

But there was no praising comment, no admission of how messed up what he’d done was, not even a semblance of an apology.

Taylor had sent a laughing emoji.

It had taken Daniel over twenty-four hours to get from his apartment in Amsterdam to the hotel room in Beijing, and under twenty-four seconds to jump into the shower.

When the first blast of hot water hit his sore shoulders, he let out a sigh. He scrubbed his skin until it was raw, yet he didn’t feel clean. If only there were a shower speaker so he could play something, anything, to distract his brain from replaying the highlights of the past three days on a loop.

First, there was the work thing.

Instead of archiving junk to make space (his actual job as the IT admin), Daniel, bleary-eyed from another night of having the same arguments with Taylor, had kicked off a command to delete, well, everything.

Eleven minutes. That was how long it took for the first business-critical process to fail. It took another five for people to start panicking.

Is it a cyberattack? A malware infestation?

All valid concerns, given that he was working for the largest bank in the whole of the tiny country that was the Netherlands. A big fish in a small pond, going belly-up because of Daniel doing (or not doing) his job. Fifteen minutes later, his managing director (Philip, never Phil) was screaming at him on the phone to “fucking fix it or find a job elsewhere.”

Daniel should have put a stop to the mayhem, but he froze. His fingers were too numb to type, his chest too tight to breathe. Then he did the video-call equivalent of running away. He hung up … on his boss’s boss’s boss.

Then the Taylor thing happened.

And now Daniel was possibly jobless and definitely boyfriendless.

After staying in the shower long enough to be considered an enemy of the climate change movement, Daniel stood in front of the fogged-up mirror. Staring back at him was the blurry image of a person who looked … well, defeated. Taylor was right. He’d summed up everything pretty damn precisely in that one single emoji. Daniel was the joke, thinking that he of all people could pull off a spontaneous trip to a country on the other side of the world. Thinking that his problems could be solved by packing his bags and running away.

He cocooned himself under the white duvet of his king-sized bed, the sheet silky against his skin. A fifteen-minute nap. Twenty minutes tops. Then he was going to change his return ticket and hop on the earliest flight home. Boarding a plane to run away from his life wasn’t just unwise; it was downright stupid. Even more stupid than the six months he’d spent trying to convince himself and all his friends that Taylor was right for him.

With that happy thought, exhaustion crashed down on him like a brick wall, knocking him out before he could set an alarm.

CHAPTER TWODaniel

A series of shrill and unrelenting rings jolted Daniel out of his sleep, each one a jab at his jet-lagged brain. What in the fresh hell could that possibly be?

Still tangled in the duvet, he fumbled out of bed. After stubbing his toe not once but twice, he spotted the blinking red light of the landline on the nightstand.

“Sorry, what?” Daniel asked after a string of Mandarin flew out of the other end of the phone.

“Sorry.” The voice switched to English. “Good morning, Mr. Wu. This is the front desk. Your driver is waiting in the lobby.”

“What? To where?” Daniel rubbed his temple with the heel of his hand. Had he sleep-booked a flight back home and then sleep-called a car to take him to the airport? Then he spotted the alarm clock, whose digits glowed in demonic red: 8:55 AM. His twenty-minute nap had turned into the kind of blackout deep sleep he rarely had.

“To Mutianyu.” She had no business being this cheerful this early in the morning. “It’s the private tour you booked to the Great Wall.”

He blinked away the grogginess. “I … uh, didn’t?”

In the background, a muffled conversation in Mandarin ensued.

“Hi, the booking was made by Ms. Poppy Chen.” A man’s voice took over, smooth and full-bodied like a Merlot but carrying a hint of sourness, as if the wine had turned. His English was perfect, with an almost undetectable Chinese accent.

It took Daniel a moment to pick up on Poppy’s name. She booked this?

Still holding the receiver to his ear, he leapt across the bed for his phone. There were twelve unread messages from the culprit, the last of which read Tour booked for the Great Wall!!! 8 am pickup. If you are thinking about running home early, at least do this one thing for yourself.

“Mr. Wu?”

“Shit.” Daniel said the quiet part out loud. It was nearly nine o’clock, so the driver had been waiting for an hour.