Page 65 of From Beijing, With Love

“Because you are my sleep paralysis monster,” Yang said, not caring for eloquence. “Because thoughts of you are what keeps me up at night.” The intense need for self-preservation beckoned Yang to stop before he said too much, but he couldn’t. “I can’t get you out of my head. You are with me even when you are not. I just … don’t do this.”

“What’s this?”

“Feelings. Complications. Not when you are …” Not when Daniel was leaving China soon. Not when Yang didn’t get to keep him.

Yang sighed, the wind knocked out of his sails.

Looking up at Daniel’s open-book face and seeing the stress lines etched between his brows made his heart ache. He would do anything to take them away. He’d always thought that it was Daniel who needed saving, but he realized now that he needed him to be okay more than Daniel needed to be saved.

“Do you have any hand sanitizer?” Yang asked.

Daniel extracted a small bottle from his pocket and squeezed a generous dollop into Yang’s palm, the gel still warm from his body heat. Yang rubbed his hands, filling the air with the scent of alcohol.

Lifting his clean hand up to Daniel’s face, Yang ran his thumb between Daniel’s brows. If he couldn’t take away those frown lines with his words, he’d do it with his hand.

“What are you doing?” Daniel laughed a little, but he stayed put.

Yang lowered his hand. “I just want you to be okay.”

“I … uh. I’m better now. Sorry that you had to see all this.” Daniel gestured to himself.

“I’m happy to see you.” Yang told the naked truth that he hadn’t allowed himself to acknowledge before. “I was … really happy when I got the call from Poppy, but then she told me she lost you.” Yang let out a small chuckle, his hand finding Daniel’s again, behind the modicum of privacy provided by the row of chairs. “Come with me to Xi’an. I need more time with you.”

After a moment of hesitation, Daniel nodded.

Yang grinned. “Really?”

“Maybe? Yes?” Daniel lifted his brows. “Should we hurry so we don’t miss the train?”

“Just a minute,” Yang said, pulling Daniel into his arms and letting the familiar scent of bitter citrus ground him.

At that moment, he felt like he had the whole world in his arms.

PART IIXi’an

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHTDaniel

China flew by outside the window, its landscape falling into a pattern of clustered concrete high-rises broken up by stretches of nothingness. The train ride was nothing like what Daniel had imagined—a whole day spent in a cramped carriage filled with sweaty bodies and zero personal space. Instead, the one-thousand-kilometer journey would take less than five hours, and the first-class carriage was blissfully empty. Poppy had managed to not only buy two last-minute tickets, but she’d also upgraded Yang’s booking so they could all sit together.

Despite being a chaos demon, Poppy was a problem solver that got shit done.

She was now curled up like a cat in the leather seat beside Daniel, fast asleep and using him as a pillow. Yang sat in the two-seater facing them, working on his postdoc proposal on his laptop. His face alternated between his concentrated look and his grumpy look, both of which involved scrunching his dark brows together like two caterpillars trying to meet each other while chewing on the end of his ballpoint pen.

“How’s the proposal going?” Daniel asked after Yang slammed his laptop shut with a sigh.

“I’ve been dreaming about exactly this for the past four years. It’s all here.” Yang tapped his temple. “The challenging part is somehow making my ideas fit with my adviser’s.”

“Why do they need to?”

“Because I don’t have the job yet?” Yang let out a mirthless chuckle. “Dr. Sun is more focused on advancing scientific knowledge than achieving immediate applicability. A purist. He’d never put his weight behind a proposal that doesn’t align with his vision, so that’s just what I have to do to make it work.”

“That makes sense,” Daniel said as he picked at a loose thread on the hem of his T-shirt.

“You are a horrible liar.” Yang prodded Daniel’s foot with his own. “Out with it.”

“It’s nothing,” Daniel said before meeting Yang’s scrunched brows again. Oh god, he was going to put his foot in his mouth. “Just that … I thought the point of the postdoc is so you get to do what you want with your research.”

“I will, but I have to get the fellowship first. It’s part of the game. Jack would do the same.” Yang shoved his laptop into his messenger bag and took out a paperback. He gave Daniel a small smile. “At least I have the rest of the week to finish it. Compared to the paper disaster, writing this proposal will feel like a vacation.”