Chapter 732 | LN’S GR ND

Chapter 732: 732 | LN’S GR ND

"You’re not even breathing hard," she said. She lifted her head an inch to squint at my throat, then slid one cold hand down from the back of my neck and pressed her palm flat to the center of my chest, between the lapels of my jacket. Her fingers spread over my sternum, right above the spot where the second heartbeat lived. "Wait. What is that?"

"My heart, Lami. Most people have one."

"No, shut up, it’s doing a weird thing." Her brow furrowed, and she pressed her ear right against my wet shirt, her nose bumping my chin. Her hand stayed splayed over my ribs with the frictionless field off, so I could feel the little calluses on her fingertips from years of fighting cheap lockpicks. "It sounds like... I don’t know. Like a big motor under the floor. Like the boiler in the basement at St. Jude’s when the radiator’s about to clank."

I looked down at the part in her wet black hair and kept my mouth shut. There wasn’t a joke in the world that covered Yeah, I died for three seconds in a dome two months ago and woke up with an ancient Greek boat engine in my chest that the voice in my head refuses to claim on its taxes, and now I can hear it thudding under everything else like a second pulse with its own schedule. That particular conversation needed more coffee than either of us had consumed in our entire lives, and I wasn’t opening it at six in the morning while hauling her soaked body through the Eastside.

Luckily, half-asleep Lami had an attention span of about four seconds on her best day. She gave another small yawn that ended in a squeak, like a kitten that had just discovered mornings existed and didn’t approve. Then she rubbed her cheek against my shirt the way a cat marks a couch cushion it has decided belongs to it now, nuzzled deeper into my collar, and went back to being a hundred-and-thirty-pound scarf with no plans to reconsider her position.

By the time we cleared the east end of the bridge and turned north onto Halverson Avenue, the fog had burned off into a dirty drizzle that hung in the air without committing to actual rain. The neighborhood was waking up in the slow, reluctant way it always did on weekday mornings. Mr. Haddad was out in front of his bodega cranking the awning out with a long metal pole, the canvas rolling out with a wet slap against the frame. Down the block, the neon over Lin’s Grand Chinese Food hummed with its usual missing letters and spelled out L N’S GR ND in flickering pink against the wet brick.

I slowed to a walk twenty feet from the barbershop so Ramón wouldn’t have a stroke watching the golden boy from the news sprint past his window with the local cat burglar strapped to his front like a stolen television.

Ramón was already in his folding chair under the overhang with a café con leche and yesterday’s paper. He lowered it two inches as I passed. His eyes went from my boots, up the wet legs of my Halloran trousers, to the emerald-scaled thighs locked around my waist and the black-bobbed head snoring lightly into my neck.

He skipped his usual line about my boots. He looked at me, looked at Lami’s safety-pinned boot dangling behind my hip, and raised his coffee cup an inch in a solemn salute before turning the page.

"Not a word," I told him in passing.

"Yo no vi nada, jefe," he said to the sports section.

I shouldered through the steamed-glass door of Lin’s, and the little brass bell over the frame jangled loud enough to make Lami twitch.

The narrow restaurant smelled like heaven, if heaven were run by an eighty-year-old Cantonese woman with a meat cleaver. Ginger and five-spice pork fat hit my face in a solid wall of heat, riding the starchy steam off a forty-gallon congee pot that had been simmering since four in the morning. My glasses would have fogged if I wore any.

Grandma Lin stood behind the counter sliding a bamboo steamer basket off the stack with two bare hands that had stopped caring about boiling water sometime during the Carter administration. When the bell rang she looked up, and her sharp black eyes dropped straight to the bundle of wet neoprene and scales wrapped around my torso.

She didn’t blink or ask why I was carrying a girl in a cut-up diving suit through her front door at seven-twelve in the morning. She set the steamer basket on the stainless prep table, picked up a heavy ceramic bowl, and pointed her chin at the corner by the kitchen door, where the replacement folding table stood in for the two-top Luz had melted last month.

"She wet," Grandma Lin said in English, which she only used when she wanted to make sure I couldn’t pretend to misunderstand. "You put her on plastic chair. Not booth. Booth take three day to dry."

"Yes, ma’am," I said. I went to the corner and bent enough to set Lami’s rear down on one of the hard orange plastic chairs left over from the eighties.

Lami didn’t let go.

I pried her ankles apart behind my back with one hand and set her boots on the linoleum. When I tried to straighten up, her arms were still locked around my neck, and they pulled my head down until my nose was buried in her collarbone. She smelled like harbor water and wet rubber under that stupid strawberry gloss.

"Lami," I said into her throat. "We’re at Lin’s. Let go."

"No," she mumbled, eyes still squeezed shut, trying to pull me down into the plastic chair with her. "You’re warm and the chair is cold. Stay here for ten minutes."

"I have homeroom across the river in an hour and forty minutes. If I’m late, my teacher is going to make me carry a boulder up a hill."

"Let her try, I’ll trip her," she slurred, and finally cracked one acid-green eye to glare at me from two inches away. The vertical pupil had gone wide in the dim light, and her cheeks had flushed a healthy pink now that the restaurant’s steam was reaching her skin. She looked down at her hands, still tangled in my wet collar, and seemed to realize all at once that we were inside a brightly lit establishment with a witness holding a ladle six feet away.

Her face went from pink to fire-engine red in half a second.

"Oh, get off me, you pervert!"