Chapter 733 | Don’t Tell the Dragon I Got Cold

Chapter 733: 733 | Don’t Tell the Dragon I Got Cold

She shoved my chest with both palms, so hard her plastic chair screeched backward across the linoleum and banged into the radiator pipe. She yanked the plunging neckline of her wetsuit together with one hand and used the other to smooth down her wet bob, which sprang right back up on the left side like a duck’s tail. "Why were you standing so close to me?! I told you I can walk!"

"You were unconscious on my collarbone for six blocks, and you drooled on my crest." I pointed at the dark wet spot beside the silver Halloran embroidery on my chest. "That’s two girls in this building who owe me dry cleaning now."

"I do not drool, that is rain, you absolute slanderer!"

Grandma Lin arrived at the table without a sound. Her tray held two bowls of congee so hot the air above them shimmered, next to a plate of four pork buns the size of softballs. Over her arm hung a faded red flannel bathrobe that looked like it had survived three wars and a laundry fire. She dropped the bathrobe straight onto Lami’s head, burying her face and goggles in fuzzy plaid, and set the tray down on the card table with a heavy thump.

"Take off rubber," Grandma Lin told the squirming lump of flannel. Then she switched to machine-gun Cantonese for a solid twenty seconds while Lami fought her way out of the sleeves like a cat trapped in a pillowcase.

When Lami’s head finally poked out the top of the robe, her shoulders were hunched up around her ears and she was staring at the tabletop like a kid caught drawing on the church pews.

"Yes, Auntie," she whispered in a tiny squeak of a voice, and pulled the red flannel tight around her shoulders and cinched the belt over the wetsuit.

Grandma Lin grunted once and turned her narrow eyes on me. She looked at my wet hair, then at my watch, and pointed one crooked finger at the second bowl of congee.

"You late for rich school," she said.

"Yeah." I pulled out the other plastic chair and sat, because my stomach had just smelled the ginger and decided Imara Steele could wait another fifteen minutes. "I’m really late."

"Eat fast," she said, and went back into the kitchen before I’d even picked up the spoon.

Across the table, Lami was already hunched over her bowl with both hands wrapped around the hot ceramic, blowing on a spoonful of rice with her lower lip pushed out so far her fangs showed. The expression would’ve looked threatening on anyone else. On her, buried in about eight pounds of oversized red flannel with the aviator goggles still tangled in her hair like some kind of failed steampunk accessory, it just looked ridiculous.

She caught me watching and kicked my steel-toed boot under the table. Hard. Then immediately winced and sucked air through her teeth, because she’d used the foot with the broken zipper and apparently forgotten that my boots were, in fact, steel-toed.

"Ow," she muttered, pulling her leg back and rubbing her shin against the chair leg like that would help. "Stop looking at me like that. And don’t tell the dragon I got cold. He already thinks I’m an amateur."

"You are an amateur." I took one of the pork buns off the plate and tore it in half so the steam wouldn’t burn the roof of my mouth on the first bite. The smell hit me before the taste did. Char siu and green onion. Grandma Lin’s recipe involved lard and probably MSG and I was not going to think about it too hard. "You used gum on a door latch."

"It was Hubba Bubba," Lami argued around a mouthful of congee that she definitely had not finished chewing. She reached across the table and snatched the other half of my bun right out of my fingers before I could pull it back. "It has structural integrity."

She stuffed the entire thing into her cheek like a squirrel prepping for winter, chewed twice without any regard for basic digestion, and swallowed hard enough that I watched her throat work. Then she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, looked up at me from under her lashes, and went very still in a way that made the hair on the back of my neck prickle for reasons I couldn’t immediately identify.

The robe was sliding off one shoulder. It had been built for a man twice her width and kept trying to drown her. In the warm yellow light hanging over the card table, with her hair still damp and sticking to her temples and the flannel bunched up around her collarbone, she didn’t look like a comic book villain or a street kid playing Robin Hood or the girl who’d tried to rob a seafood distributor with climbing gear and cartoon logic.

She looked like a girl who’d had a really long morning and was about to say something she’d been working up to for the last three minutes.

"Hey," she said quietly. "Golden boy."

"What."

"Thanks for not letting me jump down there," she said, very fast, staring into her bowl so she wouldn’t have to look at me. Her spoon went around and around in the rice, chasing the fried garlic in circles. "Into the freezer place. I would’ve... I don’t know. I probably would’ve slipped on a fish or something and gotten locked in a box."

"You definitely would have slipped on a fish." I shoveled in a huge spoonful of congee and ignored the scalding rice trying to peel the skin off my tongue. "And then I’d have had to come in after you, and my jacket’s already ruined for the week. Dralun’s upstairs?"

She nodded once, her black bob bouncing against the flannel collar. "His light was on when you carried me past the alley. He never sleeps on Fridays until the street sweepers come through."

"Great." Three more bites cleared half the bowl. I stood and grabbed a whole pork bun for the road, then fished a crumpled twenty out of my pocket and dropped it on the corner of the card table. Grandma Lin would yell at me if I handed it to her at the register. Left on the table, she could pretend she’d found it on the floor. "Finish my rice. I’m going upstairs to ruin his morning before I catch the seven-thirty."

"Hey!" Lami called as I turned toward the kitchen door. Her voice dropped into that terrible breathy purr for half a second before cracking on the last syllable. "You didn’t say you were welcome! For the extraction!"

I stopped with my hand on the swinging kitchen door and looked back at her, sitting there in the full glory of Grandma Lin’s bathrobe with a piece of scallion stuck to her chin, and grinned.

"You’re welcome, Lami," I said, and pushed through into the steam before she could throw her spoon at my head.