Page 67 of I Did Something Bad
“Why? Who’s going to tell?” His gaze jumps to my phone, which is facedown, but still recording. “Oh, right, you, probably.”
“I could probably be bribed into staying quiet if you let me have the last spring roll,” I say, already steadying the container with one hand while spearing my fork into the roll.
“The price I pay to keep my image intact. You journalists just keep getting more and more unreasonable these days,” he mutters through a smile.
“Have you”—I swallow—“serenaded any other girls with the melodies of Ms. Turner lately?”
I meant it as a joke, but the moment his eyes hitch onto mine, nothing seems funny, especially not the way my stomach is threatening to toss everything I’ve consumed back upward. I forget that I’m supposed to wait for an answer. “Hey,” I say, aware my voice has dropped to a pitch that some might label “husky.”
“Hey,” he says in an equally husky timbre.
“I have a question.”
“You have many.”
I ask the question that I can’t stop thinking about, because it feels like time has stopped for us, and whatever his answer is and whatever happens next, it won’t matter anyway outside of this apartment. “Is it true that you wanna start dating again?”
His Adam’s apple bobs, but otherwise, his face remains unmoving. Because of the sheer size of the table, we’d decided to sit adjacent to each other instead of opposite, and I don’t know when his knees first made contact with my thigh but now that I know it, I can’tun-know it. When he speaks, his words are steady, but not in a forced way. “I am going to murder May,” he says. “Any tips?”
He might not be blushing, but I know for a fact thatIam. Moreover, this surge of bodily heat is no longer limited to just my cheeks. “So, what, we just go around murdering people now?” I ask, although by the roughness of my voice, I might as well have admitted,I am ten seconds away from jumping you.
“An Asian Bonnie and Clyde. But, you know, with the stakes raised.”
“They’ll make movies about us,” I say, widening my eyes for full dramatic effect.
Tyler’s hand slowly approaches my face until his thumb makes a quick, firm brushing motion on one corner of my mouth. “Sauce, Bonnie,” he says, and, knowing exactly what he’s doing, and not to mention my simultaneous horror and euphoria, sucks off the neon orange blotch on his skin.
“Who,” I run my dry tongue over my lips, “would play me?”
His eyes glint. “Scarlett Johansson, obviously.”
The force of my unanticipated laughter propels me forward. “Stop!” I cry.
Above my keeled head, Tyler’s voice says sagely, “Color-blind casting, baby.”
I lift my head to find that my nose is placed at a precise downward forty-five-degree angle an inch away from his own. The scent of green curry and pine trees on anyone else wouldn’t be even remotely appealing, but on Tyler, it smells warm and delicious, in an excruciatingly alluring way. “You didn’t answer my question,” I say. My voice sounds like it’s been put through a sieve.
When he speaks, his own voice isn’t faring much better. “Can you repeat it? I got distracted for a second. Brain glitch. You know, the usual.”
“Brain glitch? The usual?” I repeat as though I’m teasing him when the reality is that I’m trying to recall what my initial question was myself.
“Well, yeah,” he says, a subtle, confused line appearing between his brows. “I mean, it’s… you. My brain does that a lot around you. Really, Khin, as a journalist, I thought you’d be perceptive enough to notice that.”
You are not real,I think, aware that my mouth is hanging open but unable to regain enough control of my motor cortex to shut my jaw muscles. “You can’t—” I start, but it peters out. He can’t what? But Iwanthim to.
“What if—”
We jump at the sound of a phone buzzing on the table. It’s his. He frowns at the unsaved number.
“Do you… want me to get it?” I ask, realizing that unknown numbers for him are probably way more of a safety hazard than they are for me.
“Oh no, I’m sure it’s—no, you don’t—”
I take his phone and open the speaker. “Hello?”
“Hi,” an elderly woman tentatively answers in Myanmar. “I’m looking for Tyler?”
I look over at Tyler, whose face has transformed, a cold, opaque sheen having dropped across it in the past three seconds. He catches my eye and gives a short shake of his head.
