Inheritance (16 page)

David looked up from the menu when she returned from the bathroom. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah. I texted Julian.” It had been his idea to tape the meeting with Lovick—“insurance,” he called it—and Reese had agreed immediately.

David leaned toward her and whispered, “We can’t post that online yet.”

“I know. I’m not going to give it to Julian until the right time comes.”

The waitress returned before she could say anything more. “What would you like?” she asked.

Reese glanced down at the menu. “Um…”

“This is good,” David said, flipping through the multiple pages to the noodle section and pointing out something called double-fried noodles with seafood. “Want to share it?”

“Okay.”

David said something to the waitress in Chinese, and they had a brief discussion before she picked up the menus and left.

“What did you order?” Reese asked.

“Spicy jellyfish and soup dumplings.” He poured tea from the stainless steel pot into their two teacups.

She was still agitated from the meeting with Charles Lovick, and her leg bounced beneath the table. She glanced around the restaurant, taking in the glass-topped tables, each setting laid with a single round plate and a pair of chopsticks. A tank full of lobsters glowed near the swinging doors to the kitchen. Her dad always wanted to go out for Chinese when he visited, but they hadn’t had time yet. She wondered how long he would be staying. He had been acting particularly fatherly lately, and it made her suspicious about his motives.

“Is something wrong?” David asked.

“No, sorry.” She took a sip of tea, carefully holding the cup around the rim to avoid burning her fingers. “I was just thinking about my dad, and—we don’t have to talk about it now.”

“We can if you want. What’s going on?”

“My parents are divorced but my dad’s been here since we got back from Nevada. I’m worried about my mom.” She picked up her chopsticks and pulled them out of the paper wrapper, breaking them apart. “Let’s not talk about that. It’ll put me in a bad mood.” She and David had agreed not to discuss Lovick in
public, but all she could think about was their meeting. Grasping for a new subject of conversation, she said, “Aren’t we supposed to talk about shallow things like what movie you saw recently or your favorite band?”

David grinned. “Small talk? For a first date?”

Nerves fluttered inside her at the words
first date.
She began to fold the chopsticks wrapper into an accordion. “Sure,” she said, trying to sound casual. “Small talk. Have you seen any good movies lately?”

His eyebrows rose. “Not really. I’ve been busy. How about you?”

“No. I was in a medically induced coma for a month and then I got abducted by the government. It totally cut into my moviegoing experiences. How about music? What’s your favorite band?”

David laughed. “Did you get these questions from a dating website or something?”

Reese squirmed. “Uh, no. I just thought we should, you know, try to act like normal people or something.” David seemed surprised, and for a long moment of awkward silence they simply looked at each other. She was about to tell him they didn’t have to act normal if he didn’t want to, when he reached across the table and plucked the chopsticks wrapper out of her fingers.

“You should take up origami,” he said.

She blushed as he held up the paper with its tiny, perfect pleats. “It’s my hidden talent.”

“I like the Running Brooks,” he said.

It took her a moment to figure out what he meant. “Oh. You mean the band?”

“Yeah. Theory’s good too; he does this really cool electronic stuff with rap—you have to hear it.” He grinned. “And I like Slick
Rice, this Korean American dude who dresses like a giant nerd and raps on YouTube, but his music is awesome.”

“I don’t listen to much rap,” Reese admitted. “It’s usually super sexist and gross.”

“I know. This stuff is different. It’s not like that. It’s political, but it’s fun too. I’ll make you a playlist.”

“Really?” She smiled.

The waitress arrived with the spicy jellyfish, which looked like a pile of translucent beige noodles dressed in chili sauce. Reese was a little dubious about trying it but she didn’t want to seem like a dumb American in front of David, so she quickly took a large bite. The chili burned the back of her throat and her eyes widened in shock.

David laughed. “You like it?”

“It’s different,” she mumbled. It was crunchy and slippery and tasted almost entirely of the spicy, vinegary sauce. She wasn’t sure if she liked it. The soup dumplings were more her style, and she scooped one up with a flat-bottomed spoon. When she bit into it, a savory broth spilled out. “Oh my God, these are so good,” she said, burning her mouth on the crabmeat filling because she didn’t want to wait for it to cool off.

“So what about you?” David said. “What kind of music do you like?”

As they talked, Reese began to relax. She had forgotten what it was like to just hang out with David, without worrying about their bizarre new abilities or how to figure out what it all meant. She liked the way his eyes crinkled up in the corners when he smiled, his mouth curving crookedly. She couldn’t remember if she had watched him this way, back when they were only debate
partners. She had probably tried to avoid it, because the longer she watched him, the more the warm little glow inside her heated up. He was cute, yes. He was tall and broad-shouldered and had a great haircut and his blue shirt stretched so enticingly across his chest. But it was the interior
Davidness
about him—what could not be seen from the outside—that made her want to reach out and touch him. It was the way he laughed at her bad jokes, as if he genuinely thought she was funny; it was the focus of his attention on her, steady and deliberate; it was the fact that he had always been kind to her, even before he knew much about her.

When the noodles arrived, he served her first, cutting into the crispy noodle bed with the spoon and then lifting them onto her plate, adding stir-fried shrimp and squid and snow peas. The noodles were crunchy on the bottom and soft inside, and she decided she didn’t ever want to order Chinese food without David again.

By the time they left the restaurant, she had forgotten all about the men in black who might be following them. He put his arm around her as they walked, and the heat of his body spread like warm honey through her limbs. She liked the rhythm of his paces beside her, the solid confidence in him. He didn’t doubt himself. Even though Reese had always relied on herself and was wary of depending too much on others, she knew she could depend on him. It was a new feeling: a vulnerable one. To her surprise, she kind of liked it.

She took his hand as they rode the elevator up to their parking space in the garage, and in the car, she leaned over and kissed him before he started the engine. He was startled, but then he
was kissing her back, his mouth firm as he cupped a hand around her face. She lost her breath. His fingers were in her hair. His consciousness seemed to open before her like a door, and he was full of heat.

“Wait,” he said, and dragged himself away. “We have to go to the party.”

She groaned. “Can’t we skip it?”

He gave a kind of choked laugh, and she almost reached for him again, but he said, “We’ll go to the party. We don’t have to stay for long.”

Reese had grown up in San Francisco surrounded by
people of all races, but she had never thought of herself as white until she walked through Eric Chung’s crowded living room. It wasn’t that she thought of herself as
not
white; she simply never thought about it. She realized that was probably the biggest sign of all that she was white.

David seemed to know everyone. As soon as they entered the house, people began to approach him—boys from the soccer team, girls who seemed to giggle in his presence, people with faces Reese recognized from school but whose names she couldn’t remember. The music was loud but the voices were louder, and though she and David had tried to prepare themselves for the emotional tumult, she found it more difficult than she had expected. Everybody was excited to see David; he
was their friend and they welcomed him. They were curious and a little suspicious about Reese; they wanted to know why David had brought her.

She tried to act as if she belonged there, as if it was totally normal for her to show up at a house party with David Li holding her hand. While she had gotten better at blocking the prickly sensation of people looking at her, she hadn’t anticipated feeling out of place for an entirely different reason. She knew that her social circle was a lot smaller than David’s—that was the way she liked it—but until tonight, she never realized how many of his friends were Asian. She was one of only a few non-Asian people at the party, and she stuck out like a sore thumb: white girl walking. It was an unfamiliar discomfort that made her feel unusually self-conscious.

As she and David left the living room and headed down the hall toward the back of the house, he turned to look at her.
You can’t help who you are
, he told her. She flushed, and sensed a warm amusement in him.
You’re cute when you get embarrassed
, he thought.

That made her flush deepen. “Can we get some drinks?” she said out loud.

He smiled. “Sure.”

They went into the kitchen, running into more of David’s friends along the way, and then, finally, he handed her a plastic cup of punch. It tasted like candy: sweet and deadly. She couldn’t taste the alcohol but she was 100 percent certain it was in there. A giant, empty vodka bottle stood on the counter right next to the punch bowl. David tasted his and made a face.

“I shouldn’t drink anyway. I have to drive you home.” He put his cup down and picked up a can of soda instead.

She was about to do the same when a girl entered the kitchen. She had long, glossy black hair and was wearing a black minidress and shiny red heels. She shrieked when she saw David and flung herself at him.

“Oh my God, I saw you on TV!” she cried, her hands digging into his shoulders. She had red nails the same color as her shoes.

“Hey,” David said, pulling away from her gently. “This is Reese. Reese, this is Riley.”

Riley Bennett-Huang was David’s ex-girlfriend. Reese couldn’t remember why David and Riley had broken up, though it had been the talk of the school last year. She stiffened as Riley’s gaze raked over her. “Hi,” Reese said, feeling like a kindergartner in comparison to Riley.

“Hi,” Riley said, and then turned back to David. “So are you okay? I was so worried about you.”

“I’m fine,” David said.

Reese sipped her drink and studied Riley surreptitiously as she flirted with David. Riley, objectively, was gorgeous. That dress and those shoes might look trashy on someone else, but on her they looked sophisticated. Though most of the girls were dressed more casually than Riley, she seemed quite comfortable in her outfit. She had the demeanor of someone who knew when people were looking at her, and she enjoyed it. Watching her leaning into David’s space, though, Reese didn’t think that Riley looked like his type. She was too polished. Too fake. David seemed a little uncomfortable with her, responding to her with one- or two-word answers.

By the time David extricated himself from the conversation with Riley, Reese had drunk half her cup of punch and the
kitchen was beginning to seem a bit blurry. When he grabbed Reese’s free hand to pull her with him out of the kitchen, Reese saw Riley giving her a sharp, almost jealous glance. A burst of irritation went through her, and she wasn’t sure if it was her emotion or David’s. He led her through the back door and onto a broad deck, where clumps of people were gathered together talking and laughing. She welcomed the cool night air on her warm face. She asked David, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Riley gets to me sometimes.”

“Why?” She felt an emotion pass through him like a thin wire: resistance. “You don’t have to tell me,” she said quickly.

He shook his head. “It’s okay. She’s just hard to deal with when she gets like that. Pushy.” He drew her toward the edge of the deck, where they leaned against the railing. “It’s a nice night,” he said, changing the subject.

“Yeah.” The fog that had blanketed Chinatown was absent here, a benefit of San Francisco’s many microclimates. “How does Eric get away with this big of a party?” Reese asked, looking around.

“His parents are in Korea on a business trip. I don’t think they care, honestly. He gets away with a lot of things.”

A guy Reese recognized from the soccer team came over to talk to David, and though he greeted her also, she didn’t have much to contribute to the conversation. She continued to drink her punch as a steady stream of people came out onto the deck, several of them veering over to say hi to David. Some of them tried to talk to Reese, but she was bad at small talk; she always had been. Besides, David had slung his arm around her shoulders, probably in an effort to make her feel included—or to show
that they were together—but all it did was make her feel
him
: his body, once so foreign to her but now increasingly familiar; the beat of his heart; a sense of anticipation rising between them.
We don’t have to stay for long
, he had said. The punch made her pleasantly woozy, and she had to lean into David so that she didn’t wobble on her feet. Her hand snaked around his waist, her fingers sliding over his hip. Heat flared inside him, and she felt a bit breathless. She finished her punch and carefully set the cup on the railing. The world seemed to tilt, and she grabbed at David.

“David,” she said.
David
.

His hand tightened on her shoulder.

I feel weird.

He pulled away briefly, and the air rushed between them, cool and refreshing. The noise of the party seemed to crescendo and she had to back away from the sound. “I’m sorry, I think I need to go someplace quieter,” she said.

She saw concern on his face. “Okay.” He apologized to his friends and said, “Let’s go for a walk.”

She linked her arm with his and they walked down the steps off the deck. The property was long and rectangular, and solar-powered lanterns marked the edges of a path that curved down the length of the yard. At the far end she stopped to look back. Eric’s house was lit up like magic.