The Year of the Crocodile (4 page)

Adam Reynolds chokes on his soju at the word
orgy
. “Interesting idea. No fucking thank you.”

My father looks at him. “I never would have expected Adam Reynolds to be a prude. This is interesting information.”

Oh, shit. They're double teaming him now.

Adam sets down his soju. His eyes narrow. “I'm not a fucking prude.”

“Yes, you are!” Blake calls from across the room. “Don't believe him!”

“No, I'm not. Just because I believe in personal privacy and—”

“Personal privacy?” My mom shakes her head. “
You
believe in personal privacy? Forgive me if I am misremembering events. You announced to the entire world that you were a two-bit crack whore, and—”

Adam is staring at her in disbelief. This whole thing is going wrong. Terribly wrong. Exactly as I knew it would.

My mom snaps her fingers. “Ah. I'm so sorry. English is not my first language. Sometimes I make mistakes. Did I say
two-bit
crack whore? I meant
recovering
crack whore.” She leans over and pats his hand. “I know the difference must be very important to you, even if nobody else will see it.”

I'm not even sure what to say. How to make this better.

Adam Reynolds practically explodes in laughter, shaking his head. “You're not bad,” he says, “for a commie cult member.”

He may be laughing, but I have gone to DEFCON 5. My parents practice Falun Gong, which is illegal in China. It's the reason they were granted asylum in the United States when we moved here years ago.

China's official stance is that Falun Gong is an extremely complicated cult. His statement is the offhand equivalent of tossing a grenade.

But my mother simply shakes her head. “You're just saying that because you can't do it.”

“What can't I do?”

“Falun Gong,” my father puts in. “A simple series of exercises. Requires a clear mind and flexible thinking. You can't do it.”

Adam Reynolds sets down his soju. “The fuck I can't.”

“Also, you will get yourself banned from China,” my father says.

“I'd like to fucking see them try.”

And that is how our parents first meet. Adam Reynolds takes off his shoes in my parents' living room and ends up practicing “Buddha Stretching a Thousand Arms” while my mother watches, eating cake and offering pointers like, “If you do everything this fast, no wonder you don't want to have an orgy on film. It would be embarrassing for you.”

Adam Reynolds looks over at her. “Shut the fuck up and admit you like my cake.”

She frowns at it. “Edible, I suppose.”

My father shakes his head. “Never get involved in a land war with Hong Mei,” he says, “when
cake
is on the line.”

Adam gives him a flat stare. “So it comes to this. I will eat the piece in front of me. You will eat the piece in front of you.”

Funny. I knew when they met there would be a nuclear explosion. I just didn't realize that they would end up laughing and mangling
Princess Bride
after the radiation had dissipated.

By the end of the night, my dad is doing shots with Adam Reynolds. Adam is deemed not quite sober enough to drive, and when he talks about getting a car, my mother makes shocked noises.

“A total waste of money,” she says in disbelief. “We have a perfectly good couch. Stay here.”

No fucking way will he accept, I'm thinking.

He accepts.

Adam Reynolds. Multibillionaire. Sleeping on my parents' couch. My mom gets him blankets; my dad finds him an extra toothbrush and a pair of sweats that will undoubtedly be too loose at the waist and too short in the leg.

We are all about to head off to bed.

“Hey,” Adam says. “Tina. Blake. Mabel.”

Blake and I stop, hand in hand.

Adam is still in jeans and a T-Shirt. He gives me a goofy smile. I would never have guessed that Adam Reynolds would be silly when he's drunk.

But he stands up and rummages in the computer bag that he brought with him. “I have these.”

He pulls out a handful of red envelopes.

My breath sucks in. One of the things about being young and Chinese—particularly if, like me, you grew up with very little money—is that you learn to be mercenary at the lunar new year. It's traditional for adults to give red envelopes to children. The theory is that what they give away will come back to them over the course of the year.

Everyone we know is like us: varying degrees of struggling. That means that the red envelopes I once collected usually had a dollar in them, maybe ten if it was a close family friend.

But Adam Reynolds? I have no idea what Adam Reynolds will give. Blake explained to me once that anything under a hundred grand didn't even seem like real money to him.

Mabel approaches first.

“Gong xi fa cai,” Adam says in semi-passable Chinese, handing her an envelope. If I didn't know better, I'd think he had been practicing the phrase.

“Gong xi fa cai,” she replies.

Blake is next. “Gong xi fa cai, asshole,” Adam says to his son. He passes over the envelope with one hand, as is traditional, and Blake takes it. The fistbump that follows is not traditional.

Then it's my turn. “Gong xi fa cai,” he says to me.

I almost say it back. They're just words, ones I say without thinking about their meaning.
Happy New Year,
essentially. Except that's not what these particular words actually mean.

Wishing Adam wealth and prosperity for the new year is like wishing a shark more ocean. He can't swim through the tiniest fraction of what he already has.

I'm supposed to do something risky this month. I'm not sure if there's anything riskier than asking Adam Reynolds a personal question.

“What would you want?” I ask him. “If I could wish any one thing for you, would you really pick wealth and prosperity? Or would you ask for something else?”

He looks at me. His pupils are dilated. I can smell soju on his breath. For a second, he looks old—older than his fifty years, older even than he looked sitting in the hospital after his heart attack.

He rubs one hand through his graying hair, sending it up into little spikes. Then he looks away.

“One more email,” he says. “I want one more email.”

I don't know what he means. I tilt my head toward Blake, a questioning look in my eyes. Blake shakes his head in confusion.

“Then I hope you get a hundred emails,” I tell him.

He smiles. There's no mirth in the expression. Instead, there's something almost haunting about his face.

“Nah,” he says. “I'm not drunk enough to hope for that.”

T
he apartment is dark
. The couch is surprisingly comfortable. It's the fucking alcohol that won't let me sleep. That, and Tina's question.

What do I want?

A million things I'm never going to have. But this one? The one I asked for?

That, I can imagine. I can make a case for
one
more email. I can imagine that one exists, stuck in the Cyclone mail servers. Maybe he left one last message hedged by a delivery date. Maybe it's still coming.

I want to believe it could exist. I want to think that it's not completely, utterly, finally over.

It's over. It's so fucking over that I watched it turn to fucking ash.

My stupid wish is just the alcohol fucking with my mind.
Maybe. Maybe there's more.

I pull my phone off the floor where it's charging and open my mail.

I'm trying not to imagine the way he would have laughed at me throughout the evening.
He'd
have handled this entire situation with nuance and grace. My dispute resolution tactic has always been to barge in, guns blazing, f-bombs away. I wish he were here, but I'm not him. I can't ever be him.

I miss his fucking nuance.

I don't look for a response to my last message. I'm fucked enough to send messages to his abandoned email box. I'm not so fucked that I believe he'll actually respond.

Once, I told someone that the five stages of grief were inefficient—that anyone with a fucking clue could navigate the waters of bullshit with just two. Turns out denial is not as unfamiliar to me as I had claimed.

My typical denial usually runs to extraneous bullshit posturing, but I'm drunk and stripped of my defenses. Tonight, I can't manage the crap.

I stare at the empty message field for a minute before typing.

Hey, gorgeous.

I'm finally beginning to understand what you told me. I thought that without you to soften me up, I'd eventually ossify and break into fucking pieces. Turns out I'm not that fucked. As much as it pains me to admit it, you were fucking right about one thing. I'm going to be okay.

Don't fucking think it changes anything else. You were still wrong. I love you. I will always love you.

“
I
think
,” Tina whispers to me, “this is what getting along looks like. For our parents, at least.”

We are lying in her bed after midnight, listening to the sounds of her household winding down. Her sister has been banished to the TV room, giving us a small semblance of privacy. It's a twin bed, which means the only way to sleep is tangled up in each other. Her head rests against my shoulder; her hands are against my chest.

It's almost arousing. I'm aware of her elbow against my ribs, her chin against my shoulder, our bodies meeting in not-quite-comfortable angles.

The walls are thin and the bed squeaks every time we arrange ourselves. Hence the
almost
qualifying my arousal; I'm all too aware of the noise anything else would generate. They can hear us.

And by
they,
I mean my dad.

Prude is…maybe not the right word for my dad. But he is the most intensely private person I know. Which nobody would believe, seeing as how we seemingly serve up our family life to the entire world. But affection is not something he manages well in public.

He would never say anything. But I can't imagine how he'd react to being kept awake by a distinct, rhythmic squeaking.

“I did mention this, didn't I? About my dad?” I can smell her hair. “Insults are how he expresses affection.”

“My mom is…” She pauses, considering. “Actually, come to think of it, my mom is not so different. She's not like your dad, but…”

“She teases you. Relentlessly.” I slide a hand around her hip. “I know. Why do you think you and I get along so well? I knew we would the day you first insulted me.”

Tina considers this. “I never thought of it that way. After our first little dust up, I figured you'd think I was a complete bitch.”

“Instead,” I say with a smile she can't see, “I was wired to think you were flirting. It makes me physically uncomfortable if people are straight-up nice to me. I assume they're hiding something.”

She shifts her weight. The bed squeaks again, and I wince. She straddles me and the springs protest politely. “So I definitely shouldn't be nice to you right now.”

My heart thumps. My body reacts, my muscles tensing, my cock going from potentially interested to actually interested despite the thin walls and the noisy boxspring.

My breath stutters in. “I
do
feel physically uncomfortable, yes. And you should definitely not stop.”

We're talking in whispers. She leans down and kisses me. Her body presses against mine, hip to hip, chest to breast. I slide a hand under the soft shirt she's wearing.

I love making her breath catch. Love it when she exhales long and slow, love it when her hands bracket my face. I love it when she kisses me harder. When her hips push against mine, pressing against my dick.

I don't love it when the boxspring lets out one telltale scritch, then another.

The third time it happens, I put my hand over her mouth.

“Tina, I'm sorry. Every time the bed squeaks, I think of my dad. Out there. You know he can hear everything, right?”

She laughs softly. “Do one risky thing, right?”

“Not this one.” I grimace. “It's…kind of a fucking buzzkill.”

She pushes up onto her forearms and looks at me. In the dim light, I see only the curtain of her hair. I feel the ends brush my chest. Yeah, I'm fucking interested.

“What if I promised you no squeaks?” she asks.

I look back at her. “I'm in.”

“But you'd have to be quiet.” She sets a finger on my bare chest, drawing a line down it. “Really quiet. I'm not sure you could do that.”

Her finger continues its journey down my abs. My navel. My body reacts.

“Hey,” I whisper. “I've been giving interviews since I was six. You would not believe how quiet I can be when it's important.”

She hooks her index finger in the band of my boxers. “You're on.”

There's one last squeak as she rearranges herself. She shimmies down my body. Slides my boxers down my hips.

I feel her breath against the head of my penis, then her mouth against my sensitive skin. She sucks me in, and it's damned good.

We've been together eleven months, and that's enough time for her to have learned me. She knows that I have that sensitive area right there, right on the underside of my dick, right where the loose foreskin pulls. She knows I like it when she lets her nails scratch me just a little. She knows exactly what tempo I prefer, knows where to put her hands.

I let my thoughts dissolve into the pleasure of the moment. I give myself up to the warm pressure of her mouth, give myself over to the slide of her tongue, the feel of her fingers on my balls.

I can tell she's trying to get me to make noise. To break, just a little bit.

I don't.

Silence is something I learned early, and to call it second nature is probably an understatement. It's almost my first nature. I can retreat into it until words have no meaning. Until noise is unnecessary. Until there's nothing at the core of me but fire and want and love and a hint of bitter nostalgia.

I squeeze her shoulder to let her know when I'm about to come. She glances up at my face, but she doesn't stop. I give everything over into one final gasp.

When I'm finished, I'm breathing hard.

I didn't make a noise.

She looks up at me. “That was incredible,” she breathes. “You were
silent.”

I sit up, set my finger on her lips, and shake my head.

“It was—”

I cover her mouth with one hand and nudge her down with my shoulder.

Your turn.

I don't say those words, but she understands them. Enough that she rearranges herself with a single drawn-out complaint from the bed. Enough that I kneel on the floor in front of her and spread her legs.

She's wet.

She's also not as quiet as I am. She can't help but gasp. She lets out a little noise when I slide a finger inside her. She inhales when I set my mouth to her. She tastes good—a little salty, a little sweet—and it doesn't take long.

She lets out a choked noise when I finally get her off.

After, we snuggle together. We seem to have fewer hard edges; we fit together better. Her head rests against my shoulder.

“I love you,” she whispers.

I pull her closer. “Love you, too.”

“Your dad gave me a hundred dollars.”

This is a bit of a non sequitur, and sleep is rapidly pulling me down.

“Mmm?”

“In the red envelope. I was afraid, you know. That he might make me feel uncomfortable. But that was appropriate. Thanks for talking to him about it.”

It had not occurred to me that this was even a thing I should think about. “I didn't.”

“What, you mean he was appropriate on his own? Will wonders never cease.”

There are a dozen things I could say to that.

Navigating our parents…

Well, Dad managed that better than I could have imagined. Forced politeness would have lasted through one, maybe two, encounters.

Navigating what Tina and I have—a relationship where she doesn't want her life swallowed in the larger course of mine—is an area where my dad has vastly more experience than I do.

But my dad is the most intensely private person I have ever met. It's not like we
talk
about this shit. We don't even
think
about it.

“Tina,” I finally say, “he's an asshole. That doesn't make him inconsiderate.”

“No.” This word comes out as a stretched-out syllable. “I guess it doesn't. He's actually not terrible.”

“He grows on you.”

“Go to sleep.” She snuggles against me. “I guess maybe it's the year of the crocodile after all.”

“Nah.” I hold her close. “No superstitions. It's just us. It's the year of us.”

And on that note, we drift off to sleep.