Chapter 682 | A Dating Service in the Back

Chapter 682: 682 | A Dating Service in the Back

She opened her eyes and looked at him across the melted table. "Took you a whole semester to ask me to the dance. You wrote it on a napkin and slid it across the lunch table and then left the cafeteria before I could read it."

"I had a test."

"You had a free period."

Ophelia had both hands over her mouth now. Mr. Stitches would have been proud of the restraint.

Grandma Lin picked up her spray bottle. She walked over to the melted table with the calm of someone who had put out worse fires with less warning. She sprayed it once, deliberately, for the principle of the thing. Then she looked down at Nayeli on the floor, looked at Dralun crouched beside the girl with his broad scaled hand still hovering near her shoulder, and said something in Cantonese.

It was long. It was slow. It had more consonants than any sentence had a right to contain, and every single one of them landed with the weight of a woman who had been waiting years to say them. The rhythm of it sounded almost conversational, which made it worse. Grandma Lin did not raise her voice. She did not need to. The restaurant had gone very, very quiet.

When she finished, she turned and walked back to the counter. She picked up her cleaver. She started chopping scallions with the same steady, mechanical precision she used for everything, as if none of it had been said. As if the words had not just detonated in the middle of the dining room like a delayed-fuse incendiary.

Dralun’s ears, which I had not known could turn colors, turned a dull bronze-red under the scales. The flush crept down his jawline and disappeared under his collar, and his tail went completely still behind him in a way that suggested he was using significant effort to keep it there.

I looked at Ophelia.

"What did she say?"

Ophelia lowered her hands from her mouth. Her eyes were enormous. Her pupils had dilated so wide they looked black, and her breathing had gone shallow and fast in the specific way of someone who had just been handed ammunition she had been waiting her entire professional life to receive.

"She said," Ophelia whispered, and her voice shook with the joy of a woman who had waited six years for this exact afternoon, "she said she remembers Nayeli. She said Nayeli used to come in after school and order the egg tarts. She said she would leave Oliver a tip on the table and pretend she wasn’t looking at him while she ate them. She said it took him so long to say anything that Grandma started saving the tarts for her in the back so they wouldn’t run out before Nayeli got there."

I blinked.

"Your grandmother ran a dating service out of the pastry case."

"My grandmother runs everything out of the pastry case." Ophelia grabbed both of my wrists. She squeezed them hard enough to bruise, hard enough that I felt the bones shift, and her nails dug into my skin through the jacket sleeves. Her entire face was lit up like someone had plugged her directly into a power grid. "Lukas. Lukas, he’s blushing. The dragon is blushing. I need my phone. Where’s my phone?"

"Upstairs, where you left it."

"I’ll go get it."

"You’ll ruin it."

"I’ll ruin it for content." She didn’t move. She stood there in her ruined corset with the lace hanging off one shoulder and her black lipstick smudged across her cheek, holding onto my wrists and staring at her boss like he had just grown a second head. Like the last six years of her employment had been recontextualized in a single sentence and she was watching the entire timeline rewrite itself in real time. "He never told me. Six years. Six years, and he never told anyone."

Behind her, Dralun had not moved. He was still crouched beside the girl, his tail coiled tight against the floor, his shoulders squared in the posture of a man who had been ambushed by his own past and was trying very hard to pretend it had not happened.

The girl let go of Dralun’s hand. She climbed off the chair carefully, one foot and then the other, and wobbled once on her feet. Dralun’s tail came around behind her automatically, without him looking, and caught the wobble before it turned into a fall. She leaned back against it, completely unbothered by the fact that she was using a draconic tail as a backrest, and pointed at me across the restaurant.

"Who’s that?" she asked.

Dralun turned his head. He looked at me with the flat, patient expression he gave the scanner when it crackled with a call he didn’t want to take. The kind of look that suggested he was already calculating how much paperwork this afternoon was going to produce and how long it would take to bury it.

"That’s my provisional," he said. "He talks too much."

The girl looked at me with great seriousness. Her eyes were coffee-dark, the same shade as her mother’s, and the ash on her knuckles had smeared up her wrists where she had wiped her nose. She studied me for a long moment, tilting her head to one side, and I had the distinct sense I was being evaluated by someone whose standards I had not been informed of.

"Are you the gold boy?"

"I’m the gold boy," I said. "But I only do the gold thing when there’s a monster in the room."

She looked around the restaurant carefully, at the construction guys and the teenager and his grandmother and Grandma Lin with her cleaver. Then she looked up at Dralun and back at me.

"He’s a monster," she said, pointing at Dralun.

"Absolutely not," I said. "He’s a baby daddy."

Ophelia shrieked into my jacket.

Dralun stood up. He rose all the way to his full height in one slow unfolding motion, his horns scraping the ceiling tiles and his tail sweeping out behind him so wide that the teenager pulled his feet up onto his chair. He looked down at me across the restaurant, and his brown eyes had gone flat and patient and very, very still.

Nayeli laughed so hard she had to put a hand on the wall to stay upright.

"Ophelia," Dralun said, without taking his eyes off me. "How many points does he have?"

Ophelia lifted her face out of my jacket. She was red from her collarbone to her hairline, and tears were running through her eyeliner in two black streaks, and she was smiling a wide, delighted, wicked smile I had never seen on her face before.

"Negative five hundred and ten," she said. "But I’m about to add forty for the dinosaur hoodie and two hundred for the baby daddy thing, because that was the best thing that’s ever happened in this restaurant, and I’m counting it as public service."

"Take the two hundred back," Dralun said.

"No, I don’t think I will."

The little girl tugged on his tail, and Dralun looked down at her, and every ounce of the menace drained out of his face in half a second.

"Can I have an egg tart?" she asked.