Chapter 683 | Itchy is Good, Burning is Bad

Chapter 683: 683 | Itchy is Good, Burning is Bad

Grandma Lin answered before Dralun could, which was correct, because she had been answering questions in this restaurant since before any of us were born.

She set the cleaver down on the cutting board with a crack and barked something short in Cantonese. Ophelia translated it in a wet, wrecked whisper against my shoulder.

"She says the tarts are for girls who don’t set the furniture on fire. She says you can have two."

The girl weighed this offer for a full second, then gave Grandma Lin a solemn nod, a tiny businesswoman accepting terms at the end of a hard negotiation. Grandma Lin vanished through the kitchen door.

The construction guys went back to their noodles, though the one closest to us kept peeking over the rim of his bowl at Dralun, clearly assembling a story he would tell at the job site tomorrow.

The teenager had his phone out under the table. Ophelia noticed and pointed one black nail at him across the room, and the phone disappeared into his hoodie so fast I heard it smack the zipper.

Nayeli pushed herself up off the floor in stages, one hand on the wall and one on the back of the chair.

Her uniform had surrendered somewhere around the third laugh. The zipper now sat low enough that the black sports bra was carrying the entire show by itself, and the grey polyester clung to her hips in a fashion the hotel chain had not approved when they ordered the fabric in bulk.

She had the build of a woman who shoved laundry carts up service ramps eight hours a day, all strong thighs and a waist that cinched hard under the apron ties. Loose curls stuck to the sweat at the back of her neck.

I looked at the ceiling. Lin’s ceiling did not have a water stain shaped like Ohio, only a grease mark shaped like nothing at all, and that was worse, because it gave my eyes no excuse to stay up there.

\[Ecchi Logic Event logged. Subject: Nayeli Torres. Temptation Gauge: 2% (Wary). Note: Subject’s attention remains on the dragon. Host’s attention does not.\]

I closed the notification hard enough to feel it in my molars.

Nayeli dragged the zipper up to her collarbone without looking down, a motion she had clearly made on every shift for years. Then she knelt beside her daughter again to check the girl’s palms. The skin had gone pink and shiny, the color of a bad sunburn, with ash smeared deep into the creases.

"Does it hurt, mija?"

"It’s itchy," the girl said. "Like when you put the lotion on my scraped knee."

"That’s a good sign, baby. Itchy is good." Nayeli looked up at Dralun, and her voice dropped into something lower that had nothing to do with her daughter. "Is itchy good, Oliver?"

"Itchy is good, burning is bad. She stopped burning ten minutes ago."

He said it to the girl’s hands instead of to Nayeli’s face. His tail was still flat on the tile, motionless, a garden hose somebody had forgotten to coil.

I fished out my phone and crouched at the far end of the table, well outside tail range, then held the screen up so the girl could see it.

"I have to call a nice lady named Denise and tell her about your hands. She’ll want to know your name."

The girl looked at her mother for permission. Nayeli gave a small nod.

"Luz," the girl said. "Luz Torres-Marquez. I’m six and three quarters."

"That is an impressive amount of quarters."

"I’m going to be seven in February." She held up seven fingers, then added two more, then lost track and folded all of them down in frustration. "My mom says I can have a dragon cake this year."

Dralun made a noise, low and short, from somewhere deep in his chest. Ophelia’s grip on my sleeve went white-knuckled, and her translation came out cracked straight down the middle.

"That’s the noise he makes when Mr. Haddad gives him free coffee. Lukas, that is his happy noise."

"I don’t have a happy noise," Dralun said.

"You have one, and you just made it in front of a child."

Denise picked up on the second ring, which in Verano Metro terms was a medical miracle. I gave her the address and the age and the words "heat-type, hands only, no injuries to third parties except a table," and there was a pause on the line.

"Is this one of Oliver’s again?" Denise asked.

I had not known that Denise knew the name. I filed that away next to the pastry case and the prom balcony and the fact that apparently half of District Seven had been keeping a secret from Ophelia Lin for six years.

"He’s standing behind a six-year-old right now, pretending he isn’t blushing," I said.

Denise laughed so hard she had to put me on hold. When she came back, she scheduled Luz for Thursday at four, same clinic, same converted bank, and read me a case number that I wrote across the inside of my wrist, right under Carmen’s phone number, which was still faintly visible from last week. My arm was turning into the district directory. Steele would have opinions.

Nayeli watched me write it. Her coffee-dark eyes tracked the pen, then my face, and something shifted behind them that I did not love, because it was the look of a woman doing math about a stranger.

"You’re the gold boy from the news," she said.

"That’s me, ma’am."

"Don’t ma’am me, I’m thirty-four." She wiped her daughter’s nose with the hem of her apron. "How much does Thursday cost?"

"Nothing at all. District Seven brackets pay zero for a first surfacing, and the school has to build her a plan if she needs one."

Her shoulders dropped two full inches. I watched the fear drain out of them and something heavier slide into the space it left, and then she turned her head and looked at Dralun.

"You knew that."

"I knew that," Dralun said.

"I didn’t know who else to call. I didn’t want to call you." She laughed, short and tired. "I didn’t have your number. You changed it in 2011."

Dralun’s jaw worked. "My phone fell in the river."

"Your phone fell in the river," she repeated slowly, tasting every word.

"It was a bad phone."

Ophelia made a sound against my shoulder that I can only describe as a kettle achieving enlightenment.

The kitchen door swung open and Grandma Lin came back carrying a little pink pastry box tied with red string. She set it on the table in front of Luz, then reached into the pocket of her green cardigan and produced a single egg tart wrapped in wax paper. She put that one down in front of Nayeli without a word. She did not look at her. She did not look at Dralun either, which was a statement in its own dialect.

Ophelia stopped breathing entirely.

"She saved one," Ophelia hissed. "Lukas, she pulled one out of the back. That’s the pastry case thing. She’s running the operation again, live, in front of witnesses."

Nayeli stared down at the tart for a long time. Her fingers hovered over the wax paper and did not touch it. When she finally looked up at Grandma Lin, her eyes had gone wet at the rims.

Grandma Lin said one sentence and went back to her scallions.

"She says it’s still a dollar fifty," Ophelia whispered, "and the tip is still optional."

Nayeli laughed, and the laugh broke halfway out, and she pressed the back of her wrist against her mouth to hold the rest of it in. Luz had already gotten the string off her box and had powdered sugar on her chin. She held the second tart up toward Dralun, offering it at arm’s length, and he looked at it like it might be a live grenade.

"You have to eat one," Luz informed him. "It’s the rule."

"Whose rule is it?"

"Mine. I made it just now."