Read The Scumbag

Chapter 696: 696 | You Are Paying for Your Crimes

The whole table stopped.

Vivian looked at me, then at Ophelia, and finally at the chair I was sitting in. It was identical to every other chair in the restaurant, except that it sat at the head of the table and Grandma Lin hadn’t let anyone else sit in it in six years.

“Interesting,” Vivian said.

“It’s not interesting.”

“It’s very interesting.”

“It’s dinner. It’s just dinner. He works with me. In the office. For a dragon. That’s the entire relationship, there’s nothing else, so stop looking at me like that.”

I should’ve kept my mouth shut. I should’ve eaten my char siu and let Ophelia deflect until the conversation wandered somewhere safer. That would’ve been the smart play.

Instead I looked at Ophelia Lin, sitting across from me in a black corset dress with her parasol leaning on her chair and her gloom bats circling her head like a crown of tiny miserable satellites, and I said the thing I’d been thinking for three weeks.

“She’s the first person I call when something happens down here.”

Ophelia’s spoon clattered against her bowl.

“Before Dralun. Before anybody up on the hill.” I picked up another piece of char siu with my chopsticks, because looking at food was easier than looking at her grey eyes gone wide and her whole body frozen like something had hit her and she didn’t know where to put it. “Ophelia’s the one I text at two in the morning, because she’s awake and she cares. She pretends she doesn’t, but I’ve seen her point system, and I’ve seen her draw tiny dinosaurs next to the names of kids she’s never met. She’s the first person I call. She’s the one who answers.”

The kick under the table that time was hard enough to make me grunt.

“That.” Her voice came out a whisper that cracked on the second syllable. “That was the one rule. The one thing I told you not to do.”

“You said not to be weird.”

“Looking at me while you say something nice is weird. It’s the definition of weird. It’s the dictionary entry for weird with a picture of your stupid face next to it.”

A notification flickered at the edge of my vision.

?Heroine Update: OPHELIA LIN | Temptation Gauge: 35% (from 31%). Stage: CURIOUS. Note: Subject is aggressively denying it. She is going to hit you again. You deserve it.?

I closed it without reading the rest. Ophelia’s foot connected with my shin a third time, and this one was going to bruise purple.

“Eat your congee,” she said. “And stop talking. Forever. Stop talking forever.”

Vivian had watched the whole thing like somebody who’d gotten a lot more information than she came for and was already filing it away.

“Interesting,” she said again.

“I will deploy the bats, Vivian.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“I would. I’d make you so sad. The saddest you’ve ever been. You’d cry in your affordable car all the way back to Alhambra.”

Vivian laughed, and that broke the tension enough for Ophelia’s shoulders to drop two inches and her bats to drift back up toward the ceiling where they belonged.

I ate my char siu and didn’t look at Ophelia again for the rest of the meal.

That was harder than it sounds.

The corner spot by the kitchen used to be the two-top Luz melted three weeks ago. Grandma Lin had swapped it for a folding card table that looked like it had survived three decades of family mahjong games and covered it with a tablecloth that hid the worst of the water stains and scratches.

The tablecloth was red silk with gold trim, slightly faded at the edges. The candle in the middle was new, one of those battery-powered LED ones that flickered in a way that was trying to be romantic and almost succeeding.

Percy and Rina sat across from each other with the body language of two people who had never been on a date before in their lives and were absolutely determined to get it right through sheer force of will.

Percy had a printed agenda.

I watched him unfold it from across the restaurant with the sort of enormous care usually reserved for handling evidence at a crime scene. I watched Rina reach across the table and take it out of his hands without a word, and I watched her fold it into a paper sheep without ever breaking eye contact with him.

The sheep had tiny triangular paper ears and a curled paper tail. When Rina set it on the table between them, Percy stared at it for what had to be a full ten seconds, like he was trying to solve a differential equation that kept producing impossible results.

Then his face did something I had never seen it do.

He smiled.

I knew his small controlled version, the one he wore when his data confirmed a hypothesis or when a calculation came out clean. This one went all the way up to his eyes and crinkled the corners, softening every tense line in his face. For once he looked his actual age instead of the thirty-year-old academic trapped in an eighteen-year-old body that he usually impersonated.

The purple veins in Rina’s horns caught the candlelight. Pink was spreading across her cheeks, and her cardigan had slipped off one shoulder, baring the curve of her collarbone and the soft line of her neck. She was saying something I couldn’t hear from across the room, and Percy was listening with the total focus he usually saved for route optimization and risk matrices.

Grandma Lin came out of the kitchen with two bowls of congee and a plate of char siu and set them down in front of the two of them without a word. No bill came with them, and nobody asked for money. She just nodded once at Rina, the way she nodded at every Branded kid who came through her door, and went back into the kitchen.

Then she showed up at my table and charged me double for my second helping.

“That seems unfair.”

Grandma Lin said something in Cantonese.

“She says the boy with the paper and the sheep girl eat for free,” Ophelia translated. “The boy who makes her granddaughter kick him under the table pays extra.”

“I’m funding their date.”

“You’re paying for your crimes.”

“What crimes?”

Ophelia’s foot found my shin again.