But he also wasn’t the kind of guy you classified with looks. More like the type you crossed the street to avoid, especially at night. He had a tattoo peeking out above his shirt collar, the head of a black snake with two red diamond eyes.
Goon. Bruiser. Ruffian. Thug. Gorilla in a suit.
Those were just a few of the ways to describe men who emanated with violence and danger the way he did.
I stared at him now as I did back then.
And he….he stared back at me, his shark eyes scanning me from head to toe and back again.
His gaze sent shivers through me and made my heart race—not with fear, though. With something else I couldn’t quite name because I’d never felt it before.
Who was he? Why was he here?
The answers to those questions came in the next moment when the little old woman finally dropped my arm and called out, “Hak-kan!”
That was when I realized that the man who’d made my nervous system go haywire was the little old lady’s grandson. The one she’d insisted only looked like a villain.
It was him.
3
PHANTOM
It was her.
Phantom had rushed to the hospital when he got the news about his grandmother. He lived in Rhode Island but had received the call just as he entered New York City with his cousin Victor to settle a score with their 24K rivals. It was a sign of his grandmother’s infamous good fortune that it had only taken him an hour to get here.
First thing first, he’d had a quick consult with the attending physician, who’d told him the details of his grandmother's accident and that they’d already patched her up.
“We’ll have a nurse do one more check over before we discharge her, but that’s it,” the doctor had said. “It’s a miracle that she didn’t break anything other than her nose.”
“No miracle,” Phantom had assured him. “My grams keeps it Lucky 3000. I’m zero percent surprised.”
Still, Phantom had hurried to where she was resting, just to congratulate her on holding on to that Toughest Broad in Chinatown champion belt.
However, he’d stopped short when he saw the woman sitting beside his grandmother.
It was her. Dr. Olivia Glendaver.
The memory of their first meeting ten years ago spilled into his head like a box of dropped bullets. And his heart stopped at the sight of her now, the same as it had done back then.
Yeah, he’d wondered about her over the ten years that passed. More than wondered, actually. He’d watched her from afar in ways that might not be deemed socially acceptable. And a few times, he’d been tempted, so tempted to touch.
He’d tamped down those urges, though, for over a decade.
But here she was again.
In a hospital room, sitting next to his grandma, like she was her blood relation, not him.
“Oh…hello,” she said, standing up. She looked just as confused to see him as he was to see her.
Phantom dropped his eyes to check her out before he could stop himself. Like a Chinese goon version of Joey Tribbiani.
The white jacket had covered up her body before, but now he could fully appreciate the curves he hadn’t been able to see back then. Full breasts underneath an exercise tank, and wide hips and thick thighs encased in bike shorts. So she was tall and slender, but not rail thin as he’d assumed.
She’d changed hairstyles too—a long weave worn in a ponytail as opposed to a Cleopatra bob. But other than that, she looked just like he remembered as if the ten years between now and the last time they met hadn’t happened.
“Hak-kan! Be nice! I told her you weren’t truly a ruthless villain. You just look like one!”
His grandma, speaking to him in Cantonese, ripped him away from that stare-down.
“Maamaa…” he said, re-focusing on his grandma in the hospital bed.
“Syun zai, what took you so long to get here? The tall black doctor is trying to leave!” his grandma answered as if that was way more urgent than her lost fight with that treadmill. “I am ready to die! I am so very, very ready to go on to my next life.”
“Can you tell me what she’s saying?” Olivia asked him. “She keeps trying to talk to me, even without the interpreter here, and I feel terrible that I don’t understand.”
Yeah, he could tell her, but she wouldn’t like it—especially the part where his grandma insisted over and over again that she was ready to die.
“She’s wondering what took me so long to get here,” he muttered instead.
“What are you telling her?” his grandmother demanded. She hadn’t even attempted to learn English even though she’d been living in America for longer than Phantom had been alive. “You must speak to the tall black doctor who came to my rescue! I am ready to die!”
“Thanks for coming to her rescue—she also said that,” Phantom added to Olivia, omitting all the rest.