The Heart Principle (The Kiss Quotient 3)

I’d bet my Ducati that she doesn’t fall asleep with just anybody. But she did with me. That means something.

FOURTEEN

Anna

The first thing I see when I open my eyes is Quan—he’s on his side, facing me, deep asleep. The sight is so unexpected that my heart starts racing, and I look around in a panic, trying to make sense of things. This is my bed, my room. I didn’t draw the blinds shut last night, and everything is tinted gray and hushed, the way it is right before dawn. I don’t usually wake up at this time. Only when I’m traveling or accidentally go to sleep super early.

Memories of yesterday flit though my mind. My regular (failed) practice, seeing Jennifer, the news, the book, crying in public, Quan worrying about me . . .

I vaguely remember him moving me from the couch last night and then—I slap a hand over my mouth. I asked him to stay. That’s why he’s here, sleeping on top of my covers and looking cold. I sit up and carefully fold my blankets over him.

For a while, I sit there, scared to move for fear of waking him. What do women do when they have strangers in their beds? As soon as the thought crosses my mind, I frown. Stranger doesn’t feel like quite the right word for Quan. But he’s not my one-night stand—not yet. He’s definitely not my lover. Acquaintance seems too distant. He’s talked to me a reasonable amount, listened to me, laughed with me, seen me at my worst, held me while I cried. And he stayed because I asked him to.

I think . . . he might be my friend.

That’s an uncomfortable realization and too much for me to handle this early in the morning, so I grab my phone from where it’s charging on my nightstand—Quan must have done that for me—and sneak away from him.

As I brush my teeth as quietly as possible, I scroll through the hundred-plus text messages on my phone. Most of them are from Rose and Suzie. They were discussing the new twelve-year-old violin prodigy who’s recently hit the classical music scene. For a while after I accidentally went Internet famous, I was the one everyone was talking about. But it’s not me anymore.

My time has passed.

I never yearned to be spotlighted in that way, but I suppose I do feel a sense of loss now. It’s nice to be wanted. And sad to be discarded. But I know that’s the nature of shiny new things. I need to move forward with my life like all the other people who are no longer shiny and new and find meaning where I can.

After catching up on Rose and Suzie’s group chat, I see I missed a text from my sister, Priscilla. It says only How are you? She checks up on me about once a month. If she didn’t, we’d never talk because I get too enmeshed in my day-to-day grind.

I type in my response (it’s always the same) with my left hand: Fine, and you?

She’s on the East Coast, so the chances of her being up are pretty high. I’m not surprised when my phone starts vibrating with an incoming call.

I hurry to rinse my mouth and find a place in my apartment where I can talk. Nowhere seems suitable, so I pull on my ugly bathrobe and step onto my rarely used balcony. It’s freezing out here, especially because I’m barefoot and there’s condensation on the ground, and I hold the folds of my robe shut with a hand.

After taking a quick second to collect myself, I answer, “Hi, Priscilla je.” I have to add the je for “older sister.” When I was little, I called her just “Priscilla” once and she made me kneel in the bathroom with my arms crossed for two hours. She’s older than me by fifteen years, so she got to do things like that. Because my parents were always busy working, she was also the one who came to pick me up from the principal’s office when I started sobbing uncontrollably and refused to get on the school bus to go home on the first day of kindergarten. If I went trick-or-treating, she took me. If I had a birthday party, she organized it.

“Hey, Mui mui. You’re up early,” she says. From the rhythm of her words, I’m certain she’s speed-walking somewhere. (She doesn’t walk at regular human speed. I don’t think she knows how.) “It’s what, six a.m. your time?”

“I fell asleep early last night. I think I slept for almost twelve hours,” I say as I do the math in my head.

She laughs, and the sound is rich and smooth, almost musical. “I want your life.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Whatever. You’re not pulling eighty-hour weeks. I’m getting too old for this,” she says.

“You’re not old, and I thought you loved your job.” Year after year, she earns humongous bonuses from her consulting company that my mom delights in humble-bragging about to her friends.

She makes a scoffing sound. “Everything gets old after a while, but enough about me. How’s Julian? What have you two been up to?”

“He seems to be doing pretty well,” I say. “But we haven’t been up to much, not together.”

“What’s that mean?” she asks suspiciously.

I consider lying but decide there’s no point. “He wanted to see other people for a while.”

“He what?”

“He’s dating other women,” I explain, since she didn’t seem to understand the way I said it before. “He’s seeing what else is out there before he makes a commitment because he doesn’t want to have regrets.”

“Oh my God, I can’t even . . .” There’s a long pause before she says, “When did this start?”