I come home to find Maria waiting for me with pad thai.
“You know,” she says as we spoon food onto our plates, “you may end up the most famous Tina Chen of them all. You could be the first Google result for your name.”
“Fuck that,” I say. But for the first time in years, I don’t know that for sure. I don’t know what my future holds. All of the things that I had planned, every stepping stone I had imagined… I’m not sure that I actually need them. I don’t know that I’ll do what’s safest.
I don’t have to anymore.
9:15 PM
Hi Tina.
Sorry this has taken so long.
The day’s been kind of crazy.
Can we talk?
9:15 PM
Sure. When? Where?
Don’t take this the wrong way but I kind of want to see you in person.
9:16 PM
Is there a wrong way to take that? ;-)
Meet me here in 45 mins
He sends GPS coordinates. When I check, they’re a ten-minute walk from his home in the Berkeley Hills. I’m not sure what to say to him. I’m not sure how any of this is going to work. But after I take a quick shower, I go to my closet. Ever since that day in the parking lot long ago, ever since Maria got my favorite sweater dry-cleaned, I’ve been afraid to wear it.
I’ve been afraid to believe in what it once represented: the hope that maybe today, everything that can go wrong, won’t.
I’m not afraid any longer.
I put it on.
BLAKE
I’m waiting in the park when Tina walks up. She’s wearing jeans and a white sweater. It catches the light in all this darkness, makes it easy for me to chart her progress up the street.
I stand. I can’t keep myself from going to her. My heart is pounding; my head feels dry.
Her hair is dark around her shoulders, cloaking her in the night.
“Hi, Blake.” She walks toward me. Her head tilts back as I come close, and the light from a streetlamp nearby spills across her face. I want to hold her, touch her.
“Hi, Tina.”
She’s the one who reaches for me first. She takes my head in her hands and then pulls me down to her. I wrap her in my arms and kiss her. And for a moment—or maybe an hour—I don’t do anything else. I just hold her close and kiss her in the dark, let our lips, our hands, our bodies melt into each other. They say all the things we could whisper. We kiss and kiss, first, like there’s no tomorrow, and then—when we’ve made our way past that, when our lips and tongues are acquainted once more, we kiss like there is one.
We end up on a bench.
From up here, we can see the lights of two bridges, the shimmering skyline of San Francisco against the dark night sky. We see no stars—not a single one—and I like it that way.
First, there are truths to be exchanged. I gesture south, into the darkness. “There,” I say. “Dad’s still in the hospital down there, and he’s already impatient to be out.”
“He’s really okay, then?”
“He’s fine.” I smile, despite myself. “One of the DA’s conditions was that Dad write an op-ed telling people not to do drugs. I read the first draft. I think…the DA will regret that one. But too bad. They already signed off on the deal.”
“How did you pull that off so swiftly?”
I sigh. “How do you think? Money. If they agreed to do a deal, we agreed not to contest the seizure of my car. It was basically a six-figure bribe.”
Tina shuts her eyes. “Shit. I’m sorry.”
“Hey. You may recall that I left my dad’s cocaine in there in the first place. You have no business apologizing to me.”
“Yes, I do. It’s just…” She points far out to sea, past the distant lights of an offshore rig, into nothingness. “There,” she says. “Years ago. In China. I remembered early this morning that when I was six, I said something that got my father in trouble. All my life, I’ve been remembering my mother grabbing me, telling me to be careful. And all my life, I’ve remembered what happened when I wasn’t. That’s why I walked away this morning. That’s why I tried to keep you so far away. Love is never safe.”
I think about my father, still in the hospital. I think about Peter, who I never thought I could lose. I think about Tina checking the electricity bill for her parents.
“Love is never safe,” Tina repeats. “It’s weird. It’s magical. It’s the moment when you break through the dark shell that protects your heart and say, this, this person. I’m going to let this person in, let him come so close that he can hurt me more than I can possibly imagine. I’m going to let him hurt me.” She inhales. “Love is never safe.”
“And yet,” I say, “we do it anyway.”
“We do it anyway.” Her voice is a quiet echo of mine, but her hands close on mine.
“What do you see now?” she asks.
From here, we can see the skyscrapers of the city, the lights of the Bay Bridge. Behind it, there’s a dark silhouette—the old decommissioned bridge still being dismantled. We can see the darkness of ocean, and to the north, the scattered lights of the Marin headlands.
“I’m not sure,” I admit. “I’m not sure what comes next. But whatever it is, I want you with me for it.”
We’re kissing again, bathed in the light of the streetlamp overhead and the constellations we have yet to name below us. We’re writing our own script. And the light we’re going to build together will drown out every million-year-old star that insists we cannot be.
Thank you!
Thank you for reading Trade Me. I hope you enjoyed it.
Is this the end for Tina and Blake?
No. You’ll see more of Tina and Blake in the next books in the series. Hold Me is up next, and it will be about Maria Lopez, Tina’s best friend. Find Me, the book after that, will bring you even more of Tina and Blake.
When will these books release?
I’m not the fastest writer and I don’t like making promises if I’m not sure I can keep them. I hope that Hold Me will be out in late 2015. If you want to get an email when it’s available, you can sign up for my new release e-mail list at www.courtneymilan.com, follow me on twitter at @courtneymilan, or like my Facebook page at http://facebook.com/courtneymilanauthor.
I don’t want to wait that long! What can I do in the meantime?
Luckily, I have written many other books. If you haven’t already done so, you can try my historical romances. I suggest starting with The Duchess War— it’s free on most platforms right now. There’s humor, there’s angst…there are no smartwatches, but in the course of the Brothers Sinister series, you will get primers (they go from A-Z), pretty gowns (and some intentionally hideous ones), pink snapdragons (except there is no such thing as a pink snapdragon), and exclamation points (necessary for proper pronunciation). Give them a try. If you’ve already read all my books, I have a list of recommendations on my web
site.
I want to know more about the Cyclone Series. Where can I go to do that?
I maintain a microsite for the Cyclone Series, which contains a handful of extras: more about Cyclone itself, and a biography of Adam and Blake Reynolds. You can find it at http://www.cycloneseries.com.
Is there anything else you can tell me?
Many of my historical romance readers already know that if you continue past the end matter, I have author notes and extra stuff. I’m sure some of you are wondering what kind of anti-drug op-ed Adam Reynolds would write. Flip the page, and you’ll find out. If you go past that, you’ll find a short excerpt from Hold Me. I hope you enjoy them both.
An op-ed by Adam Reynolds
Don’t Do Drugs
Hey, kids. Don’t do drugs.
That’s what I’m supposed to tell you, isn’t it? I’ve already seen myself held up by disapproving pundits as a tarnished example of what might happen to you if you screw up. Kids, don’t do drugs. You might have a heart attack. You might die. Even Adam Reynolds suffered the consequences, so drugs have to be bad.
The problem with this line of argument is that kids, unlike adults, aren’t stupid.
Hey kids. Don’t do drugs. You might win the Tour de France seven times in a row. You might make tens of millions of dollars off of endorsements. But—hey—after reigning over the world as undisputed champion for decades, you might suffer a momentary embarrassment on national television when you’re forced to admit the truth.
So definitely, kids, don’t do drugs.
Kids, be careful with drugs. They might give you the edge you need to take your company from great to mind-boggling. Between 2004, when I first started using cocaine, and 2015, when I had my heart attack, Cyclone’s market capitalization went from $223 to $413 billion. So kids—beware of drugs; they might make you and your shareholders $190 billion. You might rule the world. You’ll be on the cover of Time.
But you never know. Late one night, you might experience a momentary crushing pain in your chest, one that decent medical care will soon alleviate.