1. How to Get a Girl
This was it, then. Sparkling oval eyes. Skin the perfect tan. Luxurious black hair so smooth and shiny. The Japanese characters hanging from a small chain necklace.
Maybe his grandparents were right. The daily stress, the sleepless nights, the career path he hated―maybe it was all worth it if the stability of that paycheck afforded him the chance to call something like this his own. That face. That slender, perfect hand as it shifted to perch a smooth chin. Plush lips that parted slowly to say something…
“So…Mr. Almost-Doctor, how many inches is that tool of yours?”
A slimy, queasy knot of internal unmentionables may as well have dropped squarely into Saffie Aoki’s lap. Gradually, his daze popped, and his surroundings gathered back in around him: the table cleared of used dinner plates, the upscale restaurant ambiance, the late evening falling outside. What exactly had he done wrong this time?
“Is that―um.” Saffie’s hands brushed across his knees under the table, unintentionally whisking a cloth napkin to the floor. He swallowed quietly. “Is that a serious question?”
The female across from him smiled. One finger traced an undeniably attractive neckline. “You tell me…and I’ll tell you my bra size.”
The very edge of Saffie’s lip caught between his teeth and released with a painful sting. He took a breath. “That’s…That’s very…um.” Very what? Saffie swallowed. Smiled. Squinted at the little green stitches in the tablecloth. “Um…no thank you, actually.” Inhaling sharply, “I’m gonna go…settle that tab.” He got up abruptly, barely missing the edge of the table.
“Marcus.” The name on caller ID lit up Saffie’s phone screen not two minutes after walking out of the restaurant. For a moment, Saffie considered shoving the device right back into his coat pocket. He wasn’t ready to talk. The hollow thud of his own shoes across the darkening sidewalk filled his ears for a moment. The phone continued vibrating in his hand as the parking garage came into view.
He pictured it for a moment: her eyes, her smile. The things he found attractive about her. Bra size?
Maybe it was a sign. Women just didn’t like him.
“My man, they like you too much,” Marcus would surely say.
Crap, why do I do this to myself? Fumbling, Saffie swiped the answer icon on his phone and raised the device to his ear. “Hello?”
His best friend didn’t bother with a greeting. “Well, how was it?”
Saffie gave a glowing shop window a blank glance. Three seconds passed.
“Come on, Saf. The date. With the pretty little Asian thing.”
Pretty little Asian thing? “Are―Are you stalking me?” Just in case, Saffie passed a stiff glance over his shoulder. His question was answered with a lengthy laugh on the other end of the line.
“My man, I know your M.O.”
“Whatever.” Saffie’s hand found the cold metal of the stairway railing, and he started up to the top of the parking garage.
“Oh, no. What’d she do? Say one of those supposedly-nonexistent Japanese curse words? Refuse a cup of your grandma’s purple tea? Miss the bullseye on one of your six-hundred-and-fifty requirements? Ask you to sleep with her?”
Marcus: tall, black, handsome by any girl’s definition, career-successful, picture-perfect expecting-wife in-arm. Like he would know what it was like to search for a connection that just wasn’t there. Saffie felt his teeth sink into his lower lip. He didn’t respond.
“Ah, she wanted to hook up.”
He could imagine it perfectly: Marcus in his swivel chair; a database pulled up on the laptop in front of him; a small notebook full of his chicken scratch handwriting; his knowing, teasing, always-on-top-of-it detective stare…
“She wanted to link the chinc. Hop the daddy.”
“Man, shut up. She just wasn’t marriage material.”
“Hm. Know what else ain’t marriage material?”
For someone who worked out three times a week, his thighs shouldn’t be burning this much on a mere stairway. Saffie stopped on a platform and brushed dust off the handrail with the tips of his fingers. “Marcus…”
“A little boy who won’t put on his big boy pants―cut his damn hair―and take up a career. Dude, why’d I see an armed security renewal come through with your name on it?”
Saffie let out a long breath. “I thought you were a detective. They have you on desk duty, now?”
“I keep an eye on things.”
“Exactly how many eyes do you have?” He started up the stairs again.
“That ain’t the point. Saf, your gramps are gonna send the frickin’ Yakuza on your ass if they find out you renewed your license.”
“No, they won’t.”
“Yes, they damn will! No. You’ right. They’re gonna send the Yakuza on MY ass, ’cause I’m the one who got you into security gigs in the first place. Man, come on, you know I don’t need that drama.”
“My grandparents adore you.”
“You mean they used to, before―”
“I just need a job, okay? I’ll get stable, and then I’ll make long-term plans.”
“Your job is at Lynn Memorial. Literally waiting for you.”
Silence stole over the conversation. Saffie’s thoughts might have tracked briefly across it as he finished ascending the stairs and stepped out onto the top level of the parking garage―that set of fourteen months. Fourteen tortured, sleepless months in the Lynn Memorial ER residency awarded to a top-graduating student. A student who thought he was cut out for the robe of a doctor. A student who thought he could handle those moments when saving lives turned into helping people die…
“Hey, Marcus, I’ll talk to you later, okay?” Saffie hung up the phone barely a second later. He wasn’t about to let himself think about it. He didn’t need to go there. Not now. Not when there were so many things he had to achieve before he turned thirty.
“I’m twenty-seven years old. I’m a grown-ass adult,” Saffie murmured to himself as he started toward the dark silhouette of his car.
And yet, that grown-ass adult tripped over his own shoes not thirty seconds later. There was something unbelonging lying on the ground a foot from the front bumper of his sedan. Something large.
That’s not what it looks like, was the first thing to dart across Saffie’s mind. He gave the overcast sky a casual glance. A trash bag. A garbage can. A car part. A sandbag. A person.
It was.
Saffie’s blood turned cold in his veins. Suddenly trembling fingers slipped into his pocket for his keys. His feet moved without permission, knees going weak as he approached.
It was alive. He could hear it breathing.
“Hey? Um…hello?” The tread of Saffie’s shoes came to a stop on the concrete. Slowly, he lowered himself toward that silhouette. No response. It was too dark to even make out a face. With a glance at one of the eerily dead parking lot lights looming out across the sky, Saffie stood up and walked quickly over to his car. One hand flipping up the dialing pad on his phone, he reached into his vehicle, set the keys in the ignition, and switched on the headlights.
“911, what is your emergency?”
“I’m on the top level of the south parking garage in midtown―uh, Winchester, Arkansas. There’s an unresponsive person up here―” And that was as far as he got. The headlights of Saffie’s sedan cut a V-shaped vector across the bare concrete, setting ablaze smooth skin and soaked clothing. The face resting against the ground was like no other Saffie had seen before. Incredibly delicate features. Smooth jaw. Dark hair and sharp brows. Feminine lips. Beauty like that of a model.
But the shirt ripped almost all the way down the front gave away the thing’s gender like the drop of a black ball. Late teens or early twenties, this boy was fit, cut slim and muscular, toned like an athlete. Asian.
“Oh, shit.” Deaf to the emergency operator’s request for an address, Saffie lowered himself to the concrete. Trembling like the devil were peering over his shoulder, he checked the length of a bruised abdomen. Bruising on the chest. Ink. A small tattoo edging the left pectoral and ending just before the curve of the shoulder. Both marks seemed unnatural. If this kid was hit by a car, it would’ve had to be hours ago for that kind of coloration to seep in under the skin.
This is bad, something in the back of Saffie’s head already knew. He glanced again at the boy’s face. The remote, frightening possibility flashed through his mind that this young man could be someone from Saffie’s neighborhood, someone Saffie had gone to school with, from one of the families in Sol Park, the child of someone Saffie’s grandparents knew―
“Is―Is that…?” Still holding the phone pinned to his ear, Saffie cautiously extended two fingers across black denim. A shocked gasp broke from his throat when his fingertips smeared red.
“Sir, is the victim breathing?” the 911 operator seemed to rematerialize.
“Y―uh, yes.” Irregular, labored breathing. Saffie’s eyes lowered to the blood on his fingers. “I think―I think he might’ve…” What? What, exactly? The femur was intact. There was not so much trauma to the torso to suggest any chance of an open fracture lower on the body.
“Sir, might have what?”
“Uh. Some…Some kind of…like…” Saffie’s fingertips brushed the material of his pants. He glanced around the parking lot. “Some kind of…” Nothing. No discarded objects or blood trails to suggest any kind of stabbing, impalement, laceration, dragging of a body.
It was glaring Saffie in the face. The delicate bruising along the eyelids. Pressure marks across the neck. Abrasions running ringlets around the wrists and forearms. This was no mere hit-and-run.
“Oh my god, who did this to you?” The question left Saffie’s throat in a whisper, words freezing in the air. The phone lowered unconsciously in his hand.
A car horn blared from the street below. The sound sent a weak flinch through the body on the concrete. Saffie shifted closer, one hand moving to stabilize a bruised neck, then the other joining to keep the stranger from attempting to move his head.
Saffie’s touch seemed to spark more life to a weak, fluttering heartbeat. Dark eyelashes trembled against washed-out skin. A slit of the eyeballs showed a second later. Colorless lips shifted. A flash of unfocused pupils. Then, weakly murmured words.
They fell on uncomprehending ears. Saffie leaned a little closer before he recognized the language. “Hey. Hi. I―I don’t speak Korean. Can you speak English?” He didn’t want it, the connection he opened himself to as he watched that face, tested for an ability to make eye contact. The connection with someone he didn’t know, couldn’t be sure would be okay, may never know what happened to. “Can you tell me your name?”
This boy had beautiful eyes. What little they saw, how much less they registered―didn’t change the gentle shape, soft brown shade, glowing reflections. “D…Don’t…” There was blood on his lips. Blood in his mouth. True to Saffie’s concern, he tried to turn his head, tried to catch a view of the person touching him.
“What’s your name? Can you tell me your name?” Saffie’s voice was a gaunt shadow of what it should’ve been for someone with seven years of medical schooling. He shifted his knee to block the glare of the headlights off those wandering eyes.
Blood beaded out of the corner of pale lips as that boy formed another word. “…Remember…” It tracked across smooth skin and slipped into the concrete below. “They…said…I wouldn’t…”
“Okay, okay,” Saffie whispered. “Don’t talk. Don’t talk. It’s fine. Help will be here soon. You’ll be fine. Please don’t move.”
That depleted frame shook with a cough, a small spatter hitting the ground, drops scattering across Saffie’s pant leg. Saffie sighed quietly and glanced away. “You need to be still.”
If the ambulance took much longer, this boy would pass out again. He may even code.
