Years of determined denial willed him to stop, to still his hips, but she kept on moving on top of him.
Her slim legs were stronger than he ever would have guessed and she clung on, locking him in place, grinding deeper against him, driving her palms into his armpits, biting the side of his neck until her saliva drooled down onto his shoulder and he felt himself release inside of her, an explosion of white light behind his eyes and a slow, silent ebb.
Later, when she’d unlocked the handcuffs and untied her shirt and they both lay naked in the gray morning light, Dorrie had turned to him, something like apology in her eyes.
“Do you want to love me?” she asked.
And he’d nodded and fallen asleep.
二十九
New Orleans, LA
WHY WAS THE SCREEN on her phone always dirty? Grace pulled up her sleeve and wiped off the smudges, then went straight to her own site, Style + Grace. Everything around her smelled like grilled cheese sandwiches and french fries. She looked down at her screen again. It had already acquired a sheen of grease, but at least the feed was finally loading.
Response to her Whataburger post was strong, even though it kind of felt like a lazy image to her—just a shadowy shot of her painted toes against the green glow of the motel pool, the Whataburger roof in the distance. Still, fifty-three comments! The last one was from SmileSteez: Name of polish! Must know ASAP LOL! The polish was from her dad’s failed line. Quickly, she responded: Sorry, it’s a limited edish! A gurl’s gotta keep some secrets!
Grace looked down at her breakfast. A half-eaten western omelet and a pile of french fries, ketchup squirted over everything. They were sitting in a diner in Uptown that Uncle Nash said they had to go to. If the Fountain Coffee Room in the Beverly Hills Hotel—her absolute favorite place to go as a kid—had a vile evil twin, this place would be it. The Camellia Grill sign outside was a cheesy hot-pink neon, which was especially weird because the building looked like a church, and then inside it was pink walls and green stools, the same pink and green of the Fountain’s perfect palm wallpaper. If she was going to run away to a place, like the kids who hid out in the Met, that’s where she would have gone. She loved the takeout that came in pink and white striped boxes, she loved the platters of tiny silver-dollar pancakes, she even loved the old people who ate truly weird combinations of things, like a hamburger patty with a scoop of cottage cheese.
As soon as Saina got her driver’s license, the three of them went there by themselves all the time, sat three in a row, and watched the hotel workers in their pink shirts and the ladies who went to the spa in their pink robes climb up and down the staircase that spiraled past the glass wall. The line cooks all had stars cut out of the tops of their tall paper chef’s hats. When they stood at the griddle making perfect mounds of hash browns, the overhead lights cast star-shaped patterns that swirled and danced on the sides of their white caps. Saina and Andrew had convinced her as a little kid that it was magic, and she still kind of believed that it was, as much as anything else in the world was magic.
“You done with that, hon?”
Grace looked up at the waitress. She seemed so nice. Why did she have to work here, instead of at a magic place in Beverly Hills? Life was so unfair. She nodded, and her half-eaten plate was whisked away, but the adults were all still eating and arguing over something boring, her father waving a piece of bacon in the air, taking bites of it as he talked.
Time to text Andrew again.
We’ve been here for an hour already. Where are u?
He replied immediately.
On way.
Andrew. She was still mad at him, but having him here was better than being alone with Dad and Babs. Grace peeled open another creamer and poured it into her coffee. It was almost white now, like a toasted marshmallow. As she waited for an earlier Style + Grace post to load, she listened to Uncle Nash, who liked to talk even more than her father did.
“But we must admit that Taiwan has done just fine without China’s intervention,” he said. “You know that Taiwan’s per capita income is higher than Portugal’s, Saudi Arabia’s, and Liechtenstein’s and exactly twice as high as China—”
“Higher than new China,” her father broke in, “but that because it has many people from old China. Many people who run away from Communist, who know that study is important and money is important, who all too smart to work in fields!”
“So you think the Taiwanese people had no impact on the Taiwan Miracle? Surely you have to at least admire their lack of violence. Cambodia and Vietnam were in similar circumstances after World War II, and look at what happened there.”
“Can’t compare. Cambodia and Vietnam, whole different people. Wild. Not cultured. The Taiwanese people all just Chinese anyways.”