She never has a problem finding a cab outside the Hideaway Lingerie building. It's as if they wait all day for the models to need a ride. The rain is a waterfall of bullets that burst on contact. She is soaked deeper than her clothes, deeper than her skin. The raindrops perforate her soul, drowning her spirit and chilling her bones. She climbs into the cab.
Jin returned (the first time) on a balmy Thursday night. She was sleeping. She heard a series of loud thumps on her balcony. She woke up. Of course, she wanted to run out there. Any intruder talented enough to penetrate her beauty sleep would clearly be incapable of sufficiently defending him- or herself against her wicked prowess. Clearly. She discarded that idea in favor of the loaded gun she kept concealed in her nightstand drawer. She may have been young and dumb, but she wasn't stupid.
She crept out of bed, convinced she was prepared to use the weapon in her hands. Panda, forever the ferocious bodyguard, snoozed on the floor next to her bed. Tiptoeing around the black and white mass, she passed a mirror. The night was hot. Her sweaty, rumpled sleepwear matched the gun perfectly. Her ceiling fan helped the warm air circulate evenly. She crept into the living room, smart enough to aim the gun at the balcony door she'd been brilliant enough to leave standing open.
"I have a gun," she informed her intruder, "and I know how to use it."
"You'll forgive me if I have a hard time believing that." The voice was flat, enough to slice through her bravado.
She slumped. "Jin."
"Don't sound so relieved, Xiao." His hooded figure darkened the horizon. She stepped onto the balcony, eyeing him warily. Her haltered black leotard pinched at her skin, plastered to her like a layer of tar. A lovable pink bunny smiled beatifically at him from her white spaghetti-string top. Her shorts didn't have enough substance to qualify as clothing. Below the grinning bunny were the words: 'It's cute how you think I'm listening.' He pushed back his hood.
His ridiculous eyebrows were knit together over the bridge of his nose. She tugged at one of her twin French braids. Her hair was longer than last he'd seen, her bangs less tidy. She looked down at the gun in her hand, perplexed, then thumbed off the safety. She must have realized that wasn't right because, a second later, she thumbed it back on. She bit one side of her bottom lip and blew her bangs out of her eyes. Are you fucking kidding me, Jin? she thought.
Twenty minutes later, Xiaoyu slipped comfortably back into their old groove. Talk and listen. Jin laid in the grass, arms folded behind his head, eyes closed, a small, peaceful smile curving at his lips. She sat beside him, leaning back on her hands, telling him all about how much he had missed while he'd been gone. She relayed to him every anecdote, every funny thought, every stupid story she could remember. She would start telling him about one thing, but then another thought would occur to her, so she'd interrupt herself and go off on a tangent and then another, only to realize that she had entirely forgotten what her original thought had been, get really lost, then finally return to her initial topic when she found it again.
She told him that she was still going through her awkward stage, he just couldn't tell from the outside anymore. That's what you think, he said. She punched him. Then they made out. And for just one second, she felt whole again.
But then he pulled away, turned away, pushed away. What the fuck? she wanted to say, but she kept her mouth shut. He wasn't even there anymore. She wanted to ask him where he'd gone, but she knew he wouldn't let her go there. There was something in him she would never understand. It was a grain of sand in their relationship. She'd often thought that he came from somewhere else entirely, somewhere to which he was trying to return.
He stood. He still wouldn't look at her. He started to walk away. She stared after him a long moment, then scrambled up and followed behind him. She could hear air whistling through the puncture in her heart.
"Hey, don't I know you from somewhere?" She can see the cabdriver eyeing her in his rearview mirror. She wants to ask him if that's a trick question but keeps silent. "Hey, I know where I seen you from! You're that girl from them underwear ads! You've got one of them freaky Asian names, like, um . . ."
The streets outside are a parking lot of taxis. Her dress is all bodice and white, transparent now from the torrential rain. Their taxi seems designed to project into the cab the High Definition surround sound of tires on rain-soaked asphalt. Her dress is off-the-shoulder, barely long enough to cover her ass, a cat's-cradle of black string, sleeves resting comfortably down a quarter the length of her arm. They ride through a puddle, and her window is caked in water slowly cascading downward. Her sleeves, as far as she can tell, are furry, feathery, sheer white confetti. Her bodice, as far as she can tell, is trimmed in black of the same and tickles the back of her thighs.
She begins to chew on the end of one finger. "So how do you models stay so skinny? 'Cause my wife, she could stand to lose a few, if you know what I mean, and she's always going on all them funky diets, but she can't seem to, er, manage it, you know?"
She looks up, tip of her finger still between her teeth. This man seeing her in nothing but her underwear makes her skin crawl. I'm on this fabulous new diet, she tells him. Well, I don't eat anything, actually, and when I start to feel faint, I suck on a carrot stick. She finds herself imitating the exotic/British accent that all the other models seem to affect.
Most days she wears hooker heels. She gets all the aesthetic benefits of heels but is still not "tall" and is, in fact, still shorter than the majority of her male colleagues. Today it's spiky black boots. The congregation of cabdrivers honk at each other outside her window.
"Oh, I remembers yer name now! It's Ling! Ling, er, something. Something with an 'X'. I never can pronounce those crazy Oriental names, you know how it is. Oh, and, hey, is Ling your first name or your last name? I can never tell with them freaky Asian names . . ."
That, she tells him, is my little secret. She knows it's useless to pronounce her first name for him.
"Ling? . . . Ling Xiaoyu?" And even before she turns to see the passenger sitting beside her, she knows she's in trouble.
She often thinks that irony has a great deal to do with reality and wonders how much of both is either fantasy or fallacy.
He still looks like a beautiful blonde duck, or like one exploded on the back of his head—but in the sexiest way possible. He stares at her with his leather jacket and jeans, in his brick red T-shirt, staring at her as if she's a ghost. In a way, maybe she is. This is her first encounter with anyone from the Tekken universe since leaving it, and she feels like she's on a different planet. She stares at him through strings of hair that fall into her face on a regular basis. Steve Fox. His gym bag sits between them. Absentmindedly, she blows the hair out of her eyes.
Their cabbie's head explodes. She's more surprised than anything else to see the front windshield splinter, feel the hot splash of his blood slash across her cheek.
Steve is pulling her out of the cab, and, suddenly, the city is all around her. Honking, cussing, and the immediate crush of angry yellow vehicles, and the rainfall pounds in her ears with the ringing. No one notices what's going on. The old paranoia is back, Steve pulls her into the bubblewrap of sidewalk concourse, and she's hopping on one spiked heel, struggling with the gun she keeps hidden in the other. Her heel breaks.
Steve pulls them into an abandoned alleyway, and she feels like she's going to have a seizure. WHAT, she breathes, THE . . . FUCK? He opens his mouth to speak but receives no such opportunity. YOU . . . PEOPLE, she seethes. IT'S LIKE WALKING THROUGH THE FUCKING BERMUDA TRIANGLE! Steve's trying to quiet her. DON'T YOU SHUSH ME! she screams, nearly biting his fingers off. GOD, I AM SO SICK OF PEOPLE TRYING TO KILL ME WHEN I DIDN'T EVEN DO ANYTHING! she wails, close to tears.
Steve grabs her face and kisses her. The kiss is about ninety percent hair, what with the rain plastering the stuff to her face and it being in the way to begin with. She molds herself to him, too inextricably occupied to know what to do with her arms. Molecules within her chest rearrange, and they are soaked, their soaking clothes sticking together.
She gulps for air, and raindrops drip from their noses and eyelashes. She moans. I'm going to sleep with you now, aren't I?
"Damn right you are," he growls and kisses her again.