Chapter 5

JACK

It’s 7:01 p.m. I’ve been awake for over eighteen hours. When Rooney’s pulled away by her friend, I use the opportunity to find my colleague and grab my notebook. My colleague is nowhere to be found on the rooftop or in the apartment. Instead, he’s a couple of avenues over at a bar. I make the ten-minute trip and debate whether to go back to the party to find Rooney to say good-bye.

I should call it a night. Go back to the hotel and sleep this lousy day off. It was one thing for there not to be enough pamphlets and to be late for my presentation. It was another for Dave to have mixed up my order with someone else’s and have to spend the rest of the day passing out menus to a local Chinese restaurant for people to take notes on.

That was followed up with fielding questions about where the information on Mars and our mission went and if the mission is still even happening at all. Repeating over and over that no, the conference was not catered, and that I will not be taking lunch orders. I rushed through the last fifteen minutes of my hour-long presentation and then skipped the networking altogether. That won’t help my promotability.

Suffice it to say, today did not go well for me. But at least Noodle Palace gained two hundred new customers.

If I’m being honest with myself, assigning “lousy” to this entire day would be inaccurate. There was Rooney. Rooney who said weird things to make me laugh. Who kept me at the party far longer than I wanted to be. Who made me actually enjoy myself in a social setting. Who is unlike anyone I’ve ever met.

I pull the scarf over the lower half of my face and breathe in her smell. I feel a pen clipped into the neckline of my sweater. Rooney’s Discipline Pen. Or her Do-Good Pen, rather. I can’t steal this from Rooney. She did provide me with warmth, after all. I have to go back to the party.

Rooney isn’t in the apartment. A surprise pang of disappointment jolts through me. I continue my search and walk up to the rooftop to try to find her, but she doesn’t seem to be here, either. I should’ve said bye earlier. Covered my bases. Tied up loose ends. Now she’s somewhere in the city, an unspoken good-bye between us.

“I had given you an F-minus for leaving without saying anything,” a voice I now recognize says behind me.

I spin around, a smile widening on my face. Rooney peers up at me from behind her bangs.

“I have your pen,” I say, handing it to her.

Rooney takes her pen from my hand. “For this, you get a B-plus. I thought you left.”

“I thought you left,” I say, relieved.

“I was in the kitchen loading up on more tāngyuán. It’s red bean filled. My favorite.” She dips a shallow porcelain soup spoon into a bowl filled with liquid and a small mound of perfectly round, Ping-Pong–size rice balls. “You want one?”

I shake my head. “I don’t usually eat after seven thirty.”

“A.m. or p.m.?” she asks, keeping her face fixed.

I let out a short laugh. Rooney seems to have this effect on me. “I filled up on the cheese and charcuterie boards earlier. I’ve heard there’s good food here, but I didn’t get to explore much. I leave tomorrow.”

Suddenly, Rooney looks concerned. “Already? What were you here for?”

I feel my smile fall. “A work thing. But I’d rather not talk about it.”

“Right. Long day. I get it. I don’t want to talk about work, either. Can we just agree right now that anything work related is off-limits? It’s officially a rule, okay?”

“Deal.”

“Great.” She goes in for a bite and a half-eaten rice ball rolls down her coat. “Fudge!”

I look closer at where the red bean dripped out. “Luckily it blends in. Sorry,” I quickly say before realizing where I was looking. “I wasn’t trying to look at your—” I clear my throat as heat rushes to my face.

Rooney smiles coyly. “I was gonna say, Jack,” she teases, “it’s fine. I made this. I can always make another one.” She rubs at the spot with a napkin.

“I’ve never met someone who knits their own winter coat and scarves,” I admit.

Her face lights up with a grin. She’s always either smiling or laughing.

“And I’ve never met someone who doesn’t eat solids after the sun goes down,” she says. “What about liquids? Are those okay?”

I consider her question. “Depends on what kind.”

“Papaya juice? There’s a Gray’s Papaya nearby,” she says.

I nod in agreement, remembering the advertisement I was handed earlier. Those flyers really do work.

“Should we try to figure out who the host is and say thanks before we go?” I ask.

“Normally, I’d say yes, but we’d probably be here all night,” Rooney says with a shrug. “For all I know, you could be the host.”

In the elevator, Rooney pulls a—surprise—red knitted hat over her head.

I hold in a smile. “Do you have a fascination with crustaceans or something?”

She looks genuinely confused. “What do you mean?”

“Are you aware that you’re practically dressed head to toe in red?” I ask with a laugh. “With your hat, coat, mittens, and scarf, you look like a cooked lobster.”

Rooney gasps. “I was going for more of a crab look, but I’ll take lobster,” she says, side-eyeing me. She can’t hold in her laugh. Her body forms a comma as she tilts forward in laughter. A momentary pause, as though she might keep laughing.

We burst out from the warmth of the building into the freezing cold night. In a matter of minutes, my bones feel solidly frozen.

The light of the building streaks down onto her face, emphasizing the moles on her cheek.

“What is it?” she asks, wiping her face with her mittened hands. “Red bean?”

“No, sorry,” I say, breaking my attention from her face. “You have… the Big Dipper on your cheek. I didn’t mean to stare.”

“I do?” she asks.

“May I?”

She nods. I slowly attempt to trace one point to another with the fingertip of my glove. Time stretches with each zig and zag. I can feel Rooney’s eyes on me. I focus my gaze from her cheek to her eyes, the connection a shot of adrenaline.

Rooney scrunches her nose. “Jack, when’s the last time you washed that glove?”

I cringe. “I found it in a storage box, so I couldn’t say for sure.”

She analyzes my face. “You have the Milky Way on yours. Would you like me to show you?” She proceeds to drag her mittens across my face as she vibrates with laughter. I laugh, too.

“Yeah, that was weirder than I thought it would be,” I say, catching my breath.

Something above my head draws her attention. “Look! One of the lanterns.”

I follow the direction of her hand up over the nearest building and search for a bag of fire shooting across the sky like a comet. But there’s no fire. Just a paper lantern bobbing up and down against the darkened ocean of a sky. Making its way… somewhere.

Everything about that rooftop launch went against how missions should be. It was the sloppiest takeoff of my life. But perhaps the most beautiful.

Rooney pivots in my direction, reaching out to grab my upper arm. “Maybe it’s ours,” she says excitedly. “I thought I saw a dent in it.”

Where I’d typically tense at the touch, my body doesn’t react. Like this is a normal occurrence. As though she’s touched me there a thousand times before.

Rooney lifts her hand off my coat and takes a step back. I glance down at her, keeping my head angled up. The sidewalks are illuminated enough for me to see her blush.

“It can’t be ours. We released it almost an hour ago,” I say confidently.

“Let’s follow it.”

I should not go on a wild lantern chase with this woman. Especially not one without any sort of plan in place. I should go back to the hotel. I still need to pack for my early flight tomorrow morning.

But for some mysterious reason, I don’t want to. I don’t want this night to end right now.

“Unless you’re too tired?” Rooney asks.

“I’m not tired at all,” I lie. But it’s not completely untrue. A third wave has hit me. I’m more energetic than I’ve been all day. I check my watch—7:35 p.m. What am I doing? “This will be like trying to find the end of a rainbow. Though now that I have an idea of who you are, I’m pretty sure you’ve tried to find the end of a rainbow before.”

Rooney grins. “Every time I see one.”

“Any luck?”

She tilts her head, indicating for me to follow. “Come with me, and we’ll find out together.”