Ebony Scales

“Do you still have the money?” Yingtai asked. Joy gaped at her for a moment, before Yingtai shrugged. “Well, I know he wouldn’t get hurt. The money would be nice, and we could use it.”

“That’s Chinese thinking for you,” Longwei joked, easing the tension. “And yes, Yingtai, I still have most of the money. I think a little bit drifted out of my pockets during the run, but here, I’ll let you count it.”

Longwei handed Yingtai a large folded wad of bills, easily an inch thick, causing Yingtai to gape in wonder. She had never seen so much money in one place before, and Joy chuckled as the young woman counted the money, which ended up coming to just under twenty two thousand yuan, or about thirty five hundred dollars. “We’re rich.”

“Not quite dear, but we can use it to help the village a lot,” Joy replied, watching as Yingtai folded the money up carefully and tucked it into a small cloth bag she was using to keep all of their household finances. Only Joy’s weekly paycheck was placed in a bank in order to give a veneer of normalcy to the situation. Taking the bag from Yingtai, she opened it, fishing out a few hundred yuan, handing them over to her. “Yingtai, can you do me a favor?”

“What?”

“Can you go out for the evening? I’d like some time with Longwei alone, if it’s okay.”

Yingtai looked from Joy to Longwei, a smile breaking out on her face. She rattled something off in quick village style Chinese before grabbing her cheap shoulder bag she used as a purse and headed out the door. Joy looked over at Longwei, who shook his head in amusement. “Should I ask?”

“Probably not,” he said, “you’d most likely get embarrassed.”

Joy flushed, looking at the door. “That wasn’t exactly what I was thinking about when I asked for privacy,” she muttered, before looking back at Longwei. “I just didn’t want her to see me slap the hell out of you for doing something so stupidly risky.”

Longwei’s face turned from hopeful anticipation to chagrin. “Sorry, it’s just that I couldn’t see any other way to get in where we needed to be.”

Joy nodded, her shoulder trembling. “But you could have been hurt.”

“I could have been hurt many times in my life, especially from the Triads. I expected the danger. How do you think I felt when you insisted on manning that bunker in the last attack?”

Joy curled up against Longwei’s side, her mind filled with thoughts about just how dangerous a task they were undertaking. Still, the warm feeling of her lover against her side was calming, and for some reason she felt together they could take on the whole world and conquer it. When Longwei wrapped his arm around her shoulder, rubbing her arm through her t-shirt, she hummed in contentment. “That feels nice.”

“Amazing,” she laughed.