Chapter 1
Tan’s back hit the front door with a thud. Overhead, a tapestry of stars shone in the Palo Alto night sky, but they were lost on him. His senses were overpowered by Winter’s soft mouth. She tasted sweet, like the red gummy bears they’d devoured too many of tonight. As her fingers tightened in his hair, a jolt of sensations sparked down into his toes.
Fumbling for the doorknob, his thumb found the biolock. Even at an angle, a beep sounded. Dad’s good work. Mouths still locked, they tumbled inside into a cozy darkness. Their dress shoes sailed off into the shared collection of Lee family and Woo family shoes.
“Your room,” she whispered, which was the farthest from his sleeping parents—not to mention her bed lay in half of a partitioned suite she shared with her mom.
Winter clung to his arm, and they fumbled across the dark hallway, over the silk runner, and into his room. Sana’s bedroom door stood ajar across from Tan’s, but fortunately, his five-year-old sister slept like a log. Winter shut his door silently. Moonlight flashed on the pearl pins in her coiled black hair as they crashed together again.
The world inverted. On his bed, his tuxedo pants legs tangled in her bare ones. He felt drunk on the strawberry scent of her skin and the petals of his magnolia blossom boutonniere shredding between them. As he cupped the smooth line of her jaw, an ache burned inside him.
He’d been wanting to tell Winter how he felt about her. It had been building slowly inside him over months. It was right there, on the tip of his tongue. But at the moment, her tongue was in the way. And he wasn’t in any rush to change that.
“Winter.” He breathed her name into their kiss. His lower lip grazed hers. She shifted against him, and then the thud of something hitting the carpet reached his ears.
The dull sound was like a splash of water on Winter. She pulled away, creating a space between them that filled with cool air. Her brown eyes, rimmed with soft black lashes, opened wide and startled.
“What are we doing?” she whispered.
“Kissing,” he whispered back.
Winter rolled over to the far side of his bed and hung her legs over the edge. She gazed down at the floor, at whatever it was that had fallen.
“We can’t do this, Tan.”
Tan sat up, too. His lips burned from Winter’s mouth. They felt tender and slightly sore, in a delicious way he’d never felt before.
“I’m sorry,” Winter said. “I guess … I guess I got carried away.”
So had he, obviously. But their whole world was self-restraint, trained from the cradle. Didn’t it mean something that they wanted this so badly?
Winter bent over, and when she rose again, she was holding a vase in her hands. Moonlight caught the delicate gold lines on its peacock-blue painted surface. Rebecca, his ex, had given it to him, not for any reason. Just because. She was a gifts person.
It’s not there because it matters to me, he wanted to explain. It was there—on his bedside table—on the side he didn’t sleep on—because he hadn’t gotten around to moving it somewhere else.
But Winter beat him. “You’re still hung up on her.”
“I’m not,” he protested.
Winter’s face was obscured by shadows. He couldn’t read her eyes, which bothered him. He usually could, and he didn’t like not knowing how she was feeling. Especially right now.
Their kiss had started nearly two hours earlier. At prom, which they’d agreed to attend together at the last minute, after tickets opened up to sophomores.
After Winter asked Tan.
After Rebecca had ghosted him for four months and he’d sunk into a bleak, Rebecca-shaped depression.
After he finally made contact with her and found out she was dating another guy.
“I’m not hung up on her,” he repeated now. Which felt like the truth. And yet, why did he also feel like he wasn’t being entirely honest?
“Your parents are our landlords, Tan.”
Technically true. After Winter’s father passed away last summer, Fannie and Winter found the Lees’ in-law suite for rent on Craigslist. It was a spare bedroom with a bathroom between it and Tan’s room, intended for Mom’s widowed mother one day.
Their parents had become fast friends. So had he and Winter. Everyone thought Winter and Tan going to prom was sweet and adorable and the perfect way for him to return to life “AR” (After Rebecca).
But he’d never anticipated the magic of tonight. The way his entire body shook with laughter as their teppanyaki chef tossed a savory cooked shrimp at Winter, who caught it in her mouth—and he’d captured it on camera. How right it had felt when she tucked her hand into the crook of his arm on their way into the decorated gym.
And as they danced on the floor with her head pillowed on his shoulder and his arms wrapped tightly around her waist, prom seemed like the perfect moment to let her know the truth of what she’d come to mean to him. They’d left the gym, hand in hand, and headed for his car. Inside, he wasn’t sure who’d initiated this kiss. Both of them, it seemed.
And then they hadn’t stopped. Even for most of the drive home.
“I don’t think of you guys as our tenants,” Tan said. “Neither do my parents. You guys are like … like family now.”
She ran her hands over her rose-colored gown, smoothing down the satin folds. “How could I be so selfish?”
“Selfish?” He wasn’t following. Winter was possibly the most unselfish person he had ever met. “Winter, I don’t think you need to—”
“If we got weird, whose side would your parents take?”
“Got weird? What, between us?” Tan frowned.
“Finding your house was a fresh start for my mom. I can’t ruin that. God.”
“Ruin that? You mean, if this didn’t work out? As in, my parents would kick you guys out? No way!” Winter was looking far, far ahead into the future. That was so her. “They’re not like that—” he began, but then he realized what she was saying:
Tan’s family was Winter’s landlord.
That meant Tan was in a position of power over her, even if it didn’t feel that way. Winter and her mom had lost everything when her father died. Their house. All their furniture and most of their possessions. They’d been living off savings ever since so Winter’s mom could go to law school.
Tan gripped his cotton sheets. He’d read enough stories in English classes about entitled sons taking advantage of people in their household. He wasn’t as rich as them by far. But he was never going to be that guy.
And now that he thought about it, if their parents got even a whiff that he and Winter were attracted to each other, they might insist the Woos leave.
“I get it. It’s cool.” Tan held up his hands and slid off his bed. His feet pressed into the soft pile of his carpet, and he squeezed his toes together, trying to stay grounded. “No problem. You’re right. We just got … carried away.”
A silence fell. Then Winter rose to her feet. “I guess it was inevitable,” she said. “Hormonal teenagers living in the same house.” She gave a short laugh. “Going to prom together.”
Tan felt as though she’d smacked him. Was that really all that had happened? Some function of biology or brain chemistry or circumstances?
It didn’t feel that way. Not to Tan.
“We just need to make sure we’re never alone from now on,” she continued. “Okay?”
“Okay,” he said, because there wasn’t anything else he could say.
Then she left his room, her kisses still burning on his lips.
Chapter 2
Tan managed to avoid Winter the rest of their sophomore year and into the summer. Winter was busy with her internship at the Peninsula Youth Theatre, and Tan was busy coaching middle school kids on solving mind benders at a camp at the Community Center. He hung out with his friends on the weekends.
He needed to respect Winter’s wishes, and that meant keeping his distance, no matter how hard it was. He barely saw Winter and had to resort to rewatching her shrimp-catching video. And he tortured himself wondering: Was the whole landlord thing an excuse? Or was Rebecca the real reason Winter had backed away? Was she right? Had they simply been hormonal teenagers caught up in the music and lights of prom?
But he always came back to the same point. No matter what, he couldn’t jeopardize things for Winter and her mom. Renting their rooms enabled Winter to start sophomore year at Palo Alto High School, one of the best public ones in California, while her mom got back on her feet. Palo Alto housing was otherwise impossible to afford. Not to mention, having a boarder was how his parents pulled off buying this four-bedroom home in the neighborhood, too, until the day they could hopefully afford it on their own.
At school, Winter had formed a tight group of friends through theater and even landed a leadership role as an executive editor for the yearbook. Transferring schools would disrupt her entire life, and Tan would never forgive himself if he was the cause.
He’d upended an existence once before—Rebecca Tseng’s.
* * *
The memories played through his mind on Labor Day as he walked to Walgreens to pick up a trifold board for a major presentation later in the year. He passed Timothy Adams, Rebecca’s favorite hot chocolate shop. He and Rebecca had dated sophomore year, after she’d arrived at Palo Alto High School last September, same as Winter. Rebecca was all extremes: the sleekest black hair, the softest skin, the most satiny clothes. Elegant pearls dangled from her ears. She was a parachute kid, meaning her parents lived in Shanghai, and she lived on her own in a designer-everything apartment on University Avenue—the nicest part of town. An education consultant checked in on her a few times a week. And that was it for supervision.
They’d met in English class. She’d asked for his help with an assignment on idioms. After school, they headed to Timothy Adams for hot chocolate, and soon after that, they were a thing. He liked her openness to learning another culture and her artistic flair. Her style, alluring accent, and gracious way with words quickly made her one of the most popular girls in their class. He woke up every morning and fell asleep every night to a text from her, and he felt amazed that, miraculously, this glamorous girl had picked him.
But it all ended with Rebecca’s parents visiting in December and forcing her to literally flee the country—to get away from Tan.
That wasn’t how Winter saw the whole debacle. She thought Rebecca’s parents were monsters. But that was definitely how Tan saw it.
And that was how Tan had completely upended Rebecca’s life.
Inside Walgreens, the ceiling and shelves fluttered with BACK TO SCHOOL signs and discounts. Tan found a collection of ten different trifold boards with ten different prices and features. A big red sticker even promised an A+.
He picked it up, frowning. No matter how Winter spun what had happened, Tan had been the catalyst. He’d dated Rebecca for three months. Her parents had dined with him for an hour. The length of a serious job interview. Tan wasn’t secretive or complicated. He had medium-length black hair, regular brown eyes, and twenty-twenty vision. What you saw was what you got, and the Tseng family knew pretty much all there was to him.
And they’d evaluated him and found him lacking.
And then, Rebecca was gone.
He set the A+ trifold back with a thump. This presentation wasn’t for a grade. It was for an encryption project to showcase at a local science fair in November. Recruiters for major summer internships would attend. It was mostly targeted at college students, but some high schoolers participated, and Winter had encouraged him to submit a project. So he’d signed up. But that was a lifetime ago. Before prom. Tan and Winter hadn’t talked about it since.
Bags of gummy bears, Winter’s favorite, hung from the shelves directly beside the poster boards. The same brand Winter and Tan had eaten at prom. Suggestive selling: homework and sweets. It was effective. Tan automatically reached for a bag. Then his hand fell. This project was going to be a lot of work. A lot of hope that might only be dashed. Tan wasn’t sure he could take much more of that.
Leaving the candy behind, he grabbed the closest trifold and headed for the register.
* * *
Along with the start of junior year, fall arrived with a chill to the air and a graying of the sky. It was harder to avoid each other. Despite the in-law suite, the house wasn’t that big. One living room, one garden, one small kitchen. If she was studying on the couch, he went to his room until one of their parents showed up from work. If she was in the garden, he stayed in the kitchen.
On Winter’s end, she’d started to dress in baggier clothes since prom. Was that for his benefit … to cool things off? If so, it didn’t help. Winter’s baggy clothes couldn’t hide how pretty she was. Or the fact that Tan knew what her mouth tasted like. And every month, Winter seemed to get hotter, a feat he would have thought impossible, and that turned the weirdness up another notch.
But the good thing was, Winter’s and Tan’s parents were homebodies. Having them around was a good buffer. The three of them loved weeding the garden and cooking elaborate meals together. Their families ate dinner together around their modest dining table almost every night. You didn’t exactly think about kissing someone when her mom was asking you to pass the potatoes.
Tonight, they’d cooked a particularly elaborate meal. Everyone dug in as Sana prattled on about how she was teaching Morse code to her classmates in kindergarten. After Mom cleared the plates, Dad brought out a lemon meringue pie. He cut huge slices and dished them out.
“Is something going on?” Tan asked suspiciously.
“Just because I made pie? Does that mean something is going on?” Dad brushed a slight dusting of flour off his forehead, pretending to be wounded.
Copyright © 2024 by Abigail Hing Wen
