Page 6 of I Did Something Bad
I hadn’t thought it a particularly inquisitive question, but he goes silent for a beat, then two. Sensing something, I flick my eyes up frommy menu to his face. Nothing. Not a single crease in his smooth forehead. I look at his hands next—once again, nothing; he’s still holding on to the menu with the precise amount of tension that one holds on to any menu.
“No,” he says. He looks over while I’m still staring at his hands, and, when we make eye contact, smiles. Feeling like a kid caught with her hand in the candy jar, all I can do is smile back. “My grandparents died before my parents moved out here,” he explains.
Oh. Right. I knew that. The awkward silence makes sense, then. I’m tempted to say “Sorry,” but from personal experience, I find it tediously useless when someone apologizes for something that’s already happened and is out of your control, because then you’re obligated to say something like “It’s fine!” or “It was a long time ago!” even if the former isn’t entirely true and the latter is literally stating the obvious; so, I say nothing.
“Anyway,” he says, shutting down that topic of conversation (which is understandable; I might be trying to get a scoop, but I don’t want to make someone keep talking about their deceased family members). “It’s been our family’s go-to spot for as long as I can remember.”
“Is that why they let you rent out the whole restaurant?”
He offers me a controlled smile. “You could say that.”
As soon as he answers, I realize what a stupid question that was. Of course Tyler doesn’t need to convince a restaurant owner to close the place for him for one night. Aside from the fact that he could afford to rent out an entire private island if he wanted to, the publicity that this place is going to get from posting a photo of him eating here will make them several months’ worth of income in a matter of days.
Still, I am surprised that this is where he opted to have his first dinner in the city, especially with a journalist. When Clarissa texted me the address, I’d never heard of the place but had assumed it was some new hipster fusion eatery in Chinatown, probably on the firstfloor of a freshly renovated “colonial-style” building, somewhere where the lights are intentionally too dim, the prices aren’t printed on the menu, and the other patrons are too cool to ask him for a selfie but not too cool to sneak photos from their respective tables. But when the taxi dropped me off in the alley, I’d walked past the shop three times before a nearby parked trishaw driver, taking pity on me and my heels, asked what I was searching for.
In my defense, the wooden accordion door had been shut, and it wasn’t until I rang the somewhat-rusted doorbell hanging to the side that an old man popped out his head, asked my name, and ushered me inside.
I was worried that word might have leaked about Tyler’sactualflight and the fact that he was already in town, that maybe paparazzi and sleuthing fans would be lined up around the block, Instagram streams open and ready to go—butno oneoutside would guess that the restaurant was open, let alone that Tyler Tun was satting on the other side of those splintered white wooden doors.
We both get the wonton soup. When our beers arrive, he lifts his in my direction.
“Shall we toast to officially signal the start?”
“The start of what?”
“The interview.” He waves his bottle in a small circle. “This whole story. We’re going to be seeing a lot of each other over the next two months, right? Feels fitting we start it off with a toast.”
“R-right,” I stammer, somewhat caught off guard by his “let’s get ’em” attitude; for someone so private, he’s awfully… friendly. After a few seconds, he shifts his bottle closer to me, and I realize he’s waiting for me to clink mine against it.
As I (finally) raise my beer to his, I take a deep breath to shake off the nerves that have gripped me from out of nowhere. I need to get my shit together. I need to forget that he’s Tyler Tun, whose lastmovie broke multiple cinema websites across the world when tickets were released. Or the fact that he’s the only Asian man amongst the world’s top ten highest-paid actors. Or the rumor that he was actually Shonda Rhimes’s first choice for the Duke of Hastings, but it conflicted with another movie so he turned down the role, although that hasn’t stopped Shonda from still trying to get him for futureBridgertonseasons. He’s just… Tyler. AndI’minterviewinghim.
“Hey, speaking of the story, I did want to say something up front.” He places his free palm down on the table, like he’s literally laying something out for me. “If we’re going to see each other six days a week for two months, I think we should be honest with each other. No… games. Maybe we could even be… friends?”
The word startles me. I can’t tell if he’s being sincere, or if this is one of his tricks for Disarming an Interviewer 101. “What a… novel approach,” I say, careful not to make my confusion blatant. We’re fifteen minutes into this meal, and I still can’t get a thorough read on him. And that ticks me off.Bad.“Do you treat all of your interviewers like your friends?”
He smiles. “Depends on the interviewer.” Before I can ask what that means, he adds, “But I’ve never had someone interview-slash-shadow me for quite this long before. So what do you say?” He lifts a shoulder. “Friends?”
Okay, I’ll play along. I respond with a thoughtful nod. “That makes sense to me.”
“Okay, so let’s start.”
“Start?”
“Getting to know each other. What was your dream job as a child?”
I blink, the question jolting me like an unexpected burst of static. I don’t like talking about my personal life with strangers, period, but especially not with people I’m interviewing. “I’mthe interviewer here, remember?” I try to deflect.
It doesn’t work. “You can’t expect me to be comfortable letting you shadow me for two whole months when I don’t even know you,” he says. “You’ve had a whole Wikipedia page at your disposal. All I have on you is your LinkedIn and a very sleek professional website.”
I contemplate his point in silence until I have no choice but to acquiesce that it is a good point. Not because I’m necessarily worried about his comfort—I’m sure the rest of the world regularly bends over backward to make sure Tyler Tun is always comfortable—but because the more comfortable he is around me, the more he’ll trust me, and the more he trusts me, the higher my chances are of gettingsomethingfrom him.
“Detective,” I say. “I wasobsessedwith Nancy Drew.” I don’t ask him the same question because I already know he wanted to be a cruise ship captain.
He chuckles. “So was my sister.”
“Does she still want to be a detective?”
“No, she wants to be a doctor. An ob-gyn.” As soon as the words leave his mouth, he stills. The right side of his mouth jerks up, like a puppeteer has just pulled a stray string. Two seconds later, it falls back down, that perfectly symmetrical cover-story smile back in place.
