The Restoration Rival novel · Chapter 1 of 21
Chapter 1: The Loose Lock
Dawn in the shared dorm room. Ken shoves the bathroom door open to wash for football and catches Lu Chen in the tub. Lu Chen doesn't flinch, and Ken's own body betrays him.
The bathroom door had never latched right since September.
You had to lift it and shove. Everybody in the building knew that.
I knew it at six in the morning with my football kit under my arm.
I shoved.
The door swung in and hit the wall.
Steam rolled out into the cold room.
Lu Chen was in the tub.
The tub was full to the lip, water gone gray with soap, and he had his head tipped back against the tile.
His eyes were open. He was looking right at me.
I didn't move.
I should have said sorry. I should have backed out and pulled the door shut.
Instead I stood in the doorway with the cold coming off the window behind me and the heat coming off the tub in front of me.
His hair was wet and pushed back off his forehead.
Water ran down his chest, slow, into the water.
The room smelled like the cheap soap they sold at the campus store, the green bars.
I had smelled that soap on him every night for four months.
I had never smelled it like this.
"Su Ken," he said.
My name in his mouth. Flat. Not surprised.
He didn't sit up. He didn't cover anything.
He just watched me the way he watched everything, like he already knew how it ended.
My kit bag slid off my shoulder and hit the floor.
I bent to pick it up and my hand wasn't steady.
That was the part I hated.
I had been sharing a room with this man since the first week of term and I had never once let him see me rattled.
Provincial exam first place. Economics. The one the whole campus talked about.
The one my sister studied with on Tuesdays.
The one whose name I had heard in my grandmother's kitchen when I was nine years old.
I picked up the bag. I straightened. I made myself look at his face and only his face.
"You're using all the hot water," I said.
"There's more."
"It's six in the morning."
"You're up early," he said.
"Football."
"With that leg?"
I looked down. My left thigh had a wrap on it from last week, half unwound, hanging loose.
I hadn't told anyone about the wrap.
He was still in the water. Still not moving.
The window over the sink had frost on the inside corner.
Below it, on the shelf, his things were lined up the way he lined up everything.
Razor. Comb. A small blue jar of something that wasn't campus soap.
He was not the sort of man who was supposed to be in a shared dorm at all.
He was the sort whose family paid for a single room.
And yet here he was, in mine, every night, breathing six feet away from me.
I had asked the dorm office in October how we got put together.
The clerk had looked at her screen and said the room with the private bathroom always went to the two with the highest scores.
I had believed her for four months.
"Close the door," Lu Chen said.
"What?"
"The door. You're letting the cold in."
I didn't close it. I stood there with my hand on the frame.
The water moved. He shifted, one arm up along the rim of the tub, and the surface broke across his chest.
I looked. I couldn't not look.
That was the thing I was going to think about at practice. That was the thing I was going to think about in the dark.
His shoulders were wider than the coat ever made them look.
There was a thin scar under his collarbone, old and pale.
I wanted to know where he got it. I hated that I wanted to know.
"Take a picture," he said.
"What?"
"You're staring."
"I'm not."
"You are."
I turned my head toward the frosted window and the gray light coming through it.
Behind me the water sloshed.
Then the sound of it draining off skin.
I turned back.
He was standing up.
Water ran off him onto the tile floor. It ran down his stomach and his thighs and pooled around his feet.
He didn't reach for a towel. There was a towel on the hook behind him and he didn't touch it.
He stepped one foot out onto the bath mat.
My mouth had gone dry. My hands were cold and the back of my neck was hot.
I had a game at eight. I had a wrap on my leg I hadn't rewrapped. I had a bag on the floor with my boots in it.
None of that was in my head.
Only him, standing there, dripping, looking at me like he had all morning.
"Lu Chen," I said. It came out wrong. Too low.
He picked up the towel then. He held it, didn't use it.
"You could have knocked," he said.
He stepped over the rim of the tub toward me.
"Or stayed."
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