Page 1 of From Beijing, With Love

PART IBeijing

CHAPTER ONEDaniel

This trip was a huge mistake.

Daniel wasn’t being dramatic. Okay, maybe just a little. He was giving his brain free rein to catastrophize, as some might call it. But what was he supposed to do after a message like that?

Tell me you are NOT in Beijing right now!!!??

Technically, he wasn’t in Beijing; he was halfway between Amsterdam and Beijing, strapped into a middle seat in the economy cabin. The airplane icon hovered on the map in front of him. As he reread the text, feeling the jab of each extra punctuation mark, he cycled through all the possibilities in his head—none of which were good.

The elderly man on his left let out a wet and phlegmy cough, and Daniel fought the urge to recoil. In need of air, he twisted open the overhead fan with a clammy hand while doing his best to not move too much. The woman in the window seat was dozing off on his shoulder, but he didn’t have the heart to wake her. After her sobbing video call with her kids before takeoff, she deserved the rest.

With a disinfectant wipe, he cleaned his hands and scrubbed every nook and cranny of his phone. Tapping on the Instagram icon, he was met with his own face looking back at him from the screen—a selfie at just the right angle so it was all tousled honey-brown hair, hazel eyes, and good bone structure. In the photo, he held up his passport with the boarding pass peeking out to show off the destination. Complete with a fake smile.

He had posted it to his feed before takeoff with the caption “Being spontaneous for once”. It was word for word what Taylor had accused Daniel of never being when Taylor made their breakup about Daniel instead of what he did. So, throwing it back at Taylor—virtually, two days too late—felt good for a moment. It’d probably feel even better if Taylor had actually cared to look at it.

He hadn’t.

But Poppy had, and her ominous response waved hello right before the Wi-Fi dropped. Considering that she was the one he was visiting, her reply mattered a lot. He glanced at the map: There was only … seven hours and forty-two minutes left on the thirteen-hour flight. Daniel scrubbed his hands again with a new disinfectant wipe, his skin tight and stinging.

Closing the map, he hit play on a movie—some feel-good rom-com with a guaranteed happy ending. Even though his belief in happy endings was shaky, bordering on nonexistent at the moment, he watched on. He needed the distraction from his own head.

The big-city heroine fell in love with the small-town innkeeper on the not-so-big screen in front of him as he glanced down at his phone every two minutes. No message from Poppy or Taylor. When the movie ended with the innkeeper down on one knee, he was officially over it.

Something moved in his periphery.

Down on the armrest was a foot, shoved expertly in the narrow crack between the seats, one toe peeking out of the holey sock.

Was he about to fight over the armrest with someone from a whole other row? Before he even finished that thought, the foot grazed his elbow like the worst game of footsies.

Hell no.

Daniel shot up so fast that he forgot the economy cabin wasn’t made for people who were six foot four. His knee rammed into the seat in front while his head bashed into the overhead bin.

“Sorry” was the first word out of his mouth as pain radiated from his skull, which was hopefully still intact. He was apologizing to no one for no sensible reason like a good Canadian, even after a decade of living in Amsterdam.

The foot slipped away on the sly. The culprit from the row behind tugged down his eye mask, ignoring Daniel’s glare. Sinking back down into his seat, Daniel checked his phone again. The Wi-Fi he’d paid for still hadn’t deigned to grace him with its presence.

Great. Just great.

In the soft hum of the darkened cabin, regret didn’t so much creep up on him as it smacked him right in the face. And he deserved it.

So what if his relationship had ended the same day he royally screwed up at work? Why couldn’t he just binge eat chocolate cake while drowning his sorrows in Cabernet Sauvignon like he always did? Throw in a few breakup anthems, and he really had something there.

Though the wine was what had gotten him into his current predicament. That and five months of nonstop pestering from Poppy to visit her in Beijing.

“Babe, if not now, when?” Poppy had tossed her hands up for dramatic effect without spilling a single drop of her very full glass of wine. Her move across the world hadn’t stopped their weekly wine o’clock tradition; it just made it virtual. “I’m only here for another seven months. You have a break from your job and from … you-know-who. This is totally your chance to visit the motherland.” She gasped. “Isn’t this what they call serendipity?”

“Fatherland, you mean. And by serendipity, you mean my colossal fuckup that literally landed me on leave?” Daniel rolled his eyes, squarely ignoring that bit about you-know-who. He wasn’t going to talk about what Taylor did, not for Taylor’s benefit but for his own self-preservation.

As the wine bottle emptied, the idea of being somewhere else had sounded pretty damn good. Certainly a whole lot better than sorting through the debris of his blown-up life. Then Poppy had found a cheap flight—less than half of what it’d normally cost.

That was how, forty-eight hours later, he was sitting in a metal tube, breathing the same recycled air as three hundred other people, and diligently sanitizing the armrest like his life depended on it.

Closing his eyes, he let the exhaustion of the last three days drag him under while clutching his phone.

When he was rattled awake by the bumpy landing, he was still exhausted, maybe concussed, and severely dehydrated. He had a rule of not drinking on flights so he could avoid extra trips to the washroom that only got dirtier as the flight went on.