Page 3 of Billionaire’s Ruin

He leaned down and kissed me on the cheek.

“Morning, I thought you weren’t getting here until the afternoon.”

“Yeah, I finished work earlier.”

His sleeves were rolled up to his elbows; his top buttons undone, revealing a glimpse of his broad chest.

I couldn’t help feeling a little warmer just looking at him.

“You didn’t have time to change first?”

He glanced down at his clothes—his shirt and suit trousers, obviously too formal for this laid-back town—and chuckled.

“I wanted to check on you first. But I’d forgotten how hot the weather is.”

Without another word, he sat across from me and waved to the elderly Chinese man taking orders at another table.

“One kopi peng,” he called out before the man reached us. Then they exchanged a few more words in a Chinese dialect I didn’t recognize.

“You look well rested.”

I nodded in agreement just as a strange awareness hit me.

My shoulders had dropped.

My posture relaxed.

My eyes were soft.

My breathing was slow.

I had nowhere to be, no responsibilities to bear.

So this was what it felt like—to actually unwind.

It was strange how I’d forgotten what that even meant.

The constant knot of anxiety that used to sit at the bottom of my belly was gone.

I made a mental note to check my blood pressure at some point—maybe at a walk-in clinic for a small fee.

Dannie slouched in the red plastic chair, his posture easy as he exhaled deeply.

“Isn’t this beautiful?” he said, shaking his head from side to side as if he couldn’t quite believe the view himself.

“Yes. There’s something magical about this place.”

The view wasn’t spectacular by any means.

The water was muddy, the color gray.

There were thousands of beaches that outshone this one easily—plenty of oceans back in the States.

The old man returned with an iced coffee in a bluish, opaque plastic cup, a small orange plate stacked with toasts, and a white ceramic bowl of half-boiled eggs. He mumbled something under his breath, and Dannie handed him a red note—maybe two or three dollars’ worth. The old man set down a few coins in change before shuffling away, leaving us alone.

“You can’t eat this,” I said, wrinkling my nose.

What Dannie ordered was a local dish. I’d noticed plenty of cafés, “kopitiams,” they called them, serving the same thing. It was a well-loved breakfast here. The slices glistened with butter, or maybe margarine, sprinkled generously with castor sugar. The eggs looked perfectly poached at first glance, but their whites still shimmered—barely set. And the drink, of course, was syrupy and sweet, something I’d reluctantly grown addicted to.