I’m resting in my apartment when the buzzer goes off to let me know that someone downstairs is intending to visit me. I get up, brushing my hair back over my shoulders, and go to the panel. “Who is it?”

    “Onna, would you just open the door?”

    I blink, and my hand half-fumbles with the button as I press it. What in the world would bring Wufei here? And why now, on our day off? I nervously wait in my apartment, trying to find a relaxed pose for when he comes in, completely forgetting that I’ll have to open the door until I hear the cold and polite knocking.

    I chuckle to myself as I cross the room from the couch, wondering if I’ve ever described knocking as ‘cold’ and ‘polite’ before. I pull the door open and Wufei stands there, neutral expression turning puzzled as he takes me in.

    Not that I can blame him. I don’t wear my hair down at work, at all, and I rarely wear a skirt, or have a goofy, Maxwell-class grin on. “You wanted to see me, I take it?” I ask him, after noticing that his gaze is lingering a little longer than I feel comfortable with.

    Instead of answering, he steps past me into my apartment, dropping his jacket across the back of my arm chair. “You’ve got a lot of furniture,” he comments, stepping over to look out the picture window in the living room.

    “I get that from my mother,” I mention. He nods absently, as though he expected me to say something like that, and I close the door behind him finally. “Look, as glad as I am to see you again, Fei… this is my day off.”

    He turns to look at me, and for a second, the light catches in those chocolate brown eyes of his, and the evening orange bronzes his complexion. He’s wearing a little half smile on his face and for once his expression, open, tender, unguarded, is directed at me. And he’s letting me see it.

    “It’s mine too,” he says with that little half smile. “Am I not allowed to see you outside of the office?”

    That question catches me off guard. As a general rule, I don’t see men, except when it comes to working. The few times I tried dating, it didn’t work out. My father was very adamant about me marrying ‘Chinese’, and arranged most of my younger experiences with men. Usually boys I’d never met before, from traditional families. Dressed in suit and tie, they expected me to wear a dress and heels, put on lipstick and wear perfume and smile a lot. According to custom, it is the woman’s job to please the man, but, as my father gratingly accepted after I sent the fourth of his arranged young men home with a frown on his face, there was simply too much of my mother in me for all the Chinese customs and traditions to stick.

    “No, I guess there’s no reason you can’t see me,” I admit, truly unable to find one. Wufei is someone even my father cannot truly disapprove of, when the chips fall down. His lineage, from what I read up on his colony after I found out which one he was from, is as old, if not older, than ours, and no one in his line was reasonably suspected to be American in any way, unlike my father’s grandfather. If my father would still see me, I’m certain he would promote any sort of relationship with Wufei that Wufei would.

    It’s kind of hard since he disowned me when I left the Alliance. We haven’t spoken in three years, and counting. This Christmas marks the anniversary of our last meeting. It was… at my mother’s funeral.

    “But is there some specific reason you stopped by?”

    “I was in the neighborhood,” that’s an outright lie. The only way for Wufei to be ‘in the neighborhood’ is for him to drive or somehow get across town, which means traversing the entire distance of the downtown area, and it’s late fall, the city isn’t that warm and friendly to walking. Last time I checked, he didn’t have a car… and he lives a block down from Headquarters, unlike me. I got this apartment purposefully to get away from work when I wasn’t on-duty. “And I got hungry, and since I was near your apartment, I thought maybe I’d see if you wanted to come and get something to eat.”

    “Nice try, Wufei,” I hear myself say. I don’t identify myself with the voice coming out of my mouth, because I would never say something so self-assured and over-confident. “Now why don’t you tell me why you’re really here?”

    He blinks, surprise and… something else, bubbling up from deep within those milk chocolate eyes. There is an edge to his response, before he opens his mouth. For a second, he seems unsure of himself, and I am half afraid that he’s going to deny that I’ve caught him in an outright lie, but, thankfully, he smiles a little wider, a real smile, and says, “You caught me.”

    “Apparently,” I respond, but have no idea what to do with him now that I’ve got him caught. “So, why are you really here?”

    He shrugs, innocently, nonchalantly, and turns to inspect the plants I have lining the inside of my picture window, shoving his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “I spent the afternoon with Heero, and next thing I knew, I found myself at your doorstep.”

    Heero. A name I don’t hear so often any more, since Relena evened whatever score she had with him. He, like Duo, chose not to join the Preventers after the Mariemaia Incident. He always scared me a little, despite the intense respect I had for him, I was never quite sure what he wouldn’t sacrifice in the name of the mission. Wufei, though, seems unperturbed by his comrade’s single-minded dedication to the mission, and I guess I can understand that. In his own way, Wufei was exactly the same. Just like Trowa, Duo, and Quatre.

    No one outdoes Heero when it comes to dedication though. I love all the guys, but none of them ever blew themselves up for their … mission.

    “No real reason? No motive?”

    “Woman,” his voice is neutral, not condescending, not gloating as it can be, and he says, “are you always this defensive?”

    My answer, immediate and quick, makes me cringe, “Only around Chinese men.”

    Something peaceful in the air shatters, like a Ming vase falling onto hardwood floor and disintegrating into a million pieces.

    He turns to look at me, and pounces on that statement, “What’s wrong with Chinese men?” his voice, like a cat, arches it’s back and hisses at me.

    “Nothing,” I say quickly, moving to the closet to get my coat.

    “What are you doing?”

    “You suggested we go get something to eat.” He blinks, as though, in the past minute and all that has been shattered he has forgotten his offer. “That usually requires coats, especially when it’s this cold outside.”

    He nods, and turns to face me, a little cloudiness in his brown eyes that tells me I won’t get away with evading that last question so easily. I lift his jacket from the chair and offer it to him. He reaches for it, and then stops, as though the picture of me before him, hair down, wearing no makeup, strikes him for the first time in this instant, and says, “Your eyes are… not just blue.”

    I start to bristle, growing up I had been very proud of my blue eyes, but the awed look on his face, the reverence with which he imparts this new crystal of knowledge he has picked up about me, makes me bite my tongue.

    “Yes,” I respond, turning a little towards the door with one shoulder before brushing my hair back over my shoulder and letting it fall down my back in a long wavy river.

    “I never noticed that before.”

    “Well…” I stall, trying desperately to think of something else to say that won’t alienate him further, “I don’t imagine you spend much time staring at them, at work.”

    I make a slight lean towards the door as well, suddenly very uncomfortable with having such an observant person inside my apartment, my safe haven.

    “I suspect I don’t,” he comments, finally taking the hint that’s becoming less and less subtle as the minutes pass. “Let’s go then,” he starts to lead the way out, but at the door he pauses to hold it open for me, and then closes it firmly, waiting while I lock up.

    “Anywhere you had in mind?” I ask him as I tuck the keys into my coat pocket. In the other pocket I quickly stuff my wallet, wondering if we’re going to be taking a taxi or if we’ll be walking wherever he’s decided we’re going, and he seems to think for a minute.

    I find myself holding my breath, waiting for him to speak in some monotonous, up-tight voice that holds an unhidden command. Echoes of every other experience I’ve had with someone identifiably Chinese…

    But he throws me a curve ball.

    “Where would you suggest?”

***