“’Cause you’re trying to make your mom happy? Don’t you want to continue your old man’s name? Your dad’s a legend.”

“Death changes people,” I grunt as I push the weights up.

“You afraid of death?”

I consider his question because I’m oddly not. I’d rather live, for sure, and it would suck for my mother if I died prematurely. My father often said that the man who doesn’t fear death has the winning hand.

“No,” I answer, “but there’s nothing that appealing working ops for counterfeiting.”

“Don’t you want to climb the ranks? Where’s your ambition? You just want to run The Lotus for the rest of your life?”

I don’t. In fact, I can’t really see myself running it for more than two or three years more. Cheryl can manage the club just fine without me.

Done with squats, JD switches to cardio and gets on the rowing machine. “And what about your dad’s legacy? You just gonna walk away from that?”

I think about what my father would have wanted me to do: continue his name in the triad. Like JD, who took over his father’s job importing additives and adulterants used to cut cocaine.

Moving up in the Jing San is a logical step. The triad is my world, my family. I know I wouldn’t want to work for anyone else, and it’s not like I have any special talents to do anything else.

“I’ll think about it,” I tell JD.

“Good. It’s an honor to be recruited by Lee Hao Young, you know.”

JD recently expanded what he does after being approached by Hao Young a few months back. I don’t know the details, and I haven’t asked because the less I know, the better.

Bridget sends me an update in the afternoon:

Got a lot done, so I can come over tonight with Amy.

Like you weren’t ever going to, I think to myself. But if I text that back, Bridget might change her mind just to prove a point.

I recall the many times she had come at my place, and in that small bedroom in her apartment six blocks from campus. She’s going to want more of that. The question floating in and out of my head is whether or not she’d go beyond vanilla sex.

As if reading my mind, while we’re sitting in my usual spot on the second floor of The Lotus later that evening, JD asks, “You plan to show Bridget the other side of your club?”

The Lotus has two sections: one for the regular patrons, comprising a good chunk of triad members and their friends and associates, and the other for those who also engage in BDSM. I have distant relatives who play at a place like The Lair, which isn’t bad, though the place tends to also get gawkers and newbies. Before The Lotus, I’d played a few times at a placed called The Cross, a unique club where gang members manage to mix without getting into fights with one other. But I like my own place. It’s not as crowded as The Cross, and I control the clientele.