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The bar is dark, the way the best ones are. The shadows seem to carry the sound differently, hazy with low murmurs and soft jazz. Wen Kexing pauses in the stairwell and checks her teeth in the mirrored wall, tilts her head back and forth critically: mixed results. There’s no lipstick where it shouldn’t be, but her eyes look like impact craters in the perfect moon of her face.
She smiles, and the light catches her eyes in a way that makes her look almost alive. Holds it.
Good. Like that. Exactly like that. Time to find Ah Xu.
There aren’t many people here, tonight. It’s a night for spending with family, not at a bar alone—or with someone who barely tolerates you—if you have the option. The bar’s scattered patrons look like shells washed up on the shore, curled up and calcified over the drinks in their hands.
For a long moment, Wen Kexing doesn’t spot Zhou Zishu. Caught an earlier flight, she’d texted, seventeen minutes ago, At bar now, sending Wen Kexing on a mad dash to delegate her last hour of work while simultaneously wrestling out of seven layers of clothing and into something not made of fleece.
Maybe Zhou Zishu’s in the bathroom. She wouldn’t have just—left.
Or, well. She wouldn’t have left without saying something.
Not anymore.
That thought has just started to take up physical space at the back of Wen Kexing’s throat when, finally, their eyes meet across the room. Ah Xu. Wen Kexing’s heart gives a warm lurch of recognition. Her feet take her halfway across the room, like a little sailboat in the warm winds of Zhou Zishu’s attention, before she registers the slouched, tousled figure the eyes belong to and nearly comes up short.
But it’s Zhou Zishu alright—under the bedraggled exterior she’s somehow, ineffably, unchanged, from the way she rolls her eyes and takes a deep drink at Wen Kexing’s reaction, to the smirk she fails to hide behind her whisky glass. That doesn’t make the changes any less bizarre. Wen Kexing’s never seen Zhou Zishu wear anything but sharp-cut couture, light-eating blacks and harsh whites. But tonight, she’s drowning in an oversized sweatshirt the color of dirty dishwater. Her hair, somehow, is worse. What’s left of it, anyway—the bottom half is shaved so close to her scalp that it’s little more than the suggestion of where hair ought to be.
“Ah Xu, your parents gave you that hair,” Wen Kexing calls. She’s pleased to hit a convincingly lofty tone, one that doesn’t too obviously say, What the hell happened. Zhou Zishu probably wouldn’t have told her anyway. “The least you can do is keep it away from wood chippers and rabid animals.”
Zhou Zishu, looking both unimpressed and unmoved by Wen Kexing’s appeal to filial piety, doesn’t deign to answer that. But she does let Wen Kexing push an experimental hand though her hair, tipping her head into the motion like a cat. So Wen Kexing does it again. The hair on the top of Zhou Zishu’s head is ragged and a bit ridiculous, but there’s something hypnotic about the shaved sides: soft, almost puppyish in one direction, harsh in the other, like it’s been freshly cut.
“Ah Xu!” Tangling her fingers in the longer hair on top, Wen Kexing tilts Zhou Zishu’s face up to meet her own. “Tell me you didn’t cut it today. This is old, right?”
“I cut it today,” Zhou Zishu says mildly. “Did you know you can get electric hair clippers online? Same-day delivery.”
“Aiya, Ah Xu. What’d you do that for?” She tugs the hair in her fingers reproachfully. “I know you know it’s the New Year.”
“So what?”
“You couldn’t wait a week? What if you cut all your luck in half?”
“What luck?” A harsh, incredulous sound escapes Zhou Zishu’s throat. Her eyes cut away, and she finally reaches up to pinch Wen Kexing’s wrist. “No,” she concludes. “I couldn’t wait.”
There’s a strange note in her voice, like—sincerity, maybe. Wen Kexing makes a show of shaking out her hand and settling in the booth. There’s a full glass of neat whisky next to Zhou Zishu’s empty cup; Wen Kexing snatches it up before Zhou Zishu can decide to revoke it. “I guess the worst is probably over,” Wen Kexing concedes lightly. “The heavens couldn’t devise a worse fortune than what you’ve already done to your head.”
“Oh, shut up. I’ll do better next time. The lights in my bathroom aren’t great, you know.” Zhou Zishu shrugs, as if Wen Kexing has any idea what her bathroom looks like. “Whatever, it’s only hair. It grows back.”
It does, but Wen Kexing suspects that Zhou Zishu’s attitude would be similar if she’d accidentally cut off one of her own fingers. She has a way about her, like she sees herself the same way that little boys see worms: like she can cut pieces off herself without consequence.
“No next time, please. You’ve butchered a masterpiece of god,” Wen Kexing sighs, just to make Zhou Zishu laugh.
It works, even though it’s a lie. There’s a certain rakish charm to the way Zhou Zishu’s bangs fall unevenly over her forehead; an elegance to the exposed line of her throat. Thanks to the fact that Zhou Zishu can’t seem to stop running her fingers over the side of her head, the oversized sleeves of her sweatshirt have bunched up around her elbows, leaving the soft blue insides of her wrists exposed. Wen Kexing’s never seen that skin before outside a bedroom—or bathroom, or wherever they go when they go to fuck. Never without carefully prying a row of tiny buttons free from Zhou Zishu’s cuffs, while the woman murmurs over her, “Careful. If a button comes off, I’ll push you in the toilet where you belong.” Never had a chance before to watch the way her skin shifts and sticks when her wrist falls back to the sticky bar table. There’s a tiny bruise just under the crease of her elbow, perfectly round, like it was made by a needle. Like—
“Lao Wen,” Zhou Zishu says, and it takes a moment for Wen Kexing to realize it isn’t only in her memory. “Lao Wen, are you paying any attention at all? If you’d rather just make love to the table I can leave.” When this fails to elicit an instantaneous response, Zhou Zishu kicks her in the shin.
“Ah Xu!” Wen Kexing howls, not entirely for show. There’s a distinctive heft to the kick—Wen Kexing swerves to check under the table and discovers that here, in the parallel universe she seems to have fallen into somewhere along the way, Zhou Zishu wears combat boots. Not new ones, either; the leather creases tenderly over her ankles and toes, and the heels are ground down on the outside edges to match Zhou Zishu’s rolling stride. More on the right than the left, like the limp Zhou Zishu won’t admit she has when she’s tired. This time, Wen Kexing’s able to dodge when a boot lashes out again irritably. “I’m listening, I’m listening!” she cries, swinging back up. “Ah Xu, so violent. I’m just a delicate peach. If you bruise me, what will I do?”
“Delicate,” Zhou Zishu snorts, bumping her steel-toed boot against Wen Kexing’s sneakers, too gently to scuff the white leather. “I imagine you’ll sit at your computer and do nothing all day, just like you always do. Get a real job and then complain to me about your ankles.”
“And what will your real job have to say about that hair, Ah Xu?” Wen Kexing grins, basking in the glow of Zhou Zishu’s unusually good mood. She’s warming up, certainly—that’s not just in Wen Kexing’s head. This time last year Zhou Zishu never would have let Wen Kexing see her smile like this, loose and smug, the soft line of her throat relaxed as she tips back the rest of her whisky. She—
“Who cares what they’d think?” Zhou Zishu announces, signaling the bartender for another drink. “I quit.”
“You — when ?”
“This morning.”
Which means–what? She quit—went home—cut her hair—flew straight here? Wen Kexing ducks under the table again, and this time notices a battered hiking backpack tipped against the wall, just barely small enough to qualify as carry-on. The squashed arm of a puffer coat hangs haphazardly out of the overstuffed top. No matter how long she stares at it, it does not resolve into the scalloped Rimowa bag she’s used to seeing in Zhou Zishu’s hotel rooms.
Wen Kexing feels herself making a stupid expression—it’s a little too easy to imagine Gu Xiang’s face on her own. It takes more work than usual to relax the muscles of her face into arch curiosity. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m delighted to see you,” she muses, returning to the table. “But If you’re not in the area for business, then—what are you doing here?”
Zhou Zishu shrugs, her eyes cutting to the bar and back again. “I said I’d come, didn’t I?”
In Wen Kexing’s experience, the two things don’t have much to do with one another. People don’t come or go because they say they will: they do what they think they need to do, and find ways to justify it later. Or they die and don’t do anything at all.
“Of course you’ll come,” Wen Kexing settles on, and Zhou Zishu rolls her eyes. “I never leave my partners un–”
Zhou Zishu’s palm cuts off the rest of Wen Kexing’s nonsense. For a second she’s transfixed by the sensation—Zhou Zishu’s firm, cold hand pressed against her face, hot air building in her lungs behind it. When she glances up, Zhou Zishu is watching her with a sardonic expression. “Lao Wen. Aren’t you going to congratulate me?”
“Ah…” Belatedly, she smiles as widely as she’s able, and waves to the bartender. “Of course! Congratulations! What are you doing, we should be celebrating! A glass—no—” She points at the top shelf, to a jiao jiu that Zhou Zishu only drank once, five months ago, more slowly than usual. Zhou Zishu doesn’t argue, just watches her with dark, shining eyes. “Leave the bottle, thank you.”
Wen Kexing pours for the both of them, hands mercifully steady. Ah, she thinks, toasting her errant lover, no wonder Zhou Zishu looks so happy and relaxed. To have nothing tying her down—what must that feel like? It’s something Wen Kexing doesn’t even let herself fantasize about, not even in her most desperate moments. Revenge isn’t something she can quit as easily as a job.
“So what’s next for Zhou Zishu, now that she’s quit her fancy job and mowed off all of her beautiful hair?”
“I’ve got a train to Chengdu tomorrow morning.” Zhou Zishu smiles crookedly at her cup. “After that, Who knows? I have enough saved up to do whatever I want for a while. Maybe I’ll travel the world and surround myself with good wine and famous beauties—that’s what you’d do, right, Lao Wen?”
No. Not unless that was where Ah Xiang happened to be. But unlike Wen Kexing, Zhou Zishu has an entire life outside business trips to a backwater city. Unlike Wen Kexing, she must have other interests—other people—out there. Other reasons to live. They don’t really know each other, and now they never will.
“Of course.” Wen Kexing treats Zhou Zishu to a long glance and a slow smile, and adds, “Fortunately, I’ve already found a great beauty, so as long as we have good wine I’ll be satisfied.” Too true, maybe. She falters, chest echoing with gnawing hunger, a deep void where other people, presumably, have feelings.
Zhou Zishu takes pity on her. She usually does, in the end. “What do you think about somewhere warm? By the water, maybe. Hainan, or Guangdong.” Her eyes are bright over her glass of baijiu.
“Ah,” Wen Kexing says, imagining it. Zhou Zishu, shoulders freckled with sunlight because she kept forgetting to put on sunscreen. Sitting on a balcony overlooking the sea with a can of Wusu beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Stealing clams from the beach. Bringing them home in a bucket, staring expectantly: What’s for dinner. Zhou Zishu, smiling at a woman who wasn’t Wen Kexing, who says Well—
Wen Kexing’s never even seen Zhou Zishu in the sunlight.
Zhou Zishu must see something in her eyes; her grin flattens off. She reaches hastily to pour Wen Kexing another drink, almost guiltily.
“Ah. There’s no need to worry about it now. The sea will wait.”
Will you? Wen Kexing swallows it back.
❈❈❈
Time smears together a little, after that. If this is going to be their last night together, Wen Kexing is going to make it count. To be honest, she stopped flirting quite so much with Ah Xu when she realized that she’d found someone who understood the contours of her mind, even when she didn’t know the details of her life. It was easy to talk to Zhou Zishu, easy to be quiet with her. And Zhou Zishu didn’t need any convincing these days to let Wen Kexing follow her to bed—apparently she’d made a convincing enough case for herself that first night, when she brought Zhou Zishu off four times with just her mouth.
But tonight all her mouth can seem to do is spout nonsense, the kind of stuff she realized years ago made women less likely to sleep with her. Zhou Zishu must feel at least a little bad for abandoning her, because she’s not even that mean about it. She doesn’t even say anything when Wen Kexing starts waxing poetic about “winter melons.” Just shakes her head and pours Wen Kexing another glass.
Zhou Zishu has always been secretly soft-hearted. It’s nice of her to spare Wen Kexing’s feelings.
Eventually, though, she does reach a limit. That limit is apparently innuendoes about melon seeds. “That doesn’t even make sense,” she interjects, stealing Wen Kexing’s cup. “No more of this for you.”
“Anything can make sense if you say it the right way,” Wen Kexing murmurs. Zhou Zishu doesn’t know about her job; she thinks Wen Kexing is some kind of influencer, which—she is. Ultimately.
“I know,” Zhou Zishu agrees, a shadow passing over her fine-boned face. It takes Wen Kexing a startled moment to retrace their conversation. By the time she has, Zhou Zishu’s packed up the strange melancholy. She tips her cheek into her palm, graciously lets Wen Kexing not only steal back her cup, but trace her fingers over the back of her hand along the way.
“After all,” Wen Kexing adds, “I convinced you to sleep with me.”
“Tch.” Zhou Zishu blinks lazily. “What convincing? You just followed me up to my room like you belonged there, like a bedbug.”
“It worked,” Wen Kexing says, smug.
“Then you stole my phone number.”
“You didn’t block me! That’s the same as giving me your number.”
Zhou Zishu gapes, exaggeratedly astonished. “It’s possible to block numbers? Why didn’t anyone tell me?” She fishes her phone out of her–goddamn it, Ah Xu–her bra and taps at its screen industriously. “Let’s see…”
“Ah Xu,” Wen Kexing cries. She’s tipsy enough for the line between play and reality to blur, and there’s an ember of genuine panic burning at the bottom of her gut. “How will I contact you when you’re off on a beach somewhere? If I can’t send you naughty pictures, I’m afraid Ah Xu will forget me.”
“Fat chance,” Zhou Zishu mutters, darkly, tipping her chair onto its back legs to keep the phone beyond Wen Kexing’s reach. It stays perfectly balanced for all of ten seconds, and then the cheap legs start to bow and wobble.
“Ah Xu!” Wen Kexing makes a desperate grab for Zhou Zishu’s wrists, and grasps only air.
That’s not because Zhou Zishu is on the floor, bleeding, but because she’s righted herself easily and is doubled over the table, laughing hysterically. “Your face!” she crows. She might be crying a little. Wen Kexing plucks the phone from her unresisting fingers, and is unsurprised to find a blurry, close-up picture of Wen Kexing’s face, eyes and mouth cartoonishly wide with alarm. It may be the least sexy picture ever taken of her.
“Nooo, don’t delete it,” Zhou Zishu begs, hiccupping, wiggling her fingers ineffectually. “Let me keep it as a gift for the new year. Seriously—seriously, I’ll give you your present if you do.”
“You can’t keep a gift hostage,” Wen Kexing objects. “That defeats the entire purpose.” Still, she surrenders the phone with the ridiculous picture still on it. She’s not sure Zhou Zishu has ever begged her for anything before.
That’s usually Wen Kexing’s job.
With a triumphant, “Here,” Zhou Zishu plonks a crumpled red Cartier bag on the table.
“Ah Xu—”
”Don’t get too excited,” she warns, rolling her eyes and craning around to catch the bartender’s attention. “The bag’s reused.” As if that weren’t obvious. It’s Christmas-themed, for one thing, with stylized reindeer gamboling around the logo. For another, there’s a torn patch at the top where a gift label’s been messily peeled off.
“I’ll treasure anything as long as it’s from Ah Xu.”
She scoops it toward herself with both arms, tips it toward and finds—at least five different bags of nuts, crammed in together on top of—more nuts. The kind of things a person might buy as travel souvenirs: Sichuan mala peanuts, walnut-stuffed jujube, black sesame brittle from a confectioner in Shanghai, licorice peanuts in a hemp bag. A glass jar of Lin’an mountain walnuts. A white paper paper, taped shut, with dried betel nuts. Wen Kexing holds it up, eyebrows raised, and Zhou Zishu protests, “An old auntie sold them on the street outside my hotel in Changsha. I couldn’t get away from her.” She pauses, almost bashfully. “She said they’re good for people who work late nights.”
“Ah Xu. Thank you.” Her chest feels tight. A rapid inventory of her purse fails to suggest anything Wen Kexing could plausibly pass off as a gift. “I,” she says, and Zhou Zishu laughs and tips her cheek back into her palm.
“I’m sure you can make it up to me later,” she murmurs.
Wen Kexing’s face burns. She fumbles a jujube out of its bag and offers it first to Zhou Zishu. “Happy New Year, Ah Xu.”
Zhou Zishu recoils like she’s been offered live worms. “Eugh, no. Walnut. Gross.”
“You… but…” Zhou Zishu is wearing a pinched expression Wen Kexing has never seen before. It’s strangely cute. “Okay, okay, have some more wine. You poor thing, you had a scare, drink up.”
“Shut up, Lao Wen. Ugh.” A faint, ironic smile breaks through, and she holds up her cup for a toast. “Happy New Year, idiot.”
❈❈❈
Two hours, three drinks, and five successful attempts to grope Zhou Zishu’s sideboob later, Wen Kexing decides that she does not awfully care why Zhou Zishu is being so nice tonight. Why should it matter if Zhou Zishu is letting her leave a hand tucked around her upper thigh out of pity? It’d give Wen Kexing pause if she thought Zhou Zishu were too drunk to know or care about the fingers gently exploring the warm place between her legs, but she’s not. Her gaze is as steady and alert as ever; her fine-boned hands are confident when she pours them both another glass of jiaojiu.
There’s a loose thread on the inside seam of Zhou Zishu’s joggers. Wen Kexing plucks at it absently while she relates a story about how Cao Weining got his jacket stuck in a bus door. Zhou Zishu waits for the story’s triumphant conclusion (Cao Weining frantically running alongside the 24 bus for half a city block) before glancing significantly at Wen Kexing’s hand. “Shameless,” she decides, not quietly.
Well, it was nice while it lasted. “So suspicious, Ah Xu. You’ve got a loose thread here. I have scissors—”
Zhou Zishu grabs her wrist before she can pull her hand away. “Are you really that desperate?” she continues, as if Wen Kexing weren’t even speaking.
“I…” Just Like that, Wen Kexing is so turned on that the palms of her hands hurt. “...Ah Xu?”
“Lao Wen, do you want everyone here to know how needy you are? I’m curious. If I weren’t here, you’d have to find someone else to take care of you. How many of the women here would you have sex with?”
Until a year ago, Wen Kexing would have been asking herself this same question. And why shouldn’t she? When she was hungry, she ate. When she was thirsty, she drank. When she was horny, she fucked. It was just another way she made her body quiet, made it something more and less than aching, empty meat.
Maybe it’s just the weight of time, of scraping and starving and raising a child when she was hardly more than a child herself. She’s been planning her revenge for more than twenty years. Her body is too tired to contain her spirit; restless, it yearns for things it cannot have. Casual sex only reminds her that Ah Xu isn’t there. There’s already a deep, anticipatory ache in her gut where Zhou Zishu won’t be.
“Only Ah Xu,” Wen Kexing swears, without looking around. She already knows. It’s only Ah Xu.
Zhou Zishu tsks, but her eyes are shining. “So picky these days, Lao Wen. You think you’re too good for these nice ladies? You’d be lucky if any of them gave you the time of day.”
A spike of humiliated pleasure drives itself through her spine; she feels rooted to the chair, heavy and liquid. “Ah Xu, all water is forgettable when you’ve seen the vast blue sea.” Some of the warm haze clears to make room for this new thought. “My luck ran out when I met you, Ah Xu. How could anyone else compare? It’s hopeless. For months now, it’s only been Ah Xu for me.”
For some reason, Wen Kexing had worried Zhou Zishu would be put off by this. The best way to measure anything’s appeal was how much everyone else wanted it—sex most of all. Instead, Ah Xu laughs shortly, apparently delighted by Wen Kexing’s absurd commitment to getting off with vibrators in Zhou Zishu’s absence.
“What,” she presses, “you’ve been waiting for me all this time like a good girl? Like a little wife waiting for her husband to come home from the wars?” Ah Xu’s boot hooks behind her ankle under the table, a steady presence.
“Yes.” It’s easier to admit it, under Zhou Zishu’s hungry eyes. “Just for you.”
The foot around Wen Kexing’s jolts. This is a new game for them, but—not a bad one. Zhou Zishu must agree; she slams back the rest of her baijiu without breaking eye contact. Wets her lips.
“Lao Wen,” she murmurs. When she leans forward, it’s suddenly possible to make out the generous swell of her breasts under the sweatshirt. “Lao Wen…Is there anywhere to eat around here? I missed dinner.”
For a full fifteen seconds, the question doesn’t make any kind of sense. Eat? Dinner? Then some of the blood trickles back to her brain and she gasps.
“You what—Of course!” A sane person would have stopped to eat between the airport and the bar, but Zhou Zishu seems to run almost entirely on nerves and cigarettes. Anyway, a sane person wouldn’t have flown to see Wen Kexing in the first place. “There’s a really good noodle place—”
“Tch.” Zhou Zishu waves the suggestion away irritably. “Why should I pay for food when there’s already plenty at your place?”
“Are you psychic now? I could have a cupboard full of nothing but jelly cups, for all you know.”
Zhou Zishu gives her a long-suffering look, and says, “Do you?”
Of course she doesn’t. But: “I haven’t prepared anything in advance,” she warns. There wasn’t any point, really, with Gu Xiang off gallivanting with her idiot boyfriend’s family for the holiday. “You’ll have to settle for frozen food.”
“I’ve seen you throw together jianbing out of an empty hotel refrigerator,” Zhou Zishu grumbles, pushing her backpack out from under the table with her toe.
Wen Kexing can’t bear for jianbing to be the last thing she ever cooks for Ah Xu. It’s too ridiculous. “It wasn’t… Listen. I’m a very important philanthropist, you know; people depend on me,” she says, gesturing vaguely toward the universe before making a chopping motion. “Unlike some people, I can’t afford to cut my luck in half this year.”
Zhou Zishu scoffs. “Who’s asking you to chop anything? Whatever you have is fine for filling. Pork rind, potato chip…”
“I’m sorry, I could’ve sworn you just said potato chip.”
Looking bored now with this entire debate, Zhou Zishu squares her shoulders and delivers the killing blow: “Lao Wen’s cooking is the best.” Wen Kexing isn’t going to cry; Zhou Zishu’s mouth hitches smugly. “Come on, let’s go.”
Zhou Zishu has had her cooking all of twice, so this is patently untrue. Why now? she wants to say. Normally, it’s faster and easier to hook up in Zhou Zishu’s hotel room. Zhou Zishu seemed to like being the one to kick Wen Kexing out, and Wen Kexing could deny her nothing, not even the chance to push her out of bed at six in the morning. “I have real work to do,” she’d say, face-first in a hotel pillow, not looking as though she had any intention of moving for the next several hours. “See you in three weeks.”
And yet: “As my lady demands,” Wen Kexing sighs, resigned to some harmless manipulation if it’ll earn her a rare compliment.
So they go.
❈❈❈
There’s no reason to be self-conscious about the featureless cement walls of Wen Kexing’s building, or the way the corridors echo like back alleys. Zhou Zishu has been to her apartment. Not enough to build any kind of domestic illusions around. Just—because it was closer, or because Wen Kexing wouldn’t shut up about a new vibrator and Zhou Zishu wanted to see. Honestly, it figures that Zhou Zishu would leave Wen Kexing with one last sweet memory of her Ah Xu in the apartment, a phantom lover to haunt her bed and her bathroom and the counter next to the kettle. Ah Xu was always a bit of a bastard.
Still, Wen Kexing’s heart twinges anxiously when Zhou Zishu pauses in the foyer, one finger looped through the pull on the back of her boots, to regard the shelves crowded on either wall: Wen Kexing’s on one side, neatly crammed with designer shoes, Gu Xiang’s on the other. Its contents have dwindled down to a pair of house slippers and the battered slides she only wears to take the trash out. Everything else has either migrated to that idiot Cao Weining’s place, or gone with her on her visit to his family home. It looks like the inside of Wen Kexing’s chest.
“Guest slippers are over there,” Wen Kexing says, pointing to the bottom of her own shelf. Zhou Zishu glances back at her with an unreadable expression.
“Thanks,” she says, toeing the rest of the way out her boots and kicking them halfway into the gap the slippers left behind.
She glances back as soon as she’s across the threshold, pointing. “Kitchen’s that way, right?”
“What.” Confusion temporarily robs Wen Kexing’s voice of human inflection. She tries again: “Why?”
Zhou Zhou blinks at her like she’s the crazy one. “Where the food is.”
Now that they’re here, Wen Kexing can feel the minutes pressing in, clamoring just outside the smog-smeared windows. One second gone after another and—Zhou Zishu wants to spend it eating rice crackers? “No,” she decides, kicking off her sneakers and stalking forward in a single motion. The shoes land—somewhere. Wen Kexing’s palm lands on Ah Xu’s shoulder, driving her back until she collides with the wall, and then further, until their bodies make a single warm line. Eat this, she wants to say, Eat me, but somehow her tongue is already in Zhou Zishu’s mouth. She must have done it herself—there’s a protesting sound leaking out the sides of their kiss, and it’s coming from Zhou Zishu’s throat. Wen Kexing pulls back, so the sound can resolve into, “Fucking lunatic,” and then they’re kissing again.
Nice as the kissing is, Wen Kexing is not going to have sex with Zhou Zishu for the last time ever next to a shoe rack. Zhou Zishu looks first dazed, then put out when Wen Kexing pulls away.
“Lao Wen,” she starts. Gratifyingly, the sight of Wen Kexing whipping her own shirt over her head stalls her temporarily. Her eyes trace the narrow straps of Wen Kexing’s bralette down to the cups—which don’t so much cover her breasts as frame them. The apartment is as cold as it always is, a few degrees below what Wen Kexing could technically afford. The thin mesh bunches around her cold-pinched nipples, warm brown shadows under the shock of red.
“Ah Xu,” Wen Kexing replies, unbuttoning her jeans as she backs into the darkened bedroom. It’s a dangerous maneuver: she’d place equal odds on whether Zhou Zishu will follow her or just head straight to the kitchen to look for something to eat that isn’t roasted nuts. Once she’s set a course, Zhou Zishu is nearly impossible to redirect, and Wen Kexing normally knows better than to try. Pushing or begging will only backfire; Zhou Zishu has to pick this all on her own. She has to.
Fortunately, Wen Kexing’s only left in suspense for one incredibly painful handful of seconds before Zhou Zishu stalks in after her, stomping out of her joggers as she goes.
What a beautiful slob.
What a terrible time for Wen Kexing to realize she’s in love.
Zhou Zishu knocks Wen Kexing back onto the bed with one hand on her stomach and a foot hooked behind her calf, not ungently. It’s not the most dignified landing, but Wen Kexing doesn’t have time to register chagrin—not when Zhou Zishu’s cold palm is scraping its way up her chest and neck, her fingers coming to rest around Wen Kexing’s jaw. “Don’t think you’re getting out of making me dinner,” she warns, matter-of-factly, before forcing Wen Kexing’s chin up and biting the thin skin over her pulse.
“This wife would never,” Wen Kexing tells the headboard, dryly, but Zhou Zishu wrenches her face back down before she has to swear to anything. Then they’re kissing again. At some point, Zhou Zishu nudges Wen Kexing’s bedside table open with her food, lunging away just long enough to palm the first toy she finds and a bottle of lubricant.
“Okay?” she says, holding up a pink rabbit vibrator in the dim light cast by the city outside.
As long as something touches her pussy soon, Wen Kexing is okay with anything. She doesn’t say that—just hitches her knees up, so her pussy’s exposed to the cold air, and says, “Ah Xu, do it, please.”
As obliging as she’ll ever be, Zhou Zishu does it, but not before fingering her for long, tortuous minutes, kneeling back on her heels so Wen Kexing can’t reach her. “Ssshh,” she soothes, crooking her fingers and watching Wen Kexing writhe on them with something like awe. “You’re doing so well. Can you take it now?”
“What,” Wen Kexing gasps, as Zhou Zishu’s fingers slide free, “sick of torturing me already?”
A half-smile cracks across Zhou Zishu’s face. The haircut might be awful, but like this, it’s so easy to see how beautiful she is, all strong lines and soft shadows. “Who’s torturing you, Wen Kexing,” she says, and presses the vibrator flat against Wen Kexing cunt—apparently just to hear her scream. “So good,” she whispers, and slides it back, and in, and out, and back again, until nothing exists in Wen Kexing’s mind but static and pressure and the bright moon of Zhou Zishu’s face over her, smiling.
“Lao Wen, you’re so good. So good for me.” Zhou Zishu brushes the hand that isn’t fucking Wen Kexing over her cheekbone. “I’m going to sit on your face,” she decides, and does, right on top of the keening sound whistling out of Wen Kexing’s lungs. “Good girl.”
Wen Kexing gurgles out an incoherent sound into the wet folds of Zhou Zishu’s cunt.
Her own pussy is one hot, impossible mess of sensation—pressure, warmth, somehow—color—and the pleasure buzzing through her makes focusing nearly impossible. But she does it, inhaling wetly, putting as much of herself as she can in her tongue as she searches for Zhou Zishu’s clit. If she weren’t so full, if Ah Xu weren’t still pressing the vibrator in and out and in and out, it wouldn’t be so difficult. It’s swollen and hard, and when Wen Kexing finally closes her lips around it and sucks, Zhou Zishu jolts so hard she nearly loses her grip on the vibrator.
“Naughty,” she gasps, approvingly, and pushes the vibrator in and up, unerringly finding the place that makes Wen Kexing kick and howl.
“Are you trying to show me how good you can be, Lao Wen, taking it like this?” Zhou Zishu wonders. “What a good little wife you’d make.”
A desperate, stifled sound escapes Wen Kexing’s throat. She could, she thinks. She could be so good. She’d make sure that Zhou Zishu ate a warm breakfast every morning and something sweet every night. Zhou Zishu would never wear another thing that wasn’t sweet-smelling and clean. If she insisted on buzzing her hair at home, Wen Kexing would make sure the back was neat and soft. She’d pour her warm baths and hot tea, and wash away the dark shadows under Zhou Zishu’s eyes. She’d work so hard, she thinks, as Zhou Zishu thumbs a hot line behind her ear.
“My little wife,” she whispers. “If I could, I’d keep you as a pretty face in my house.”
Wen Kexing, overwhelmed, bursts into tears.
Her face is already so soaked with Zhou Zishu’s slick, she thinks at first that Zhou Zishu can’t tell she’s crying. She’s not really a person anymore, she thinks, hopes—just a wet thing under Zhou Zishu. She does notice, though. Inevitably, Zhou Zishu notices everything, in the end. She runs her free hand from Wen Kexing’s hair to her jaw, catching the mix of tears and cum. “Shit,” she says, “you’re so beautiful,” and Wen Kexing comes with a hitching sob. Zhou Zishu grinds down, catching every desperate inhale with her clit, and follows her over.
“Sorry,” Zhou Zishu says groggily, after a moment, pulling the vibrator out and thumbing it off. “Sorry,” she repeats into the silence it leaves behind, and finally collapses onto the bed beside Wen Kexing.
❈❈❈
Crying secretly next to someone in bed is surprisingly easy. Wen Kexing tugs Zhou Zishu’s arms around her shoulders and rolls on her side, curls up tight. Like this, Zhou Zishu is everywhere around her, but she’s an invisible warmth in the darkness. Wen Kexing can press her face into a pillow so that none of the tears reach Ah Xu’s skin. She learned a long time ago how to cry silently, how to keep her spine and shoulder relaxed and her breaths even. The only thing she’s never managed to control are the tears themselves. They don’t feel like a part of her body—they feel like a river running through her, churning up silt and dread as it rushes from some unknown source and through the dark cavern of her skull.
“Lao Wen,” Ah Xu whispers into her hair. “Lao Wen.”
Wen Kexing swallows hard. Her voice, when it comes out, is surprisingly steady. “I’m right here, Ah Xu. What are you calling me for?”
Zhou Zishu carefully thumbs away some of Wen Kexing’s tears—succeeds mostly in smearing them around more. “Lao Wen, tell me what it is,” she says, startling when Wen Kexing jerks her face back and knocks her hand away.
“Stop it.” Her voice isn’t anything she’s used with Zhou Zishu before—but it’s hers, even if it sounds like it’s coming from someone else’s throat. Slowly, her eyes never leaving Wen Kexing’s face, Zhou Zishu’s fingers curl back toward her palm. She tucks her hand under her chin, where Wen Kexing can see it, as if she’s promising to keep it there. It only makes her angrier. “Fuck,” she says, with feeling.
Zhou Zishu’s brow crinkles together. She starts to say something, then subsides, whatever she was about to say shuddering out of her in a long breath. “Sorry,” she says instead.
This makes the tears worse. They feel like they’re being pushed out of her.
“You’re sorry. What for,” she scoffs, half scornful, half curious what Zhou Zishu will say.
“I.” Zhou Zishu swallows, eyes cutting away for just one second before they’re back on her, steady and determined. “I know it’s a lot. All at once. I should have talked to you about it first, but—we don’t really.” She doesn’t finish the thought, but she doesn’t have to. It’s true. They don’t really.
Still. “‘We’, ” Wen Kexing echoes snidely, pushing the heel of her hand across her face.
Zhou Zishu looks taken aback, then angry. “Yes, we.” Her knuckles clench under her chin. “Isn’t that what this is all about? You’ve kept your secrets for now—fine. But don’t blame me for it.”
“What secrets,” Wen Kexing objects, smearing her face awkwardly on the pillow. “That I’m too poor to leave? That I didn’t finish university? Not exactly pillow talk for a fuck buddy, Zhou Zishu.”
Zhou Zishu’s cross look stiffens. She looks suddenly, alarmingly, determined. “I mean your little water army. Your campaign against—”
Wen Kexing sits up.
“Get out,” she says.
Zhou Zishu gets out, flinging the blankets back into Wen Kexing’s lap. “You’re a coward, Wen Kexing. You’re good at pretty words, but when it counts you’re as reliable as wet paper.”
“I’m a coward?” Wen Kexing hisses. “Which one of us is it that spent the past year crashing in and out whenever she pleases? I’m here every day, just waiting, and you—you’re just going to fuck off again like you always do.”
Zhou Zishu turns her face away, suddenly focused on picking her clothes up off the floor. “Make up your mind, Wen Kexing. Do you want this or not?”
“Of course I want this! It’s all I’ve ever wanted!”
Zhou Zishu freezes, her arms stuffed halfway back into the disgusting sweatshirt. “Then…” She looks from Wen Kexing to the sweatshirt, as if she isn’t quite sure how it got there or where it should go next. She crosses her arms protectively over her chest, the sweatshirt bunching and pooling absurdly over her midriff. It makes her look suddenly, painfully young. “Is it… something I did?”
An incredulous laugh gurgles out from behind the tears clogging Wen Kexing’s throat. “What—that made me love you?” It wasn’t really any one thing Zhou Zishu did. Laid out, the things she’s done largely range from painfully banal to objectively horrible. “It’s just. You are.”
She means to finish the thought, but nothing else comes to her. Maybe that’s it.
“Then if it’s something else,” Zhou Zishu ventures, resting one knee back on the bed. “If it’s someone else—we can take care of it together. I know you don’t want to tell me everything yet, but I’m OK with that. Lao Wen, whatever it is—if that’s how you feel, that’s all that matters. Or we can wait. I have plenty of money. I don’t have to move here now, I can—”
Wen Kexing boggles. “Move here? ”
“Yes?” Zhou Zishu’s other knee is on the bed now, the sweatshirt slipping back down her arms and pooling in the sheets. “But like I said—”
“You said you’re leaving,” Wen Kexing corrects. Her memory’s not always great, but she’s sure about that. “Hainan, or—”
“Hainan? What?” Zhou Zishu visibly replays their evening, eyebrows bunched together. “You mean—that was a joke, Wen Kexing. I quit my job. I came here. Where you are. What’s in Hainan?”
A lot of things. Apparently. Wen Kexing’s water army was hired several months ago for a tourism push. But—”It’s awful here.”
“You’re awful too,” Zhou Zishu agrees peaceably, knee-walking forward on the bed. “And yet.”
“Are you shitting me right now, Zhou Zishu?” Constant crying has left Wen Kexing feeling light-headed. Nothing feels entirely real.
“Gross,” Zhou Zishu says, fondly, wiping first one cheek, then another, with the loose arms of her sweatshirt.
“You’re one to talk,” Wen Kexing gurgles. Still not fully in command of her own voice, and in danger of losing her tenuous grip on it with every tender swipe of Zhou Zishu’s hands. “Where’d you even get that disgusting sweatshirt?”
“It’s my little brother’s. It wouldn’t fit in his bag.”
What the fuck. Brother? “The grubby hiking bag?” Wen Kexing echoes, grasping the only part of this that makes sense. “Why do you have your—brother’s bag?”
In the half-light, Zhou Zishu’s face looks entirely calm and reasonable, even though her words don’t make any sense. “He didn’t have too much left in the house, but I didn’t want to leave it unattended while I was out. In case of an ‘electrical fire’ or something like that. That’s a favorite trick of his—my boss’s. Former boss’s. He wanted to bring in Jiuxiao too after he graduates, and—”
“Ah Xu,” Wen Kexing gasps, looking at Zhou Zishu’s distractingly terrible haircut in an entirely new light. “Are you on the run? Do you work for the mob? Did you risk getting caught for a booty call?”
“Don’t be dramatic,” Zhou Zishu says crossly. “It’s probably fine. Lao Wen, I stopped to see if we were on the same page before I made more plans.”
Ridiculous. The whole thing is ridiculous. At some point Wen Kexing stopped crying, she realizes. “Hmmm,” she says, tipping her head into Zhou Zishu’s palm, tracing her free hand over the soft peach fuzz of Zhou Zishu’s hair. “It sounds like you’ll need all the luck you can get.”
Zhou Zishu’s eyes are very bright in the darkness. “So?”
Wen Kexing smiles so widely it aches. It feels like it might get stuck that way. “Ah Xu, I love you. Let’s go rescue your dumb little brother and then stay together forever.”
“That was already the plan,” Zhou Zishu grumbles, not quite hiding her own smile. “Don’t say my plan like it’s your plan.”
“I see how it is. Already stealing things from your wife.”
Zhou Zishu laughs, nosing back into Wen Kexing’s space and tipping them both back into the pillows. “They do say to start the year as you mean to go on.”
“Ah, such a devil. Fine. Take anything you like.”
“Lao Wen,” Zhou Zishu says.
At first Wen Kexing thinks she’s just calling her, leaving more thoughts unfinished. And then she hears it.
"Lao Wen," she says again, softly, smiling at whatever she sees on Wen Kexing's face—whatever it's doing. Wen Kexing doesn't really feel in control of it anymore.
"Happy New Year, Ah Xu," she whispers, and sees the same face—so absurd—reflected back.