Chapter 13: A dropped lighter

 

Cheng Jia changed her clothes and opened the door to find Nima standing in the corridor, looking like he'd been there a while and wasn't sure how to explain himself.

"Why did you come up?" she asked.

He rubbed the back of his head. "Seventh Brother told me to call you down for dinner."

She looked at him for a long moment — long enough that he started to look uncomfortable — and then said, pleasantly: "Do I look like I believe that?"

"Sis, it's true—"

"He's calling me to dinner." She closed the door behind her, heels clicking sharp and clear on the wooden floor. She took a few steps, then stopped, smiled privately at nothing in particular, and said, "The wind blows from the moon."

Nima abandoned the pretense. "I was worried you'd be angry. I came up to check."

"I won't be angry with him."

The relief on his face was immediate. "That's good. You're so patient, Sister Cheng Jia."

Patient wasn't quite the word for it. She had never been angry with Peng Ye — not once. She thought about this sometimes. With his build and temperament, she would barely have time to spoil him, let alone waste energy on anger.

Besides, she knew exactly what he was doing. Deliberately irritating her was practically a hobby.

"He thinks it's ugly, so it's ugly?" She smoothed her sleeve and continued down the corridor. "He spends all day looking at cuts of lamb and beef. I'll take his judgment on meat. Fashion is another matter entirely."

"Right, right," Nima agreed, following. He was thinking that Cheng Jia had a very healthy relationship with her own ego. He tried to soften the mood further: "Seventh Brother talks about you sometimes. Even before we met you — back when we thought you sold, uh, family planning supplies — he mentioned you."

Cheng Jia stopped. "He mentioned me?"

"Yes."

She waited.

Nima, whose greatest flaw was honesty delivered without timing, said brightly: "He called you a shrew."

Silence.

He realized, a half-second too late, that he should have edited that. He waved both hands quickly: "Don't misunderstand — Stone actually said you were a female demon. Seventh Brother corrected him. He said no, she's a female demon."

Cheng Jia considered this. "Thank your whole team for me."

"Any time," Nima said, and immediately realized that was also wrong.

---

The sound of her heels on the stairs announced her before she appeared.

An'an and Xiao Ling turned to look — and then simply kept looking. Cheng Jia had changed into something simple: white knit sweater, black wool skirt, leggings. Clean and uncluttered. On anyone else it would have been unremarkable. On her it looked like an editorial spread.

Sixteen studied her for a moment. "I couldn't really tell, under the windbreaker — but you look good, Cheng Jia."

Stone asked, "Is that wool?"

Cheng Jia looked at him. "Can you think of any animal that isn't a sheep?"

"...Cow?"

Peng Ye, at the head of the table, distributed rice bowls and chopsticks with the focused attention of someone who had not noticed anyone walk in.

---

There were four long benches. Sixteen and Stone shared one; Nima sat with Peng Ye; An'an and Xiao Ling squeezed together on a third. No one made a move toward the remaining bench, which left Cheng Jia sitting alone on one side of the table like someone presiding over a meeting.

The two university girls were lively and curious about everything, and dinner conversation came easily. They asked Sixteen question after question — about the road, about the region, about what it was like to work somewhere this remote. He answered whatever wasn't confidential, which turned out to be quite a lot.

After the meal, Stone and Nima cleared the table. An'an pitched in, a little self-conscious. Xiao Ling kept talking to Sixteen. Cheng Jia went upstairs.

Ten o'clock was early by her usual standards. Back home, this hour was roughly when her evenings began. Here there was nowhere to go and nothing to do.

She shook a cigarette from the box and put it between her lips. Her thumb pressed the lighter wheel —

She stopped.

She was remembering a voice, slightly irritated: Who gave you permission to smoke?

She stared at the small flame for a moment, then pulled the cigarette out of her mouth and clicked the lighter shut.

Cheng Jia lay down on the bed, unlit cigarette turning between her fingers, ceiling overhead.

The wooden building carried sound the way old buildings do — clearly, indiscriminately. She heard footsteps in the corridor and knew immediately whose they were.

Her hand went still.

The door to the next room opened and closed. Footsteps crossed the floor on the other side of the wall.

She turned this over for a moment, then sat up. She was about to throw the cigarette — thoroughly squashed from all the fidgeting — into the bin, then reconsidered. Cigarettes were hard to come by out here regardless of money. She put it back in the pack.

She put on her heels and walked to her own door, knowing the footsteps were audible through the wall. She opened it and closed it with exactly the right amount of noise — not too emphatic, not too careful, just a door being opened and closed. Her steps down the corridor to his door were the same.

She leaned against it and waited.

You know I'm here. You must know.

Downstairs, the faint sound of the girls laughing drifted up. On his side of the door, nothing.

Her palms were slightly damp. She turned the lighter over in her hand. After a few seconds, his voice came through the wood, low and unhurried: "Who's outside?"

Cheng Jia smiled, just to herself. "Wind."

A pause. Then — in a tone that suggested he was asking against his better judgment: "Which direction?"

She stood in the east-west corridor. His door faced south.

"If you open the door," she said, "a south wind blows in. If you don't, a west wind goes past."

Silence from inside. The girls' laughter continued downstairs, perfectly audible and entirely uninvolved.

One second. Two.

Footsteps crossed toward her, and the door opened.

Peng Ye leaned against the frame. The light from his room fell across the sharp angles of his face. He didn't step aside.

Cheng Jia was leaning against the wall, lighter in hand, the small flame catching and releasing. A faint smile on her mouth. Her eyes were calm.

He made no move to let her in.

"Aren't you going to invite me in?" she asked.

"Is there something you needed?"

She was wearing heels and still had to look up at him. She straightened slightly — and the door shifted under her weight. He braced it with one hand, not quite reaching for her, holding the door instead.

She read the tension in him. The controlled stillness. His eyes fixed forward, not quite on her.

"Come inside," she said. "We can talk there."

"We can talk here."

The smile faded. "It's all right," she said, evenly. She pushed off the wall to leave — and her lighter slipped from her hand and hit the floor.

She stood and looked at it. Then she looked at Peng Ye, her expression conveying, wordlessly and with complete composure: If I bend down to get that, somebody might need medical attention.

He looked at her. He clearly knew she had an angle. He bent down anyway.

As his head came level with her knees, Cheng Jia crouched slightly and ran her fingers through his hair. Just once.

It was thick and a little rough at the ends, softer underneath.

She straightened up. "Softer than I expected."

Peng Ye stood. His eyes were cooler than they'd been. He looked down at her. "What are you doing."

"I meant the hair," she said. "Just the hair."

"..." A beat. "Next time, I won't be polite."

She held his gaze. Neither of them moved. A few seconds passed with the weight of something unresolved.

Then Cheng Jia said, quietly and clearly: "Peng Ye."

His name, spoken properly, for the first time. He had no answer for it.

"Don't fall into my hands in the future," she said.

Not a threat, not a warning — something else. Her face was still, her eyes steady as still water, but underneath the steadiness was something that said: because if you do, I won't let go.

He understood. He said nothing.

From downstairs: "Seventh Brother, Cheng Jia — come down for a bit!"

Neither of them answered. The silence held between them.

"Seventh Brother? Cheng Jia?"

She looked at Peng Ye. "You answer," she said.

Then she turned and walked back down the corridor, unhurried, heels quiet on the wooden floor.

He watched her go.

He stood in the doorway for a moment after she'd turned the corner, replaying it — not because it was unclear, but because it had landed so cleanly, in a language he hadn't known they shared. No agreement, no rehearsal. It had just arrived fully formed.

If you open the door, a south wind blows in. If you don't, a west wind goes past.

She had told him she was the wind. She would come in if he opened the door and go home if he didn't. Simple. His door faced south. He had opened it.

And then the other thing she'd said, which sat differently:

Don't fall into my hands in the future.

He understood that one too.

---

Stone had been worried that two extra guests at dinner meant not everyone had eaten enough. He roasted potatoes over the charcoal brazier, and by the time everyone had gathered around it the room smelled warm and faintly sweet, and the atmosphere had shifted into something easy.

Cheng Jia peeled one the way Nima showed her — the papery skin coming away in her fingers, steam rising from the pale flesh underneath. She sprinkled salt on it and took a bite. Sweet and soft with the salt cutting through it. She had never particularly liked potatoes.

This was genuinely good.

An'an and Xiao Ling kept exclaiming over theirs. Stone was very pleased with himself.

Xiao Ling looked around and said, "When we came into the yard, I noticed two cars covered in snow out front. Are those yours?"

"Yes."

"All the way under. Is the snow going to stop?"

"Tomorrow."

"How do you know? Did you check the forecast?"

Sixteen pointed at Peng Ye. "He knows."

Xiao Ling accepted this with an "Oh" and didn't push further.

At half past eleven, the group drifted off to bed. An'an and Xiao Ling, having recalculated the risk of being the only women on a remote mountainside, moved themselves from their original room to the one across from Sixteen's — which happened to be next to Cheng Jia's.

Xiao Ling climbed onto the heated brick bed and rubbed her calves vigorously. "I must have lost my mind agreeing to this trip. I'm never coming back here, even if someone paid me."

An'an said nothing.

They were college classmates. This had been planned as a graduation trip — Qiangtang, because Tibetan areas were popular right now, because it felt like an adventure. Xiao Ling's boyfriend Guo Li was supposed to come. Then they'd argued before departure, and Xiao Ling had changed the dates in a fit of temper and dragged An'an instead.

"It's good his phone got lost," Xiao Ling said, with the conviction of someone who was not as unbothered as she sounded. "He can't reach me. He'll be going out of his mind."

An'an said, "Guo Li didn't do anything wrong. His advisor called an emergency meeting. He couldn't help it." She paused. "Keep pushing and one day you'll push too far, and I don't know if you'll be happy about it."

Xiao Ling rolled onto her side and pulled the blanket up. "I don't want to think about it." A short pause. Then: "Those guys were decent, actually."

"Yes. I feel bad for suspecting them."

"The woman's different, though." Xiao Ling's tone shifted. "Very full of herself. Like she's never seen money before."

An'an said, "Her clothes looked expensive to me. And she has the same bracelet as yours."

"There are fakes everywhere. And people who live in places like this are probably watching their budget. Those cameras and things — could be borrowed."

"The camera looked real."

Xiao Ling made a dismissive sound. "You see it all the time at the art school next to ours. Everything designer, all bought by someone else. Our university, at least, has standards. Which one of our classmates isn't straightforward?"

"You shouldn't generalize like that."

"We might not have expensive gear, but we have our own dignity."

"That doesn't mean other people don't."

"Think about it — she barely looked at anyone all night. She doesn't know these men well. They're just people she ended up traveling with." Xiao Ling's voice dropped into something more knowing. "An'an, I've seen things on Weibo. There are women who come to these areas on a budget, hitchhike for free, and — well. You know. They use what they have."

An'an was quiet for a moment. "Xiao Ling," she said carefully. "Gossiping in the dorm is one thing. But saying it like this—"

She wanted to say vicious. She didn't quite get there.

"I'm just being realistic. The world is complicated, An'an—"

A knock on the wall from the next room. Sixteen's voice: "Cheng Jia, are you asleep?"

Cheng Jia: "Not yet."

"Open up a second. Did you forget your medicine tonight?"

"Ah. Coming."

The room next door went briefly quiet as footsteps crossed to the door.

An'an and Xiao Ling looked at each other. Neither spoke.

The wall between the rooms was wooden. Thin. Old.

So.

Cheng Jia had heard all of it.