Chapter 18: You Don't Need to Apologize
"— Ruan Jing?"
"No, but there's definitely a Ruan Jing here. Are you Mr. Zhao Qiyan?"
He frowned.
If the person on the other end wasn't Ruan Jing, then the name Zhao Qiyan was — in anyone else's understanding of it — associated with composure and good judgment. "Yes."
"Ha! We found the culprit! You've been bullying our Jing!"
He stood with that for a moment, not knowing whether to laugh or not.
Ruan Jing watched her friend beside her clamoring into the phone on her behalf and didn't stop her. She wasn't sure why she'd let it happen. Something about wanting to pull at something, to see what was underneath — or the glimpse of something unguarded in him, earlier, that had gotten past her defenses without her permission. She didn't usually act on impulses like this. She also didn't usually think of herself as someone who could be unbalanced.
Zhao Qiyan was doing something to her equilibrium.
When he arrived at the bar, she was coming back from the restroom and they nearly collided at the door of the private room. The group inside saw him first.
"The legendary Zhao Qiyan—"
"He's more handsome than Jiang Yan."
"Ah Jing, bring him in—"
"Sing 'Tomorrow I'm Going to Marry You' with me—"
Ruan Jing walked past him and took her original seat.
Her friend, sensing the awkwardness, stepped in. "She's like this when she's drunk. Don't take it personally."
Qi Yan stood for a moment in the doorway, taking in the room, the noise, the fact that Ruan Jing was looking directly at the opposite wall. He said, evenly: "I'll wait in the car."
As he turned and left, one of the sharper people in the room said: "That looks to me like Ah Jing is torturing him."
Ruan Jing smiled, and it didn't reach anything. She knew it, too. Zhao Qiyan wasn't easy to approach; there was something in him that resisted — not unfriendliness, exactly, but a quality of maintained distance. She had wanted to get past it. To see him confused or shaken, because of her. She sat with how that had just played out and felt, in a clear and specific way, despicable.
She stayed another half hour.
He was outside when she came through the door, and he had been waiting the entire time. He stubbed out his cigarette and stood.
They got in the car and he drove. Neither spoke.
She looked at his profile. Under the dim light from the dashboard he was — the word that came to her was clean, which wasn't adequate, but it was the impression: something precise and uncluttered about the line of his face, even when still. In public he carried a certain coldness — the dark suits that fit exactly, the manner of someone accustomed to being the version of himself that other people worked around. He didn't adapt to rooms; rooms adapted to him. And then he would turn and look at her, and something in his eyes — some particular quality of quiet heaviness — made her feel that she, specifically, could reach someone that no one else was reaching.
She found that both useful and frightening.
After ten minutes she said: "You didn't have to come."
"We're friends, aren't we?"
The ease with which he said it left her without an immediate response. That was what he did — absorbed her provocations quietly and offered back something she couldn't argue with. No sharpness, no reproach. Just a gentle, patient ground that she kept finding herself unable to get purchase on.
She looked out the window. She had made a mess of this evening. He hadn't deserved any of it. "I'm sorry. About tonight. Work pressure lately — it gets to me sometimes. Don't take it to heart."
"Ruan Jing." A pause. "You don't need to worry about my feelings."
She felt it. Just briefly, in the chest — some small involuntary thing.
He'd stated a fact. That was all. No sting in it, no intended wound. She turned to look at him and his expression was the same as always.
"Zhao Qiyan." She heard something in her own voice she hadn't planned for. "You don't have to be so good to me."
"I thought that's how friends should be."
"Don't—" She stopped. "Don't say that word again."
He let that sit for a moment. Then, quietly: "What do you want to hear? Tell me and I'll say it."
She didn't know why she was being like this. She sat with the question for a while, then said: "Tonight was my fault. I'm apologizing."
He pulled the car over.
She looked at him. His eyes were very steady. Dark and clear, with that quality she couldn't quite name — the heaviness that wasn't sadness, not exactly.
"Ruan Jing." His voice was level. "If you feel better torturing me, you don't need to apologize to me."
"I didn't—" She stopped. Because: yes. She had been. Deliberately and with intention. She'd wanted him shaken, and she'd staged a provocation to do it. She couldn't finish the denial.
They sat in silence. He started the car again.
They didn't speak again until she got out.
She didn't say goodbye. She walked to the door without turning back.
He watched her go, then sank back in the seat. He thought about how he'd spent the past however many months and felt, simultaneously, some admiration for himself and considerable sympathy. He closed his eyes.
You want me to give up on you completely. The thought arrived without anger. If that's what you want, I'll — try.
He laughed at himself, quietly, in the dark car.
Ruan Jing got home, ran a bath, and lay in bed afterward looking at the ceiling. Several years of not being particularly moved by anyone, and now this. Her chest felt strange — not quite sad, not quite anything she had a word for. Something that hadn't been there before.
Friday was the opening of Xie Xia's exhibition at Gao Fan.
Ruan Jing got through her morning obligations and slipped into the hall in the early afternoon. Xie Xia's work was primarily figures, executed in a bold style with strong color — not subtle, but not without depth. Ruan Jing stopped in front of one painting she had responded to during the planning process: a woman, titled Graceful and Refined. The brushwork was confident, almost aggressive in its certainty, and yet the figure came through it as genuinely luminous — something alive captured.
She was still standing there when she registered, at the entrance, two figures.
One of them was a silhouette she would know anywhere.
She stood very still for a moment, deciding: greet them, or don't. She always had too many of these small hesitations with him, these half-seconds of recalculation. It had always been like this.
The decision was made for her — Xie Xia spotted her and brought Zhao Qiyan over.
Ruan Jing felt something tighten, very briefly. She made it not show.
"Jing." Xie Xia was radiant today, the kind that came from someone's work being out in the world and received well. "Thank you. This is exactly what I hoped for."
"It's my honor," Ruan Jing said, and meant it.
"Which painting do you like best?"
She looked back at the one she'd been standing in front of. "Her."
Xie Xia seemed briefly surprised. Then she smiled. "Qiyan chose the same one. I was going to give you something from the collection as a thank-you—"
"Really, no need."
Zhao Qiyan said nothing during any of this. He stood slightly apart, present and quiet.
The two hours of the exhibition passed. Ruan Jing moved through the room, talked to people, did what the event required. And throughout all of it, she was aware — as a kind of negative space — that Zhao Qiyan gave her none of his usual attention. No particular gaze, no movement toward her across the room. The distance he maintained was deliberate and complete.
She had never felt its absence before, because it had always been there.
She stood in front of Graceful and Refined and understood what was happening.
He was withdrawing.
She had asked for it, hadn't she? In every way available to her short of saying it directly, she had asked him to stop. And now he was trying.
She stayed with the painting for another moment. The woman in it looked back at her, bright-spirited and unanswerable.
Well, Ruan Jing thought, for the second time this week. Well.
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