Chapter 9: Be My Wife

The explanations were all technically plausible. But with both parties sitting at the same table, both fully aware of what had actually happened, each attempted consolation only widened the space of embarrassment rather than filling it.

Yun Li had the sensation that time had slowed to an unbearable pace — not just at their table, but through the entire restaurant, through the whole of Haitian Mall, through all of Nanwu.

She closed her eyes briefly.

She could not throw this situation at Fu Shize to fix. She gathered herself and said, cutting across the thread of conversation, "Thank you, everyone, but I'm really fine." She added, for texture: "This isn't even the first time I've asked someone for their WeChat."

Deng Chuqi, reading the room correctly, smiled and said, "That's right — you asked for mine."

Xia Congsheng leaned forward. "Ask for mine right now. I promise I won't refuse."

The subject shifted.

Yun Li exhaled quietly and smiled. "Sure."

Everyone produced their phones. The table engaged in the small, sociable ritual of contact exchange, phones tilting toward each other, QR codes appearing.

Everyone except Fu Shize.

Fu Zhengchu noticed and frowned with theatrical disapproval. "Uncle. Why aren't you participating."

Xia Congsheng added, "I almost forgot you were here and assumed you were a stranger sharing our table."

Fu Zhengchu: "Big brother, you're welcome to move to a different table. We don't do shared seating."

Yun Li had already quietly put her phone away. She was not expecting this to go anywhere.

Fu Shize appeared to consider the group's collective pressure, found it unproductive to resist, and handed his phone to Fu Zhengchu.

"That's more like it." Fu Zhengchu unlocked it without any apparent concern about passcodes and held the QR code toward the two of them, pleasantly professional. "My uncle works at EAW. If you ever want to visit, let him know in advance."

Yun Li held her phone and did not immediately move. She remembered the clear, unbothered refusal delivered on a roadside three nights ago. She did not feel the word you in Fu Zhengchu's sentence included her specifically.

Deng Chuqi, assuming Yun Li simply couldn't reach the screen from where she was sitting, took her phone, scanned the code, and returned it.

Yun Li looked at the screen.

A new contact. A red notification dot.

No one at the table seemed to find this remarkable, and Fu Shize's expression had not moved by any perceptible degree. Yun Li turned off her screen, redirected her attention to the hotpot in front of her, and attempted to appear as though her internal state were entirely ordinary.

She had actually. Added him.

---

Deng Chuqi extracted a promise that Yun Li would stay over, on the grounds that they would be seeing each other less once the semester started. Yun Li, who had two days before she needed to be organized, agreed.

After dinner they all went down to the parking lot together. Fu Shize drove, Fu Zhengchu claiming the passenger seat. The three women settled into the back.

Passing a supermarket, Xia Congsheng remembered she was running low on household supplies. Everyone agreed to stop.

Fu Shize, Yun Li observed, appeared to have no preference about anything. He neither objected to the stop nor endorsed it. He simply complied, moving through the situation like a piece of very quiet machinery that had been assigned to accompany the group and was fulfilling that assignment without comment.

Fu Zhengchu, the opposite by every measure, located the sections that interested him within the first minute and vanished.

Yun Li didn't have much to buy, since it was Deng Chuqi and Xia Congsheng's shopping trip. But she was staying a few nights, and she had a specific craving for chocolate milk. Her usual brand was not on the shelf. She compared several alternatives.

She ended up with three brands, three cartons of each, held against her chest in a precarious stack.

Xia Congsheng glanced at the armload and said, "Where has Fu Zhengchu gone? Uncle, this is quite heavy — could you put them in the cart?"

Yun Li, staring at her phone while holding nine cartons of chocolate milk, felt the particular discomfort of someone whose ordinary habits have become a public spectacle. For the first time in her life she considered the possibility of simply not purchasing milk.

Fu Shize didn't react with any expression at all. He reached toward her and said quietly, "Give them here."

"Oh — yes, thank you."

When he had gone, Deng Chuqi leaned toward Xia Congsheng with genuine interest. "Your uncle gives off this completely unapproachable impression, but he's somehow — what's the word — quite cooperative? And you just order him around."

Xia Congsheng said, "I just call him that. He's actually a few years younger than me, so I can't really treat him as a senior."

"Oh? I thought he just looked young."

Yun Li, without fully thinking it through, added, "He's the same age as us—"

They were looking at her.

She caught herself and added a word to the end of the sentence: "Right?"

A pause. Xia Congsheng considered this. "He should be, yes."

---

The drive back was briefly eventful.

Fu Zhengchu, once returned and belted in, appeared to be processing an incident from the supermarket and addressed the driver's seat: "Uncle, why didn't you respond when she said hello? It's lucky I stepped in."

Xia Congsheng asked what had happened.

Fu Zhengchu explained: they had encountered someone named Sang Zhi, who apparently lived nearby. Further details emerged about her brother having some connection to Fu Shize.

"Are you classmates?" Xia Congsheng asked.

Fu Shize, eyes on the road: "I think so."

"Then he's your senior. Why didn't you even acknowledge him?" Fu Zhengchu adopted the tone of someone delivering long-overdue instruction. "You can't maintain the aloof persona in every single situation, uncle. Do you understand."

Then, apparently deciding the correction should be thorough, he turned toward the back seat and addressed Yun Li: "Sister Li, the last time he drove you somewhere — did he give you any attitude? Tell us honestly. We'll back you up."

Yun Li waved her hands. "Not at all."

Fu Zhengchu pressed: "Did he smile?"

"...No."

He turned back with visible satisfaction at having identified the problem. "See, uncle. This approach leads to getting hit. You need to be warmer, more approachable, kinder to people."

Fu Shize said, "Mm."

Yun Li, watching from the back, thought he did seem to be listening.

About ten minutes later, Fu Shize found a gap at the roadside and pulled over. He reached across and unclipped Fu Zhengchu's seatbelt with one hand, then rested his arm on the steering wheel and turned to look at him.

"Get out."

Fu Zhengchu stared at the dark, fairly empty stretch outside the window. His confidence evaporated. "What? Uncle, you remember — I was supposed to stay at great-grandfather's place tonight — with you—"

"Can't be helped," Fu Shize said, without heat. "Afraid you'll drag me into getting beaten up."

Fu Zhengchu did not say another word for the remainder of the drive.

---

They said goodnight in the parking lot. The three women went upstairs, took turns in the shower, and settled in the living room with snacks and a movie that was mostly a backdrop for conversation.

After a while Xia Congsheng checked her phone. "Li Li, that bag you brought — it's still in my uncle's car. Do you want my brother to bring it over?"

"Oh, no — those were for you. Towel roll cakes, I made them. If they want to try some, they're welcome to."

Xia Congsheng thanked her and sent a message.

Deng Chuqi opened a bag of chips and said, with the tone of someone asking a purely academic question, "Do your uncle and brother have girlfriends?"

"My uncle doesn't."

Yun Li looked up without meaning to.

She returned her attention to the screen before anyone could register the movement. She kept her expression entirely neutral.

How strange. This had nothing to do with her. It was information with no relevance to her situation.

And yet.

Something small and warm had arrived in her chest before she had time to decline it.

Xia Congsheng added that she wasn't sure about her brother — he had been through a breakup recently. "Why? Interested?"

Deng Chuqi sighed dramatically. "One's too cold, the other's too much."

Xia Congsheng laughed. "What about you, Li Li? If either of you develops feelings for someone, tell me. I'll help."

Yun Li, holding the specific knowledge she was holding, felt as though she were balanced on a very thin edge. Not willing to admit to anything, not wanting to lie to people who had been nothing but kind to her. She said nothing. She smiled along with the laughter, which seemed to be sufficient.

The other two were joking. No one looked at her too closely.

---

The movie ended near one in the morning. Deng Chuqi and Xia Congsheng were barely awake by the end, conducting the last ten minutes of conversation with their eyes half-closed.

Deng Chuqi said goodnight, lay down, and was breathing evenly within two minutes.

Yun Li listened to the rhythm of it, waited until she was certain, and reached for her phone.

Under the covers, screen brightness turned all the way down, she opened WeChat and found the contact she had added at the restaurant.

She had not been able to look at it properly with people around. This was the first opportunity she'd had, in the dark, with no one watching.

His display name was a single capital letter. F.

The profile picture was a small image on a black background — a white arc near the bottom of a dark square. It could be the lower curve of a moon. It could also, if you tilted your head slightly, be a small smiling mouth without a face. Somewhere between a crescent and a punctuation mark.

Quiet, slightly odd, with a dry kind of charm that she hadn't expected.

She thought of his expression at dinner — at every dinner, actually — and found that it was both entirely incongruous with this image and somehow, on reflection, made perfect sense.

She lay there looking at it for a while.

It was a strange thing, to have spent years with someone existing only in a video and a news caption, and to now hold their contact information on a phone in a borrowed bedroom at one in the morning.

She opened his Moments. The background was still the platform default. He posted rarely — a handful of shared academic papers, a few links to materials, nothing about daily life. She scrolled to the end quickly.

Mostly empty. As expected.

She went back to the chat window.

Her thumb hovered near the dialogue box. She wasn't going to type anything. She was only looking, in the way that felt allowable when no one could see.

She must have tapped the dialogue box by accident, because the keyboard had appeared when she wasn't paying attention. She moved to close it.

Deng Chuqi shifted beside her.

Yun Li startled, hand closing around the phone, screen going dark, breath held.

Several seconds passed. Nothing more.

She peeked out from under the covers. Moonlight through the curtains. Deng Chuqi's face still and peaceful, still asleep.

Just a position change.

Yun Li let the air out slowly. Her eyelids were growing heavy. She put the phone back on the nightstand, adjusted her pillow, and was settling toward sleep when the phone vibrated.

In the silence of the room it was shockingly loud.

She grabbed it before the sound could continue. One eye on Deng Chuqi, she opened the screen with her thumb.

The chat window. Fu Shize's contact. Still open.

And on her side of the conversation, sent five minutes ago while her phone was in her hand and she was not paying attention: a sticker. One she had saved from Deng Chuqi's collection earlier in the evening. A small stick figure with one arm extended, index finger pointing directly at the screen. Block letters underneath.

Be my wife.

Yun Li stared at the screen.

Below it, timestamped just now, a single message from the other side.

Fu Shize: [?]