"Hello, Mr. Jiang. My name is Shang Zhitao." She hadn't expected Jiang Lan to suddenly ask her name, but at least that was all she'd asked.
"You've handled things well." Jiang Lan praised her, then added, "I'm staying right next door. When luke wakes up, let me know. We still have industry association matters to finish."
"Of course. I'll leave luke a message to find you when he's up." Zhitao was gradually learning to read people, gradually learning where the lines were. Jiang Lan's "let me know" really meant "have luke come find me himself."
After seeing Jiang Lan out, she went back to Luan Nian's bedside. He was still faking it. Everyone else had left and he still kept his eyes shut tight. She called his name twice, gently, and he wouldn't open them, just murmured a low "hot."
Zhitao made a small sound and picked up the towel to wipe his face, in earnest this time. Even if the drunkenness had started as an act, he'd had enough to drink that he had to be feeling it by now.
Luan Nian caught her hand. They never touched hands outside of sex, but today he'd done it twice, first hooking her finger, now holding her hand outright. His palm was hot from the alcohol against the cool back of her hand, his thumb moving lightly across her skin, and his voice came out with a gentleness she rarely heard from him. "Come straight to my place Friday, the moment you land?"
She set the towel aside, leaned in, brushed her lips against his, and pulled back just as quickly. "Okay."
"Shang Zhitao."
"Mm?"
"My head hurts."
Luan Nian never complained about feeling unwell. Zhitao had always assumed he was made of something indestructible, endless energy, a mind that never stopped, a life force that never ran low.
"Should I get you a painkiller?"
"In my laptop bag."
She found the painkillers in his bag. A few were already gone, so this clearly wasn't the first headache. She poured him a glass of water and couldn't help asking, "Do you get these often?"
"Sometimes. Nerve pain. My mother has it too."
"Oh." She crouched by the bed and pressed her fingers to his temple. "Here?"
"Yeah. Thanks."
"Don't mention it. You took care of me when I had pneumonia."
"Is this you paying me back?"
...
The security guard at Luan Nian's complex who knew Zhitao had been promoted to deputy captain. He'd traded his old uniform for a sharper one and looked crisper standing at the gate. When he saw her dragging her suitcase, he drove the cart over on his own. "Let me get that for you."
"Thanks so much."
He loaded the suitcase into the car. "This way, Miss Shang." He no longer thought of her as someone with a questionable line of work.
Luan Nian had come back on the early flight and was on a call at home when he heard the door. He looked up to see Zhitao looking travel-worn. She'd earned it. The event had just wrapped, she'd had to settle accounts with the event company that morning and chase down all the cleanup work, and she'd probably been up since six.
Zhitao dropped his house key into her bag, swapped her shoes for the slippers she kept there, walked over, and took a drink of the iced soda water by his hand. She pointed upstairs and mouthed, "Going to shower."
Luan Nian muted the call and caught her wrist. "Shower, then sleep for a while."
"Okay."
She went to the guest room, showered quickly, changed into pajamas, and found she wasn't tired at all. So she opened her laptop to write her performance review. She'd never written one before and had no idea where to start. She pulled up a colleague's report for reference, but their work was different enough that she could only borrow the shape of it. The slide deck sat open in front of her. She didn't understand why a review report needed to be a slide deck in the first place.
She wrote, deleted, wrote again. After a long stretch of this she had fewer than fifty words. Luan Nian finished his call, came upstairs, and found the guest room door open. He stood in the doorway watching her. "Not tired?"
She shook her head. "Still haven't finished the report."
He sat on the edge of the bed and took her laptop, looked at the fifty-odd words on the slide. "So in the last hour you've averaged less than a word a minute?"
"I don't know what to write..." She looked a little ashamed.
He glanced at her. She really could stand there being useless without flinching.
"What have you actually done this past year?"
"I..."
"If your answer is that you've just been doing odd jobs, then give up on this promotion." He cut her off. That was Luan Nian. Always strict.
"I probably need to organize my thoughts first." She felt a little exposed. Any time work came up around Luan Nian, she never quite felt she had solid ground under her.
"Then organize them." He handed the laptop back. "A review isn't about listing every task you did down to the last detail. It's about sorting through the mess, breaking the work into categories, and showing how you got things done, how you got them done well, maybe even leaving behind something other people can learn from. Is that clear?"
"Clear."
"Then start writing. First section, budget management."
Luan Nian knew perfectly well what work she'd done. But he wasn't going to write it for her. She needed to learn to think for herself.
"Okay. Thanks, luke." Whenever the conversation turned to work, she called him luke, switching over without a second thought.
He went back to his room, and after a while came back in with his laptop. He was sitting in on a review committee, the kind the company convened once a year to select an industry expert, with a million in equity and an adjusted salary package on the line. He tipped his chin to the side, signaling for her to make room on the bed. She shifted over. He leaned back against the outer headboard and stretched his legs out.
He muted his end and said to her, "Don't know how to write a review report? Listen to this."
"I'm allowed to listen?"
He looked at her. "You talk too much." He didn't see anything wrong with her listening. In fact, he thought the whole promotion system had problems, and he'd said as much to tracy. He wanted senior expert hiring to be more open and transparent, to allow observers, maybe even become fully public. Tracy disagreed. Her reasoning was that a review conducted that way had too many variables, that it often stopped being about the work at all and became a contest of background, resources, connections. There was no way to guarantee it would be fair.
The person presenting was grace. Grace was a core member of the creative center with a dual role spanning the planning department too. Zhitao had worked with her on projects before and knew exactly how good she was.
This was the first time Zhitao had seen a review like this.
Was this even a review? It was a battle.
Grace would be presenting some point and get cut off without warning, hit with a question sharp enough to draw blood. Luan Nian asked one that made Zhitao think that if she'd been in grace's seat, she'd have been cursing him out in her head.
Luan Nian asked, "This project's success. What does that have to do with you? Sales closed the client."
God.
Luan Nian really would go after his own people, in a room like this. It suddenly occurred to Zhitao that being his subordinate wasn't such a good deal after all.
Grace was quiet for a few seconds, then answered, "I'd say, quite rationally, that my part in this project was the finishing touch. It would have been delivered without me. It just wouldn't have been as good."
Huh. Zhitao thought, is this what lumi meant by workplace confidence?
Riding on Luan Nian's coattails, she'd gotten to sit in on a promotion contest between the company's top performers. It was 2011. A million in equity and a substantial raise wasn't just money, it was a ticket into this city, enough to buy an apartment outright.
Their work really was excellent. S-level projects, resources pulled together across the whole company and beyond, industry standards written from scratch, international awards won. Every one of them an expert in their own field.
That day left a real mark on Zhitao. What work paid out depended entirely on who you were. What the truly excellent could earn was beyond anything she'd imagined.
"So is my review going to be like that too?" she asked Luan Nian once it was over.
"No. Yours is a department-level review. It'll depend on how your department runs things."
Zhitao stared at the one page of her own report and thought it was terrible. Luan Nian carried his laptop out of the room, leaving her to work it out on her own. Sometimes even sex could wait, and this was one of those times. He'd rather she finish that miserable report of hers.
She stayed up late and slept in past noon on Saturday. Luan Nian was working out. She usually left once she got up on Saturdays. In the first couple of months, he was often still asleep when she left, only lounging in bed on weekends. At some point since then, he'd started getting up a little earlier.
Sometimes he'd ask, "Something urgent?"
She was too embarrassed to admit she was studying and didn't want to hand over her private life to him, so she'd say, "Meeting my roommate for a meal."
"Every week?"
"Yeah. Isn't that what you do too?"
But today she hesitated. They hadn't done anything the night before, nothing at all, and without that, the reason for her being there stopped making sense. Luan Nian set down the equipment and wiped the sweat off, saw her standing in the doorway, and said flatly, "If you're not in a hurry, stay a bit. I'll help you rehearse your report."
"Really?"
"Yeah."
She was a little surprised he'd offered on his own. Between the two of them it was always her asking and him answering. Him taking the first step was rare, very rare.
"Could you look over what I've written first?" She felt a little uneasy. She'd sat in on yesterday's review and now thought what she'd written looked like garbage. She could already picture the look on his face when he saw it.
"Send it over." He picked up a towel and headed for the elevator. "You'll have to wait for me to shower first. And make something to eat."
"I can cook!" She raised her hand, volunteering. She knew she wasn't much of a cook, and always eating his food made her feel like she owed him something. So she'd gone and learned a couple of dishes from Sun Yu on purpose.
"Go ahead, then."
"I won't burn down your kitchen this time." She swore it solemnly.
While he showered, she went down to the kitchen and looked at how much was stocked in his fridge. She only trusted herself to boil noodles. But she was determined to redeem herself properly, with a real bowl of tomato and egg noodle soup.
He came down from his shower and found her plating the dish, pinky finger raised, and walked over to look. She'd even worked out the color on the plate, an improvement in presentation from last time.
Looks were one thing. He took a bite and his brow furrowed. He saw her watching him, full of hope, and said, "Don't make this again."
She took a bite herself. It was like eating a spoonful of salt. Too embarrassed to spit it out, she forced herself to swallow. He sighed, got up, rinsed the noodles under water, then pulled out a jar of sauce and spooned in a couple scoops, making do with that instead.
A little embarrassed, she told him, "I'm just not skilled yet. I'll practice more. I should be able to make it taste good eventually."
"You ate noodles like this all through school? For four years?"
"Maybe the cooking equipment's changed since then..."
"Is it really that hard to just admit you have no talent for cooking?"
"Oh."
They bickered their way through the meal, and afterward he had her rehearse.
Zhitao was only moving from level two to level three, a department-internal review, mostly a formality, and whether she passed depended on alex. But alex had already given her the Suzhou project. His intentions were clear enough. She was going to pass this time.
Luan Nian knew that too, but he didn't say so. She'd have to face harsher competition eventually, and starting to practice now wasn't a bad thing.
He asked her, "Why did you choose that particular supplier in Suzhou?"
Then, "What do you think has been your biggest improvement, your biggest gain, in your year at Lingmei?"
"What about your current work confuses you or leaves you dissatisfied?"
"Do you think the current market strategy is right? Does it need adjusting?"
None of these were questions a level-two employee should have to answer, but he asked them seriously anyway. She had no experience with this kind of review and kept getting caught flat-footed, her mind unable to keep pace with his questions, until by the end she felt genuinely discouraged.
"Scared?"
She nodded. "I'm nervous."
She'd expected him to tell her that if she was nervous she should just give up, the way he usually talked. Instead, uncharacteristically, he was almost lenient. "If you're nervous, then practice more."
If you're nervous, then practice more. Did that even sound like something Luan Nian would say? He went further. "Be ready. If you're going to win, win it well."
Her gaze drifted. He stood up and asked her, "Fish. Want to go?"
"Didn't we already eat at noon?"
"That barely counted as a meal." He picked up his car keys. "On the way we can check how the bar renovation's coming along."
"I'll come too."
They rarely spent a weekend together. She still had questions about the promotion process, and used the fish as an excuse to get in the car. He'd said he was going to tear the place down and rebuild it, and that was exactly what had happened.
They drove up the mountain and she rolled her window down to let the wind in. His phone rang. He hung up on it without a thought. It rang again. She glanced down and saw the name on the screen: Zang Yao.
It felt like seeing something she wasn't supposed to see, and she looked away quickly.