By Friday, Shang Zhitao's period had come.
She felt a wave of relief, for no reason she could name. She hadn't realized until then that she'd been, even a little, reluctant to go to Luan Nian's place.
She went with Lumi to buy coffee and ran into Luan Nian at the cafe, in the middle of talking business with someone. After Lumi greeted him, she said to Shang Zhitao, "He's not going to think we're skipping work again, is he?"
"Aren't we skipping work?" Shang Zhitao blinked at her. Lumi clapped a hand over her mouth. "You're going to be the death of me, keep your voice down! Iced americano again?"
Shang Zhitao shook her head. "No, it's not a good time for me today." She said it a little louder than usual, just loud enough for someone else to catch it. She wanted Luan Nian to hear, the implication being that she wasn't coming over this time.
"Oh, oh, oh." Lumi made a couple of noises and asked, "Where are you off to this weekend?"
"Out with my roommate."
"Where to?"
"Mount Wutai."
"No way."
Lumi took the coffees and handed Shang Zhitao a hot one. "All you ever do is work or go out and have fun. When are you going to find someone? You're twenty five, right?"
"Isn't twenty five still young? Grace said she didn't get married until she was thirty."
"Fair enough. But you've got to date someone for a few years first, don't you? Remember that friend of mine I mentioned two years ago? Still single. Tell you what, dinner tonight?"
Shang Zhitao meant to decline, but she suddenly remembered what Luan Nian had said that day: I have a date, with Miss Gong Yue. Since then, they'd barely exchanged a word that wasn't about work. She knew Luan Nian was waiting for her to give in, waiting for her to come running to his place over the weekend the way she always did, so things could go back to how they'd been before: her obedient, him in control.
"Sure."
"Deal! I'll set it up right now!" The two of them left the coffee shop. Lumi glanced back inside and suddenly said to Shang Zhitao, "Damn, is Luke glaring at me or something?"
Shang Zhitao looked back too. Luan Nian was talking to someone, his arm draped over the back of the sofa in an easy, relaxed pose, not looking at them at all.
"Are you just feeling guilty about skipping work..." Shang Zhitao said.
"Was that my imagination? Am I going blind?" Lumi muttered to herself.
Shang Zhitao carefully composed a text to Luan Nian: "I'm not feeling well, I won't be coming over this week." Thinking the tone sounded too stiff, almost like a challenge, she changed it to: "I'm not feeling well, so I won't be coming over this week, okay!" Luan Nian didn't reply.
That evening, she really did go to dinner with Lumi. Lumi's childhood friend was just as much a chatterbox as she was. He looked well off, strings of curio beads wrapped around his wrist, a fine piece of jade at his neck along with lapis and amber, an outfit loud enough for midsummer even though it was only spring. He was even holding a folding fan, which struck her as pretty funny. The moment he sat down he said to Shang Zhitao, "You've got a nice figure, miss."
Shang Zhitao had never met anyone who opened with a line like that, and her face went red on the spot. Seeing her blush, Lumi's friend looked stunned. "Damn, how long has it been since I've seen a girl blush like that?"
Lumi kicked him under the table. "Shut up already!" She gave Shang Zhitao an apologetic smile. "He's like this, he's not a bad guy, just has an annoying mouth on him. Don't mind him." They'd barely started eating when Lumi found herself wondering what kind of man her friend even was and how she'd never noticed before. In the end it came down to how much she liked Shang Zhitao, so much that even her wealthy childhood friend suddenly seemed unworthy of her.
Shang Zhitao thought they were hilarious and couldn't stop laughing. The whole dinner turned into a comedy: Lumi kept hitting her friend, he kept begging for mercy, and Shang Zhitao kept trying to break it up with "it's fine, it's fine." After dinner, the friend said to Shang Zhitao, "I'll be honest, miss, I really do like you. But I'm not the settling down type, and I'm afraid you'd end up hurt. If you..."
"Shut your mouth!" Lumi hit him again. "If nothing! What if? Go take a piss and look at yourself in it! We haven't seen each other in over a year and you've turned into such a bullshitter! Get lost!" After giving him an earful, she pulled Shang Zhitao away.
They'd already walked half a loop around Houhai and Lumi was still apologizing. "I'm so sorry, that was so embarrassing. He didn't used to be like that."
"It's really fine, I thought he was funny. My stomach hurts from laughing." The two of them walked arm in arm, and Shang Zhitao finally remembered that Kitty had reported her for taking bribes. She asked Lumi, "How do I deal with this?"
"Then I could just as easily say he's trading favors for sex with the boss! Since when does whatever she says become the truth? No way. What did Director Wang say?"
"I called him. He didn't pick up."
"Didn't pick up?"
"Didn't pick up."
Him not answering should have meant something was wrong, but Shang Zhitao had nothing to hide and wasn't afraid. Lumi glanced at her, sensing this wasn't so simple. "That little bastard Kitty must be up to something."
"I don't know."
"We'll take it one step at a time. If it doesn't work out, go find Luke. He's your boss now, and he ought to look out for someone in his department who's being wronged, shouldn't he?"
Shang Zhitao didn't say anything. She didn't tell Lumi that she felt Luan Nian didn't trust her. That he didn't trust her hurt more than it ever had before, so much that just thinking about it left her breathless.
She didn't understand why she needed his approval so badly. Was his approval really that important?
It was in the deep hours of a spring midnight, as she lay awake staring blankly at the moon and clouds outside the window, that she realized something: however much she claimed she had nothing to hide and didn't care about being reported, it had quietly been eating at her all along.
As frightened and troubled as she was, she still didn't want to turn to Luan Nian for help. She felt there was no point in it.
When she set out early the next day, the dark circles were still under her eyes. Zhang Lei drove over to pick them up. He'd been promoted again and had traded up to a big SUV. Four people and a dog, just like it had always been. They drove all the way toward Shanxi.
The highways were always under construction back then, and every so often the road turned bumpy and pitted. They were jostled around in the car, laughing the whole time, while Luke barked from the trunk now and then to join in the fun.
By the time they reached Mount Wutai, it was already evening.
They ate a vegetarian meal in the scent of incense and candles, then spent a while admiring the moon. Sun Yuanzhu had his beloved camera slung over his shoulder, photographing their silhouettes under the moonlight. The four of them sat side by side in the courtyard, none of them in a hurry to sleep, each thinking ahead to the first incense of the next morning. It seemed like everyone had a great many wishes.
Shang Zhitao had brought two walnut carvings she'd bought on a business trip to Suzhou, meaning to have them blessed. She'd never believed in anything before, but these past few days she'd suddenly felt as if she'd offended her zodiac year, and kept wanting to find some way to ward it off. She wanted peace of mind, and she wanted things to go smoothly.
The two carvings showed a boy and a girl, both terribly cute, the boy herding a cow, the girl reading a book. They were hand carved, over a thousand yuan apiece. She didn't even know why she liked these little trinkets so much, but in the end she'd paid for them anyway.
She hoped the monk would recite a few extra lines of scripture when he blessed them, so the Buddha would hear.
"What are you going to pray for when you burn incense tomorrow?" Shang Zhitao asked Sun Yu.
She thought about it and said, "For the person I love to live a long life, and for my career to go smoothly."
"What if you could only ask for one?"
"Then for the person I love to live a long life."
There was a faint glimmer of tears in Sun Yu's eyes, but by the time she lowered and raised her head again, they were gone. Every so often she glanced at Sun Yuanzhu, and there was something in her eyes that Shang Zhitao couldn't read.
"What about you?" Zhang Lei asked Shang Zhitao.
"I... for my career..." Shang Zhitao lied. What did she really want to ask for? She wanted love.
After everyone else had gone in to sleep, Shang Zhitao stood in the courtyard and called Luan Nian. It was noisy on his end. She asked him, "Where are you?"
"At a bar."
"Is there an event tonight?"
"Yeah."
The late spring evening wind blew over her, as if trying to wake her up. But Shang Zhitao had only just turned twenty five, still at an age eager to find answers, and if something remained unresolved, it would occupy her mind until she got to the bottom of it.
"Luan Nian, there's something I want to say to you."
"Hold on." Luan Nian stepped outside the bar and stood in the parking lot out front, the same late spring wind blowing over him too. He thought his heart seemed to be beating a little faster than usual, or maybe that was just his imagination.
"Luan Nian, there's a lot I want to say to you. Let me start from the beginning."
"I'm not a casual person. I've had one real relationship. Before you, I never had a one night stand with anyone, and I haven't since."
"At the start, I couldn't see my own feelings clearly. I didn't understand why things began the way they did between us. But as time went on, I got to know you, and I told myself, privately, that I understood you better than anyone else did..."
"I started wanting more. Luan Nian, I want to ask you..." Shang Zhitao stopped talking. She still had the chance to say nothing more, to keep pretending, to keep weaving the fantasy that Luan Nian might love her a little too. But she couldn't do it anymore. Four years had passed, and if something hadn't come to her in four years, why would it ever come? It wouldn't. Shang Zhitao wasn't going to take that chance.
"I want to ask you, can we date like ordinary couples do? Date, raise a dog together. I think you actually like Luke quite a bit. Watch movies, eat out, go shopping, cook together, and if it's possible, later on, when the time is right, get married and have a child or two..." These were all the small, hopeful fragments she'd imagined about Luan Nian over the years. She didn't dream often, but every once in a while she had a dream just like that. She really did like Luan Nian, more than she'd ever liked Xin Zhaozhou. She liked him so much that she thought she'd never like another man for the rest of her life. She was so foolish.
When Shang Zhitao finished speaking, she waited quietly for Luan Nian's verdict. But Luan Nian said nothing, and Shang Zhitao couldn't tell what he was thinking. She said, "Can you say something?"
Luan Nian finally spoke. "I hope you'll calm down. I'm not planning to change how things are between us. I'm not ready to take things any further."
"Why not? I thought that after four years together, a lot of things had changed. At the very least, things should run deeper than they did at the start." Her voice and her hands were both trembling slightly, though she didn't notice it.
"Things have changed, but not enough for me to think we should date and get married. You're still young, and you're not settled on anything yet. Even if you say now that you want to be with me, tomorrow you'll still go to some blind date and meet other men. I'm not willing to date someone like that."
"I was only helping Sun Yu out."
"Is that so?" Luan Nian asked her. "Are you sure about that? You're only helping Sun Yu, which is why you go to blind dates every week. You just want to spend time with a friend, which is why you're sharing an apartment with a man in a relationship that's anything but clear. I'm sorry, but I think we're better suited as friends with benefits."
Shang Zhitao didn't say anything. She didn't know what to say. She could see now that the impulse that had driven her to speak had only brought humiliation on herself. She understood, suddenly and clearly, that whatever concern Luan Nian seemed to show her had only ever been a grand illusion of her own making.
"I understand."
Shang Zhitao hung up the phone.
Everyone has, at least once in their life, a moment of throwing caution entirely to the wind, reckless of the consequences. It was fine, really. The other shoe had finally dropped in her heart.
Luan Nian hung up and walked back into the bar. Tan Mian asked him, "What's wrong?"
"Nothing."
"But you look like you're in a bad mood."
"I'm in a fine mood."
The bar was lively, but he sat there looking a little detached from it all. Gong Yue asked him, "Still not drinking tonight?"
"No."
"Want to go for a walk, then?"
"No."
Luan Nian stood up, unable to name what he felt. He'd never been afraid of turning people down and was good at it too, a few times every year, cleanly, without hesitation. It had never once bothered him. Tonight was the first time something sat lodged in his chest. He didn't want to be trapped by love. Every relationship, once it grew more intimate, began to bring restrictions, possessiveness, petty troubles, and Luan Nian didn't like that. Even though what he felt for Shang Zhitao was different, he didn't think it burned hot enough to count as love.
He was being too arbitrary.
He'd called others childish, but he was the most childish one of all.
Shang Zhitao still had the monk bless the two little figures, one for herself and one for Luan Nian. She didn't ask for much, only that they'd sleep soundly and that life would go smoothly for them both.
On the way down the mountain, there was a tree by the roadside, its branches reaching out, already showing the first hints of summer's abundance. Shang Zhitao tied the carving of the boy herding the cow onto one of its branches. A thin ray of light slipped through the grooves of the carving, lighting up the boy's face bright red.
Like the very first stirrings of love in a lifetime.
But that kind of time would never come again.