Chapter 35
Zhou Yue's new home is in a villa halfway up the mountain, a place that is even more completely isolated from the world. Everything here is white: white tiles, walls, white dining table, white leather sofa... White gauze curtains flutter in the wind in front of the huge floor-to-ceiling windows.
The living room was so empty that it made people feel uneasy. The arched doors of each room were so high that the end was out of sight. This was only the first floor. Zhou Yue stood on the endless white tile floor and looked up at the dark second floor. The escalator spiraled upwards, as if floating in a weightless space, with a white grand piano as the only fulcrum.
She sat in front of the piano and played "The Blue Danube" and "Starry Sky". When the song ended, she heard someone calling Miss Zhou. She turned around and saw that it was the first time she met Aunt Xu, a typical Jiangnan water town girl. She smiled gently and docilely with her head down, and the fine lines at the corners of her eyes were like ripples on the water. She wore a refreshing moon-white buttoned blouse, wide-leg pants, and a pair of white shoes with dark embroidery that never made a sound.
"Do you want me to show you around?" Aunt Xu was smiling the whole time. Her face and mouth were smiling, but her eyes were cold. She pushed open the doors one by one and showed Zhou Yue the rooms that were not used for any purpose. There were beds, desks, and private bathrooms. Only the room at the end of the first floor was blank, painted white, as if it had been forgotten, or as if there was an extra room out of thin air.
"Mr. Jiang usually stays on the first floor when he comes back..." Aunt Xu whispered. Zhou Yue didn't know why they were so quiet since it was just the two of them. Aunt Xu, perhaps noticing her surprise, smiled in a mysterious way and added, "It's always safer to sleep in alternating rooms. Staying on the first floor won't disturb Miss Zhou's rest."
Then why not just not come back? Zhou Yue thought so, but she didn't dare to say it.
One good thing about Aunt Xu is her strong sense of boundaries. In the days before Zhou Yue was chained, she was practically invisible, surfacing like a lotus flower at mealtimes. She would gently knock on the door twice, no more, no less, and then start talking: "Miss Zhou, it's time for breakfast." Or "Miss Zhou, it's time for dinner."
She quickly got used to Zhou Yue's habit of sleeping for two or three days at a time, and made no sound. Whenever Zhou Yue woke up, she seemed to sense it, fluttering up the stairs like a butterfly and gently knocking on the door, "Miss Zhou, are you awake? Would you like some tea?"
When Zhou Yue has nothing to do, she likes to wander around the villa and jump around. The amazing thing is that she can't make any sound, just like a ghost.
She followed the corners of the walls to the doors of each room and peeked inside. Sometimes she would see Aunt Xu changing the sheets and quilts inside. When she noticed Zhou Yue, she would look up and smile at her. At this time, her smile was soft and relaxed. "Miss Zhou, is there anything wrong?"
"Oh, it's okay. I'm just taking a look." Zhou Yue leaned against the door frame and smiled. "Aunt Xu, what are you doing?"
"Boss Jiang came back last night," Aunt Xu said, looking at her with amusement. "Miss Zhou, didn't you hear?" She smiled again after seeing Zhou Yue's bewildered expression. She bent down to spread out the new sheets and stretched them out. "He came back alone and asked if Miss Zhou was asleep. I told him you were asleep, and then Boss Jiang went to bed."
Of course, they don't always have time difference. When the time difference is the same, Jiang Huai will come back and chat with her, listen to her playing the piano, teach her where she plays poorly or too stiffly, and sit behind her to help her play again.
When it was time for dinner, they sat at both ends of the long dining table to eat. No one spoke at this time. After dinner, Jiang Huai still wanted to read the newspaper. He read it in the living room. After finishing his work, he went upstairs with light and slow steps. When he entered, he asked her what she was doing. She sat on the small sofa and said she was reading a book or drawing. But he didn't really care. He sat beside her and listened to her answers absent-mindedly, leaning his head and making soft "hmm" sounds, his eyes lowered, his fingertips roaming over her eyes, nose, mouth...
After venting, he lay on her and looked out the window at the night scene. The corners of his eyes were as blood red as the teeth marks on her chest. "Sometimes I dream. I dream about when I was a child. That morning my mother gave me some money and said I could buy a popsicle. I was so happy that I picked for a long time in the ice shop. The freezer door was always open. The owner's wife couldn't stand it anymore and slapped me in the face, calling me a poor bastard. On the way back from buying the popsicle, I saw a girl. Her pigtails were shiny black in the sun. She was wearing a blue dress. She was skipping along in front. I limped after her. She walked so fast that I lost her after a few steps. I looked at her back and felt my hands were sticky. I lowered my head and the popsicle had melted long ago. Ha."
He buried his face in her chest and rubbed it, his eyelashes fluttering and making her feel itchy. "When people have nothing, they swear to get everything. When they really have everything, they want to go back to the past."
"Sometimes I wonder, if I were just an ordinary man, with all the money I had, I could only afford that small house on Shahe Street. Would you be willing if the two of us cooked two dishes and made a soup in the shared kitchen every day, brought it home, put it on the coffee table, and cuddled up on the sofa to eat while watching TV?"
Zhou Yue looked at the blank ceiling, rubbing his hair with her palm, and after a long moment, she said, "Yes."
"Heh," he closed his eyes and smiled into her chest, "Your heart is beating so fast."
There was another silence. Zhou Yue wondered if he had fallen asleep, so she asked softly, "But... isn't your father?"
"Illegitimate child, big sister." He burst out laughing, "He's been with me for almost three years."
"I didn't dare ask." She laughed.
"There's nothing I'm afraid to ask." He rolled over and got off her, lying flat on the bed, looking up at the empty ceiling with her. "That jerk Jiang Jide, he got to the top thanks to his father-in-law, and he even played with women outside. He played with my mother and gave birth to me, without paying her a penny. My mother brought me up in Kowloon alone. The opera troupe didn't want her, and she didn't want to sell her body, so she had to be chased around like a cockroach. Even so, Jiang Jide still didn't let her go. I don't know where he got the news from, but he found her and played with her again. She got pregnant with my sister again. When my sister was born, my mother didn't even have milk and could only feed her rice soup. I was six years old at the time and loved her so much that I held her every day without letting go. But children don't understand anything. They didn't even know she was dead and smelled bad, and they still poured rice soup into her mouth."
"When I was fifteen, I returned to my roots. Haha," Jiang Huai laughed until his chest turned red. "It was because that loser Jiang Pingnan got poisoned and the Jiang family was going to be extinct that the old man remembered me."
"Jiang Pingnan," he stood up, supporting his head with one hand and looking at Zhou Yue, "Pingding Jiangnan, wow, so sharp! Hahaha, what's my name?" He lowered his eyes and looked into hers, "Jiang Huai, you can tell he's a son of an actor."
"While their family was touring Jiangnan and spending lavishly, my sister starved to death." Jiang Huai leaned over to Zhou Yue's face, looking at his own reflection in her transparent eyes. "Do you think I should avenge this?"
Zhou Yue was silent. The two stared at each other for a long moment. He looked away and yawned lazily. "Alas... What a pity! No revenge is truly satisfying. Revenge is a cold dish. You can't exact revenge when you're filled with hatred. You have to wait for the hatred to cool, to the point where neither you nor the other party can feel it anymore. Only then can you strike and win."
He let go and fell onto the bed, looking out the window, blinking his eyelashes slowly. "When I sent them away, I didn't feel a thing."
That day he must have drunk some wine after dinner, so he was talkative and had a lot to do. He pestered her to give him a bath, rub his hair, and comb out the white hair to show him, "I'm old and I still need you to take care of me, it's comfortable." He tilted his chin and looked at her with a foolish smile, how much of his intention was sincere and how much was fake, no one knew.
Even so, he still did not sleep with her.
"I'm going to sleep. You should have a good rest." He put on a black bathrobe, put on his glasses, and got up from the bed. When he reached the door, he turned back and said, "Xiao Yuan can walk now, but he can't do anything yet. I'll accompany you for a walk during this time."
"good."
He held the door handle, stood there with his back to her in silence for a long time, then turned around and said with a smile, "Next month, come with me to Hong Kong."
"good."
Zhou Yue slept very deeply that night and had countless dreams. When she woke up, it was still early morning, but the electronic clock on the desk showed that two more days had passed.
"Miss Zhou, someone's looking for you." Aunt Xu brought the porridge to the table with graceful movements, her fluttering trouser legs carrying a whiff of orchid fragrance. "He's been standing at the door for over an hour!"
Zhou Yue paused with her spoon, looked up at the scorching sun outside the floor-to-ceiling window, and then looked at Aunt Xu's back. She was busy in the kitchen with light movements and a faint smile on her lips. She looked relaxed and comfortable because there was no one here except her, including Zhou Yue.
"I understand." Zhou Yue said softly, lowered her head and slowly drank a bowl of porridge before standing up.
"Aren't you hot standing here?" Zhou Yue, wearing a straw hat, jumped down the stairs with her hands behind her back. The hem of her blue dress fluttered, and her white casual shoes made a clicking sound on the concrete floor.
"It's not hot." Xiao Yuan still stood at the door with his hands behind his back. Zhou Yue looked up at the eaves and said, "At least you can stand under the eaves for a while. You can't bear it."
"I want to bask in the sun."
Zhou Yue looked at the blue sky and white clouds in silence. After a while, she said, "Let's go."
"How is your injury?" Zhou Yue spoke again when they got in the car.
"Thank you for your concern, Miss Zhou. I'm almost well now." He turned his right cheek towards her, always smiling. Zhou Yue was too lazy to look at him anymore. She lowered her head to smooth down the wrinkled hem of her skirt. "Is your last name Yuan?"
"Um."
"Round and round?"
"No, it's Yuan Shikai's Yuan."
"Oh, it's Yuan Shikai again, you're so great that you'll die." Zhou Yue looked at the scenery outside the window. There were green trees along the way, and white clouds rolled like cotton candy, rolling and expanding.
But Xiao Yuan obviously didn't want to respond to her nonsense and drove away without saying a word.
His behavior reminded Zhou Yue, and the sunlight stung her eyes. She turned around and glared at him fiercely, "I almost forgot! Why did you pick up that painting last time? Li Jia clearly drew a chimpanzee for me, why didn't you show our chimpanzee drawing to Mr. Jiang? Why don't you just tell him that we only drew chimpanzees?"
"Mr. Jiang wants to see Miss Zhou's paintings, not hers."
"Oh my god!" Zhou Yue threw her head back and laughed heartily, "Tsk tsk tsk, you're the worst lackey I've ever seen. No wonder President Jiang likes you!"
The car stopped at a red light. He turned his head, his dark pupils shattered into countless strands in the sunlight like black crystals, swaying coldly in his eyes. This made Zhou Yue feel uncomfortable. "What are you doing?"
He smiled, and this time he really smiled. He put one hand on the steering wheel and looked at her and said, "Mr. Jiang also likes Miss Zhou very much. He likes her so much that he would never go to anyone else. It's just a painting. He won't do anything to you."
Zhou Yue looked into his eyes, and the smile on the corners of her mouth slowly cooled down. It took too long, until the car behind her honked its horn wildly, then she looked away and looked out the window. The car started silently and flowed into the sea of cars.
After that, the two of them drove in silence. When the car arrived at the bookstore, Zhou Yue jumped out of the car as soon as it stopped, slammed the door, and ran towards the entrance of the bookstore. People who came towards her were stunned when they saw her, and then hurriedly avoided her as if they were avoiding stray bullets.
This was her first time visiting the book city in Shenzhen. Her first impression was that it was like a huge tiered classroom. In the middle were countless bookshelves, row upon row, so high that the top was out of sight. There were stairs going up step by step around it. A young student couple was sitting on the stairs with their computers, reading and taking notes, concentrating and calming their minds.
The little kids weren't so focused. They would run around, pick up a book, sit on the steps and flip through a few pages, then run downstairs to get another one, and then run back up again. Their parents were so annoyed that they couldn't finish a single page of the book and would yell at them in a low voice, "Let's see if I bring you here next time!"
Zhou Yue hadn't seen so many people in a long time. Her palms were wet. She stood in the middle of the bookstore with her neck tilted back, her heart pounding. It took her a long time to walk to the nearest row of bookshelves. She swallowed her saliva, and as soon as her hand touched the spine of the book, she retracted it as if she had been electrocuted. She took a deep breath and took down a book. It was "The Kite Runner", which she had read when she was in junior high school. It was about Amir and Hassan, a young master and a servant. Hassan was blocked in an alley by a bully and raped in order to get a blue kite back for Amir. Amir witnessed it all but did not stand up.
"Do you think Hassan has ever blamed Amir?" Zhou Yue asked Kang Xingxing.
"No."
"Why?"
"Because Hassan would do anything for Amir."
She flipped through the book casually and saw the sentence: "For you, thousands and thousands of times." She felt a suffocating pain in her chest and put the book back in a hurry. Her eyes hurt and her throat was choked. She held on to the bookshelf and lowered her head to relieve the dizziness, but she didn't put the book down firmly and it fell to the ground.
"Miss Zhou, the painting books aren't here. They're upstairs." Xiao Yuan walked over to her and bent down to pick up the book from the floor. His movements were stiff, and the scar on the back of his neck spread from the collar of his black jacket to his hair. He picked it up and put it back, then looked at the bookshelf for a while. When he turned back, he had a smile on his face, not looking at her, but looking down at the ground. "But Miss Zhou, if you want to buy other books, you can buy as many as you want. I have plenty of money."
"You can either buy the bookstore or you can buy it. That would be awesome. It would be worth your time following Jiang Huai. I said that. Go tell him. He won't do anything to me."
Zhou Yue's face was covered in cold sweat and his lips were white. He looked up at him coldly, spoke word by word, and then turned and left. He looked at the ground the whole time without saying a word.
Zhou Yue went upstairs in one breath. There were not as many people here as on the first floor. Vocal music and painting were put together. She walked into the painting area, picked up a book and opened it, then stared out the window in a daze. After staring out of the window, she looked down again. The sketches and the complex human body structure were completely invisible to her eyes, as if she had not seen anything. So staring out the window in a daze became staring at the book in a daze. She stood there motionless. People passing by her would frequently look back, on the one hand seeing the beauty, on the other hand seeing the female psychopath. There is a disease called Kabuki syndrome. This woman was as beautiful as a black-haired SD doll. She was probably sick.
After being in a daze for a long time, she sighed, put the book in her hand back, and looked out from behind the bookshelf, but no one caught up with her.
"You're a bully, you deserve it!" She cursed with a gloomy face, turned around and prepared to go out, but as she turned around, she bumped into a wall. It was a wall with a black jacket on. She was so scared that she shuddered and almost screamed out loud.
"Why are you walking without making any sound?" she screamed in a low voice.
But he didn't respond. He pointed behind Zhou Yue and said expressionlessly, "This is high-level painting."
Zhou Yue was stunned and looked back. Sure enough, the label on the bookshelf clearly stated: "Painting (Advanced)".
"I've picked out a few introductory books." He lowered his head and twisted the books in his hands into a fan shape. "It shouldn't be difficult for you to learn."
But Zhou Yue didn't read the book. She tilted her head and looked at his hands blankly, her eyes covered with a layer of mist. After looking for a while, she snatched the book away and said, "Are you dealing cards? Who told you to deal books like this?"
After cursing, he held the books and looked out the window angrily. Neither of them spoke.
A few children ran past them. Zhou Yue looked away, then slowly glanced at his black-gloved hands and sneered, "Wearing gloves in this hot weather? Why are you trying to be cool? They'll go bad!"
"Probably not," he said calmly, "the skin tissue is damaged."
Zhou Yue looked up at him upon hearing this. Her eyes, as gentle as moonlight, flowed across his black eyes and long eyelashes. He also lowered his eyes to look at her, "A dog is supposed to protect its master. This little injury is nothing, and death is nothing either."
Zhou Yue was stunned for a moment, then smiled, "Okay, wait for me here," he lowered his head and sighed, "What did he give you that makes you so devoted to him like a dog?"
"money."
"Money?" She stared at the shadows of the two people under the light, "Even if you have money, you still have to have the life to spend it, big brother."
"As a man, if you have money, you can have whatever you want."
Zhou Yue raised her head and met his eyes, which were as quiet as the night. After a moment, she lowered her head and said, "Yeah."
She lowered her eyes and felt a shadow coming over and lightly touching her forehead. She was startled and shook it off, "What are you doing?"
He pulled his hand back and pointed to the same spot on his forehead.
"This?" She touched her forehead unhappily. She had bumped into the tile wall on New Year's Eve, and the scab had only just fallen off, but there was still a mark.
"I bumped into him by accident," she said, recalling the time he paraded her down Nanjing Road in Shanghai. She threatened him fiercely, "Stop touching me!"
The two of them stood there in a stalemate for a while, no one knew what the stalemate was all about. Finally, Xiao Yuan spoke first, "Miss Zhou, have you finished your shopping?"
"Let's buy these three books today," she said. "You won't be able to finish them in a short time. You can buy more books after you finish them."
"Yeah," he nodded, turned around and pointed to the opposite side of the floor, "Do you want to go shopping there?" Zhou Yue looked at it while holding the book, frowning, "What is it?" But when she saw it clearly, the corners of her mouth couldn't help but rise, "Yes!"
It was stationery. Everything in the bookstore was ridiculously expensive, including pens and paper. For example, an ordinary little notebook with an embossed ethnic embroidery pattern on the cover could cost tens or even hundreds of dollars. She picked up a palm-sized plastic-covered notebook with a moon and stars printed on it, flipped to the back, and saw the price. She exclaimed, "That's so expensive!"
One hundred and eighty yuan.
"It's okay." His voice was hoarse, but he smiled. "I brought a lot of money. Miss Zhou can buy anything she wants."
"Hmph," Zhou Yue took the notebook and went back to her pen, the mechanical pencil clicking loudly. "I still have to ask Mr. Jiang for reimbursement."
"Boss Jiang has already given me a lot."
"Okay, okay," she smiled so hard that her eyes were invisible, "You really are worthy of being our General Manager Jiang's right-hand man." As she spoke, she followed him with her hands behind her back and stepped on his shadow. As soon as she stepped on it, he slipped away. She was not convinced and stomped hard, the soles of her shoes making a clattering sound. After she was done, she remembered and ran to his side.
He held up a thick stack of everything she had bought, and without looking away, he said, "Miss Zhou, please speak."
"That's not what I meant just now," she thought, looking up at the ceiling in a literary manner. "I should correct that. It's not a dog relying on the power of others, it's a fox taking advantage of the power of the tiger."
"Miss Zhou likes to quibble over words."
"Haha, that's not the case." She lowered her head and laughed, the tips of her ears red. "I wasn't good at studying either. I didn't even get into university."
"And you?"
"Me too."
"Oh..." Zhou Yue pondered.
"Would you like some milk tea?" he asked.
"Hah!" Her eyes lit up with excitement. She looked up at him, but no, she couldn't see clearly. She walked around to his left and saw the corners of his mouth raised high in the sunlight, revealing his white teeth.
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