Chapter 38
Zhou Yue sat in the bathtub, hugging her legs. She turned to look at the tiny scars on her face in the mirror. They looked like they were scratched by a cat. The bleeding had stopped long ago, but the steam had made every scar red, swollen, hot, painful, and itchy. This was already tormenting her, and he...
She looked down at her fingers, pointed and slender, like the hands of a piano player. She thought of a round coin, dipped in sweet syrup, swallowed by a black glove. The scar spread out from her collar like a tongue of fire, and the scar from the corner of her mouth to the base of her ear wrinkled half her face...
The fingertips wrinkled by the hot water in front of my eyes became more and more blurred, and the hot tears dripped into the water, drowned by the dripping sound of the faucet.
There was a knock on the door, and the wooden door made two muffled thuds. The voice outside the door seemed to be from a long distance away. "Hasn't it been washed yet?" After waiting for a while, there was no response, and then the other person said, "Don't soak the wound in hot water for too long."
Zhou Yue swallowed several times, enduring the pain like swallowing a needle, and finally managed to suppress a whimper. She looked at the door and whispered, "It will be over soon."
"Um."
She wiped the moisture off the mirror. Her eyes, pale and bloodshot, rimmed with cold water. She waited for the redness to fade, took a deep breath, and opened the door. As she walked out, she bumped into the man at the door. He was wearing a bathrobe, his hair half-dried. He must have showered. The scent of shower gel lingered in the air, like a misty temple. When he saw her emerge, he asked, "Are you done?"
"Um."
"Where's my newspaper?" He put his hands behind his back and looked down at her with a stern face.
Her mind went blank. She looked up at him for a long moment and said, "It's right next to your bed."
"Really?" He adjusted his glasses, glanced at her face lightly, lowered his head and slowly walked across the corridor, muttering as he walked: "Didn't I see it?" He had already gone upstairs while speaking.
Zhou Yue stood in the dark corridor next to the bathroom door. She could still hear her own deafening heartbeat until the footsteps disappeared.
Unlike Shenzhen, Jiang Huai sleeps on the second floor and Zhou Yue sleeps on the first floor.
The moonlight was like water, and memories, like water, rose and fell in the night. The tide lapped against her bed. From afar, she could hear Kang Xingxing calling her, "Don't be afraid, Yueyue! Come down! I'll catch you!"
She was afraid of water and it was quite difficult for her to learn to swim. In the end, she only learned freestyle and breaststroke. But Kang Xingxing was a good swimmer. When they first started learning, he would always jump into the pool first, grin at her with his big white teeth, and wave. The sun made him look like a little bronze man.
She covered her mouth and nose and jumped as if ready to die. She hit the water with a thud and sank deeper and deeper. She was so scared that she kicked her arms and legs, thinking that she was going to die, until a pair of hands hugged her, lifted her up, and she jumped out of the water like a dolphin.
She screamed in fear and coughed at the same time. She finally wiped the water off her face. She looked down and saw a black face with a smile on its face. Its chin was resting on her belly button and it was looking up at her. It looked so worthless, like a fool who had married a pretty wife at the village entrance.
"Brother, you want to strangle me."
She smiled with her eyes closed, gently stroking the hand that was around her waist, gently stroking the round-boned wrist and delicate skin, and suddenly sat up in bed, sweating profusely in the dark.
"What's wrong with you?" The person behind him had a hoarse voice, filled with anger from being woken up.
"Mr. Jiang." Zhou Yue's heart was beating so fast that her vision went dark, but in the moonlight she could still clearly see the feminine facial features of the person on the bed, her thin and curled eyelashes, and even a faintly visible gloomy mole between her eyebrows.
"Why are you here?" She spoke with difficulty, turning her back and not looking at him.
"I can't be here?"
"No..." Zhou Yue's quilt was soaked, and the back of her nightgown was also wet. She blinked rapidly in the darkness, forcing herself to wake up. "It's mainly because you never..."
"Then lie down and sleep."
Zhou Yue lay down with her back to him, her neck stiff. The man behind her came up and hugged her. "You're sweating so much, are you hot?"
"Um."
"I turned on the air conditioner," he stroked the tip of her cold ear, "you're as cold as ice."
Zhou Yue was speechless. She stared into the darkness with her eyes wide open in horror, and heard him say, "What did you call me just now?"
"elder brother."
"Oh," he chuckled, his chest vibrating against her back, "it turns out it's real. I thought I was dreaming." He smoothed her hair, brushing it against her cheek as he tucked it behind her ear, and murmured, "You haven't called me that in a long time."
The two figures overlapped on the moonlit wall, looking so affectionate that Zhou Yue didn't dare to blink.
"It's because your identities are different now. You're not the injured person I picked up on Shahe Street. You can't call me that casually."
He grabbed her hand, interlocked their fingers, stretched out his arm with her, and looked at her slender fingertips from afar, which were so white and glowing in the night. "Do you regret saving me?"
“…I don’t regret it.”
"Why."
"You give me money and save my mother."
The lingering sound faded away, drifting into the long silence like a kite with a broken string. The chest behind him paused in its rise and fall, and returned to normal after a while.
"Um."
He didn't say anything after that. He put down his hands, hugged her, and whispered, "Go to sleep." He held her shoulders and caressed them, his fingertips rubbing against the straps of her silk nightgown, making a soft rustling sound. He buried his face in her hair and rubbed it, and soon fell asleep.
He was still as silent as ever when he slept, only his breathing became heavy and his body became heavy, pressing down on her until half of her body was numb.
She could no longer sleep and stayed awake until dawn.
After that, they stayed in Hong Kong for a while. Jiang Huai basically never went out. Since he couldn't go out to cause trouble, he had to make a fuss at home. He was not satisfied with any of the three meals a day.
But he slept very soundly, so soundly that he was in the same position when he woke up in the morning as before going to sleep, as if he were dead. It must be that in the early years when his sleeping posture was formed, he had no room to turn over.
Only Zhou Yue could no longer fall asleep. She woke up when the sky was bright. The first thing she saw was the Roman columns and the high ceiling, and the second was his sleeping face. The faint morning light shone through the tight curtains, as dim and lifeless as the sunset at dusk. At this time, her shoulders had no feeling, and she didn't know how to move, so she didn't dare to move.
But sometimes he would sleep with his back to her, facing the wall, half lying prone. At this time, she would sit up and look at him. The bedroom was so quiet that you could hear a pin drop, and no one could hear the storm in her heart.
She was afraid. She admitted that she had never killed anyone, not even a chicken. The man lying on the ground with his brain hanging out of his head and the little boy whose shoulder was torn off by Xiao Yuan's bullet flashed back and forth in front of her eyes. As they flashed, she suddenly covered her mouth with her hand, her stomach cramped and she broke out in a cold sweat. She crawled out of bed and ran to the bathroom, not daring to make a sound.
Jiang Huai woke up when Zhou Yue was taking a shower in the bathroom, but she couldn't hear any noise. When she came out of the shower and looked downstairs, she found that he was already in the living room drinking tea and watching a boxing match, with a newspaper spread across his knees and wearing a bathrobe. His face was pale from being soaked in water, but the corners of his eyes and lips were bright red.
She held onto the stairs and thought, he actually had so many white hairs. You couldn't see them normally, but after washing them, and from the angle of looking down, she could see that they were wet and mottled with gray, making him look even crazier. That was the result of his inflated desires and exhausted energy.
He seemed too lazy to care about his gray hair. A few strands of wet hair of complex colors fell down in front of his forehead. He just stared at the TV. When he leaned over to pick up the teacup on the coffee table, he whispered, "What are you watching?" His voice was so soft that it could not be heard at all. But at that moment, the sound of the TV stopped suddenly. She heard it and was startled. She stood at the far end of the stairs, trying her best to ignore the rapidly flashing images of blood and flesh flying on the screen. She asked him, "Mr. Jiang, what would you like to eat for breakfast?" He said, "Porridge." His eyes did not leave the TV.
The porridge he was talking about was neither white porridge nor mung bean porridge, but seafood porridge. Abalone, swimming crab, shrimp, and scallops were the basic ingredients, and the auxiliary ingredients included celery, preserved vegetables, and salted duck eggs... He didn't tell her how to make it, but just told her the ingredients and asked her to remember them. She wanted to check it on her mobile phone, but she didn't have one.
When the porridge was ready, he only drank a sip, frowned, and sat on the sofa to read the newspaper. Zhou Yue sat at the huge dining table and drank porridge alone. He lowered his head to look at his hand. It was pricked by a crab shell. Although the skin was not broken, it was very itchy and it turned red when he scratched it.
"Unhappy?" The man on the sofa crossed his legs and flipped a page of the newspaper. "You're grateful and willing to go through fire and water, but you've made a bowl of porridge and your face is so sullen. Our ancestors said you can't do business with women. If you say ten out of ten, you'll only get three out of ten."
"I didn't." Zhou Yue looked at the patches of blue irises outside the floor-to-ceiling window. The wisteria flowers climbing all over the wall even climbed onto the window, forming a window eaves that blocked out the sun.
This corner of the courtyard always seemed overcast, the grass a faint dark green. The wind rustled, carrying it all the way to the distant dark forest, where the mournful cries of partridges rose. But she longed to touch something warm, like her black gloves, like the hem of her suit that had been scorched by the sun outside her Shenzhen villa halfway up the mountain, or that bloody, boiling kiss...
"I want to go out and get some sun."
"I want to eat fruit."
Zhou Yue stared out the window for a while, then got up and went to the kitchen.
Jiang Huai likes to eat blood oranges, which are sweeter than ordinary oranges. She had never seen this thing before, and she was shocked when she cut it for the first time. The purple-red juice splashed all over her hand, and it felt like she had cut a blood clot.
She took one, placed it on the chopping board and cut it with a Santoku knife. Japanese knives are lighter than German knives, and they made soft thuds on the maple chopping board, which could not cover the sound of newspapers being thrown onto the coffee table in the distance, and the sound of footsteps approaching.
"Okay, cheer up." He pulled out the dining table chairs and sat down facing the kitchen. He took her half-finished porridge and drank it mouthful by mouthful. "Your good friend's injury is almost healed, otherwise we wouldn't have stayed in Hong Kong until now."
She paused with her knife, and heard the clink of the spoon against the bottom of the bowl. "What a waste! If he could have shot that little bastard in the head, he wouldn't have had to take two knives for no reason."
There was a dead silence. Zhou Yue's knife hung in mid-air for a long moment. Then the clinking sound of the knife against the chopping board resounded again, followed by the crisp sound of a spoon colliding with a porcelain bowl. He smiled and said, "But no matter what... he's done a great job protecting the master. This time, I'm giving him triple the price: a house."
"You've done a great job protecting the master." Zhou Yue made the final cut, the knife clattering against the marble countertop. She stared at the tiled wall in confusion. She heard the person behind her slurp the last of their porridge, the bowl set on the dining table with a clang. "Any questions?"
"No." She placed the orange slices on the porcelain plate and arranged them, laughing as she did so. "It just reminds me of when I was a kid, I argued with my mom about the piano, and she starved me for three days. I was so hungry that I had to watch TV day and night to distract myself. I watched everything. I like watching Sailor Moon, but the local TV station is so chaotic. Sometimes they only broadcast one episode, and sometimes they have more than half an hour of news between episodes. I was so hungry that I watched the news every minute. While watching, I ate the seasoning packet of Little Raccoon instant noodles. That stuff is salty, and when it's salty, I drink water, and when I drink water, I'm not hungry anymore. That day I happened to see in the news that you donated 10 million to children sick with SARS. I was still calculating. How many pianos can I buy with 10 million? How many packs of Little Raccoon instant noodles?"
"Life is really..." She laughed, "Who would have thought that one day I would become the master? I really have to thank my mother for giving me a face, otherwise someone like me would have been shot to death on my first day on the job, and I wouldn't even be worthy of being your slave."
"Haha!" He laughed and stood up, his chair sliding back a long way. He walked into the kitchen unsteadily in his slippers, "Use me to stab me, huh?" He suddenly grabbed her waist, his lips rubbing against her temples and ears. His right hand stroked her shoulder to her wrist, and he took the knife she was holding upside down, turned it around and held it right side up. With his left hand, he grabbed her left hand and pressed it on the chopping board. He helped her cut the remaining half of the blood orange while saying aggrievedly, "Why do you hate me so much? I didn't make them kneel on the ground as my footstools, nor did I beat or scold them in the street. When they have nothing to do, they just drive for me and stand guard at my door, and then they have endless money to spend and endless women to play with. I pay for my mother's surgery and the children's schooling. My wife has seven or eight gold bracelets on both hands, and she can't even lift her hands at the card table..."
"When I found Xiao Yuan in Shenzhen, he was squatting on the street with a bunch of bad boys. When the construction site manager came out, they all swarmed up, jostling each other, waiting to be picked by the manager. He was as thin as a chicken and didn't squeeze with others, but there were several people around him who listened to him. Those who work with their minds rule others, and those who work with their hands are ruled by others. I appreciate people with brains. I asked him if he wanted to follow me and told him what I wanted to do. He said he was willing, but he wanted money. No problem, I gave him more than others."
The chopping board made steady rhythmic clacking sounds, one after another.
"Then tell me, would anyone with a conscience be willing to work for me?"
"You, you have no conscience." He pressed his face against the top of her head, whining and scolding, holding her left hand tightly, the blade hovering a centimeter above her thumb. "I thought you were frightened, so I pushed everything aside and stayed home with you, but you ignored me, didn't talk to me, didn't even look at me, fed me at mealtimes like a dog, and even hid from me at night, running upstairs and downstairs. I had to wait until you were asleep before I dared to sneak in, lying at your feet, waiting for you to wake up and touch me."
He placed his lips on her temples and tilted his head to look at her trembling eyelashes from the side. "But you never touched me once after you woke up. You just wanted to kill me."
The blade fell suddenly and chopped into the chopping board. The woman's heart-wrenching scream made the old window frame crack with a crisp sound. Even after the scream died down, the corrugated blade was still buzzing.
Zhou Yue cried so hard that her face was covered with snot and tears. She looked down with tearful eyes. There was no sign of her severed finger on the bloody chopping board. There was only a knife stuck vertically into the chopping board and thinly sliced blood oranges.
"Hahaha! What do you think? My knife skills are pretty good, right?" He laughed triumphantly, then hugged her again, pressing his face against her sweaty hair, inhaling the rose fragrance evaporating from her hair through sweat, and sighed dejectedly, "When I was little, I was poor. The thinner the slices, the more bites I could eat. One orange felt like two, and I tricked myself into thinking I was full."
He hugged the woman who was crying so hard that her whole body was shaking like a sieve, gently rocked her, looked out the kitchen window, and hummed the Wu dialect nursery rhyme in his throat, as if he was coaxing a child to sleep.
Hong Kong was once again covered in rain and dark clouds. The sky was gloomy and dark, and his eyes seemed to be filled with a layer of dust, making them look gray.
"When Xiao Yuan was running away with you, I told Uncle Jiu our story." He looked up at the sky, his eyes dark and gloomy, like old glass marbles. "Haha, Uncle Jiu felt sorry for you. He scolded me terribly... He said I traded my wife's life for mine, and that this was a story about a farmer and a snake. If he hadn't saved me, nothing would have happened to you."
"That makes sense," he laughed. "I didn't kill you when I left Shahe Street. I was keeping you for use. Isn't it natural for a snake to kill the person who saved it? I gave you so many things. I wanted you to be happy in the past few years and live a good life that most women can't have in their entire lives. This can be considered as compensation. Ha, who knew you were such a poor guy, unwilling to spend a penny."
"Xiao Yuan took you out in forty-six minutes and thirty-two seconds. How slow! It took me half an hour to wipe out Uncle Jiu's lair. After I was done, I sat in the restaurant, thinking you were all dead and wouldn't come back. I sat there and thought about the rest of my life. Uncle Jiu was the last one. With his death, no one in Hong Kong would dare to raise their heads and talk to me anymore."
His cold hand trembled as he stroked her cheek. "I have many wives and concubines, and a large family with many children and grandchildren."
"Then I suddenly thought of a question: Would you be angry? The thought struck me as ridiculous. You're already dead, why would you be angry? The second I thought about it, the more ridiculous it became, because even if you were alive, you wouldn't be angry."
His hands entwined around her tightly like snakes. The sky was completely dark. The drizzle turned into a downpour. The big raindrops hit the window with a muffled crackling sound. Occasionally, there was a deep thunder in the sky, but it was isolated outside this wilderness villa. Only his dreamlike voice was close to her ears:
“When you see a rose, you say it’s beautiful, and when you see a snake, you say it’s disgusting. You don’t know that in this world, roses and snakes are close friends. At night, they transform into each other, the snake’s cheeks become bright red, and the rose’s scales gleam.
You see rabbits and say they are cute, and you see lions and say they are scary. You don’t know how they bleed and how they love each other on stormy nights.
He finished reciting Yukio Mishima's "The Marquise de Sade," and his swaying body stopped, his breath rising and falling on her back. "Tell me, who is bleeding, the lion or the rabbit?"
There was a long, deathly silence, and he suddenly hugged her even tighter, so tightly that her soul flew away.
"Alright!" He smiled and swung her around. "I put you in danger, and you're mad at me. Now we're even!"
Zhou Yue's body was as stiff as if filled with lead. She let him sway back and forth. He pulled her shoulders and forced her to face him, so that she could see his bare chest exposed from the open collar of his bathrobe.
"You're not good to me." He declared solemnly, pressing his face to the top of her head, pressing his entire weight on her, and pulling her limp arms to pull them around his waist.
"They said you held onto Xiao Yuan and wouldn't let go when you were dragged out. You never even hugged me. How could he have saved you without my order? I sent my most capable men to protect you, and I took those Thai monkeys who didn't understand human language to provoke the wolves." He closed his eyes and spoke, his voice getting softer and softer until it was just a whisper. His breathing became heavier. He kissed her from forehead to chin intoxicatedly, opened his eyes and looked into her pupils. There was no smile in his eyes, and he aggressively didn't let her blink even once. "I'm really scared."
"Don't be angry anymore, right? Don't be angry anymore," he said, his hand slipping under her skirt to stir up trouble. "It's been so many days, you want to suffocate me to death." He sniffed her neck and behind her ears and smiled, "Today is a good day." He picked her up and walked towards the bedroom while showing off like a treasure: "I'll take you to see Xiao Yuan tomorrow. I've arranged the most spacious and brightest ward for him. Don't run away, be obedient, and I'll let him play with you, take you to school, and pick you up from school in the future."
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