Chapter One Hundred and Eight — Dinner Together

Night fell swiftly, especially after the Start of Autumn. The realm of daylight was being gnawed away by darkness until it was ragged and incomplete, torn and battered. It was as though, after five in the evening, blackness came as naturally as breath.

For two people, a single evening meal was simple, yet not simple at all.

Yi Shu busied herself in the kitchen with hands and feet alike, cooking dish after dish. Tang Chao could not sit still; he paced back and forth between the kitchen and the living room.

More than once he reached out to help, only to be firmly stopped by her.

In her mind, he was simply not the sort of man who could shine in a kitchen. Besides, he was still ill.

Tang Chao sat quietly curled up on the sofa, watching a tedious talent show on television. “How did he even get through to the next round? He doesn’t sing half as well as I do,” he muttered, pointing at one of the male contestants shrieking through a hysterical song.

Strange as it was, in singing competitions, as long as a contestant howled and wailed his way through a performance, the chances of advancing were indeed very high. By contrast, for those sweet, plain little songs, there were few who ever stood out.

Yi Shu kept herself busy and had no time to pay him any mind.

“Hey.” He turned the television down. “Yi Shu, is dinner ready? I’m starving. I’m still sick, and this is how you treat your patient?”

“Honestly.” Yi Shu sighed and shook her head, setting down the lid in her hand. “Then please, be a normal patient and go lie down in your own home. When dinner is ready, I’ll bring it over.”

“I want to watch you cook,” Tang Chao said, his tone softening into a hint of coaxing, no longer barbed. “All right, I won’t rush you. Take your time.”

He had always imagined a scene like this: coming home to find a gentle, capable wife with a table laden with food, taking the briefcase from his hand and greeting him with a smile. Welcome home.

Perhaps for Tang Chao, who had not yet reached twenty, such hopes were premature. But for someone who had gone so long without the warmth of home, to long for warmth was only human.

“Have you taken your medicine?” Yi Shu asked, noticing the flush rising over his cheeks and ears. She could not tell whether it was the indoor heating or whether his cold was worsening. She had first noticed the signs earlier, while they were shopping at the supermarket.

He sulked like a child. “I don’t want to.”

Then, sensing the chill that had crept into the heavy air, he added, “I’ll take it after I eat.” It sounded like bargaining.

“Take it now,” Yi Shu ordered. “That medicine has to be taken before meals.”

“What difference does it make, before or after?” He did not care in the slightest and turned the television up again. “Once it’s in the stomach, it’s all the same.”

Was she coaxing a child? Yi Shu’s expression darkened, and suddenly she no longer wanted to say another word. Perhaps she was tired, perhaps weary; perhaps it was simply unnecessary to raise the banner of concern and force someone to do what he did not wish to do.

In her memory, only Yi Hui, before the age of fourteen, would kick up a fuss, cry and shout that he did not want to take medicine.

Since childhood, Yi Hui had never been able to swallow pills. If forced down, they would catch in his throat, neither up nor down, leaving him in unbearable pain. So Yi Shu’s mother could only break the pills open, pour them into a bowl, add water, stir them well, and make him drink.

In that way, the bitterness wrapped within was released without restraint.

He had never been willing to drink it, and would push the bowl away as though avoiding something harmful.

Only after his mother passed away did he begin to learn how to swallow pills. Whenever it remained too hard to get down, he still used the old method: break them open and add water. For him after that, any bitterness seemed somehow diminished.

“Why aren’t you saying anything?” Tang Chao had waited a long time, but Yi Shu still had not spoken, and he could not help asking, “Are you angry?”

“I don’t have the leisure to be angry with you.” Yi Shu’s tone was cool and flat.

Caring for someone required energy. To give without return was not something everyone could keep up forever.

“If you say it like that, then you must be angry.” Tang Chao wore the look of someone who had seen through everything. He carried a peculiar confidence in life, and sometimes he would project his own assumptions onto others. “With a face as handsome as mine in front of you, how can you still be angry? You should be happy.”

There he went again.

Yi Shu let it pass like the wind. In truth, confidence and insecurity were not all that different; they merely produced different effects depending on whose body they inhabited.

“All right, I’ll eat.” After waiting a long while and receiving no reply, Tang Chao realized a one-man stage could not perform a play. “Look, I’m eating.” He deliberately made exaggerated gestures.

Yi Shu continued to busy herself at the stove and pretended not to see.

“Come eat,” she said, carrying the dishes to the table. “Dinner’s ready.”

“At last.” Tang Chao could barely wait. He snatched up a huge mouthful of vegetables and stuffed it into his mouth, swallowing it whole without chewing.

Yi Shu brought out two bowls of rice from the kitchen and sat down opposite him. She ate carefully, slowly, and with restrained propriety, as though she were the guest and he the host.

In a way, that was not wrong. For now, she could hardly be called the mistress of the house; at most, she was acting in that role.

She watched him, her own chewing slowing further, and before long she had drifted into a daze.

Xu Shixi always ate the food she made just like this, wolfing it down in great gulps. She often reminded him to chew slowly, but as he ate, his pace would always somehow quicken again without his noticing.

Xu Shixi had spent many years in the business world and had long since learned every sort of professional etiquette, social etiquette, table etiquette and more. Yet before Yi Shu, he cast all such formalities aside and revealed his truest self.

“Why are you staring at me?” Tang Chao raised the hand that held his chopsticks and waved it before her eyes. “Thinking I’m a feast for the eyes?”

“Eat your food.” Yi Shu’s face grew cold. “Finish and go back quickly. I think your cold is almost better anyway.”

“Then I’ll eat slowly,” he said, slowing both his chopsticks and his chewing. “Best if I eat until dawn.”

Then I can stay with you a little longer.

“Stop fooling around, will you? Stop joking like that, okay?” Yi Shu fixed him with a stern look, then suddenly lowered her long lashes, her expression going blank. “When you’re done, just go home on your own. Leave the bowls and chopsticks; I’ll clean them tomorrow.” She set down her chopsticks, pushed back her chair, and walked toward the bedroom without looking back.

“Hey...” Tang Chao stretched out his unfocused gaze, trying to call after her, but for a moment he could not think of a single word to say.

He remained seated in that wooden chair for nearly an hour. In a heated room, food cooled just as quickly as it did in a cold one.

If only he had not said those things. But regrets, once things had gone this far, were useless.

“Yi Shu, are you asleep?” He went to her bedroom door and knocked lightly. “I’m leaving.”

You should sleep early too.

Yi Shu lay in bed for an hour and still could not fall asleep. The words she had wanted to say, when they reached her lips, had already been stripped of most of the force they ought to have carried.

Such a faint voice, even in the hush of night, could scarcely be heard through a wall.

Tang Chao returned to the place downstairs where he lived. At the door, a thin band of yellow light spilled through the crack.

He had forgotten to turn off the lamp when he left.

He had also forgotten the central air-conditioning.

But perhaps that was for the best. Once inside, a wash of warmth wrapped itself around his body.

Though Tang Chao was thinking of Yi Shu, he could not resist the heavy drowsiness brought on by the cold medicine. The moment he lay down, he fell asleep.

His sleeping posture was almost the same as hers. Both of them stared up at the ceiling.

He was thinking that just above the ceiling ought to be her room, with only a floorboard of a few dozen centimeters between them.

In the world above that floor, Yi Shu seemed to feel sleep come over her as well. She yawned twice in a row, and then her eyelids no longer had the strength to stay open.

Yi Shu thought of Yan Lu and Lu Xugao. Since their parting at the Scholar's Tea Cafe, she had not seen them for quite some time. Even their phone calls had grown sparse.

In fact, before November arrived, Lu Xugao had already signed logistics contracts for the second half of the year with several large and small companies in Yunbei. After all, once October ended, only the final two months of the solar year remained. In these two crucial months, one had to give it everything. The only thing he felt he owed Yan Lu was that, when he had first intended to give her a life of ease and abundance, abundance had indeed come; as for ease, there was probably still a long road ahead.

Fortunately, they had a direction to follow.