◎ Fairness ◎

Gu Qiao tilted her head back and looked into Luo Peiyin’s eyes: “Whatever I tried — it won’t have been more than you.”

With each word she spoke, Luo Peiyin’s gaze pressed half an inch closer to her face. Her blood was squeezed by his gaze, inch by inch, surging outward until it all flooded to her face.

In the quiet of that night, Gu Qiao heard the occasional distant bird call, and the sound of the other person’s breathing — two people’s breath mingling together until it was impossible to say whose was whose.

In the midst of that collision of breath, Gu Qiao heard herself say: “Let’s go back. I’ll drive.”

“You?”

Gu Qiao guessed Luo Peiyin was probably picturing her rolling the car in the snow all those years ago — he still saw her through old eyes: “My skills are a lot better than they used to be. You drove here, I’ll drive back. That’s only fair.”

When Luo Peiyin’s eyes drew close to hers, Gu Qiao could see the red veins in them. It was a long road. Driving for extended distances was no small matter.

“The most important thing about a casual relationship is fairness, right?” Gu Qiao’s tone was easy and light, even though her heart had already wound itself around this reunion through more turns than she could count. But the underlying logic by which she understood relationships had never changed: love had to be fair — you couldn’t just keep pulling on one person.

“Fairness?” Luo Peiyin repeated the word, looking at the person in front of him — this person speaking such words with complete sincerity, words he found entirely absurd.

“There’s no fairness or unfairness in how I think about love — only willingness and unwillingness. But since you insist on fairness, we’ll do it your way.”

As he said this, his fingers slid along the line of her spine all the way down to her waist. His touch was feather-light, as though only barely making contact — grazing her, teasing her. The pleasant warmth that had just subsided in Gu Qiao came flooding back. Then his hand settled at her waist and gripped her firmly, cinching her like a burning brand pressed against her. This time, Gu Qiao felt his full strength. His breath fell against her face, warming it to a flush: “In this state — can you actually keep a firm grip on the steering wheel?”

Gu Qiao’s face grew even redder — not from shyness this time. Of course she could grip the steering wheel. But before she could say a single word, the passenger door opened. Luo Peiyin scooped her up and deposited her in the passenger seat, leaned in to fasten her seatbelt snugly, and murmured close to her ear: “Wait until your legs stop feeling weak, and you can drive for as long as you like. Tonight, for the sake of your safety and mine, I’ll drive.”

“You—”

Luo Peiyin returned to the driver’s seat. The temperature inside the car was set quite high.

“Since you’re so insistent on fairness — when I ask it of you in return, don’t go back on your word.”

The person in the passenger seat pressed down heavily on the word “fairness,” biting it off with emphasis. Talking about fairness in love was as absurd as insisting that the stock market rewarded effort in direct proportion — one part effort, one part return. Even if love could be compared to business, the only principle that held was four words: you gamble, you live with the outcome. This person, who loved nothing more than making money, had never gone chasing after the frenzy of the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock markets even at the height of their heat — she had sold products, earning one item’s worth of profit at a time. She had probably never spent even a single second dreaming of putting in a little effort and reaping ten times the reward.

But talking about fairness in love was simply too absurd. Nothing mattered more than willingness. Could it really be that their breakup had stemmed only from her belief that fairness hadn’t been achieved?

His hand rested on the steering wheel. He turned to look at this person — this person who treated fairness as an absolute principle and believed she held the final authority over it. The car hadn’t moved a single centimeter. He simply looked at her, unselfconsciously searching for the faint traces of his own teeth on her lips.

Gu Qiao felt his gaze gnawing at her face: “Could you turn down the temperature a little?”

Luo Peiyin’s fingers brushed across Gu Qiao’s earlobe, gauging the temperature of her skin: “The car is at a perfectly normal temperature. You’re the one running a little hot.” But when the car started up, Luo Peiyin still rolled down his half of the window. The wind outside came drifting in through the opening.

With someone else in the passenger seat, Luo Peiyin refrained from driving one-handed even on this deserted road. He had no taste for dragging others along into risk.

“What are you driving these days?”

“Yellow Dafa.”

“You’re sentimental about that, at least.”

Gu Qiao added instinctively: “Not the old one.” She may have concentrated all her funds in the shop with none left over for buying a house or a car, but she wasn’t still driving a 1984 Yellow Dafa. The wealthiest person she knew drove a Mercedes — she had ridden in it once, and it was quite a different experience from her Yellow Dafa. The owner was a senior acquaintance of Luo Peiyin’s — about ten years older, who had made his fortune in Hainan and was now in the systems integration business. Systems integration was very effective at moving a good portion of software inventory.

Gu Qiao had meant to clarify that she was driving a new car, but tacked onto his remark about sentimentality, it made her sound as if she were denying being a sentimental person at all.

New cars are preferable. Old people are preferable.

When silence fell over the car again, their breath collided once more, impossible to disentangle, and his breath fell against her face and neck again and again like a warm wind, each wave of it finding every inch of exposed skin with nowhere to hide — and then it slipped in under her collar and made its way deeper into her body, traveling further and further down.

The car sped along the small road at a rapid clip, jostling Gu Qiao thoroughly. Something inside her was slowly swelling, expanding. The person beside her kept his eyes fixed straight ahead, as though he hadn’t noticed her at all. But she could tell from the tendons standing out on the back of his hand that he was reining himself in, working to stay composed. She didn’t know whether his palm was as hot as hers — the warmth he had worked into her palm hadn’t yet faded, and a thin, close layer of perspiration had gathered there.

Later, when they reached the wide, smooth main road, Luo Peiyin held steadily at the highest speed within the limit. Even so, by the time they reached the hotel entrance, Gu Qiao’s heart still hadn’t calmed.

The moment they stepped through the revolving door, the hotel’s interior lighting left her complexion fully exposed — more than enough for him to observe every color in her cheeks and ears, clear as day.

The elevator offered a different kind of light. Three reflective surfaces gave back Gu Qiao’s face from multiple angles. Luo Peiyin’s hand rested at her waist, pressing with deliberate, varying force. Testing her reactions, calibrating by degree. Standing this close, he didn’t look at her directly — he found her face in the reflection of the elevator doors and studied it there, in those mirrored panels where everything was lit bright and clear, tracking the subtle shifts moving across Gu Qiao’s face.

Gu Qiao pressed her lips gently together. She was not what she had been in 1992 — every emotion visible, even the slight drop of her lashes betraying what was happening inside her. But the complexion that showed in the elevator doors still gave her away.

Gu Qiao did not yield. Rather than seeking his reflection in the distant elevator doors, she fixed every degree of her gaze directly on his face. Luo Peiyin’s grip at her waist tightened incrementally. His hand gauged in Gu Qiao the longing she was suppressing in this enclosed, potentially accessible space — and he had no reluctance whatsoever about deepening that longing by degrees. Yet in the elevator doors’ reflection, he was only resting a hand at her waist, his eyes not even trained on her.

Once they reached Gu Qiao’s room, everything changed. The strong light above the door made every fine expression fully visible, beyond concealment. Luo Peiyin could not conceal anything either, but he had no intention of concealing anything here.

Luo Peiyin looked her over at his leisure. His gaze seemed to bounce against her lips, setting them tingling. Gu Qiao bit her lip and looked back at him, letting him help her out of her coat and jacket until only her blouse remained.

She assumed, as in the distant past, that he would next kiss her mouth.

But he didn’t. Instead he leaned close and asked: “That money order you couldn’t cash back then — how much was it?”

That he would ask such a question at a moment like this. Gu Qiao had never known her cousin to kill a mood like this. And besides, wasn’t a casual relationship supposed to have no business dredging up old affairs? How did that even come to mind just now?

“Does it matter? Didn’t I already tell you — that money came back in the end.”

“It wasn’t a small amount, was it.”

Time had passed, and there was no longer any reason to hedge. Gu Qiao said it lightly: “Six hundred thousand. I did tell you, didn’t I — after the lawsuit was won, the bank even paid interest. The only small regret is that the interest was calculated at a demand deposit rate.” She still remembered that the demand deposit rate at the time had been 2.16%. Just before the Hainan real estate bubble burst, the demand deposit rate had briefly risen above 3%.

If he hadn’t asked, she would never have retrieved the memory again.

Six hundred thousand — a small amount? Luo Peiyin’s fingers pressed into Gu Qiao’s shoulders with enough force to make her wince: “Six hundred thousand was no small number for you back then.”

It wasn’t a small number for her even now.

“But the loss was only a small amount.”

“You didn’t say a word to me at the time. Did you think I wouldn’t be able to help?” His breath fell directly against her face. “Or did you simply never think to ask for my help?”

The latter, of course. Gu Qiao had never considered asking him for help. And even now, she had no regrets about that decision.

“Breaking up the moment you hit a difficulty — what were you even in a relationship for? Surely not just to realize your ideals of fairness.”

Without Gu Qiao needing to say it, Luo Peiyin already understood clearly: Gu Qiao’s shift into software sales had not been driven by any idle curiosity.

“Why are we back on the past again? I thought you were never one to drag things out.” Gu Qiao tilted her head back and smiled at him. “Didn’t you say you could give me something casual?”

Getting through difficult times together was not exactly what one would call a casual relationship. She was actually rather looking forward to exploring what a casual relationship with Luo Peiyin might look like.

“Don’t you think honesty saves more time and is more relaxed?”

His gaze pressed close in the strong light, as though he wouldn’t be satisfied until he had seen straight through her. Gu Qiao almost felt that everything Luo Peiyin had done before — the kissing, the holding, wave after wave of sensation — had all been in service of weakening her resolve, wearing down her guard, and forcing her innermost thoughts to the surface.

But her innermost thought was that she had no regrets about her decision back then. That was probably not something he would want to hear, so she had no intention of telling him tonight.

Luo Peiyin understood very clearly what Gu Qiao’s brief silence meant, so he gave her no further time to formulate an answer — and sealed her lips with his own.

Gu Qiao’s mouth ached from being bitten, while his fingers traced the line of her spine with the barest suggestion of a touch. Her entire body felt as though it had been electrified — the current shooting straight down to the soles of her feet.

Gu Qiao tilted her head back. As Luo Peiyin left a series of bite marks along her neck and collarbone, her hands pressed hard against the wall, trying to find something to grip, to keep herself from melting to the floor. She had no way of knowing whether the next mark would be gentle or fierce.

She waited each second in anticipation, and each second she guessed wrong.

She didn’t know why, but she suddenly felt a desperate urge to cry out. Even when he pressed close to her ear and murmured that the soundproofing here was very good, Gu Qiao still clenched her teeth and refused to let the sound escape. While she held her jaw shut, a pale blue vein pulsed at her temple.

That pulsing vein called to mind something from long, long ago.

—