◎ Remembering ◎

Through the window, she could hear cars honking outside.

But that noise did nothing to prevent Gu Qiao from hearing Luo Peiyin’s breathing.

Gu Qiao explored him with her fingertips, one touch at a time, with no intention of teasing him at first.

When Gu Qiao had just gotten together with Luo Peiyin, she had been fascinated by the ways he differed from her. She used him as a way to understand the other gender — or rather, her curiosity about the other gender was simply a way to understand him more deeply. She always noticed his Adam’s apple and would occasionally want to poke it with her finger. She also liked to run her hands through his short hair when they kissed, because it was different from hers.

But this was the first time she had touched him there with her hands. The first time Gu Qiao had ever laid eyes on that particular part of him, she had been genuinely startled — it was so fierce, so unlike the person she cared for.

At the time, she had thought: loving someone means you can’t only accept the sides of them that please you. If she loved a tree, she couldn’t recoil when that tree showed her the roots it had driven deep into the earth, saying: *these roots are so ugly, nothing like what I saw from outside.*

This time, she did not snatch her hand back as if burned, the way she had the first time she saw it. Instead, she wrapped her fingers around it. Her expression was calmer than Luo Peiyin’s at that moment — as composed as if she were simply shaking hands.

Still, this did not stop her odd thoughts from surfacing. She even found herself thinking from the perspective of a clothing seller: *size is a weakness — if men were a little more neat and compact down there, it would make trousers far less difficult to fit.* Her mind wandered briefly to wondering what kind of trousers could possibly accommodate all these changes. She didn’t share these thoughts with Luo Peiyin. He didn’t give her the time to think further anyway — he pushed into her body, and the force of it shattered her thoughts entirely. That fierce, burning thing had linked the two of them together.

Looking back on it later, she was glad she hadn’t said anything. It would have sounded a little foolish.

Gu Qiao’s palm grew hotter and hotter, and desire swelled beneath her careful touch.

She had genuinely only wanted to understand him at first — every part of him. But now, watching his throat move as he swallowed, his breathing heavier than before, she suddenly wanted to see him lose control.

In this bright light, they could see each other with perfect clarity. Gu Qiao’s hands did not stop moving, but her eyes stayed fixed on Luo Peiyin’s face. She heard his heavy, labored breathing, the warmth of his breath landing against her face like a wave of heat. He didn’t let her observe him any longer. His fingers threaded through her long hair, and he kissed her mouth as though he meant to draw her entirely inside himself.

They rolled from one end of the bed to the other, and he covered her again.

□*□

Gu Qiao’s body was at odds with itself — it wanted him, yet feared it couldn’t contain him and tried to push him away. But the burning want of him won over everything else. Her hands locked tight around his back, pulling him deeper, wanting more.

Her nails sank into his skin, and only then did it truly feel like they were one and the same. As it turned out, when two people grew this close — so close that *you* and *I* ceased to be separate — both of them would feel the ache. Her voice was shattered by him, the fragments flying toward the glass window before flying back, pieces colliding into other pieces, and every fragment was her voice crying out his name.

Time passed without her notice. Outside the window, everything finally grew quiet — no more voices, no more horns.

Everything seemed to still. He seemed to have come simply to rest inside her. The space he had forced open was a hundred times more sensitive than her fingertips, capable of feeling every shift in his desire.

Luo Peiyin’s fingers moved through Gu Qiao’s hair. He kissed her face gently — her eyes, her nose, her ears. Gu Qiao felt herself melting, dissolving together with the part of him still buried inside her.

Luo Peiyin pressed his lips to her ear and said: “When people ask me if I miss home, I always substitute the question in my mind with: *do I miss you?*”

He never answered that kind of question directly. At first it was because he found it dull. Later it was because it was too difficult to admit that he missed someone who had broken up with him.

“I always remember you — but I think there’s a difference between *remembering* someone and *missing* someone. So I never tell anyone that I miss home.”

She too had always remembered him, even when the situation had nothing to do with him. Qiu Shuang had so many senior schoolmates, but whenever Qiu Shuang mentioned those two words, Gu Qiao’s mind would briefly drift for a few seconds to Luo Peiyin’s familiar face.

Gu Qiao had not yet had a chance to debate with him the distinction between *remembering* and *missing* before Luo Peiyin unsettled the quiet of her body all over again.

—

The three of them had breakfast together in the lobby. Looking at the matching watches on Gu Qiao’s and Luo Peiyin’s wrists, Qiu Shuang felt distinctly like a third wheel.

When Gu Qiao had called her to say there would be one more person joining them for breakfast, Qiu Shuang had not expected it to be Luo Peiyin. When she arrived in the lobby, Gu Qiao was already there — but the man seated beside her made Qiu Shuang’s footsteps slow.

Qiu Shuang’s first thought was: *surely these two didn’t spend the night together.* But the moment the thought surfaced, she pushed it right back out. Imagining things like that about her own boss, whom she saw every day, was just — besides, Gu Qiao’s hair was pinned up without a strand out of place. She held a newspaper in one hand and a coffee cup in the other. Though they were in the lobby, she had clearly already shifted fully into work mode. The man beside Gu Qiao also carried an unmistakable air — the kind that invited admiration from a distance but not casual familiarity. To think about them that way was really quite inappropriate.

Qiu Shuang had spent the night at the hotel on short notice and was still wearing yesterday’s clothes. She wouldn’t have thought much of it, except that she noticed Senior Luo’s tie, shirt, and jacket were all different from the previous day. Even his tie had been changed. She wasn’t used to being around men who placed such demands on their own appearance — but her boss, for her part, seemed to have no such thoughts at all.

—

When Qiu Shuang arrived, Gu Qiao was discussing her plans for opening a Shanghai shop with Luo Peiyin.

Gu Qiao’s leg accidentally brushed against Luo Peiyin’s, and she quickly pulled it back. That brief contact was enough to bring last night rushing back to her — she felt like it had nearly worn her legs raw. If Gu Qiao had known sooner that Luo Peiyin would be staying in Shanghai from now on, she would have slept in a little longer instead of wanting him again and again. They had seen each other so rarely that every last night together had felt like a farewell. To keep herself alert now, she had no choice but to pour coffee into herself.

When Gu Qiao saw Qiu Shuang arrive, she smiled and introduced her to Luo Peiyin: “Qiu Shuang — she’s a junior schoolmate of yours from Z University. Once our Shanghai shop opens, she’ll be running it.”

Qiu Shuang was just trying to decide how to address Luo Peiyin when she heard Gu Qiao say: “Luo Peiyin. My boyfriend.”

Qiu Shuang had already half-guessed this the day before, so her expression showed no particular surprise. She smiled and said: “I’ve heard so much about you.”

She had indeed heard of him — but the fact that Luo Peiyin was her boss’s boyfriend was something she was only learning now.

The couple displayed no excess of affection. The distance between them was purely social, and Gu Qiao even sat closer to Qiu Shuang than to Luo Peiyin. Yet Qiu Shuang still felt distinctly like an outsider. The two of them had a kind of understanding between them that nothing could penetrate — the sort that only came from a long time spent together.

During conversation, both of them made an effort to include her, and the main topics even revolved around her: Gu Qiao was introducing Qiu Shuang to Luo Peiyin — how indispensable she was, how Gu Qiao had convinced her to come work at the shop in the first place.

Luo Peiyin was very courteous toward her as well. When ordering from the breakfast menu, he had asked for two sets — one for Gu Qiao and one for her.

Only one small thing gave away the nature of their relationship: Gu Qiao didn’t ask Luo Peiyin what he wanted to eat — she simply ordered for him, as though she had long known his preferences by heart. And Luo Peiyin quietly added cream to Gu Qiao’s coffee. The one who added it did so naturally; the one who drank it accepted it just as naturally. As though they had known each other for a very long time.

Qiu Shuang watched Gu Qiao lift the coffee to her lips. “Did you sleep badly last night?”

Qiu Shuang had meant it out of concern — worried that Gu Qiao had drunk too much and not slept well. Gu Qiao stiffened for just a second, as though something had crossed her mind, but her expression smoothed over immediately: “Not bad at all.”

She didn’t glance at Luo Peiyin. He would certainly think she was lying again — but could she really tell the truth about this?

Qiu Shuang couldn’t quite contain her curiosity and asked: “How long have you two known each other?”

Gu Qiao answered: “Six years ago.”

Qiu Shuang was momentarily stunned. She had never once heard Gu Qiao mention Luo Peiyin — she had even assumed they must have met after Gu Qiao arrived in Shanghai.

Luo Peiyin then brought up their past: “Your shop manager once rented out a room here to sell leather jackets. When her daily sales were in the hundreds of thousands, I was still a broke student. Back then, I was always worried I wasn’t good enough for her.”

Gu Qiao glanced at him sidelong: *Can you say that with a clear conscience?* But his expression was entirely composed — as if he were stating nothing but the honest truth.

Qiu Shuang, however, believed him at once and couldn’t help raising her voice: “Hundreds of thousands in daily sales?”

“Leather jackets have different profit margins than software. On hundreds of thousands in revenue, the actual profit would still be in the low five figures. And that kind of turnover certainly wasn’t every single day.”

Though Gu Qiao said this, it did nothing to diminish Qiu Shuang’s admiration for her. She could now vaguely piece together the shape of this love story. Who had pursued whom — well, she didn’t need to ask. She already knew the answer.

—

Old Boss Zhai had not expected to see Gu Qiao here. Compared to years ago, Gu Qiao’s bearing had settled and deepened considerably. She looked like someone who had no shortage of money — which wasn’t surprising, really. That girl had a mind sharper than anyone, and she’d never been afraid of hard work or risk. That she was doing well was no surprise at all.

He must have stared at Gu Qiao for too long, because the man beside her shot a glance in his direction — sharp and pointed. He quickly looked away.

Back then, though he hadn’t personally gone to cause trouble at the room Gu Qiao had rented, the people who did had not been short of his encouragement. Later, the person who had forged the bank draft was arrested and sent to prison, proving that Gu Qiao truly had nothing to do with it. Old Boss Zhai naturally never received any compensation either — the swindler had long since gambled away the money. Word had it the con man had tried to swindle Gu Qiao as well, but she had been sharp enough to insist on having the draft verified at a bank, and had narrowly escaped the trap. Once the truth came out, he wasn’t quite shameless enough to face Gu Qiao without a flicker of guilt.

Fortunately, Gu Qiao had stopped dealing in leather jackets over the past two years, so he no longer needed to go out of his way to avoid her.

Old Boss Zhai had been genuinely puzzled when she gave up the leather jacket business. After all, the lawsuit was over, and after half a year, even the people who had come to cause trouble at her stall had grown tired of it — including him. He had lost the motivation to stir anyone else up. And Gu Qiao had built up such an extensive network of resources in the leather jacket trade. She had survived all that harassment and still managed to keep the business going, then rebuild it. Not only could she keep it running — she could likely have made it even bigger.

When Gu Qiao quit leather jackets, Old Boss Zhai felt a faint twinge of guilt at first. Even with old grievances between them, driving a young woman to that point was indefensible — especially since it hadn’t been Gu Qiao who’d deceived him. She had simply been sharp enough not to fall for the same scam he had.

But Old Boss Zhai’s guilt didn’t run very deep. What he felt more than guilt was relief — relief that he had one fewer competitor. In his eyes, none of the leather jacket sellers could match Gu Qiao. He decided to replicate her successful approach and began renting out rooms at foreign-guest hotels himself. He had once thought that Gu Qiao was too young and reckless to be renting rooms in these hotels before she had even made much money — too full of herself. But events proved that Gu Qiao had seen ahead of her time.

Old Boss Zhai didn’t just copy the room strategy. He even hired models to shoot leather jacket advertisements — a complete copy of her methods from start to finish. At first, business was decent enough, but as more and more people followed suit, the advantage disappeared. The one who hit him hardest was the Peng fellow. Where outsiders only imitated the surface of Gu Qiao’s methods, Peng Zhou had the network Gu Qiao had painstakingly built, plus youth and boldness, and his business quickly grew larger than Zhai’s.

Business had not been particularly smooth for Old Boss Zhai these past two years. Ever since Manager Yu, from the foreign trade company he’d been working with, was jailed for embezzling public funds to speculate on real estate in Hainan, things had gone from bad to worse — though he was still keeping afloat. He was recently considering relocating to a lesser hotel, as profit margins shrank by the day.

What frustrated him most, though, was his own son — who was now about the same age Gu Qiao had been when he first met her. The son wasn’t entirely useless; he could manage half an accountant’s work. But comparisons are cruel. Whenever he thought about how, at his son’s age, Gu Qiao had already been fully independent and even stealing his business, he would look at his son — still dependent on his father — with nothing but disdain.

When criticizing his son, he would always invoke Gu Qiao without naming her: “I know a girl, about your age when she was starting out, already doing business on her own. She got into leather jackets later on, and the scale of her operation was no smaller than mine. And look at you — all day long doing nothing useful, just playing video games. I never should have bought you that computer. You pour every cent into buying software.”

His son — born in the mid-seventies, raised in the new era — wasn’t having any of it: “You can’t even figure out how to turn a computer on. All you ever fiddle with are your leather jackets. Your whole way of doing business is outdated. Look at how other people do it now — in the new era, the customer comes first. Spend over five hundred yuan and get a VIP card, buy software at an 12% discount, and every month they send out newsletters with new products. If you live far away, they even offer postal delivery. You’re always looking to take advantage of the customer — maybe works once, but who’d ever come back? You’re obsessed with squeezing every last cent out of people.”

Father and son exchanged mutual contempt. The son thought the father’s business thinking was hopelessly outdated; the father scolded the son — *you, spending your money on software, you’re just letting them pick your pocket, and you stand there cheering them on.*

The day before, there had apparently been some game software launch event, and his son had gone to queue for it. Old Boss Zhai found the whole thing baffling — software wasn’t food or clothing; people queueing to buy it clearly had too much time on their hands. His son hadn’t come back empty-handed, though — he’d not only bought the software but also won a voucher worth a hundred yuan, redeemable for any software item under a hundred yuan in the store. Old Boss Zhai looked at the promotional flyer his son had brought back. The words “Gu Jia Software Specialty Store” stood out prominently across the top.

Old Boss Zhai saw the surname Gu and somehow thought of Gu Qiao. He couldn’t help musing to himself that people with the surname Gu really did seem to have a talent for business.

—