◎ Calm ◎

Gu Qiao turned her back to Luo Peiyin and poured herself a glass of water. She was not someone who couldn’t take a refusal. As she tidied up, she processed the rejection while already thinking about who else she might find to do the shoot.

“You can ask me for something else.”

Gu Qiao took this as compensation for the refusal she had just received. But she didn’t want compensation. She turned to face him with a smile: “It’s fine — I understand. You’re naturally shy at heart, aren’t you? You don’t like people looking at you.”

She preferred this explanation. And the moment she said it, her mind immediately began searching for evidence to support it.

She had a tendency to blush easily when she was with Luo Peiyin, but that was simply because this was her first relationship and her resistance to him was practically nonexistent — her body was too responsive, to the point where even just his hand wrapped around hers was already enough to unsettle her. But she herself was not, at her core, a shy person. She had never been reluctant to express what she liked or disliked.

But him — even on stage, with everyone around him buzzing with excitement, his expression remained perfectly composed throughout. Perhaps it wasn’t innate calm at all, but innate shyness, as though letting his true emotions show in front of others was somehow shameful. Her body had been seen by him in full light, and yet even in that afternoon in Hohhot — when the daylight had been blocked out by curtains and only the bright white ceiling light shone down — she had never quite managed to see him clearly either.

Thinking back to that day, the image of his body wasn’t especially vivid in her mind; only the sense of touch felt real. Luo Peiyin had not pulled his shirt free from his trousers until she was already too flustered to look at him properly, and whenever she summoned her resolve and tried to actually look at him clearly, his eyes and his teeth would come at her without warning, pulling her back before she could see him fully.

Looking back on it now, Gu Qiao attributed all of this to Luo Peiyin being a naturally shy person. Because he was shy at heart, he refused to model in an advertisement for her. And it wasn’t just the eighty-yuan jacket — even if an eight-hundred-yuan jacket were placed before him, Luo Peiyin still would not put it on for her photograph.

This explanation she found entirely reasonable and easy to accept. Being watched by the man she had just called naturally shy, it was her own face that reddened first.

Her cheeks flushed warmly, her eyes bright: “Then I’m asking you to come to dinner with me right now. I’ve heard about a restaurant with excellent fish ball soup. You haven’t had that since you got back, have you? I’ve been too busy these past two days to cook, so you’ll have to make do with someone else’s food. Next time…”

Gu Qiao stopped herself. *Next time* — that sounded like a little too much. She tilted her head back and looked at Luo Peiyin. The smile on her face carried a faint trace of guilt.

The smile hadn’t yet faded from her face before she was pulled into an embrace. She didn’t cooperate to make it a proper hug; her first instinct was to pull away: “I smell like leather — my whole body does, even my hair.” She could almost detect the faint, lurking scent of leather oil clinging to her round-neck sweater. These were all freshly made jackets, piled together, the smell not yet dissipated; she had been moving stock back and forth and staying in this room all day, and the smell had inevitably soaked into her.

If she were fresh and clean right now, she wouldn’t be pushing him away. Brand new as it was, this relationship — she had her own privately developed standards for hugs and kisses.

But fresh and clean felt very far away at this moment. Especially because their relationship was different from most. Other couples could see each other the next day and overwrite the previous impression. But their meetings were so difficult to arrange that the impression left by any one encounter might not be fully replaced until they met again months later. She wanted him, when he thought of her, to picture something a little more presentable. And she didn’t want his clothes to carry the smell of leather either.

But Luo Peiyin didn’t let go. She was almost convinced that his sense of smell had stopped working.

Gu Qiao resisted more fiercely than she ever had — her entire body seemed to be pushing him away. Her head turned to one side, her body twisting and writhing, trying to create some distance within his arms; but he held her tightly, and her struggling only pressed them closer together.

In the midst of her resistance, Luo Peiyin leaned in and kissed her hair, which had probably absorbed the smell of leather oil too: “I love you just as you are.”

His voice was soft, but each word landed directly in her heart.

“But…” Gu Qiao said nothing more. They were already too close for her to keep talking. His lips had probably picked up the smell of leather now too. Well, fair enough — neither of them could complain about the other.

Leather jackets in bags and bundles, leather jackets hanging from the rack, leather jackets everywhere. But standing this close, Gu Qiao had no room left to take in all the leather jackets — she could only see Luo Peiyin’s face.

Gu Qiao drew a deep breath and pressed her lips against Luo Peiyin’s. When she moved in like that, there was something almost reckless about it, like walking alone into enemy territory. He didn’t mind her. She wouldn’t mind him.

She pressed those lips of hers firmly, stubbornly, against his. At first it was simply a declaration — a statement of intent, nothing to do with desire, and even her eyes held that same determined look. After some number of seconds had passed, the nature of the kiss changed entirely.

Luo Peiyin’s fingers traced over her through the fabric of her clothes. Gu Qiao slowly closed her eyes and let him hold her. She felt like she was resting against the trunk of a great tree on a warm spring afternoon, the sound of a stream nearby, the water just breaking free from the ice; and if she opened her eyes she would see sunshine and white clouds and green trees and flowers of every color — she had always loved weaving all sorts of flower crowns to wear on her head. Like a cat being petted against the grain, she was so comfortable she couldn’t help letting out a soft sound, her whole body so close to leaping out of her skin, wanting to press herself even closer against his hands and rub up against them.

The long, involuntary sound snapped Gu Qiao back to herself. She opened her eyes. Luo Peiyin had moved from her lips to her heated cheek; her entire face was burning, but she ignored the flush and simply stared at Luo Peiyin’s ear.

Gu Qiao’s lips were damp, full with the vivid color of her age, and she looked at Luo Peiyin with reddened cheeks and smiled: “Cousin, your ear has gone red.” It was as though she had found decisive evidence that he was the naturally shy one — absolutely not her. The way she said *cousin* this time carried a teasing edge.

She had barely finished speaking before her mouth was covered. Luo Peiyin’s fingers slid into her hair, as though he wanted to draw in every trace of softness and warmth and teasing from her lips, along with every last bit of that small defiant pride. By the time the long kiss ended, Gu Qiao’s chest was heaving. She did her best to steady her breathing, with no energy left to tease him — she only looked up at him with a sideways glance, making it plain that this was nothing to her.

Suddenly her feet left the ground, and she was lifted entirely into the air. Now it was Luo Peiyin who looked up at her, the angle making his neck appear even longer; he no longer used his lashes to conceal what his eyes held: “Didn’t you want to look down at me before?”

Gu Qiao lowered her head. She began to look, broadly and unhurriedly.

Then slowly, without restraint, she let herself look as she pleased. The day had been too busy; she hadn’t yet registered that in fewer than seventy-two hours they would be apart again, and after this separation it would be several thousand more hours before they met again. For the first time, she looked at Luo Peiyin this carefully and this thoroughly — from his eyes, his nose, his mouth, down to his jawline, and then to his neck.

She looked at him; he looked at her.

The water in the glass on the table had gone cold. The stopper sat beside the thermos flask, which was venting steam freely into the room since no one had replaced the cap, its warmth slowly bleeding away. But nobody noticed.

Gu Qiao was being slowly, intently scorched by a pair of eyes. Her face had already been red for some time. She had never understood why her complexion reacted this way — what was perhaps three parts of actual shyness always came across as ten. But now even the parts of her that weren’t being touched felt seared by his gaze.

After some number of seconds, Gu Qiao found herself on the bed. Nothing happened — they simply lay facing each other, as though the only reason he had laid her down was to bring their eyes level, to see each other more clearly.

This close, they could each hear the other breathing. Gu Qiao looked down and saw her own chest rise and fall. Then she heard the sound of Luo Peiyin’s palm moving against her shirt, and through the fabric she could almost feel the lines of his palm. Gu Qiao trembled all over, uncontrollably — though this didn’t stop her from reaching out and touching the parts of him she had just been praising.

She heard the sound of her own jeans brushing against another kind of trousers, and her whole body grew warmer and warmer from that unavoidable friction. He felt her warmth and reached out to help undo the shirt buttons that were growing increasingly constricting.

Gu Qiao didn’t resist. The longing to understand each other more deeply expanded in her heart bit by bit. She pushed down her shyness and reached toward the hem of Luo Peiyin’s shirt: “I want to look at you properly too.”

Gu Qiao had never been timid, but the hand pulling at his shirt trembled beyond her control. Her curiosity about the other sex had always hit a certain limit and stopped — she simply wanted to understand Luo Peiyin. Even with her hand trembling, she did not stop.

Outside the door, a conversation rang out in some foreign language — two men, or perhaps three. They had no fear of being overheard.

Every sound broke apart in Gu Qiao’s ears, dissolved from words into syllables and finally into meaningless background noise; all that remained was the sound of her own breathing and her heartbeat.

Later, the light went out. Gu Qiao no longer had to worry about Luo Peiyin seeing her flushed and flustered face, and she no longer had to pretend to be perfectly composed under his gaze. Perhaps it wasn’t just her — perhaps he too needed this darkness to conceal something.

But even if the light had stayed on, she might not have had any attention left over to think about such things. Every inch of her seemed to ache with longing for his hands. She wanted the touch to go on forever, and yet it wasn’t enough. At some point, the gentleness vanished, and the hands that had been pressing and kneading her seemed intent on reaching through to her very bones. She both craved him and was afraid of him, afraid of him and craved him.

The foreign voices outside had gone; footsteps moved through the corridor and faded.

As though the impression left last time had not been deep enough, he pushed into the deepest part of her, deeper than before. Gu Qiao bit down to keep from crying out, pressing her teeth together so that nothing could slip through, and into the flesh of the person causing her pain she pressed a series of fingerprints.

He buried a part of himself inside her, kissed the perspiration from the tip of her nose, and told her he liked her. She made him think of home — of warmth, and every word associated with home in every description he had ever known.

In return, with his lips and his fingers and his embrace, he gave her tenderness and warmth — but never stillness.

Once, twice, three times…

Tirelessly, again and again, he stirred her, so that she could never be still. As though tomorrow would not come, every intimacy could only happen today.

—