Incurable Chapter 2 Part 1

Chapter 2 (1/2)

“Ha—”

Mu Wan laughed as she rolled the window back up. Then she started the car and drove away.

As expected of Taoist Liu. He really had mastered the art of keeping his desires in check.

She drove home to the north side of the city. Two months earlier, she had bought a secondhand apartment in Qinghe Mengyuan, an old residential complex in Xiacheng’s old district. The buildings there were all more than thirty years old.

It was the classic old-city setup: cramped, worn-down apartments in an excellent location. The buildings were shabby, but the neighborhood was convenient, the shops and facilities nearby were complete, and living there was comfortable enough.

Mu Wan had only been out of school for two years. Two years of acting had earned her enough for a down payment and not much more, so she was still paying off the mortgage month by month.

The apartment itself was old. The previous owner’s renovation had been stuck in an eighties style, and the furniture and appliances were all worn out. Lin Wei worked in interior design, and since Mu Wan didn’t want to tear the whole place apart, Lin Wei had simply helped her freshen it up. The result leaned toward a soft Taiwanese style, light and homey, almost pastoral.

There were no parking spaces in the complex, so Mu Wan left her car at the mouth of the lane and walked the rest of the way home.

The neighborhood might have been old, but it was far from empty. It was dinnertime now. Elderly men and women returning from the market walked along with baskets of vegetables in hand, chatting in dialect and making plans to head to the little public square after dinner to dance. Ivy climbed across half the exterior walls, winding around the iron bars outside the stairwell windows. The whole aging complex was thick with the warmth and bustle of ordinary life.

Mu Wan’s building was in the last row, first on the left. The entire complex had only six buildings in two rows, so it was easy enough to find. She pushed open the stairwell door, climbed to the third floor, took out her key, and unlocked the apartment on the left.

Just inside the entrance was the switch for the living room light.

Click.

Soft ivory light flooded the room. The apartment was only about seventy square meters in total, and the living room wasn’t large, but it was clean, tidy, and so comfortable to look at that it instantly eased the mind.

The moment she stepped inside, the tension she had been carrying all day finally drained out of her.

She dropped onto the arm of the sofa, then let herself collapse all the way across it.

She had been filming all morning, taken the high-speed rail back at noon, rushed straight to the hospital to see Lin Wei without even unpacking, and by now she was completely running on empty.

Outside the window, rain began to fall again. Through the faint patter of it, Mu Wan heard two cats meow.

In an old residential neighborhood like this, even house cats were raised like strays. At night, they roamed outside, and under the trees and in the shrubbery, there were cats everywhere. No one bothered to neuter them, so once they were left to roam, they multiplied fast. Big cats, little cats—the whole neighborhood was overrun.

Lin Wei had once said Mu Wan was rather catlike herself: wild, lazy, adaptable, content wherever she landed. She had even tried to convince Mu Wan to keep one, but Mu Wan had refused.

She wasn’t lonely. She didn’t need a cat for company. If there were a cat in the house, that would only be one more thing to worry about. Neither she nor the cat would really be free.

Thinking of cats brought back the scene at the hospital—the way the man had lifted his lashes, the fine broken lights laid beneath his eyes.

Mu Wan raised an arm to cover her face and let out a low laugh.

She had had a long day, and after dinner she went straight to sleep. She slept dreamlessly through the night, only to be woken in the morning by her ringtone.

When she opened her eyes, the sky beyond the window was still a blanket of dull gray. It wasn’t raining, but it hadn’t cleared either.

The rainy season left everything damp. Even the air felt wet against the skin. Mu Wan picked up her phone. The screen read Li Nan. She answered and greeted him lazily.

“Morning, boss.”

Li Nan was her agent. In all of Xinzhou Entertainment, he was the only one. The seven or eight artists under him all called him that. Mu Wan had signed with Xinzhou right after graduation. The company was small, but it paid on time, had no predatory clauses, and offered a steady if limited flow of work. For someone like her, it was a good fit.

“Tomorrow night at seven, Director Zhang Chengze is hosting a dinner at Qingsongxuan,” Li Nan said briskly. “He’s preparing a new television drama. Mi Yu is going to audition, and I want the two of you to go together.”

For an actress like Mu Wan, social obligations were rare, but not nonexistent. In a business driven by fame and favors, dinners and drinking were part of the routine. She probably had to attend something like this two or three times a month.

This dinner wasn’t really about her. The focus was on Mi Yu, the most popular artist under Li Nan. At her peak, Mi Yu had played the second female lead in a hugely successful drama. Mu Wan’s role was just to fill out the table, eat and drink quietly in a corner, offer a toast, show her face, and maybe pick up a small supporting role in the process.

Mu Wan acknowledged everything one by one. Li Nan gave a few more instructions, then hung up.

After the call, she peeled off her clothes and headed toward the bathroom for a shower. The weather was cold and damp, and the clammy film on her skin was making her uncomfortable.

After showering, she picked up her glass cup and toothbrush and started brushing her teeth. She hadn’t even finished when Lin Wei called.

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