Chapter 36 (1/2)
On the other end of the call, Liu Qingyuan was forcing himself to stay calm, drawing out one deep breath after another.
Liu Qianxiu lowered his eyes to the rain-darkened ground outside the window, where a stray cat was darting back and forth, and ended the call.
Listening to the dead tone, Liu Qingyuan felt as though his pride had been dragged through the mud under Liu Qianxiu’s heel and ground into it for good measure. His expression darkened. Behind the gold-rimmed glasses, his eyes turned cold and hollow, the whites showing faintly with strain. He paced across the office several times before his jaw flexed.
Then he slammed his phone to the floor.
“Fuck!”
All his breeding and polish vanished in an instant.
He could no longer tolerate Liu Qianxiu.
Calmly fastening the buttons of his shirt, Liu Qianxiu walked back to the sofa, picked up his book, and resumed his morning meditation.
What they had done the night before had been intense enough that even when Mu Wan used to work through the night on set, she had never felt this exhausted. She had gone to sleep utterly spent, and perhaps because of that, she had slept deeply and well.
Before seven, Mu Wan opened her eyes.
A fine, gauzy rain had started up again outside. The bedroom air was cool and damp under the air conditioning. Mu Wan looked to the other side of the bed.
He was not there.
“Liu Qianxiu?” she called.
By the end of the previous night, after losing count of how many times he had made her lose control, Mu Wan no longer had the strength to keep her voice down. Now her throat was dry and husky. When she called his name, the sound came out with a faint, aggrieved softness that made her seem almost pitiful.
She had not spoken loudly, but even through the bedroom door, Liu Qianxiu could hear her clearly from the living room.
The bedroom door opened.
The man came in.
She was sitting up on the bed, her face small, her features vivid. A white throw was draped over her body. Her thick, dark curls fell over her narrow white shoulders, her collarbones straight and fine, like some little spirit not yet fully formed, hidden inside a blossom.
Liu Qianxiu walked over, gathered her into his arms, and bent to kiss her on the lips.
“What were you doing?” Mu Wan murmured against the kiss, drowsily yielding into him, soft and pliant in his arms. Her waist still ached a little. The memory of last night made her face heat again.
So this was what it felt like, she thought. This thing between men and women was so intoxicatingly good. No wonder once people fell into it, they became addicted.
Though that did not seem to include Liu Qianxiu.
He could indulge for one night, then gather himself back together afterward and still remain that same clear-hearted, abstinent Taoist—untouched by ordinary dust, remote as ever.
“Morning cultivation,” Liu Qianxiu answered.
Just as she had expected.
Mu Wan laughed.
Her shoulders trembled with it. Last night, after everything ended, Liu Qianxiu had cleaned herself up. She had gone to sleep wrapped in nothing but that white throw. Now, with the way she was clinging to him, the blanket slid down a little. Blushing, she reached for it.
Her arm was white and slender.
His gaze darkened. He gathered both Mu Wan and the blanket up into his arms and lifted her.
Wrapped again, Mu Wan gave a low laugh and looped her arms around his neck. Turning her head, she looked toward the living room as he carried her out and sat down on the sofa with her in his lap.
The book was still on the table.
The same dry, difficult ancient text as always.
A few sparse lines, distant and austere in meaning.
Liu Qianxiu liked reading things like that.
Mu Wan did not.
The air in the living room was cool, too. Mu Wan was naked beneath the blanket, bundled up like a little snowball in his arms.
Liu Qianxiu read in peace.
Held there, Mu Wan gradually warmed. Soon she felt like a small stove, hot all over. She shifted against him in tiny, restless movements.
The man remained unmoved.
At last, she turned fully toward him and kissed him once.
Her kiss was soft and small, like a kitten parting its mouth and letting out the faintest sound. Her black, clear eyes glittered with broken points of light.
Just one kiss.
Careless, almost absent-minded.
And yet deliberately provocative.
Liu Qianxiu lowered his eyes. They had grown deeper than before.
Under his gaze, a blush spread over her shoulders, pink as a peach ripening on the branch. Her throat trembled. She rose again and pressed another tiny kiss to the corner of his mouth.
She distinctly felt his body go still.
Yet he still looked cold and restrained, like an immortal who had already attained enlightenment before a solitary lamp, watching her smile as though untouched.
Mu Wan bit her lip. Her mouth was red and moist, the place caught between her teeth paling almost translucent.
“Do you have anything to do this morning?” she asked softly, the corners of her eyes already flushed.
Liu Qianxiu looked at her, his voice low, with a trace of hoarseness hidden in it.
“No.”
She smiled then, like a flower opening all at once, and kissed him again.
His throat moved. The book in his hand was set aside. One hand came to her shoulder, palm dry and faintly hot.
“Can you handle it?”
“Of course I can,” Mu Wan said.
She folded herself into his arms and whispered in his ear, “No matter how much you give me, I can handle it.”
He pinned her down on the sofa.
They forgot themselves completely that day.
By the following morning, Liu Qianxiu went to work, while Mu Wan headed to the film studio. She had scenes to shoot.
Her role was not large, and she would finish before Liu Qianxiu got off work. When the time came, the two irresponsible cat parents planned to pick up Zhouyi and the others from Xu Xingkong’s house.
These days, around the start of autumn, the lingering summer heat was especially vicious, but Mu Wan’s shoot went fairly smoothly. The role she had taken this time had no outdoor or fight scenes. Everything was indoors. She wore a flimsy costume made of cheap gauze, but the room had fans and industrial blowers running, so at least the heat was bearable.
This was a low-budget web drama, adapted from one of the light, comedic novels Mu Wan had read in the Taoist temple a few days earlier. She had finished the novel, which meant she had effectively finished the script too. When Li Nan asked which productions she wanted to try for, she included this one.
She was playing a senior palace maid, with a hidden romantic line involving one of the imperial consorts. The relationship between the two women was implied rather than explicit, which was precisely why the drama could only be made as a web series.
Mu Wan’s scenes were neither too many nor too few, but they were concentrated together, which meant she had large stretches of downtime on set. During breaks, she would go to Gao Mei and borrow novels to read.
That day, Gao Mei was filming a spy drama in the studio complex’s Republican-era district, while Mu Wan was on the ancient palace set. The two areas were adjacent, so they were not far apart.
Mu Wan left the palace buildings and entered the long street of the Republican-era district. Different crews were filming all along it, the atmosphere hot and bustling. Some actors were dressed for winter scenes, others for summer ones, and all of them looked miserable in the heat.
She had spent years as a supporting actress and knew the studio like the back of her hand. She turned into a small side alley and headed toward a courtyard house.
There were over a dozen houses tucked inside that lane, and seven or eight had active shoots underway. But all the filming was happening inside the courtyards. The alley itself was empty.
And because it was empty, the moment someone appeared there, Mu Wan lifted her head automatically and looked over.
Mu Qing was wearing a high-slit qipao, her long hair pinned up. The lily pattern embroidered across the fabric made her look pure and elegant. An assistant followed behind her carrying an umbrella. The assistant was shorter, struggling to keep the parasol high enough, with half her own body exposed to the sun, but never letting even a thread of sunlight touch Mu Qing.
That was how the two met in the alley.
Mu Wan stood in the sunlight, her fair skin almost transparent. The moment she recognized Mu Qing, she looked away again, as if she had seen a complete stranger, and kept walking without changing expression.
She was still in costume. The cheap gauze on her body stood in brutal contrast to the exquisitely tailored qipao Mu Qing wore.
A trace of disdainful satisfaction flickered through Mu Qing’s eyes.
So Mu Wan had work again. And this was the sort of work it was—one of those trashy web dramas, crudely made, with hollow little roles. Alone in the studio lot, wandering from set to set without so much as an assistant holding an umbrella for her.
When Mu Wan had started getting roles again—roles that seemed to push even the Shen family’s influence aside—Mu Qing had briefly thought she might really have found someone powerful backing her, someone who might carry her upward.
Now, it seemed that backing was nothing extraordinary after all.
And whatever that backing was, it evidently did not mean much to her either.
There were countless beautiful women in the entertainment industry. Sleep with this one, and if he liked you, maybe he would give you a slightly better role. If he found you dispensable, you got some tiny side character instead.
Women lined up for it, ruining their bodies and throwing away their pride.
“Aren’t you the one who’s always had such a stiff spine?” Mu Qing said lightly. “So proud you’d rather become someone’s kept woman than come ask me for help.”
The words were nasty, but she delivered them with a smile so graceful it might have belonged to a different person entirely.
On the surface, she was worlds away from the Mu Qing of the past.
Inside, she had not changed much at all.
Her thinking still stank.
Mu Wan arched a brow and looked her over once before smiling.
“And what if I were? Then we’d be in the same line of business, wouldn’t we? Besides, the man keeping me is still better than the one keeping you. At least the roles you got cut for me are roles I’m getting back now.”
Her smile deepened as she said it.
She had always been this way—her mouth unforgiving, even when her father had beaten her. When she struck, she struck where it hurt most.
Mu Qing’s temple twitched.
She went stiff for a moment, then let out a cold laugh.
So this was what Mu Wan had come up with—calling herself someone’s kept woman now, was it? A fantasy to salvage her pride after losing.
Mu Wan did not bother to wait for more. Tugging her cheap gauze costume into place, she turned and walked away.
After borrowing a novel from Gao Mei and lingering there a while, Mu Wan returned to finish filming for the day. Once she changed out of costume, she hailed a taxi and went to the hospital.
The air was damp and hot, making her feel as if she were moving through steam. Only when she stepped into the hospital lobby and the heavy coolness of the air-conditioning wrapped around her did her body shiver and reset.
She took the elevator to Liu Qianxiu’s floor.
It was five in the afternoon, nearly the shift handover. People filled the corridors, busy and restless. The moment Mu Wan stepped out of the elevator, she noticed several nurses at the station glance over at her.
Their eyes traveled over her once or twice before they lowered their heads to pretend they were looking at files. In reality, they were talking about her.
Probably saying she was here again to pester Doctor Liu.
How shameless.
She had heard it all before. She was used to it.
Drawing back her gaze, she looked down the corridor and immediately saw a group of doctors emerging from a conference room. Among them, only her Doctor Liu looked as if he had been drawn in cleaner lines than the rest. Tall and long-limbed, broad-shouldered and narrow-waisted in his white coat, his legs alone reached the waistline of the female doctor beside him.
He was holding a file, listening quietly to whatever Xiao Yun was saying as they walked.
After only a couple of steps, he sensed something and lifted his head.
Mu Wan was standing among the passing crowd in the corridor, smiling at him in that bright, beautiful way of hers.
The doctors came closer. Several of them had already noticed Mu Wan. Xiao Yun among them.
When Liu Qianxiu was nearly within arm’s reach, Mu Wan smiled and called out,
“Liu Qianxiu—your girlfriend is here!”
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