Su Wanying’s face went dark.
“Why is it you?”
She had finally, painstakingly talked herself into being reasonable about the whole thing. Shen Baizhu was a man. Men had physical responses to young bodies. He was going to be filming more intimate scenes going forward and she needed to be mature about that. As for Rong Shu, that little green tea piece of work, the best strategy was simply to ignore her.
And then she turned a corner at three in the morning and found Rong Shu walking out of Shen Baizhu’s hotel room, the faint flush behind her ear not yet faded.
“Why can’t it be me?”
Rong Shu leaned sideways against the doorframe, arms folded, watching Su Wanying the way you watch a clown doing its routine. Relaxed. Faintly entertained.
Su Wanying held herself together through what felt like genuine physical effort, her chest about to burst, and cut a look past Rong Shu into the room.
“Baizhu– Baizhu!”
A hand came up and blocked her view. A finger pressed lightly against her lips.
“Shh. I know you’re in a hurry, but hold on a second. Last night was exhausting, my whole back is still killing me. Your boyfriend is sleeping, okay?”
Rong Shu smiled. Perfectly innocent.
Su Wanying was nearly blind with anger, but one last thread of clear thinking made her glance over Rong Shu’s outfit to check for any recording devices. Satisfied, she let herself go.
“Film bed scenes as a stand-in during the day, then crawl into the actual bed at night. Have you got a shred of dignity left? You’ve dragged your ancestors back eighteen generations through the mud.”
“How much did Shen Baizhu pay you for last night? I’ll give you ten times that. Take it and get out. I’ll find a different stand-in.”
She pulled a thick stack of bills from her wallet and moved to fling it at Rong Shu.
The satisfying smack of money hitting skin never came.
What came instead was the sharp, clean crack of a slap.
Su Wanying pressed a hand to her face, staring. “You hit me?”
“I hit you, so what? Do I need to pick a special occasion to smack a dog?”
Rong Shu said it coldly, and in the same breath she caught a flicker of movement in her peripheral vision. The elevator indicator was climbing fast. Only two rooms were occupied on this floor. It was not hard to guess who was inside.
Su Wanying’s face was her livelihood, and she had just felt it take a hit. Fury overrode everything else. She shoved Rong Shu hard.
What she did not see was that the elevator had already opened behind her, and a pair of cold, flat eyes had just taken in the whole scene.
Rong Shu let herself fall.
She did it on purpose.
She landed in Shen Baizhu’s arms, letting her hair fall forward to cover one side of her face, and pressed close against him, her voice small and wounded.
“I don’t know what I did wrong. Wanying-jie saw me coming out of your room and she called me a… I’m not that kind of person. I’m really not.”
A soft sound that was not quite crying.
Shen Baizhu’s eyes went dangerous. He lifted a hand to push her hair aside and check her face. She pressed it back down and did not let him look.
Su Wanying’s composure cracked for just a second before his gaze hit her and gutted whatever confidence she had walked in with.
“You’ve bruised my face,” she tried. “I’ll have to stop filming for days. It’ll hold up Baizhu’s schedule too. And she’s standing there making herself the victim.”
Shen Baizhu looked at her.
“So what? Is your face worth more than someone else’s dignity?” His voice did not rise. In truth his voice did not need to rise for it to be cutting. “Su Wanying, learn where your lines are. What I do has nothing to do with you.”
She had never seen him angry before. She stared at him. “But we’re not… I mean, we’re a couple, everyone in the industry knows that…”
A contract couple, yes. But still.
Shen Baizhu cut her off. “Know your place. I mean it. Because if you can’t manage that, I will tear up that agreement, whatever the penalty costs me.”
Su Wanying’s cheek was still burning. She made herself nod. “I understand.”
Shen Baizhu’s gaze dropped to the pan-fried buns in her hands. His voice went flat.
“Pan-fried buns. I got tired of those in high school. If you gave them to me, I’d feed them to a dog to avoid the waste. Stop doing things like this just to make yourself feel something.”
A pause.
“Also. I slept in the trailer last night. Nothing happened between us. If you look at the world with a dirty mind, everything you see is going to look dirty.”
Su Wanying watched Shen Baizhu walk to the elevator with Rong Shu, her head full of nothing but those three words, going around and around.
I got tired.
He likes them soft and sweet-faced and perfectly built now. Little green tea types with innocent eyes.
So what did her ten years of quietly loving him add up to?
She had found out in high school that his family had already mapped out his whole future, straight into the top film academy in the country. She had followed his footsteps, scored in the top three of her program to get into the same school. Their lives had never overlapped. She had spent years hunting for scraps of information about him, shown up over a hundred times in places he might be just to pass him in a hallway.
She was not going to accept this.
Rong Shu needed to pack her things and leave.
A cold, sharp smile settled on Su Wanying’s mouth. Shen Baizhu did not know yet that Rong Shu still had a bed scene this morning, this time with the second male lead. She pulled out her phone and sent Huo Yuqi a message. A simple one. Asking him to take good care of her.
Huo Yuqi was exactly the kind of person the industry whispered about over drinks. Rich second generation, mediocre at his craft, addicted to being on set, a different scandal trending every other week. The list of minor celebrities he had gotten his hands on was somewhere between the hundreds and the thousands depending on who was counting.
She was curious.
Would the pure, delicate little green tea act collapse in front of the cameras when someone started helping himself?
Would she cry her eyes out and storm off set?
Rong Shu arrived at the filming location in Hengdian in Shen Baizhu’s trailer. Shen Baizhu opened a small tube of ointment and turned to her.
“Let me see your face.”
Rong Shu dropped the act and sighed.
“She didn’t actually hit me. I fell on purpose. The things she said made me so angry that I slapped her first, and then I immediately regretted it. I thought about how you’re filming with her at the same time and realized this was going to mess up your schedule.”
Shen Baizhu nearly laughed despite himself. His large hand came down toward the top of her head, paused for a moment, and then did not follow through on whatever it had been about to do.
“Why would you think I wasn’t going to take your side?”
Rong Shu’s whole face opened up into a smile. “I knew it. Teacher Shen is the best.”
Like a small cat that had just gotten a treat and was already pushing for another piece. Strange, because he had never liked it when people put on an act. Right now, though, all he felt was a pull toward her. A quiet desire to make sure she did not have to be so careful all the time settled within him.
He schooled his expression to hide that desire and said, “She was the one in the wrong, mocking someone is always the fault of the person who does it, whatever the other person’s job is. Don’t let it sit in you.”
He dipped a cotton swab into the cream, white and faintly thick, and touched it to her earlobe. She flinched away, then gave in and relaxed her shoulders. But the more he worked at the spot, the more the shell of her ear flushed, going deeper and deeper red.
“It’s so itchy. Am I just really sensitive?”
A small sound left her, catching somewhere between her teeth, soft and involuntary. The warm air between them blurred until neither of them could quite tell whose breath was whose. Her eyes had gone hazy, a soft wateriness to them, and she was watching the clean line of his profile with an expression that had stopped making any particular effort to be neutral.
Her lips curved.
Like she was waiting to be kissed.
Shen Baizhu looked at her for a moment, then turned his face away and set down the cotton swab.
And in that exact instant, Rong Shu turned toward him.
Soft lips brushed across his cheek.
The contact lasted less than a second.
Both of them went completely still.
“Sorry, Teacher Shen, I didn’t mean to. I bumped into you by accident.” A beat. “Do you want to kiss me back? To make it even?”
T/N: “Do you want to kiss me back? To make it even?” RONG SHU. BESTIE. This is not how debts work and you know it!!! Also Shen Baizhu’s hand going for her head and then just… stopping… SIR you are not fooling anyone. Also Su Wanying sending Huo Yuqi to “take care of” Rong Shu is sending chills down my spine because our girl is walking into that scene completely unprepared… or is she? 👀 Next chapter is going to be intense, I can feel it!!