It was like a short circuit suddenly finding its connection again. Rong Shu smacked her own lips together and groaned at herself.
“Ugh, why doesn’t my brain ever work before my mouth? I guess I really need brain supplements to catch up with speed of my lips.”
“It’s fine. You didn’t mean to.”
Shen Baizhu swallowed once, quietly. She was a little naturally an oblivious person, wasn’t she. Which meant all that accidental teasing was just… her being herself.
No wonder it was so difficult to deal with.
No wonder it sat in his head and refused to leave.
His expression settled into something darker as he stepped out of the trailer. “We need to reshoot yesterday’s scenes first. You have another one this afternoon, so you can rest in the trailer during lunch.”
Rong Shu climbed out after him. “I have a scene with Teacher Huo this morning.”
Huo Yuqi. He had heard of him as a man with a reputation that had no flattering angles.
“If anything feels off, contact me immediately. I’ll come over.”
They walked out side by side. The cast and crew were collecting their breakfasts in the open area, and assistant Chen was hurrying past with a cold egg to press against Su Wanying’s bruised face. She spotted the two of them and stopped feeling incredulous.
A bed stand-in. And the film emperor. Whose girlfriend happened to be her own artist.
Had the film emperor done something which he shouldn’t have?
Ah! Men in this industry, you can never find a single decent one among them.
Rong Shu walked through what felt like a hundred pairs of eyes all tracking her at once. Shen Baizhu said as if noticing her discomfort, said to her in a voice only audible to them, “Don’t look at them.”
They made their way back to yesterday’s location.
The original director had stepped down overnight. The assistant director had taken over, which was a call Shen Baizhu had arranged through his brother the previous evening.
“Action. Scene eight, take two. Close-up on the hands.”
They took their positions under the same deep red light as before.
A muscled arm pressed down against something soft. A chest rising and falling fast. Beads of simulated moisture rolled across skin and disappeared into the places where two bodies met.
The air went thick and close.
Rong Shu shoved hard against him. “Let go of me!”
Her resistance got her nowhere. Every push was met with arms that only pulled her tighter. She ran out of fight eventually and sank her teeth into his forearm.
Shen Baizhu watched her do it. Something soft moved through his eyes.
Just for a second, he lost focus.
The assistant director called cut.
“Teacher Shen, I need a reaction from you. You’re the one doing the forcing here, so why do you look like you’re tucking her in for a nap? Young audiences want tension. They want to feel something. Come at her like you mean it.”
The assistant director was an idealist about his craft. He had standards and he kept them.
Shen Baizhu nodded once. “Understood. One more take. Just keep the camera on me.”
The next second he came down over Rong Shu without warning.
She went back against the bed, boneless, sinking into the white covers, and Shen Baizhu pinned both her wrists above her head and looked down into her furious eyes.
“Don’t let me see that expression again,” he said. “I’ll make sure you can’t get out of bed. My lady.”
He caught the soft skin at the corner of her eye between his lips and worked at it slowly, deliberately, like a punishment being carried out with full intention.
“Mm! Lighter, you’re only doing this because you know I can’t actually kill you…”
She cried the way a pear blossom looks in rain, petals trembling, on the edge of falling apart entirely. There was something about her in that moment, something fragile and crushed, like a flower pressed into mud, that made something in the chest want to bear down on her further and simultaneously want her to stop breaking.
It was exactly the kind of sight that got under a man’s skin.
Not just Shen Baizhu’s.
Huo Yuqi, sitting off to the side near the monitors, had his chin resting in one hand, watching with a slow, measuring look.
He had come onto this production chasing the male lead role and lost it to Shen Baizhu. So he had turned his attention to Shen Baizhu’s woman instead, sent Su Wanying a few messages with some warmth behind them, and got nothing back. Su Wanying had asked him for a favor this morning and he had agreed on the spot, on the condition that she have lunch with him.
But watching the bed stand-in now,who was soft and overwhelmed under the cameras, he started reconsidering things. Shen Baizhu clearly had his eye on her too. That was the only explanation for a professional of his caliber dropping two takes in a row.
Suddenly Su Wanying, seemed to turn pale in comparison to this beauty, while Su Wanying was beauty in herself she could never be compared to her who bloomed like a red rose in bed and outside bed looked like a white rose.