He still remembered the sequence. He pulled his composure back together.
At the sound of her husband’s name, Shen Baizhu’s expression darkened. He shoved her face away.
Rong Shu tumbled back onto the sheets. The soft skin of her inner thigh grazed his calf on the way down, a brief, hidden friction, and then the rose fragrance thinned to barely a trace.
Shen Baizhu was struck, for just a moment, by an inexplicable sense of loss.
The director’s cool, measured voice came through the speaker.
“Good. Not bad. We’ll do a close-up of the front angle shortly.”
The lighting crew and others cleared the set. Shen Baizhu stepped off, and his assistant was already at his side straightening his costume and touching up his makeup.
Rong Shu, on the other hand, was a body double. A solo act. She had the training, the technique, the credentials, but her family was ordinary and she had never dared sign with an agency. The penalty fees alone if something went wrong would swallow her whole.
So she retreated to her corner, quietly and without complaint.
That was the nature of this work. A stand-in was exactly that. You lent your body. You left no name behind. Half the time people looked right through you as though you were simply a prop shaped like a person.
But Rong Shu the original cannon fodder had no complaints about her body. She had made her peace with it long ago, had in fact built something of a small life around it. She ran a modest social media account, posted content that walked the line just enough to keep a few generous followers happy. Food, rent, the occasional luxury. It was enough.
She had only auditioned for this because of Shen Baizhu.
She raised her phone now, tilted it to a soft forty-five degree angle, and took a photo. In it, her eyes were wide and doe-like, clear and disarmingly sweet. One hand drifted up to rest lightly over her chest, covering just enough to technically count as covered, while the curves beneath her clothing remained thoroughly distracting regardless.
A cool, unhurried gaze landed on her face. Brief, almost incidental.
Rong Shu noticed. She felt no embarrassment. Instead she brightened and stepped toward him.
“Teacher Shen, could I get your autograph? I’m a genuine fan. I’ve watched everything from your first spy thriller The Heart of a Spy all the way through to Warm Days at the Family Compound. That scene where you’re piloting the aircraft, holding your nerve through the whole rescue operation, I still think about it. You were so cool.”
Her eyes curved into a smile as she spoke, the kind of expression that made the people around her feel inexplicably lighter without knowing why.
Nobody was immune to being liked. The corner of his mouth lifted, just slightly.
“Thank you. Hand me the paper.”
Rong Shu blinked, her round almond eyes going wide. “Oh, I didn’t bring any paper.” A brief pause. Her head tilted. “Would you sign my hand instead?”
She extended it toward him. Soft, boneless-looking, the knuckles faintly pink.
Shen Baizhu had just spent the last stretch of time acquainting himself with the finer details of a young woman’s figure. He hadn’t expected her hands to be quite this lovely too.
She looked up at him with something hopeful in her expression. The red mark from where he had gripped her jaw was still visible on her chin.
Shen Baizhu found himself wondering, without quite meaning to, whether gripping those hands would leave the same kind of mark.
He turned to his assistant and asked her to find some bruise ointment from the kit.
Assistant Zhang blinked. Shen Baizhu never concerned himself with injuries on female cast members. Even usual two words of polite sympathy were considered generous, if they came from him. But something about Rong Shu’s pale face with that red line across it, like a cracked porcelain doll, made his hands move faster without him noticing.
When he spoke again his voice was low and even, though he himself didn’t register the faint coaxing note that had crept into it.
“Next time then. You have scenes tomorrow as well.”
Body doubles in this line of work were scarce and expensive. The standard practice was to compress all the explicit scenes into a tight back-to-back schedule over a few days.
“Oh. Alright.”
She looked just a little disappointed. Then, almost to herself, she murmured, “If you’d signed my hand, I wouldn’t have washed it for the rest of the month.”
Shen Baizhu gave a short, quiet laugh. He had never had a fan say something quite so unguarded before. He held out the ointment.
“Sorry about your jaw. I hurt you.”
t/n: the female lead really knows her knacks well.🐱