The director raised his megaphone. “Scene eight, take two. Action!”
This time they had switched positions. The camera was angled for a front shot, and the lighting had changed to a dangerous, dusky red that pooled across the luminous surface of Rong Shu’s skin.
Shen Baizhu slipped into character first.
The woman whose whole heart belonged to her husband, was driving him to the edge of madness. They had loved each other so completely once. That particular anguish, of wanting and being refused, and watching her choose someone else over and over again, raked through him with the urge to tear her apart.
Shen Baizhu pulled Rong Shu up from the bed in one motion, pressing her shoulder blades flush against his chest, flooding her with the heat that had nowhere else to go.
This was worse than before. Far harder to contain. He could feel every breath she drew, every small tremor that moved through her.
She had remarkable control over her emotions. It wasn’t just the camera that could feel her internal struggle. He could feel it too, from where she was pressed against him.
“Hurry up!”
Shen Baizhu gave a cold laugh, his expression carrying the particular edge of unhinged desire the scene called for. His gaze dropped to her bare, faintly shivering shoulder. “In a moment like this, you really shouldn’t tell a man to hurry.”
He caught her ear between his teeth like a wolf with something it refused to release, drawing on the soft, resilient curve of it. The script had called for a bite. A substituted angle would have been acceptable.
But Shen Baizhu found he could not quite suppress the urge to pull it fully into his mouth. His throat moved visibly as he swallowed it down.
The shell of her ear went the color of something bleeding red. A low, muffled sound spilled from between her teeth.
It only encouraged him. He dropped his voice to something close to her ear, low and deliberate as a devil making an offer.
“Madam. Mr. Liu has consumption. I doubt very much he can satisfy you these days. Allow me to keep you company instead. Consider it practice.”
He pressed into her like something predatory and unhurried all at once, the veins along his forearm standing out as he bore down against her chest. The camera caught the shot it had been waiting for.
Rong Shu made a sharp, startled sound at the pressure. The rise and fall of her ribcage grew more pronounced, her shoulder blades shuddering with the kind of movement that looked like a butterfly working to break free of something.
A cool, crackling voice came through. “Watch for the close-up on the tears.”
“I. Hate. You. You ruined everything I had. Did you think I didn’t know it was you who gave Jingyu the consumption? Why couldn’t you just leave my life alone?”
A single tear dropped and shattered against the tanned skin of his forearm.
Shen Baizhu watched the water spread across his skin and for a brief and unscripted moment, felt heartache and fear. He was afraid that Rong Shu actually got scared by him. Afraid that if she realized what had been happening in his body for the last however many minutes, the image she held of him, composed and disciplined and untouchable, would collapse entirely.
Something soft moved through his gaze. Something that had no business being there. The script hadn’t asked for it. The male lead’s feelings for the female lead were still weighted far more toward hatred than love. Hearing her hatred should have made him want to punish her for it.
This was the first time he couldn’t locate the line between what he was performing and what was simply happening.
Fortunately the camera wasn’t following his eyes.
“You hate me that much? Then why did you come crawling here? Go on, leave. Go home and wait for that sickly husband of yours to die.” The words came out cold and vicious, but his arms pulled her tighter, tucking her hard against him like he was trying to press her into his ribs and keep her there.
“Don’t you dare say his name! Let go of me! Let go!”
Rong Shu fought against his arms with everything she had. She moved like a fish trying to thrash its way free of a net, the motion constrained by how completely he had enclosed her, just enough movement to rock the bed slightly beneath them.
It was the worst possible kind of struggling. Every upward lurch, every twist of her body against his, was felt in full by the man holding her from behind. He laughed, low and unpleasant, and locked his grip across her chest, pressing down harder.
The line of her neck where it curved stubbornly upward, refusing to bend, pulled at something in him that had no clean name. The heat in his body stopped being general and concentrated itself with single-minded intention.
Both of them were breathing in the same rhythm now without meaning to. His exhales fell hot across the snow-pale expanse of her back. The dangerous red light moved across her bare skin like something slow and inevitable.
“Good work from the stand-in. Keep going. Bite Teacher Shen’s arm.”
Rong Shu did not follow through with the action.
She had felt something. A full-body shiver moved through her.
Her shoulder blades shook with it, a deep involuntary tremor. The flush that had started behind her ear had traveled all the way down the back of her neck.
A faint look of guilt crossed Shen Baizhu’s face.
His eyes, however, were not cooperating. They held something territorial and consuming that he had no good way to hide.
“Cut!”
t/n: “癆病” literally refers to tuberculosis/consumption, a classic illness used in period and modern drama alike to signal a husband who is either dying, absent in function, or both. the narrative implication here is doing a lot of heavy lifting.