What followed was not a thought, rather it could be described as an image. Rong Shu shivering hard, her whole body shaking with it, skin cool to the touch.
The urge to warm it was immediate and not something entirely rational.
“Thank you.”
He took the remaining cup from the bag and walked out through the door without looking back, leaving Su Wanying standing stunned.
“Wanying-jie isn’t Teacher Shen too impolite. even though he is an film emperor why did he have to take the congee out just to eat it. Not like you would snatch it from him.”
Su Wanying followed Shen Baizhu out only to see the congee that was meant to end up in his stomach was personally handed over to that bed-scene stand-in. That sl*t really needed someone to teach her about what she can aspire and what she shouldn’t even think of tainting even by her eye-sight.
Assistant Chen came rushing with a cloth to clean Su Wanying’s coat only to see this, frustrated for her artist she huffed. “Wanying-jie, wasn’t that the bird’s nest congee you brought for yourself? You bought it from a five-star hotel one that costs eight thousand yuan a cup. What’s more it can not be bought by just any hilly-billy and the film emperor just handed it straight to that girl.”
Su Wanying’s breath stagnated in anger. She had just taken a hit, and now her assistant was helpfully pressing on the bruise.
“It’s fine. Delete the photos. Pull two from the filming stills instead, pick ones where we’re close.”
Assistant Chen, being an all-in-all professional who valued her employment more than her 60 sq ft. appartment, said nothing further and quietly complied. Though she privately thought that the film emperor treated Su Wanying with a remarkable indifference.
Out in the corridor, Shen Baizhu held the congee out toward Rong Shu.
“Do you want this? The night wind is bad. You’ll freeze.”
Rong Shu was in the middle of packing up her things to head back to the hotel.
She stopped. Both round eyes swiveled toward him in a slow, blank rotation, like a goose that had momentarily lost the thread of what it was supposed to be doing.
Something in his phrasing must have landed on a sensitive register, because the tips of her ears went another shade deeper.
Exactly the shade he had seen just twenty minutes ago. The skin there was flushed a deep, bruised red, warm to the surface and vivid against the pale of her neck.
Neither of them said anything. Neither of them needed to. The memory of what had happened in that room, and what had happened in both their bodies, sat between them in the corridor like a secret that shouldn’t and wouldn’t require an acknowledgment.
The silence stretched, slow and dense, stirring something humid in the dark around them.
“I. My brain stops working when I stay up late.” Two in the morning, body sluggish, reflexes running on a significant delay. Shen Baizhu accepted this as a reasonable explanation. She had also, in the span of that explanation, managed to look even more like a goose than before. He noted this privately.
Then she broke into a smile, unguarded and pleased with herself in a way that had nothing extraordinary about it.
Shen Baizhu had not spent much time around people like her. Someone who cried when she needed to cry, laughed when something was funny, endured when she had no other option, argued when she had been wronged, went blank when she was tired, went red when she was embarrassed. Not a single layer of the industry’s usual careful construction.
The thin line of his mouth curved before he thought to stop it.
Rong Shu, having resolved something internally, took the congee with both hands and tipped it directly to her lips.
Shen Baizhu’s hand came down over hers on instinct.
The cold of her fingers reached his palm in slow degrees. Something in him surged forward with the immediate and unreasonable desire to transfer every bit of warmth in his own hands into hers. He curled his grip around hers and pressed the cup back down.
“It’s still hot. Wait until it cools.”
His voice came out gentler than the night wind around them.
“Oh, it’s very hot alright. Hot enough to splash all over someone and leave a mark. Might want to skip it entirely.”
Su Wanying’s voice arrived from behind them, its edge entirely undisguised.
T/n: bird’s nest congee (燕窩粥) is a prestige health food in Chinese culture, notoriously expensive, the kind of thing you bring someone to signal both wealth and devotion simultaneously. Su Wanying spending eight thousand yuan on a cup and watching it get handed to someone else in under five minutes is a specific kind of devastating. also “five-star hotel” here refers to the congee being sourced from a luxury hotel kitchen, which is a flex in itself. the layers of this woman’s suffering are genuinely Shakespearean. I can totally understand Wanying’s irritation and cutting remarks.