There was a strong mixed smell of leather and disinfectant inside Qin Sheng’s car. It was probably because the car had been left baking in an open-air parking lot for too long. Even with the air conditioning on, the smell would not dissipate.
He drove to the roadside, found a parking spot, and took Qin Shui to a nearby street stall to eat grilled skewers.
The place was close to the city center. It had not been demolished because it was classified as a historical site. Later, it was developed into a nationally well-known tourist attraction, with a large pedestrian street packed with stalls and crowds.
The mechanics from the repair center often ordered takeaway from here. If their lunch break was long enough, they would also drive over and eat something simple. The stall owner was very familiar with Qin Sheng. Even though the grill was already smoking heavily and both the inside and outside were full of customers, he still found time to greet him.
The inside was full, so the two of them sat at a small, low table by the roadside. The tables were set quite close together. Qin Shui had just turned her head to glance at what the other tables had ordered when the owner’s wife came over with a pen and order pad.
She was wrapped in a headscarf and had a rather plump figure. She exchanged a couple of greetings with Qin Sheng, clearly taking a liking to the young man, smiling so broadly that her apple cheeks puffed up.
“I’ll bring you some grilled tendon first. Once the rest are ready, we’ll go table by table to ask. You can add whatever you like.”
The proprietress was all smiles. Qin Shui stared at her face and couldn’t help smiling along as well. “What would you like to eat, miss? Our grilled chicken wings are really fresh here. Want a skewer?”
Qin Shui nodded. Qin Sheng said to the owner’s wife, “Don’t put chili on anything. She’s injured and can’t eat spicy food.”
After the owner’s wife left, Qin Shui typed to ask whether he was a local. Qin Sheng said he was.
He did not have much of an accent. His Mandarin was standard, his voice slightly low, and he did not project much emotion overall. Qin Sheng said his parents divorced when he was around ten years old. His mother remarried and moved to Zhuhai. He was assigned to his father back then and stayed here.
Qin Shui shrugged and smiled, made a simple sign, and indicated that she was from the neighboring city.
“Didn’t your city get rated as a National Civilized City last year?” He accepted the skewers the owner’s wife brought over and asked her, “Have you graduated from university?”
Qin Shui nodded and typed, “Graduated for one year, worked for one year, but just lost my job.”
Qin Sheng asked, “Where did you work?”
“A very small state-owned enterprise. You definitely haven’t heard of it,” she typed. “The leadership didn’t like me because I don’t obey easily.”
He held an orange soda bottle and took a couple of sips, looking a little surprised. “Someone like you can be disobedient?”
Qin Shui set the stripped iron skewers neatly on the table, cheeks puffed out as she made an incredulous expression at him while chewing. Almost automatically, Qin Sheng pictured her stubborn look in his mind, wearing a sour expression and refusing to give any response, no matter what.
If she ran into an incompetent leader, she definitely would not be able to provide them with any emotional appeasement.
Qin Sheng said, “You do look pretty stubborn. But at least you didn’t run into sexual harassment. There used to be a front desk girl at our factory who was constantly harassed by her superior. She eventually resigned too.”
Qin Shui withdrew the hand holding the skewer, awkwardly touched her brow, then simply mouthed, “Female leader.”
“A female leader should be fairly gentle. You still got bullied?”
Qin Sheng passed her a chicken wing. She did not take it, instead burying her head in her phone and typing rapidly. “I’m not sweet-tongued, and I’m not cheerful. She scolded me every day. Half a month ago, she scolded me so badly that I couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t talk back, and I ended up with hypoglycemia and collapsed in her office.”
He stared at the phone screen for a moment, then looked up at Qin Shui.
The young woman in front of him was quite pretty, at least in Qin Sheng’s eyes. Her skin was fair, with a faint trace of baby fat that was hard to notice. Her hair was jet black and smooth, lightly stuck to her forehead by a thin sheen of sweat. She looked especially obedient and gentle, though she was probably indeed very stubborn.
But that was not a reason for her to deserve being bullied.
“You didn’t tell your family?”
“I did, but I didn’t dare say too much. They couldn’t really help anyway. You’re the first stranger I’ve told all this to.”
Qin Sheng smiled with a hint of roguishness, took a big bite, and teased her. “I’ve already treated you to a meal, and I’m still a stranger?”
Qin Shui felt a little lighter, though it still felt as if a heavy stone was pressing on her chest, making it hard to truly feel happy. The skewers had no chili and were missing some punch, but Qin Sheng seemed completely unbothered. Qin Shui originally wanted to thank him, but it was hard to find the right moment to insert those words, and she was not even sure what, exactly, she should be thanking him for.
“And then?” he asked.
She was lowering her head to eat the grilled eggplant when Qin Sheng suddenly asked this. Qin Shui raised her eyebrows in confusion. He explained, “After you fainted. What happened next?”
She had thought he was no longer interested in this topic.
Qin Shui typed for a long time again. “Then she called another colleague and said to call my parents to come take me home, or call 120. In any case, she wanted to get me out of her office first.”
Qin Sheng laughed. “Calling your parents to take you away? What did she think you were?”
He summarized while eating. “It’s a good thing you had hypoglycemia. If you had just endured it and left quietly like the girl at our place, that would’ve been the real loss.”
“I accepted the compensation, but that job was actually very good. If it weren’t for this man-made disaster, I wanted to keep doing it,” Qin Shui typed. “I’m good at it, and jobs aren’t easy to find now.”
Qin Sheng seemed to agree with her. He nodded, pressed his tongue lightly against the inside of his cheek, and said in a comforting tone, “You’re still young. You won’t go hungry.”
“Still, thank you for treating me to a meal.”
She said this in sign language. It was simple and restrained, and Qin Sheng understood it. The customers at the neighboring tables noticed her constantly typing and using fluent sign language and began casting sideways glances in their direction. Qin Sheng had noticed long ago but clearly did not mind.
“I would’ve had to eat even if I were alone. It’s nothing.”
They ate the grilled skewers with ease and genuine enjoyment. The meat was hearty and satisfying. After Qin Shui finished eating, she stayed seated for a while, waiting for Qin Sheng. When he went to pay, the owner insisted on rounding the bill down. Unable to refuse such goodwill, Qin Sheng left him a pack of cigarettes. He then took one out of his own pocket, leaned closer to the grill, and casually lit it using the flame that leapt up from the stove.
When Qin Shui followed him toward the parking space, she was already a little tired. After eating her fill, drowsiness came easily, but she forced herself to stay alert and keep close to Qin Sheng. There were quite a few tourists and local residents out for dinner along the way. Afraid of losing him in the crowd, she simply stretched out her arm and looped it around Qin Sheng’s arm.
The sensation of human skin was actually more or less the same. The reason different emotional and psychological reactions arose was mostly because the person themselves possessed a special, irreplaceable quality.
The lines of his arm were very pleasing. Qin Shui gripped his wrist tightly. The gauze taped to her arm rubbed against Qin Sheng’s skin and made him a little itchy, so he simply took his hand out of his pocket and held her hand instead.
At that moment, Qin Shui suddenly remembered the day she fainted in the office. She had actually felt a little nauseous and wanted to cry, but out of concern for her pride, she did not dare let herself collapse too badly. It was not until four emergency workers walked over to her desk and began measuring her blood pressure that her hands started to tremble.
Those four sturdy paramedics surrounded her like a wall, and only then did Qin Shui feel a bit of security in that open space.
When she was trembling so badly that even her blood pressure could not be measured, that was when she finally began to cry.
Because it was her first job after entering society, because of her colleagues’ indifference, and also because she herself had not wanted to go to the hospital in the first place, yet her aggressive superior chased her into the office and insisted on calling 120, just like the car owner’s wife that afternoon, as if afraid she might try to extort them.
Yet she had never intended to extort anyone at all.
She was, unmistakably, a real victim. The other side feared the victim, yet when it came time to inflict harm, they held nothing back.
Qin Sheng gave her a feeling that there was some kind of filter in front of his eyes. When he looked at Qin Shui, it automatically filtered out her dishevelment and frustration. Yet she could still tell that Qin Sheng had truly taken her experiences to heart.
He was clearly just one person, yet he made her associate him with the sense of security she had felt when surrounded by four people like a human wall. It was truly strange.
Qin Sheng’s driving skills were good. The road was a bit congested, and Qin Shui was afraid that the direction to his home might not be along the way, that he would have to go against the flow during the evening rush hour just to take her back. But Qin Sheng acted completely unconcerned, saying it did not matter. The repair shop reimbursed employees for commuting fuel anyway, so he would just treat it as a leisurely drive.
The five-kilometer journey took half an hour. He drove into her residential compound, parked beneath her building, and neatly pulled up the handbrake.
“Is this the place you rent?” he asked.
Qin Shui nodded.
It was an old residential compound for employees’ families, but it had been renovated by the government two years earlier. Elevators and security grilles had been added, and the interior and exterior walls had been repainted. The environment was passable.
She unfastened her seat belt and mouthed the words, “Where do you live?”
Without thinking, Qin Sheng replied, “Near the old campus of Jiaotong University. It’s not too far from here.”
Qin Shui smiled and nodded, then typed a few large words on her phone: “Invite me over as a guest next time.”
He had double eyelids, a straight nose bridge, and slightly prominent brow bones. When he smiled, he carried a kind of carefree, worldly air like a character from a Jin Yong novel. Qin Shui opened the car door to get out. Qin Sheng suddenly leaned over and held the door, readily agreeing.
“Alright. Next time I’ll come pick you up.”
He smoothly turned the car around beneath the building and drove off. From the lowered window, he slightly leaned out and raised his hand to wave goodbye to her. Qin Shui stood in place. After his taillights had completely disappeared, she absentmindedly stared for a while longer at the barrier gate that rose and fell.
She wanted to message Qin Sheng right away, wanted to ask him when the “next time” he mentioned would be, on which day and at what moment he would come to pick her up again.
Qin Shui turned her phone, which had been on silent for years and set to Do Not Disturb every day after she resigned, up to maximum notification volume. She went upstairs, took a shower, then returned to her bedroom holding the light-colored dress she had worn that day. She sat on the edge of the bed, brought it close to her nose, and sniffed.
It still smelled like her own scent. She did not know if it was just psychological, but she also caught a faint trace of engine oil and leather, like a blend of the smell on Qin Sheng himself, inside his car, and in the repair shop.
To hold onto that momentary feeling, she put in her earphones and slowly lay back on the bed while hugging the dress.
To save electricity, she left the window open and did not turn on the air conditioner. The half-damp strands of hair clung to her body and felt a little cool. She turned the volume on her earphones all the way up, faintly able to hear some sounds. A song she had never seen before came up in the daily recommendations. Qin Shui read the lyrics. They went like this:
My heart has long since melted
My love is burning
Before I met you, life was like drifting waterweed
Floating and wandering, rising and sinking in the bustling sea of people
When each breath
Is filled with the fragrance of happiness
May my love also be able to warm you
She closed her eyes tightly. The dress lay lightly draped between her legs. Although she could not hear the melody in her earphones clearly, at least for the duration of that one song, she felt a strange sense of floating, as if her soul were dancing in the air above her. As long as she did not open her eyes, she could keep watching that joyful dance.
“Ding——”
The phone vibrated once in her arms. Qin Shui immediately unlocked the screen and opened WeChat.
It was not Qin Sheng.
Jiang Yang was a close friend she had known since high school. Her family was better off. The two of them went to university together in the provincial capital, and after graduating, Jiang Yang chose to study abroad. Qin Shui briefly told her about the car accident, and Jiang Yang, having calculated the time difference, sent her a message.
“How was today? Did the car owner give you a hard time?”
Qin Shui sat up, still hugging the dress, and replied, “It’s fine. Everything’s settled. I’m home now, just finished showering.”
“You still dared to shower with injuries? Be careful not to leave scars!”
“It’s okay. I was very careful. I didn’t let the wounds get wet.”
She lowered her head to look at the gauze, then silently typed out two long messages, telling Jiang Yang about meeting Qin Sheng that day.
Jiang Yang, anxious, sent three consecutive sixty-second voice messages asking whether Qin Shui was in a bad state of mind, whether she had taken too big a blow and was a bit out of her senses.
Jiang Yang expressed caution about Qin Shui’s initiative in letting Qin Sheng drive her downstairs. She knew Qin Shui had not been in a good state recently. First, she had suffered a man-made disaster, then encountered an accident. She had been mentally strained by an idiot superior, lost her job, and now had inexplicably ended up injured again.
But Jiang Yang did not believe Qin Shui was the kind of person with such low self-worth that, simply because the blows were too heavy and hormones were acting up, she would run off and fall in love with a car mechanic.
Qin Shui strongly disagreed with her view. She said that earning a living by one’s own abilities was nothing to be ashamed of. Besides, the Beidaihe Repair Center was doing quite well, and Qin Sheng was highly skilled. That job was far more impressive than sitting in an office, pounding on a keyboard, and writing official documents.
After that, Jiang Yang stopped responding to her.
Qin Shui felt a bit resentful toward Qin Sheng, yet she also worried about whether he had gotten home safely. If he had any intention of staying in touch with her after settling in at home, he should at least have sent her a message. But until late at night, their chat window was still empty.
One thing Jiang Yang said was not quite right. Even if Qin Sheng was just a car mechanic, he was still one who stood one meter eighty-five tall, handsome and spirited. As for Qin Shui herself, she was a mute. She could not speak. She was not as whole as Qin Sheng.
Setting everything else aside, who would be willing to have a partner who was inconvenient in daily life and an unemployed disabled girl?
Her friends never allowed her to use the word “disabled” to describe herself, but Qin Shui knew the term was fair. If Qin Sheng never contacted her again from this point on, she would not dare take the initiative to message him either. She could enjoy the fleeting happiness of the present and let it distract her, but in the end, she would still have to face life.
For example, face this rented room of hers.
At midnight, Qin Shui had long since turned off the lights and lay in the darkness. Her phone was switched back to Do Not Disturb.
She could not sleep. She thought about Qin Sheng. This was the only good thing that had happened to her in over a year. That interview had ended in less than five minutes. From the HR’s attitude and the perfunctory interview process, she knew she was just there to make up the numbers, so there would be no second interview call.
At one in the morning, she could not help opening WeChat and saw that Jiang Yang had sent her another message.
“Qin Shui, your parents want you to find a boyfriend with good conditions in the provincial capital, someone with a place to settle down. If you’re in a bad mood or if you like him for some other reason, then date him. It’s fine to distract yourself a bit, just don’t take it seriously.”
She silently swiped left on the chat window and tapped Do Not Show.
Who did not want to marry a rich second-generation heir? Who did not want a foothold in a big city? But saying it was easy. Actually achieving it depended entirely on herself, and that was too hard. Besides, Qin Sheng was also a local, with his own home. He was not inferior to anyone. She might want to date him, but whether he would respond was another matter entirely.
She opened Qin Sheng’s Moments. It was completely blank, without even a personal status. Qin Shui had originally thought the repair shop would make employees post advertisements on Moments, but she had guessed wrong.
Qin Sheng’s Moments background image was a photo he had taken himself, a vast stretch of clouds floating above a low gray-white wall, looking very much like cotton candy.
Qin Shui closed her eyes. Both dejection and fantasy pressed into her chest. She held onto her dress with her right hand, and only then was she finally able to fall asleep.
Over the following week, her WeChat message list maintained an eerie silence. After handovers were completed, she left the dozen or so work group chats she had previously joined. The world returned to quiet once more.
She did not tell her family about resigning or the car accident. Her parents thought she was busy with work and did not disturb her. Since that night, Jiang Yang had not spoken to her either.
That afternoon at the Beidaihe Repair Center dissipated like a dream.
No more messages came from Qin Sheng, and Qin Shui’s phone once again entered twenty-four-hour Do Not Disturb mode.