In the dusk, the light was ambiguous and indistinct. The distant scenery was merely a cluster of chaotic, bright color blocks, leaving almost no impression upon the eyes.
This hotel was in a prime location. Looking straight out, one could catch sight of the river and the scattered rooftops nearby. At this hour, the river surface was practically devoid of ripples; only golden, brilliant rays fell into Jiang Youlan’s eyes before fading away completely.
There was a slight sting.
Jiang Youlan probably shrank back a little, or perhaps uttered an hm. She stopped, feeling somewhat at a loss.
I
Shh, don’t speak.
The rain outside was too heavy to hear human voices, so they simply fell silent together.
She turned around, opened her arms to embrace her, and kissed her earlobe, soothing the other person’s unease. Her lips touched a drop of sweat, and she did not dislike this sensation.
The lingering scents of body wash and shampoo hung in the air. The other person’s skin emitted a dry, warm, and unique fragrance, along with a trace of an unidentifiable, slightly earthy scent of freshly cut grass.
She closed her eyes, feeling as though she were lying in a meadow after a storm. The soil was soft, the blades of grass were moist, and the severed grass leaves exuded green juice. The clouds had not yet dispersed, hanging low and gently, like a heavy embrace.
She wrapped her arms around the person’s neck and tousled her hair, which felt a bit prickly. Following the motion, she stroked the other’s face, burning hot, youthful, and covered with a layer of fine, short fuzz.
The person grew shy, her body temperature rising continuously as she buried her head into the crook of Jiang Youlan’s neck and nuzzled against it.
Yet she did not stop.
Outside the window, it began to rain at some point, and the sky had darkened completely. Looking out, the shimmering light on the river was no longer visible. The room was not lit, rendering everything invisible, yet neither ears nor mouth had failed.
The rain fell recklessly, fast and dense, striking the ground with a tremendous roar that muffled the noises and voices both inside and outside.
Water vapor misted the window, making it almost translucent.
It also blurred her eyes.
She could not see the rooftops outside; her fingers traced the other person’s spine. It was a scorching, rolling mountain range rising and falling in the darkness.
Something choked her throat, preventing her from speaking and conversing with the other person.
What would you like for a midnight snack?
I want to drink alcohol.
What kind of alcohol does a child drink? Drink soda instead. Be a good girl.
Having finally managed to speak, she could only utter mundane, irrelevant trifles, missing the point entirely.
She felt a sour swelling in her chest, filled to the brim with rain, and seemingly something else besides. It could not be clearly articulated or defined, failing to find a suitable word.
On such a rainy night, language was redundant.
The rain fell for a long time, giving the illusion that it would never stop. In the violent rainy season, such rain was probably commonplace.
The rain kept falling.
After their breathing stabilized, she received a few fragmentary kisses, falling upon the corners of her eyes and brows like the dense rain of a spring night. She thought of getting up to light a cigarette, but delayed making a move. She could not figure out why she lingered either, as if maintaining this posture could hold onto something.
Sister, what are you thinking about? Someone murmured close to her ear, her breath scalding Jiang Youlan’s ear and causing her to shrink back.
Sister?
This form of address felt somewhat peculiar, like a sudden flash of lightning illuminating this self-deceiving night.
It was Qingyi.
Jiang Youlan shuddered; everything shattered, and she abruptly opened her eyes.
Fortunately, it was merely a dream.
Jiang Youlan sat up, breathing heavily, and gulped down several sips of cold water placed by her bedside table before calming herself down.
The rain outside fell in torrents, pounding fiercely against the metal rain guard and producing a tremendous din.
It turned out that it really was raining.
However, how could she have dreamt of her?
Did she want to demand a kiss from her? Or did she want more?
She… wanted her?
Jiang Youlan patted her face, trying to wake herself up. This was abnormal; she must have been too exhausted lately, and because she kept running into her, her thoughts were far too chaotic.
She checked the bedside clock: 4:00 AM.
She left the lights off, sitting alone in the darkness as she tried to sort out her thoughts and figure out why she had dreamt of that child she had only recently met. She could not understand why she cared even a little bit about that child.
Perhaps it was because she was simply too young.
She was truly youthful, holding within her hands boundless youth, possessing everything Youlan had already lost, never had time to attain, or might have had a chance to reach.
Tap, tap, tap,
Jiang Youlan was immersed in her thoughts and remained dazed for a moment upon hearing the sound, before realizing someone was knocking on her door.
This building had some years on it, and the soundproofing was not quite ideal; sometimes when neighbors had visitors, she would mistakenly think they were knocking on her own door.
However, guests rarely ever came to visit her.
Tap, tap, tap,
The person knocking did not use excessive force, nor did they seem to carry much emotion.
This allowed Jiang Youlan to calm down slightly, though she still could not help recalling various social news reports. The door panel and the walls appeared thin; separated by the door, she had no way of knowing whether the person outside was human or a ghost.
The knocking still did not stop, and the person outside seemed quite persistent.
After considering for a while, she walked on tiptoes to the kitchen to grab a kitchen knife, then stood behind the door.
Who is it? She gripped the knife handle tightly. The knife was not commonly used and had grown rather dull; she wondered if it would still come in handy shortly.
Youlan.
It’s me.
She let out a sigh of relief, relaxed her shoulders, and placed the knife back on the table.
Why are you here at this hour?
The woman was standing against the light, and since it was currently the darkest time before dawn, her face could not be seen clearly. However, Jiang Youlan noticed the blue turquoise star earrings dangling from her ears.
Sure enough, it was Xuanxuan.
Xuanxuan?
Had she not gone to find her boyfriend? How could she appear here?
Did you guys fight? Jiang Youlan turned sideways to let her in, then closed the door.
Xuanxuan walked into the room unsteadily, moving like a walking corpse, and collapsed face-first onto the sofa.
Jiang Youlan initially thought she was drunk, a scenario she witnessed quite often, and indeed, there was a strong smell of alcohol on her.
There was also the smell of cigarette smoke.
Yet it seemed… there was also a faint trace of the smell of blood.
Realizing this, Youlan turned on the lights to examine her face and arms carefully. Fortunately, her face was clean, and there were no wounds anywhere on her head. However, there was a wound nearly ten centimeters long on her arm, though it was unclear how she had injured herself.
The wound was not deep, and the bleeding had already stopped, but it had not been properly treated.
Youlan sighed, fetched some bandages and iodine, and wrapped a bandage around Xuanxuan’s arm. The final knot looked somewhat unattractive and clumsy, but it would have to do.
Xuanxuan could perhaps be considered a hopeless romantic. People who did not understand her would simply use such a label to define her.
Jiang Youlan felt that Xuanxuan was merely starving.
For a long time, she had received very little, which was why she always felt an emptiness in her stomach and constantly wished to use something to fill herself up.
She had been deceived; when she first entered her line of work, she was tricked by a teenage boyfriend from high school. Youlan had heard many such stories. At the start, girls always believed that teenage first love was pure and innocent; no matter what flaws the boy possessed, they could beautify them into a unique romance within the illusions of dreamscapes.
Xuanxuan, too, was born in a remote village where her mother bore so many children that by the time Xuanxuan was born, children were no longer cherished. She was simply given casual mouthfuls of food to raise her, and managing to reach high school was entirely thanks to the school principal and her homeroom teacher visiting her home repeatedly and continuously persuading her parents.
According to what Xuanxuan said, she used to do all right in her studies, not particularly outstanding, but if she had continued to finish high school, getting into a junior college would probably have been no problem at all.
However, during the summer vacation of her freshman year in high school, a boy in her class invited her to play at his house. His home was not too far away, just two mountains away from Xuanxuan’s village.
Come to think of it, that boy looked ordinary as well, but he had grown tall early on and had fair skin, making him stand out somewhat from the mediocre flock of his peers. Xuanxuan had a slight crush on him, having exchanged a few words with him, though they were not very close.
Near the end of the summer vacation, the boy climbed across two mountains to invite her over. She originally wanted to ask her mother, but her mother was busy taking care of her younger brother, who was only a few months old, and had no attention to spare for her.
By that time, she had already read quite a few Qiong Yao novels borrowed from the town library, filling her head entirely with romantic fantasies.
So she went, carrying romantic imaginations of future life.
Fancies of elopement, making vows, loving each other for a lifetime, and so forth.
She crossed the mountain and arrived at the boy’s house. Not long after she sat down, the boy said that the village was no fun and a new store had opened in town, suggesting they go there to play together.
Xuanxuan hesitated a bit, but the boy had borrowed his cousin’s motorcycle, saying he could give her a ride there, that it would only take an hour, and that he would send her back before dark.
Meeting the boy’s expectant gaze, and then looking at the gleaming reflection of the motorcycle parked at the entrance, she failed to utter words of refusal.
That day, she was unable to return home. For many years after that, she could never truly return home either.
To this day, a decade later, she still regretted it.
When Jiang Youlan first heard her recount her story, her heart had leapt into her throat the moment the boy issued the invitation.
When Xuanxuan reached the part about the newly opened store, her heart sank heavily.
That was not a respectable establishment. In those years, KTVs, night clubs, and the like had sprouted up in many economically underdeveloped towns, as if aligning themselves with big cities in terms of entertainment styles and venues would somehow allow them to catch up economically as well.
Youlan did not know whether those places of glittering lights truly stimulated consumption in towns and small counties; she had only witnessed many young girls whose futures were snapped in half in such places before they even had the chance to grow up.
Of course, it was hard to say whether they were willing.
Yet sometimes, a forced beginning was too difficult to bear, which was why they used romance to gloss over that period of experience.
Love served as the best cover, making violence and falsehoods appear tender beneath it. It was as if by uttering the word love, all injuries could be written off at once.
Jiang Youlan knew this was false and untenable.
Xuanxuan knew it too. Back then, after finishing her story, she gave a self-deprecating smile and said, He sold me for fifty yuan.
The first man I ever fell in love with in my life tricked me there for fifty yuan.
Sometimes I wonder if my whole life is only worth that much.
How cheap. If it were five hundred, or five thousand, maybe I’d feel a bit better inside. Look at this face of mine, it’s still worth some money.
Jiang Youlan had wanted to comfort her at the time, but Xuanxuan told her it wasn’t necessary. Xuanxuan had already drifted and sunk in this cannibalistic society for many years; she understood everything.
No amount of words could fill the void within her heart.
Over the years, Xuanxuan increasingly craved sincerity, honesty, and love. She wanted to grasp something, to devour something, just to rid herself of that sense of starvation.
Therefore, she frequently fell in love, sometimes with customers, sometimes with colleagues, and occasionally with men she met by chance.
She wanted love, true love, the most precious kind. If she could not attain it, she would obtain something else: a few fractions of sincerity hidden within deceit, a shred of pity amidst the tactical maneuvering, or simply money, along with the desires wrapped in money.
Desire was piping hot; when love was absent, using it to fill one’s stomach would have to suffice.
Still unsatisfied with her meal, she sought to extract as much genuine affection as possible. One or two parts would do; three or four parts were plenty.
Youlan watched her pass by one man after another, sometimes getting dead drunk, sometimes covered in wounds.
Yet Xuanxuan was persistent; she constantly hovered in a hunting state, unafraid of lies and violence, having long grown accustomed to coping with such things. Perhaps without them, she wouldn’t even know how to interact with people.
This time, her luck was probably bad, leading her to cross paths with a man of terrible temper.
However, moving forward, Xuanxuan would likely cut ties with that person; Xuanxuan was not someone fond of entanglements, and she always had new options.
As for men, there were plenty of them. If this one didn’t work out, switching to the next one would be even better.
Most of the time, Jiang Youlan merely acted as a bystander. She knew nothing of love, and she didn’t even believe in the word itself.
It was merely a fairy tale humans invented to deceive themselves, with infatuated men and women trapping themselves in cocoons across various beds.
Yet dreams, dreams were beyond control.
How could one condemn a dream?