Shen Qingqing’s lips were less than two centimeters from his palm.
When she blew gently across the wound, her breath carried the lingering warmth of her body as it brushed over the bleeding cut in his palm, light as a feather skimming across water.
All five of Huo Yan’s fingers jerked open at once as though he had been burned.
He couldn’t see.
But every one of his senses had been twisted to the limit in that instant. The touch of her breath against the raw flesh of the wound was amplified tenfold, twentyfold, surging upward from the nerves in his palm through his wrist, forearm, and elbow before racing straight into the back of his skull.
The clean scent of soap on her drifted into his nose, absurdly fresh against the moldy stench of the rental room.
“Fuuu…”
She blew on it again.
Longer than before, softer than before, carrying a faint nasal tone, like someone soothing a child.
“It’s okay, it’s okay, the pain will fly away.”
Huo Yan clenched his molars tightly.
The pain will fly away.
The moment those four words left her mouth, it felt as though someone had smashed a hammer into his head. A loud buzzing exploded in his ears, drowning out everything else.
When was the last time he had heard those words?
He couldn’t remember.
It was too long ago. So far away that he had personally crushed that memory himself and buried it in the deepest corner of his mind beneath layers upon layers of hatred and dried blood.
His mother.
When he was five years old, his mother had blown on his wounds the same way.
“Fuuu… fuuu…”
Shen Qingqing blew on the wound twice more, and on the third breath, something fell onto the back of his hand.
Warm!
Not tap water, not blood.
A round, scorching droplet fell from above, landing on his knuckles and slipping down between his fingers.
One drop, two drops.
The third landed on an old scar near the base of his middle finger, the warmth sinking deep beneath his skin.
She was crying. Huo Yan’s breathing stopped for half a beat.
This woman was lowering her head to blow on his wound while murmuring that the pain would fly away, tears falling one after another onto his hand.
His palm was split open, the wound exposed. Her tears slipped directly into it, the salt stinging the tender flesh painfully.
But this pain was unlike any he had felt before.
Every pain he had known until now had dragged downward, heavy and suffocating, sinking deep into his bones, something he could endure.
This pain moved upward instead.
It burrowed through the wound in his palm into his chest, drilling all the way into his heart until his entire ribcage trembled from the heat.
Suddenly, he yanked his hand away.
The movement was so abrupt it looked like he had touched a live wire. His whole body recoiled backward, his spine slamming hard against the wall as he hid both hands behind him.
Caught off guard, Shen Qingqing accidentally bit her own tongue, immediately tasting rust in her mouth.
“What are you doing?” she asked as she looked up, tears still hanging from her lashes, her eyes red as a rabbit’s.
Huo Yan didn’t answer.
His back pressed tightly against the wall while both hands remained clenched behind him, his fingers digging into the wounds in his palms hard enough to make his knuckles twitch from pain.
He was using pain to suppress something else.
His breathing had become uneven, rough and hurried, like someone who had been trapped underwater too long before finally breaking the surface. The rhythm of his lungs expanding and contracting had doubled.
Shen Qingqing stared at him.
The tips of his ears were red.
From his earlobes to the rims of his ears and all the way up to his temples, color spread across his grayish face as though he had developed a fever.
“Y-you… why are you hiding?” Shen Qingqing’s voice still carried traces of crying, thick and muffled from her stuffed nose. “Did I hurt you?”
Huo Yan shoved his hands even farther behind him until his shoulder blades ground against the wall with an audible creak.
“No.”
“Then why are you shrinking away like that?” Shen Qingqing snapped, shuffling forward on her knees as she reached for his arm. “Show me your hand!”
“No need.”
“What do you mean no need? The wound’s still open. Are you trying to get an infection? Do you know infections can lead to amputation? If they cut your hand off, how are you supposed to eat? Then I’ll have to spend money pushing your wheelchair around too!”
She scolded him righteously while grabbing his elbow and trying to pull his arm forward.
Huo Yan’s arm didn’t move an inch, solid as an iron post nailed into the wall. He was thin, but not weak. The moment he exerted force, Shen Qingqing nearly stumbled forward from the resistance.
“I won’t die.”
The three words were squeezed out from deep in his throat, low and muffled like a voice emerging from underground.
Shen Qingqing released him and sat on the floor, panting twice before wiping the tears from her face with the back of her hand.
“You say you won’t die? Fine. Then show me your hand.”
Huo Yan remained motionless.
“If you don’t, I’m not leaving. I’ll stay here all night if I have to.”
Shen Qingqing plopped herself onto the floor cross-legged, kicking the ruined high heels aside.
“At worst I’ll starve to death here. Our entire fortune is two yuan and fifty cents anyway. We probably won’t survive more than a few days.”
After saying that, she picked up the two one-yuan coins and the fifty-cent coin from the floor and counted them twice on her knee.
Behind his back, Huo Yan’s hands clenched and loosened repeatedly.
The wounds in his palms had started bleeding again from his own fingernails digging into them, sticky blood coating his hands.
The room fell silent for more than ten seconds.
Outside the window, sounds from the urban village drifted in through gaps in the newspaper-covered glass. People shouting in the alleyways, children crying, sizzling oil from someone’s wok.
All those noises mixed with the silence inside the room, making the air feel unbearably stifling.
Slowly, Huo Yan brought his hands out from behind his back.
Palm facing upward, resting on his knee.
The wounds were bleeding again. Fresh crescent-shaped nail marks overlapped the cuts left by the glass shards.
The moment Shen Qingqing saw it, her temples throbbed with anger.
“Huo Yan, what are you, some kind of hedgehog? Who injures themselves like this?”
This time she didn’t waste any words. She bent down and rummaged beneath the bed again, dragging out the remaining fabric from the old T-shirt and tearing off two strips with gritted teeth.
Her movements were more practiced now. She wrapped his hand three times before tying a knot, then wrapped it twice more and tied another, sealing the wound tightly.
When she reached the final layer, she lowered her head and bit the loose end of the cloth to pull it tighter.
Her lips brushed the back of his hand again.
Huo Yan’s fingers jerked sharply as though pierced by needles.
Shen Qingqing didn’t look up, fully focused on tightening the cloth. Her hair had fallen loose and brushed lightly against his wrist, making every hair on his body stand on end.
“There.” She released the cloth from her teeth and clapped her hands lightly. “If you dare touch glass again today, I’m throwing every breakable thing in this room straight into the trash.”
Huo Yan’s fingers curled inside the wrappings while his thumb slowly rubbed the patch of skin her lips had touched.
Warm! Warmer than the water.
Warmer than anything.
Shen Qingqing stood up, her legs numb from squatting too long. She staggered slightly and steadied herself against the bedframe. Then she bent down to collect the two yuan and fifty cents from the floor, stuffing them into her pocket along with the hundred yuan she had borrowed from Huo Yan earlier.
“Let’s go.”
Huo Yan tilted his head slightly.
“Where?”
“To make money, obviously. You want to sit here and wait to die?” Shen Qingqing kicked aside the ruined high heels and wandered barefoot through the room until she found a pair of flip-flops behind the door. After slipping them on, she dragged out Huo Yan’s sneakers from beneath the bed. The soles were worn almost paper-thin.
She tossed them beside his feet.
“Put your shoes on and come with me.”
Huo Yan bent down, found the shoes by touch, and slipped them on.
Shen Qingqing pulled open the door and glanced back at him.
When he stood up from the bed, both hands wrapped in cloth hung quietly at his sides, his face completely expressionless. The redness around his ears had disappeared entirely, as though it had never existed.
But the hand clutching the loose tail of the cloth strip never loosened once.
Shen Qingqing noticed none of this. Her mind was entirely occupied with the ingredient list flashing inside the Food and Medicine Share the Same Origin interface and the four-yuan-fifty-cent startup cost. She was busy calculating what time the market would close, which stall sold the cheapest dried rice noodles, and whether eggs could be bought individually.
“We’re going to the recycling station first,” she called back from the stairwell.
“The recycling station?”
“We’re selling those fake bags for extra startup money. Hurry up already, stop dragging your feet.”
Huo Yan followed downstairs with one hand brushing lightly against the wall, his steps steady and nearly soundless against the stairs.
Ahead of him, Shen Qingqing’s flip-flops slapped noisily against the floor as she kept turning around every few steps to make sure he hadn’t fallen.
After leaving the alley and turning the corner, they reached the recycling station at the east end of the urban village. A crooked metal sign hung from a utility pole while piles of cardboard boxes, plastic bottles, and scrap metal were stacked beneath it.
An elderly man wearing a straw hat sat beside a weighing scale, lazily fanning himself with a palm fan. The moment he saw Shen Qingqing dragging over a plastic bag full of counterfeit handbags, the fan stopped moving.
“Sir, do you buy bags like these?”
The old man leaned forward, pulled one out, examined the stitching briefly, then tossed it back.
“Fake, not worth much.”
Shen Qingqing slammed the bag onto the scale.
“I asked whether you buy them, not whether they’re real.”
The old man resumed fanning himself twice.
“Two yuan per pound.”
“Who are you trying to fool?” Shen Qingqing’s voice shot upward immediately. Standing with her hands on her hips, she stomped one flip-flop loudly against the ground. “Look at this leather, these metal fittings, these zippers. Even if they’re fake, they’re high-quality replicas. Two yuan per pound?”
Huo Yan stood three steps away with his back against a utility pole, head tilted slightly.
Her voice exploded in his ears, sharp and lively, completely different from before, as though she had transformed into another person entirely.
“Five yuan,” the old man said.
“Ten.”
“Are you robbing me?”
“This whole bag weighs at least six or seven pounds. Ten yuan per pound isn’t unreasonable. You’ll turn around and resell them for twenty.”
The old man stopped fanning himself and narrowed his eyes on her.
Shen Qingqing opened the bag and laid the handbags one by one across the scale platform, her mouth never stopping.
“Look at this one, the hardware’s copper-plated. This zipper’s even YKK. The imitation quality is amazing. Feel this texture—”
Leaning against the utility pole, Huo Yan’s lips twitched faintly.
Less than five minutes ago, this woman was still crying with a thick nasal voice.
Now she sounded like a fierce market vendor haggling at full volume.
His thumb rubbed the tail of the cloth strip once more.
The warmth from her lips still lingered on that patch of skin.