Time and air seemed to freeze. In that moment, Shu Wan’s mind went completely blank.
Forget explaining—she could barely even open her mouth to speak. And an explanation might not help anyway, since she had been the one to lie first.
“Don’t frighten the girl. Let’s find out what happened before we say anything.”
A clear, springlike voice drifted into the silence, breaking through the wall of frozen air.
Shu Wan took several deep breaths. Her eyes shifted slightly, and only then did she realize Meng Huaijin hadn’t come alone. Gorgeous Miss Jiang was with him.
“I have something to do tonight. I’m not going up,” Meng Huaijin said to Jiang Jie, then walked straight toward them.
“Huaijin,” Jiang Jie called from behind him. He didn’t look back.
Their eyes met, ice colliding with fire. Shu Wan instinctively wanted to retreat, but her feet felt as heavy as lead and wouldn’t budge.
“Is this the guy you told me about?” Zhou Ze was calmer than she was. After asking quietly, he put on an air of maturity and extended his right hand toward Meng Huaijin. “Hello, Uncle. I’m Wanwan’s classmate and a friend she’s known since childhood. My name is Zhou Ze.”
Meng Huaijin acted as if he hadn’t heard him. He didn’t even glance Zhou Ze’s way, continuing straight toward Shu Wan.
The next instant, she felt a tight grip close around her wrist. A force as strong and unyielding as steel dragged her out through the hotel entrance at a brisk pace.
Shu Wan couldn’t keep up with him at all; she was practically being hauled along. “…Slow down. I can’t keep up.”
Meng Huaijin said nothing. His long strides carried him onward.
They’d gone another several dozen feet when Shu Wan called out to him again and again, until at last her voice turned tearful. “You’re hurting me!”
Without a word, Meng Huaijin slowed down. He reached the car, opened the door, and pushed her inside, then got in after her and slammed the door shut.
The guard at the wheel jolted. He turned and saw Shu Wan in a panic, and was just about to plead on her behalf when his captain shot him a look sharp as a blade.
“…I’ll get out and have a smoke. Um, Captain, talk it out. Just talk it out.”
.
Once the guard got out, only Shu Wan and Meng Huaijin were left in the car. Silence filled the cramped space for a long while.
“Nothing to say, Shu Wan?” The man took out a cigarette and rolled it between his fingers. He didn’t light it. His voice was like a dry well hidden beneath thick fog—impossible to see into, yet perilous at every turn.
Shu Wan rubbed her wrist, which had nearly been scraped raw, and glanced at him before quickly looking away. “I’m sorry. These past few days, I lied when I said I was going out with my deskmate.”
“So you were going out with your boyfriend, secretly dating.” Meng Huaijin stated it as a fact.
“He’s not my boyfriend, and I’m not secretly dating!” Shu Wan finally dared to turn and look him in the eye.
Meng Huaijin took in the girl’s flustered indignation. “Shu Wan, you even went to a hotel with him, and you still won’t admit it?”
His words hurt and shamed her more than a lash across her body. Growing up was like that: what seemed insignificant to other people could feel like the end of the world to Shu Wan. The tip of the girl’s nose twitched, her eyes reddened, and tears quickly welled up.
“Is that what you think I’m like?” she asked.
The tears poised to fall from her bloodshot eyes stung Meng Huaijin. He had been questioning her, but somehow she had ended up questioning him instead.
His straight brows drew together, though his voice remained cold. “Shu Wan, be reasonable. If he isn’t your boyfriend, why did you lie and tell me you were going out with your deskmate?”
Shu Wan didn’t know how to describe the generation gap between them. Her cheeks flushed with frustration. “Last time, I only cried a few tears because of friendship, and you asked me if I was crying over a boyfriend. What was I supposed to say?”
“If I’d told you that the person coming to see me was a boy—and that he’d flown from more than a thousand kilometers away—would you have believed we were just friends?”
“You still wouldn’t, would you? Because you adults only believe what you’ve already decided is true. But Zhou Ze really is my friend…”
When she reached the part that hurt, the girl broke down completely, sobbing too hard to speak clearly. “He, Bai Fei, and I have been close friends since kindergarten. But after something happened to my family, they stopped contacting me for several months because of reasons they couldn’t avoid. I thought it was because I was a bad person, that no one liked me, and that I couldn’t even hold on to my friendships.”
“This time, Zhou Ze risked being disowned by his family to come see me. I was on edge every day, afraid you’d find out, but I was happy, too. I went back to the hotel with him today because they’d brought me gifts and I wanted to pick them up. And then… you said I’d gone to a hotel with a boy. Do you hear how awful that sounds?”
“I’m still a virgin, okay!”
“…”
Meng Huaijin pressed his fingers to his temples. Faced with the girl’s machine-gun barrage, he actually forgot what he’d meant to say—especially after that last line.
For two or three minutes, Meng Huaijin said nothing.
Only after she had mostly calmed down did the man quietly pull out a tissue and wipe her face, roughly drying the tear tracks that remained. “I say one thing, and you come back with ten. You’ve got quite a mouth on you, Shu Wan.”
The girl pressed her lips together and lowered her eyes to her toes. After a long while, she murmured, “I was wrong to lie to you before, too. I’m sorry. But Zhou Ze really isn’t my boyfriend, and I didn’t go to a hotel with him.”
She didn’t dig in her heels. When she was wrong, she admitted it, sincerely—but if she wasn’t, she’d stand her ground to the death. She certainly had principles. Who said she was obedient? She was a persuasive little debater.
Meng Huaijin looked away and tossed the crumpled tissue aside, his tone as calm as ever. “Next time a friend comes to visit, I’ll arrange for them to stay either at home or somewhere else. But you have to tell me.”
Shu Wan sniffed and glanced sideways at him. “I understand.”
Meng Huaijin rolled down the window and finally lit the cigarette. He took a couple of light puffs, then reached outside to flick away the ash. “Shu Wan, there’s nothing shameful about dating. You don’t have to think there is. I’m not against you having a boyfriend. If you do start dating someone in the future, you can bring him home openly.”
She hadn’t expected him to bring that up out of nowhere. Shu Wan blinked, unsure what to say.
“But for now, dating is off-limits. Even if he’s only a male friend, you have to keep your distance.” The man’s tone left no room for argument.
It sounded a little overbearing. She wasn’t secretly dating, but how many people were rational about things when they were young?
Shu Wan asked softly, “Did you date when you were young?”
Meng Huaijin pressed the cigarette butt to his tongue. White smoke drifted from his nostrils as he looked down on the world. “When I was your age, I spent all three hundred and sixty-five days a year in the army. Even the birds perched on the telephone poles were male. Who was I supposed to date?”
The girl stared at him, her swollen almond-shaped eyes fixed on him. It took her a long time to remember to blink.
When she was eight, she’d thought he was a bandit with an impossibly striking face. It hadn’t been without reason.
Compared with the man before her now, set aside his stiff, by-the-book identity as a bureau chief and strip away the Meng family’s distinguished revolutionary credentials[1]This refers to prestige gained through an older generation’s revolutionary service or historical political connections, rather than a formal qualification held by every family member. jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_3733513_1_1').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_3733513_1_1', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], });: with the cigarette pressed to his tongue, what was he if not a bandit, wildness and ferocity all in one?
And as he’d grown older and gained more experience, the uncle she saw now had only surpassed the man he’d been back then—frighteningly domineering.
“What about now?” Shu Wan heard herself ask. “Why were you and that beautiful, badass Miss Jiang at the hotel? Were you going to get a room? Or… are you two dating?”
References[+]