Original | The Day the Contract Ends

[Original story · Fiction · All characters are adults]

Shen Zhixia drafted the contract herself. She was twenty-nine, an architect, and she drew everything as a plan. One year. Separate rooms. Married in public, roommates at home. She put the last clause in bold: either party may say stop at any time.

Lu Xingzhou, thirty-two and a lawyer, read it and added one line beside the bold clause: the person who says stop owes no explanation. His hand was steady when he signed.

They married because her mother was ill and wanted to see her in a wedding dress once. And they married because he needed to be married to take on a case his family wouldn't hand to a single man. The reasons were practical, and neither of them pretended otherwise.

In the first month, they nodded to each other in the kitchen. By the third, he was cooking an extra bowl of soup. In the sixth, her mother left the hospital, took both their hands at the door and said, "Take care of each other." Neither of them spoke on the drive home.

In the ninth month, the power went out on a rainy night. She went looking for candles in the dark and walked straight into him. She heard his breath catch.

"May I?" he asked. His hand stayed in the air between them.

She thought about it for so long that she found the candles. "Yes," she said. "But you have to ask me again."

He did. Before she kissed him, before she pulled him down beside her, before the candle burned low. Each time she said yes, and each time he waited until she'd finished saying it. She never drew what happened after that on any plan.

When she woke, he was sitting on the edge of the bed with the contract in his hands.

"It's day three hundred and sixty-five," he said. "I can say stop. So can you."

She sat up, took the contract, turned to the last page, and under the bold clause added a line in pencil: either party may say "one more year" at any time.

"This one needs both signatures," she said.

Lu Xingzhou smiled and took a pen from his pocket. "I'm a lawyer," he said. "I know."

He signed. So did she. Outside, the rain stopped, like a decision that didn't need explaining.