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Chapter 7 Saying It Plain
Chapter 7 Saying It Plain
Saturday had no rain. The sunlight was white enough to look a little false. It came into the living room and put three bright rims on the glasses on the coffee table. All three of them were up. Nobody made the kind of breakfast that was excessively generous. Zhang Xue fried eggs herself and asked whether they would eat. Wu Ziyi said yes. Li Gan said yes. The eggs sat on the plates like a temporary ceasefire.
When they had eaten, Zhang Xue pushed the plates into the kitchen, came back, and sat down. She did not circle. "I'll say mine first. I'm jealous. The jealousy is specific. Ziyi touched him first, kissed him first, slept with him first in the car and at the office. I don't know every detail. I know enough. At the same time I want Li Gan. I don't want a cohabitation in which I'm looked after. I want him to touch me. I want to be able to open my legs in front of him without first turning into a person who understands. And I have to say something more troublesome. Ziyi, I've looked at you. Not only as a rival. When you come out of the shower, my eyes stop. If this relationship only allows me to hate you and doesn't allow me to admit I also want to touch you, then I'm still pretending."
The living room was quiet for a few seconds. Outside, someone was walking a dog. The dog barked once and went far off.
Wu Ziyi's hands were clasped on her knee, clasped tight, then loosened. "I heard you. I'll own mine first. I was the one who reached for Li Gan. I checked more than once that he wasn't failing to refuse because of my rank and my age. His review isn't with me. I'm making that clear to you now too, so you don't think I'm holding him inside the company. I hid it from you because I was greedy. I wanted to possess a beginning that belonged only to me. I was also afraid of you. You laugh more easily than I do. You make this flat feel more like a home. If I only took you for an obstacle, I wouldn't be sitting here today. I'm sitting here because I can imagine that after you join, I don't only lose an exclusive claim. I might also get something I can't give him by myself. As for you looking at me." She lifted her eyes. "I wasn't unaffected. Once you handed me the hair dryer and your fingers touched my wrist, and afterward I stood in the bathroom a long time. I didn't count that as permission to already put my hands on you. Now that you've said it, I can say it."
Li Gan sat in the single armchair off to the side between them. He felt the position was too symbolic, so he shifted his body forward until he was equally near both of them. "I'll finish mine too. I want Ziyi. Not because she came first, so I have no choice but to want her. I want her, the person. The way she asks me. The way she fears being taken for a teacher. The way, when I'm inside her, she still wants me to say her name. I don't want to give any of that back. I want you too, Zhang Xue. I don't want you in order to patch the balance of the household. The night you had the fever I got hard, and I hated myself for it then. Not going through your door was right. Going on afterward pretending there was nothing was wrong. I'm twenty-six. I haven't been with two people I like at the same time. I may do it wrong. When I do it wrong, say so directly. I don't want you swallowing hurt in order to take care of my age."
Zhang Xue stared at him. "You said you want both. You said it very smoothly. Have you thought about how the smoothness itself hurts? For her and for me, it sounds like you want to keep everything."
"I have thought about it," he said. "So I'm not going to say now that I can guarantee fairness forever. I can't do that math. What I can guarantee is that when I'm in one person's body I won't be thinking about how to hide it from the other. I won't compare which of you is tighter, which of you cries out better, and then use that to provoke the other one. And I won't let either of you become the person who only watches, unless that time she herself wants to watch. If some day I find that what I actually wanted was only novelty, I'll say so, and then I'll step out. When I step out, the one who moves is me. You two looked at the flat first. The car can go on being yours to use. At work I'll ask Zhou Heng for a few days remote and finish the handover. I won't use disappearing to punish you."
Wu Ziyi looked at him a long time. "Those sentences make me want to kiss you more than your breathing in the kitchen last night did. But Zhang Xue said no taking clothes off while we talk. I'm holding it."
Zhang Xue was made to laugh by that, a short laugh, and the anger went down a little. "Then we talk terms. If we can't agree, today ends here. If the two of you still want to go on, get a room outside. Don't do it in this flat again. I'll consider moving out. That isn't a threat. It's my boundary."
"Reasonable," Wu Ziyi said. "If we do agree, my terms are here too. First, anyone can say red light. Once it's said, we stop, whether it's two people or three, no matter how close we've gotten. No punishing the other person with a face after stopping. Second, at the office we don't do it anywhere someone might walk in. I don't want another night like that meeting room. Too dangerous, and it drags security and the cleaners into it. Third, we don't use work to speak. If someone's proposal gets revised, that's the proposal. It doesn't get taken to bed as revenge, and nobody promises a project in bed. Fourth, condoms. Until all three of us have been tested, and until we say again whether we want to do without, we wear them, no exceptions. Fifth, between me and Zhang Xue there is no duty to perform for Li Gan. We touch if we want to touch. When we don't want to, he doesn't beg with his eyes. Sixth, jealousy can be said on the spot. It doesn't get saved into an explosion at midnight, and it doesn't get saved into an 'I'm fine.'"
Zhang Xue nodded and added her own. "Seventh. For the month before this started, I don't require the two of you to write a confession about what you already did. But from now on, in this home, there is no sex hidden from the third person. If some time only two people want it and the other one is home, ask first. Asking isn't requesting approval for every time someone enters someone. Asking is telling the other person: we want to now. You can join, you can go out for a walk, or you can say not today. If the other person says not today, we stop. Eighth, I will not be called the later one, the extra one, the one who understands. If, when you speak, you set me down as a supplement, I'll walk out. Ninth, Li Gan is not allowed to call me older sister. Especially not in bed. If Ziyi doesn't want to be called teacher either, then all of us use names."
"I agree," Li Gan said. "I didn't want to hide behind older sister anyway."
Wu Ziyi's fingers loosened. "The tenth is mine. Zhang Xue, if some time I'm jealous enough that I don't want to watch the two of you, I can say I'm going out for a turn. You have to let me go. Don't read the going as me pulling the table out from under us. I'll allow you the same. We haven't bought a contract that requires someone to be present every minute."
"Yes," Zhang Xue said. "But before you go you say it's jealousy. Don't say you're going to buy water. I can't stand that kind of clever excuse. I promise the same. When I go out, I speak like a person."
They went through the ten terms again. The going-through was not sexy. It was like aligning meeting minutes. Zhang Xue felt her shoulders come down a little at a time. Minutes were more reliable than an affair. Reliable was what made it possible for her to hand her body over again.
Li Gan poured water for all three of them. His hands still shook a little. He set the water down and said, "Then when we start is for the two of you to decide. I can do nothing today. I even think that doing nothing today sounds more like the right thing."
Zhang Xue looked at him. "Tonight is all right. But not now. If anyone kisses me now, I'll feel it's to stamp the agreement. I don't want a stamp. I want the evening. After we've eaten, after we've showered, if all three of us still want it, then we start. If someone stops wanting it halfway, they say red light and go back to their own room, and the other two don't follow them in and coax it through to the end."
Wu Ziyi nodded. "All right. Then I'll add one sentence that belongs only to tonight. Li Gan, tonight the first touch is Zhang Xue. Not because I'm generous. Because she has waited longer than I have, and I've already had a taste of you. If the first touch is still me, I'll look down on myself. Zhang Xue, this isn't me handing you what's left. If you don't want to be first, change it. You have the right to change it."
Zhang Xue's throat tightened. She stared at Wu Ziyi, looking in the sentence for charity. What she found was a fairness that had been forced out through clenched teeth. "I accept. But you are not allowed to stand beside us playing mentor. If you want to watch, watch as a person who wants to watch. If you want to touch me, ask me first. I might say yes. I'm not sure now. Not sure isn't a refusal announced in advance. It's that I truly don't know yet whether I'll cry when you touch me."
"Then I'll ask," Wu Ziyi said. "I won't suddenly put my fingers in your mouth to prove we're very bold."
Li Gan listened until the roots of his ears were red through. He still did not move. "Then at night I'll ask every time we change what we're doing. You may think I ask too much. I'd rather ask more."
"You ask," Zhang Xue said. "If you don't ask, I stop. I'm thirty-six. I'm not here to experience a young man deciding things on his own."
By the time the talk reached there, the sunlight had moved from the coffee table onto the rug. All three of them were a little tired, tired the way people are after a real meeting. Wu Ziyi got up to wash the dishes. Zhang Xue followed her in to wipe the table. Their shoulders touched once in the narrow kitchen. Neither of them dodged, and neither pressed in on purpose. In the living room Li Gan wrote the ten terms into a note on his phone in his own words, read them through, and sent them to both women.
Zhang Xue answered: Written like a delivery document. Ridiculous. Keep it.
Wu Ziyi answered: I'll say the seventh again. The person who is home is not furniture.
He looked at the two messages and suddenly wanted to laugh, and could not. Evening had not come yet. The agreement had not been tested by skin. But the air in the living room was already different from last night's bare bulb. It was still tight. Inside the tightness there was a place that existed because it had been spoken. Each person had a place. Nobody was required to turn first into the shape of someone who understood.
In the afternoon all of them actually slept a while. Before Zhang Xue fell asleep she wondered whether she had agreed to the evening too quickly. When she finished wondering she put her hand on her lower belly and admitted it: it was not too quick. She had already said the hardest sentences under the light. What remained, if she still wanted it, ought to be answered with the body, not with another week of silence used to punish everyone, herself included.
Wu Ziyi lay in the master bedroom and looked at an old crack in the ceiling. She thought of Zhang Xue saying she had looked at her collarbone. That sentence made her wetter than any scolding. She did not touch herself. She saved the desire for evening, for the moment when it would have to be admitted in front of the others. She was afraid. The fear made her feel she was still alive, and not a person who only knew how to move first and then keep the situation in hand.
Li Gan could not sleep. He lay in the smallest room and heard the two women's beds each make a sound, then go quiet. He thought of the red light, of the rain by the river, of the legs of the meeting-room table, of the kitchen light. In those scenes Zhang Xue was absent, or she was only in the doorway. Tonight she would be there. He was hard, and as she had asked he did not take care of it early. He wanted to walk into the evening carrying a whole day's clarity. To want them while he was clear. And to be ready to be stopped by any single sentence.
