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Chapter 14 Said Aloud
Chapter 14 Said Aloud
The rumor grew a name anyway. On Tuesday afternoon the version became: Ms. Shen was with Zhou Ye from marketing, personnel already knew, so it was true. The people telling it no longer mentioned the same car. They talked about age. Thirty-five and twenty-seven. Someone said it wasn't worth it. Someone said no wonder. Someone said marketing's days would be easier from now on. That last sentence was the dirtiest. Zhou Ye heard it in the print area while the paper was still coming out of the machine sheet by sheet. The two people speaking saw him. Their voices broke for a moment, and then they pretended they had not broken.
Zhou Ye took the paper out and said, "The review has already been recused. My pages don't go through her. If you want to look at the process, ask Director Lin. I have no obligation to explain the rest."
He left after he said it. His legs were steady. His hands were a little cold. Chen Xia came after him and, in the stairwell, looked at him and said, "So it's true."
"It is."
Chen Xia was silent for a few seconds, and then she said, "Then your ears going red has a reason. I won't help you spread it. Don't expect me not to be surprised either. Ms. Shen is Ms. Shen. You are you. If the two of you dirty the work, I'll be the first to turn on you. If you don't dirty it, let other people talk if they like talking."
"We won't dirty it," Zhou Ye said.
"You'd better not." Chen Xia pushed him once, with the force of a friend. "Go be busy. Don't stand in the stairwell like you're waiting for someone to come interview you."
He did not hear all of the ugly sentences on Shen Man's side. At night she told him part of them herself. A woman director had said, in the restroom, to another person, that a woman who had reached this seat and still went looking for a subordinate was simply pulling the ladder out. The person speaking did not know Shen Man was in a stall. When Shen Man came out to wash her hands, the two of them had already left. She repeated the sentence to herself in the mirror and said it was not new. What was new was that she had not gone back into the stall to cry. She put lipstick on again and went to open the next meeting.
"I'm telling you not because I want you to go curse people for me." She sat on the sofa, her feet on Zhou Ye's legs. "I'm telling you because we agreed not to carry those sentences alone. I carried the scene. The remaining half is yours. After you've heard it, let it be."
Zhou Ye heard it. His hand held her ankle. His thumb rubbed slowly over the bone. "I heard it. Today I also answered with one sentence about process. I didn't mention the bed. I didn't mention the picture. Chen Xia said if we dirty the work she'll turn on us. I said we won't."
"I like that sentence of Chen Xia's," Shen Man said. "It's more useful than sympathy."
They decided not to add further explanations. An explanation would feed the next version of the story. Zhao Heng had already written the recusal into the system. The path of Zhou Ye's weekly report had changed. Shen Man's signature line had disappeared from his pages. That was the whole of the fact that could be taken out. The rest, the company did not deserve to receive.
On Thursday evening Lin Qiming actually nodded once to Shen Man in the elevator, and said to Zhou Ye that the review page could be finalized. Both sentences were ordinary. They were ordinary enough that Zhou Ye did not react until he had walked out of the elevator. This was a kind of acceptance. Acceptance was not a blessing. Acceptance was the other person refusing to go on looking at them as a joke for the break room. In email Shen Man replied to Lin Qiming with only a received. When she told Zhou Ye about that received, her eyes were a little hot.
"He didn't become our enemy," she said. "And he didn't become our audience. That's enough."
On the weekend they went and rode Route 32 once. It was not the last bus. It was the emptier run on Saturday afternoon. There was no rain in the sky. The seats were all dry. Shen Man still sat down beside Zhou Ye. She wore a dark coat. Her hair was not pinned. A mask covered half her face. She did not look like a resident of the seventeenth floor, and still less like an executive vice president. Zhou Ye watched her set her bag down and said, "The other seats are dry."
"I know," she said. "I'm still sitting here."
The bus started. There were no wet clothes, no water dripping onto the back of his hand, no closed bridge. Their shoulders rested together, so openly that it was almost unfamiliar. Shen Man's hand came over and, under the cover of the coat, closed around his fingers. After she closed them she looked at the window, not at other people. Zhou Ye's thumb moved lightly on her knuckle. This ride was so short it did not resemble that night. Short was also good. When they reached Binhe Station, Shen Man did not get off at once. She turned her head. The voice under the mask was very clear.
"We've already told the company. What's left is whether we ourselves are going to keep being led along by other people's sentences. My answer is no. Yours?"
"No," Zhou Ye said. "We go on. What should be recused stays recused. When we ought to sit together, whether the seat is dry or wet, we sit together."
Shen Man's eyes bent a little. They got off and walked into that ordinary high-rise. There was a neighbor in the elevator. They did not kiss. After the door closed on the seventeenth floor, Shen Man took the mask off and kissed him. The kiss was light and slow, as if it were also bringing that daytime bus into the apartment.
The clothes came off one piece at a time. There was no rush. Shen Man pushed him onto the bed, straddled him, and first ground against him with the inside of her thigh until both of them were too hard and too wet to bear it, and only then did she go for the condom at the head of the bed. When she sat down, both hands pressed his chest. Her eyes were on him.
"This isn't payment," she said. "That page of paper in personnel isn't a ticket. I'm here because I want you."
"I know." Zhou Ye's hands held her waist. "Me too. If you only want to hold each other and sleep, we can stop now."
"We're not stopping," she said, and began to move.
Afternoon light came in through that window and fell on her body. Zhou Ye looked at the light, and looked at her. Her breasts swayed lightly in the movement. When he took a nipple in his mouth she made a short sound. She pushed the rhythm from slow to fast, and then slowed it herself, as if she were using her body to drive a week of noise out of her bones. Zhou Ye's thumb pressed her clit. Shen Man looked down and watched him do it. Her breathing came apart. She said right there. She said she wanted to come once in the light. When she came, the sun was just moving onto her collarbone. That small patch of skin, once covered by concealer, now had to cover nothing. She shook. She clenched around him. Her hands braced on his shoulders. She laughed until the corners of her eyes went red. Zhou Ye turned them over, pressed her into that patch of light, and still asked if he could. She said he could. She said deeper. He went deep. His forehead rested against hers. He moved very slowly, until her legs tightened again, until she said, by his ear, together. When they came together, a car passed outside the window, an ordinary sound, laid over the sound on the bed. Neither of them had to press their voices down anymore as if they were doing something wrong.
Afterward Shen Man lay on his chest. Her finger tapped his ribs.
"Don't change the lock screen back," she said.
"I won't."
"The album can stay. Every so often, we ask once whether we're still keeping it. Any time one of us says not to keep it, we delete it. And after it's deleted, no scene about it."
"All right."
"At the next operations meeting, the time you look at me still stays only as long as necessary." She looked up. The corner of her mouth was soft. "Necessary may be half a second longer than last week. The extra half second, I'll treat it as if I didn't see it. You'd better treat it as if you didn't see it either."
Zhou Ye laughed. "I may not control that half second well."
"Then practice," Shen Man said. She kissed his chest, and then, as if she had remembered something, she pushed herself up and went for her phone. She opened the picture from in front of the window, looked for a while, and turned the screen toward him. "It still belongs only to us. It didn't turn into a condition. That much, we did."
Zhou Ye looked at her in the picture. Rain, river, black clothes, bare feet, and on the collarbone that small patch of red only the two of them recognized. He nodded. "We did."
Shen Man set the phone face-down and lay back down. The evening light moved slowly away. The apartment on the seventeenth floor was not large. The title was outside the door. The recusal was written in the system. The rumor would live a few more days. But the two people on the bed had already finished saying what had to be said. Shen Man's foot hooked his calf. Her voice was lazy, and still clear.
"That night on the last bus, the seat was wet. I had nowhere else to sit. That part is true." She said, "What happened after I sat down was not because there was no other seat. It was because I looked at you, and you looked at me. We chose. From now on, we choose too."
Zhou Ye brought her hand to his mouth and kissed it once. "From now on, we choose too."
Outside the window the river brightened. Route 32 would keep running at night. The last bus would still be a few minutes late. The seam in the roof would probably still leak. None of those things was a reason pushing them together anymore. The reason was in this room, in the few human sentences that had already been said aloud, and in the moment she leaned in again and, in a voice only he could hear, said his name.
Zhou Ye answered. Shen Man laughed. After she laughed she said she was hungry, and said this time the eggs were not to be burned. They put clothes on and walked into the kitchen. A copy of the envelope was still in the drawer. The picture was still in the lock. The company knew the part it ought to know. The rest of the night was theirs. The water boiled. The rain did not fall. The city shone, ordinarily, outside the window. Shen Man passed him the chopsticks. Her fingers paused for a moment in his palm. In that pause neither of them owed the other anything. It was only the way they still wanted to go on.
