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Chapter 2 The Slow Stop
Chapter 2 The Slow Stop
The traffic control did not lift quickly. Route 32 stopped in front of a low bridge for nearly twenty minutes. Rain hammered the roof as if someone were pouring beans without pause. The driver switched on the hazard lights, turned his head, and said he was sorry, in a tone that had grown used to saying it. People in the bus began to make calls. The voices stacked together, all of them explaining why they were not home yet.
Shen Man's phone lit as well. Zhou Ye did not try to look, but the light of the screen sat at the corner of his eye. The caller display was only two characters. He did not make them out. She looked for two seconds, hung up, and set the phone face-down on her bag. After she had set it down, her fingers still pressed the phone, as if she were still deciding whether to call back.
"Work," she said, probably because she felt the silence would make the call seem heavier.
"So you hung up."
"It will ring again tomorrow," she said. "Tonight it doesn't need to find me."
Zhou Ye nodded. He suddenly felt that he should not understand the sentence too quickly. A vice president hanging up a nighttime call, sitting in wet clothes, sharing half a dry seat with someone from marketing who wrote reviews: if it had happened to anyone else, it would already have been enough for the break room to talk about for a week. Happening to Shen Man, it only made him feel that she was tired. Tiredness was a concrete thing, in the shoulders she had let down, in the hair she was no longer keeping pinned.
The bus still did not move. Shen Man loosened one button at the collar of the trench coat, and then, as if she regretted it, did not go on undoing them. Wet clothes against skin had to be uncomfortable. Zhou Ye could see a small patch of skin above her collarbone, cooled by the rain, a truer color than the makeup on her face. He looked away, at the water stains on his own trouser leg.
"Your review," she said suddenly. "That page about the third-tier cities. Did you change it afterward?"
"I changed it. I'll give it to Director Lin tomorrow."
"The problem isn't the third-tier cities. It's that you wrote what you could explain into the table, and hid what you couldn't explain in a note." She said it very evenly, as if she were still in the conference room. "That line in the note, that users would come back on their own, has no evidence."
Zhou Ye was silent for a moment. "I wrote that line. I wanted the conclusion to look a little better."
"I know you wrote it." Shen Man turned her face and looked at him. "That's why I had you redo it. I didn't have Lin Qiming redo it for you."
That sentence was more dangerous than the knees touching. It meant that what she had seen in that conference room was not a name that could be swapped out. It was him. Zhou Ye's throat moved again. He did not know whether to thank her or to admit that he had, at the time, been hiding.
"It isn't that I can't write it," he said. "It's that I was afraid that after I wrote it, the conclusion wouldn't look good."
"Then it doesn't look good," she said. "Bo'an can't afford too many good-looking lies. Neither can you."
The driver finally started the bus. The low bridge still would not let them cross. The bus turned into a narrower road. Plane trees on both sides gathered the rain into denser lines. The carriage rocked hard. This time Shen Man's shoulder struck solidly half an inch into his chest. The ends of her hair swept his jaw. Both of them went still at the same moment. Her hair was cool. The scalp and the neck beneath it were hot. That little heat reached his skin straight across the distance.
"Sorry," she said.
"The road is uneven," he said.
But neither of them moved their bodies back to the polite distance of a moment before. To move again would make it look as if they had taken that contact for something. Not to move would let the contact go on being something. Shen Man's breathing grew a little shallow. Zhou Ye could see a short length of collarbone inside the neck of her sweater, rising and falling with her breath. Under the trench coat was a thin turtleneck, a deep color, and after it got wet it clung to the shape of her chest. He should not have looked. He looked. She knew he had looked, because she lifted the bag a little and blocked part of it, and then put the bag down again. The meaning of putting it down was clearer than the meaning of blocking. She was not inviting a whole night. She had only not used the vice president's shell to pinch that one look to death.
"Zhou Ye." Her voice dropped. "If you turn your face to the window now, this is only the last bus being too crowded."
"And if I don't turn?"
"Then both of us will be in a difficult position."
He did not turn. He also did not turn the sentence into a frivolous joke. The rain was very loud, just loud enough to cover the slight hoarseness in his voice. "Ms. Shen, I know it's difficult. You're the vice president. I'm in marketing. I didn't come prepared to trade this for anything."
Shen Man looked at him for a long time. Somewhere in the bus someone laughed at a voice message. The laughter had nothing to do with them. Her eyes, at this distance, were softer than they were in the conference room, and also sharper, because the softness was not a letting-go and the sharpness was not a job title.
"Then don't trade," she said. "If you dare treat tonight as an opportunity, I'll get off now."
"I don't dare," he said. "And that isn't what I meant."
"Then what do you mean?"
Zhou Ye thought. Honesty, at this moment, was more useful than cleverness, though honesty could cause trouble just the same. "What I mean is that after you sat down beside me, I couldn't keep seeing you only as Ms. Shen. I know that isn't appropriate. If you want me not to speak before the stop, I can not speak. But you asked."
Shen Man's lips moved. She did not smile. She drew her gaze back and looked at the bag on her knees. The leather had been soaked into a ring of darker color. Her thumb rubbed slowly over that ring, as if she were giving herself time.
"I'm thirty-five this year," she said. "You ought to know that."
"I'm twenty-seven. It's in the file."
"There are a great many things in the file that shouldn't be discussed on the last bus."
"Then we won't discuss the file."
She finally let out a breath, very lightly, as if she had lowered, by an inch, something she had been carrying all evening. "All right. We won't discuss the file. We'll only discuss how much longer this bus still has to run."
The announcement sounded again. The driver said two stops ahead would be skipped, because a truck had run aground on the road. The last bus was being diverted. The terminus was unchanged. The time would be longer. A wave of discontent rose in the bus. Shen Man listened, and said quietly, "Longer."
"Mm."
"Then put the coat over yourself. If you get any wetter, you'll have a fever tomorrow. If you have a fever, the review still has to be handed in."
Zhou Ye could not help a small smile. Only after the smile came out did he realize how tightly he had been holding himself. Shen Man saw the smile as well. The habitual tightness at the center of her brow let go. She settled her body back into the seat and no longer sat on only the outer third of it. From that moment their arms stayed against each other. Neither of them explained it again.
When the bus moved on, Zhou Ye pulled the coat out from under her side of the seat. The cloth on the inside was indeed dry. The outside was entirely wet. He did not put it on. He folded it and set it on his knees, still leaving the dry side for her, if she needed it. Shen Man looked at the coat and did not say thank you. She only, at the next brake, did not take her weight back again.
