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Chapter 7 Monday
Chapter 7 Monday
The operations meeting began at nine-thirty. Zhou Ye was already sitting in the seat against the wall of the eighteenth-floor conference room at nine-ten, the laptop charging, the last page of the review already revised. The column for the third-tier cities had been changed to a shorter sentence. The line in the note that had no evidence had been deleted. His hair had been dried. The shirt was a spare one from home. The cuffs were a little wrinkled. Lin Qiming passed him, glanced at the screen, and said, "This will do. Don't write lyricism into it again."
"There isn't any lyricism."
"Your ears are red. If you've got a fever, don't force it."
Zhou Ye touched his ear and said the wind was strong. Lin Qiming did not ask again. Chen Xia from marketing sat down beside him, pushed a cup of coffee over, and asked whether the last bus had flooded again. Zhou Ye said it had. Chen Xia began to talk about the outrageous fare she had paid for a car, and halfway through she stopped, because the conference room door had opened.
When Shen Man came in, her hair was pinned without a strand out of place. She wore a dark gray suit dress. She had changed into a dry pair of low heels. There was no trace of the night on her face. She nodded to several directors. Her gaze passed over the seats against the wall and stopped on Zhou Ye's face for exactly as short a time as it stopped on anyone else's.
"Begin," she said.
When Zhou Ye presented his page, he looked at her as she had required. The necessary time. Shen Man listened very steadily. She asked two questions. Both were about numbers. Neither was a private opening left for him. When he had answered, he put his eyes back on the document. Under the table Chen Xia tapped his shoe with a pen and said, low, "You're in good form today. Ms. Shen didn't pick at you at all."
"Because I revised it."
"Modest," Chen Xia said.
The meeting ran until eleven. When it broke up, people crowded toward the door. Two directors stopped Shen Man to talk. Zhou Ye passed behind her and smelled that scent the rain had once washed thin. Now it was whole again, and restrained, as if no one had ever photographed her in front of a window. His fingers curled once at his side. Shen Man did not turn around. There was only a pause in her speaking, short enough that someone else would think she was considering the budget. Zhou Ye knew she was feeling him go by.
At noon he did not send a message. He was afraid that the moment he opened the chat he would write extra words. Shen Man wrote first. The number had no note on it. The avatar was empty. The message was only two characters' worth of meaning: Have you eaten.
Zhou Ye looked at those words, sat at his desk for a few seconds, and replied: I have.
The other side came back quickly: Good.
That was all. In thirty minutes he looked at his phone three times. Chen Xia leaned over and said he must be seeing someone, smiling that foolishly. Zhou Ye turned the screen down and said someone at home was nagging him to eat. The lie was thin. Chen Xia made a sound of understanding and did not press, but the bit of interest in her eyes had already stayed. Zhou Ye went to the restroom and washed his face with cold water. The person in the mirror still looked like Zhou Ye from marketing, twenty-seven, wrinkles at the cuffs. No one could look at that face and see whose mouth he had come in that morning. The thought made him both hot and panicked. He dried his hands and told himself the panic was proper, and the heat was proper, and what was not proper was carrying either of them into the corridor.
In the afternoon Shen Man did not appear in marketing again. Zhou Ye finished the attachments to the review and checked the lock on the encrypted album once more. The picture was still there. She stood in front of the window, looking at him. He looked for two seconds and closed it. After he closed it, the feeling of looking at her was still on his hands.
Near the end of the day the empty avatar lit again.
The bridge is open tonight. Go home. Don't come.
Zhou Ye replied: All right.
He really did go home. The place was smaller than her apartment. The walls smelled of damp. A raincoat hung on the back of a chair and dripped. He showered, lay on his own bed, and sent her: I'm here.
Shen Man took twenty minutes to reply: Mm. As long as the picture is still there. The rest we'll talk about on Monday.
Zhou Ye typed a long stretch and deleted it. In the end he left only: It's still here. We'll talk Monday.
He looked at the ceiling and listened to the rain on his own building. The rain was not the same as that stretch on the seventeenth floor. Here there was no sound of her breathing. He got hard. When he took care of it with his hand he closed his eyes, and what he remembered was her telling him to go slow, telling him to look, telling him not to exchange the picture for anything. After he came he did not feel empty. He was only clear about this: it was not an accident that could end on the last bus. They had already said the rules out loud. The rules were still there. The people did not want to withdraw either.
