The night wind battered the windows with muffled thuds, extinguishing both sets of birthday candles.
Fu Tingli, looking thoroughly pleased, began slicing the cake and dividing it up. Glancing up, she caught Kong Liyuan staring blankly at the two cakes, lost in whatever thoughts.
“What’re you thinking about?”
She waved a hand in front of Kong Liyuan’s face, her tone light and joking. “Or can you not eat it after all? Big close-up tomorrow?”
Kong Liyuan’s distant gaze finally sharpened—not on the hand, but on the two extracted birthday candles. “Twenty-nine?”
“Oh, this.” Fu Tingli didn’t feel like she had lied. “I must’ve missaid when I ordered, so the clerk grabbed the wrong ones.”
To head off any follow-up, she pointed preemptively at the candles Kong Liyuan had brought. “Yours aren’t twenty-fives either.”
Kong Liyuan smiled, dismantling the deflection. “Mine are for you. What else would they be but twenty-five?”
Fu Tingli was caught flat-footed.
She couldn’t very well double down on the mix-up, so she pivoted. “You’ve known for a while, then? About us sharing a birthday?”
“Five years ago today, I heard that host on the radio say, ‘Wishing you smooth sailing.'” Kong Liyuan replied simply.
“Ah, so that’s how.” Fu Tingli served her a plate with the cake neatly divided—half of each.
She wasn’t one to get flustered over it. Instead, she flashed an open grin. “Good that you heard it. I sent it because I wanted you to.”
“When did you call into the station?” Kong Liyuan ate her cake slowly, savoring each small dab of frosting.
“Let me think.” Fu Tingli’s eyes narrowed slightly. “The morning after, probably? I was waiting in the car for you—you weren’t ready yet. I fiddled with the radio dial, remembered it all, especially since you’d told me about 37 Degrees the night before. I was bored, so I shot an email to the station.”
“You started that early.” Kong Liyuan remarked.
Fu Tingli didn’t mention that it had actually been sooner still. On the very first day, when Kong Liyuan had asked what the radio was saying—later that afternoon, after they met Nicole and Kong Liyuan dozed off in the car—Nicole had remarked that the woman looked awfully fierce.
She had disagreed. She said the woman was simply hurt, and she hoped the wounds weren’t as bad as they seemed.
—So she had wished her smooth sailing.
Fu Tingli smiled candidly. “Yeah, you could probably tell. Back then, I’d act on any impulse without a second thought.”
Kong Liyuan nodded. She stared at the cake in her hand for a long moment before asking, “You still remember that whole 37 Degrees thing?”
“Mm-hm.” Fu Tingli nodded. “Guess I have a good memory.”
“What if I’d lied to you?”
“Then you lied. No big deal.” Fu Tingli laughed, her gaze drifting lazily through the play of light and shadow. “If I didn’t believe what people told me, how boring would the world be?”
“Conversely—”
Kong Liyuan lifted her eyes to meet hers but said no more.
Fu Tingli prodded at the fluffy cream cake with her spoon and picked up the thread. “But if I try believing the people I meet along the way, imagine how much fresher the world would seem.”
Kong Liyuan fell silent, simply watching her. Then she smiled faintly.
“You really are…”
“Really what?” Fu Tingli was eyeing the two large remaining slabs of cake, at a loss.
“Just like before.” Kong Liyuan’s smile lingered, though it had grown a bit more scattered.
“Am I?” Fu Tingli didn’t agree, her voice soft. “Truth is, everything I just said—that’s the kind of thing only the old me would say.”
“I’ve changed a lot, Teacher Kong.”
“That’s not for you to decide.” Kong Liyuan turned the woman’s earlier words back on her.
Fu Tingli was stumped once more, at a loss for words.
She began tidying the table instead, moving slowly. But then Kong Liyuan spoke up abruptly.
“Leave it for now. The fridge won’t fit it all.”
“Fair enough.” Fu Tingli paused. “So what do we do?”
“I’ll take care of it tomorrow.” Kong Liyuan lowered her lashes and murmured her name softly.
“Fu Tingli.”
“Huh?” Fu Tingli looked up in mild confusion, her hands still sticky with frosting.
Kong Liyuan raised her eyelids. Though she sat right there across from her, her gaze felt impossibly distant.
“Can I stay the night?”
~~~
Staying over wasn’t a big deal. They had shared tight quarters more than once through summers and winters past.
Leaving aside everything in California, they had even crammed into a single small room at Saliha’s home in Hewatu.
And this wasn’t winter.
They wouldn’t even need separate blankets—just one thin quilt, since that was all Fu Tingli owned.
After washing up and getting ready for bed,
Fu Tingli let out a yawn. She switched off the light and flopped down sleepily beside Kong Liyuan.
The bed in the rental was narrow, just one and a half meters wide—enough for two grown women to lie side by side without crowding each other.
Kong Liyuan had showered too. She wore one of Fu Tingli’s old T-shirts, a pair of shorts, and some fresh underthings ordered through an app. She carried the familiar scent of Fu Tingli’s bath gel.
The fragrance of her hair, the smell clinging to the worn clothes, the bath gel aroma—all of it matched Fu Tingli’s exactly.
When Fu Tingli emerged from the bathroom after washing up, Kong Liyuan was already lying on her side, wrapped in a thin blanket, curled up slightly like a solitary creature huddling for warmth in the dead of night.
Yet she had left half the blanket for her.
“Are you okay? Did you drink too much and feel unwell?” Fu Tingli still felt a twinge of worry.
Kong Liyuan didn’t speak for a long time, but the faint breath wafting from her side was still warm.
Fu Tingli frowned, rolled over, and gazed at Kong Liyuan’s narrow, slender back. She was just about to ask again when Kong Liyuan’s weary, lazy voice drifted over. “At today’s wrap party, Xia Yue passed on your message: ‘Happy wrap to you.'”
She hadn’t answered her question, only brought up this.
Fu Tingli yawned. “Oh, yeah. I told her to wish a happy wrap to everyone.”
“Why didn’t you come to the wrap party?” Kong Liyuan’s voice was so heavy it seemed about to sink away.
“I had an interview that overlapped—” Fu Tingli began.
But Kong Liyuan had already rolled over to face her directly, her gaze shaky and blurred.
“I saw your sculpture.”
“What sculpture?” Fu Tingli hadn’t caught on yet.
Kong Liyuan stared at her, her eyes harboring what seemed like a layer of flame on the verge of ignition.
Finally, Fu Tingli realized, her mind bridging the gray-blue light and shadows drifting through the air, Kong Liyuan’s seizing gaze, the old T-shirt of hers that Kong Liyuan was wearing, the cold pale skin beneath her open collar, the damp ends of her black hair, the fragile remnant of a flying bird tattooed on her waist and back—a mark that had once lingered there but now appeared so vulnerable…
She saw it then: on a small wooden desk occupying no more than one-fiftieth of the space sat a red flying bird sculpture, more than halfway painted.
Glamorous and vividly crimson, like a vast, grotesque dream.
In that moment, Fu Tingli had the sudden impulse to light a cigarette and let Kong Liyuan lean against the wall, drawing on it languidly and carelessly.
“Is it nice?” Those were the first words out of her mouth, about that very thing. “I haven’t finished coloring it completely. I think it could be more detailed, but I still haven’t found the right shade for the wings.”
“Beautiful.” Kong Liyuan chose that word, her voice lazily soft, as if that high-density dream had unbiddenly floated into the space between them.
“You said you like beautiful things, so you want beautiful things to keep going forever.”
“You actually remember that?” Fu Tingli was a little surprised. If Kong Liyuan hadn’t mentioned it, she herself would have forgotten those words she’d once spoken.
Kong Liyuan didn’t answer the question. She simply stared at her like that, slowly raising her hand as she always had before, to toy with Fu Tingli’s hair—still half-damp from her wash and blow-dry.
“So is this your way of keeping beautiful things going?”
“Pretty much. Though some parts… I don’t remember all that clearly, so the details might not match exactly.” Strands of hair fell as they were stroked, tickling Fu Tingli’s back a little.
“Do you think it’s a pity?” Kong Liyuan asked.
“A pity?” Fu Tingli gave a small laugh. “I felt that way a bit before, but not anymore.”
“Why not now?”
“Because it’s almost done. Some details don’t look as clear when you look back on them, but there’s beauty in that lack of clarity too.”
Fu Tingli spoke openly and brightly. Yet even as she did, she could feel the woman’s cool fingertips slipping through the gaps in her hair.
This woman was still the same—even in summer, her hands stayed so cold. To put it bluntly, it was the chill of something lifeless.
But before Fu Tingli could voice the question,
That cool hand slid slowly from her hair to her own hand. She shivered from the chill, only to be drawn forward until her warm palm was pressed against the fragile, rising-and-falling remnant of the bird.
She startled and tried to pull away.
But the other woman’s hand clamped down firmly, holding her in place. Damp strands of hair—whose they were, she couldn’t tell—twined into fine threads that draped across their facing visages and over the fingers they gripped together so tightly.
In her ears rose Kong Liyuan’s ragged breathing, along with words spoken in excruciating slowness:
“Then… are you not going to keep working on your sculpture?”
Fu Tingli froze. A body heat that wasn’t hers slowly spread, seeping into her palm.
It surged into the depths of her skin, her bones and blood, tugging at those traces of alien blood that had mingled into her own through the endless cycles of her past.
It sank into the heart of that summer solstice, where it contracted unbearably, sharply—like an intense, silent contest.
It wasn’t that she didn’t understand.
The signal was unmistakable, especially with the hand she couldn’t wrest free.
A few seconds later, she knew exactly what Kong Liyuan’s words meant.
They weren’t clueless youngsters anymore.
Long before that summer solstice in California, they had already shared a journey entangled with every human emotion and desire.
Back then, they had been twenty and twenty-four—old enough to ask nothing, say nothing.
Even nameless to each other, they could treat one another as fated travel companions, parting ways inevitably, savoring the mystery and romance of the road.
They could take it as a given: frenzied kisses in an open car, a wild chase to the blaring strains of “California Dream” echoing down the streets, a casual “Safe travels” amid a world awash in blood…
Young and mad, doing all those things that weren’t worth living for without a touch of insanity.
—Those moments seemed to belong only to Bertha and Zoe. Not to Kong Liyuan and Fu Tingli.
In the wavering gray-blue light and shadow, Fu Tingli felt her curled fingers stirring with the urge to move.
She closed her eyes, counted silently to ten or more, then let out the faintest sigh. She took the initiative to clasp Kong Liyuan’s palm and murmured softly,
“Kong Liyuan, why are your hands so cold?”
She could no longer pretend not to ask the hard questions like before. She couldn’t place “romance” ahead of all the standards she held dear.
Yet she didn’t let go of Kong Liyuan’s hand.
She didn’t know why. Clearly, she knew right from wrong in her heart—this wasn’t California five years ago, nor the snowbound Northern Border. There were no summer old dreams, no hidden retreats from the world.
Only countless eyes nailed to them from above, peering down with schadenfreude, witnessing, scrutinizing, dissecting their summer missteps.
So they shouldn’t continue. They shouldn’t become the next Jiang Mou and Wen Shijia. They shouldn’t fool themselves into enjoying only the sweet parts of love while ignoring the bad, the impure.
Otherwise, they’d get hurt. They’d be unable to end it cleanly. They’d bring enormous risks to themselves—and to Kong Liyuan.
But for an instant—if Kong Liyuan weren’t so obsessed with movies, if her path weren’t so fraught with hardship that she had to throw herself into it body and soul just to forge this grand vista before her…
Perhaps Fu Tingli could have thrown caution to the wind, like Zhu Muzi and Zhu Manda, and plunged headlong into being lovers in a blaze of glory.
And in the midst of these dazed, chaotic thoughts, her fingers curled uncontrollably.
At that, Kong Liyuan released her hand first. She curled deeper into the wide old T-shirt, her black hair draping over her slim back. With a voice on the verge of scattering to the winds, she called out,
“Fu Tingli.”
Her downcast lashes trembled ever so faintly, like a flying bird plaintively beating its thin wings. In a low voice, she said,
“Hug me.”
