Chapter 25 Part 2

But to Liang Shi, this was a big deal.

She’d always had strict requirements for sleep. Even during overnight shoots, she’d always find time to get proper rest in a comfortable bed.

If there was no bed, she’d rather not sleep at all.

The sofa was impossible. She got up again, tossing and turning several times, growing increasingly restless.

After a moment, she switched on the dim bedside lamp.

She pulled a book from the bedside drawer: a poetry collection.

Judging by the wear on the pages, it seemed to belong to Xu Qingzhu.

The collection was entirely in English. Liang Shi couldn’t really read it; her English was limited to verbal communication, and only simple conversation at that.

Her talent agent had been forward-thinking enough to hire a tutor to drill her spoken English, thinking she might one day go international and wanting to spare her the embarrassment of being called uneducated when collecting awards abroad.

Liang Shi flipped through a few pages and put it back.

There was nothing in the room to entertain herself with, so she took out her phone, opened a video app, and randomly tapped on a movie.

She leaned against the headboard; the soft cushions were comfortable enough to ease the weariness of a long day.

She piled the entire oversized duvet over to Xu Qingzhu’s side. The bunched-up blanket drew a clear dividing line across the bed. One side had someone sleeping soundly; the other didn’t even have room to toss and turn.

But as long as there was a spot where Liang Shi could be slightly more comfortable, she wouldn’t feel so restless.

The movie was an old one. Liang Shi noticed that some of the films she liked also existed in this world, along with new ones she’d never heard of. New productions inevitably meant new stars, and she didn’t recognize a single one of them.

She clearly understood: this was not her world’s entertainment industry.

But being able to start fresh somewhere was still quite exciting.

Even though she hadn’t gotten her own body back yet, Liang Shi was already looking forward to entering the industry and acting.

After all, having lived so many years, acting was the thing that gave her the greatest sense of achievement and self-worth.

Thinking of this, she couldn’t help but look at Xu Qingzhu.

How am I supposed to win you over? she wondered.

The system’s exact words were: Earn her affection, trust, and love.

A tall order.

Just achieving the first two was hard enough.

But as the saying went, take it one step at a time.

Liang Shi never wasted too much of today’s time on tomorrow’s troubles.

The movie was a same-sex romance, set before the age of ABO gender differentiation.

The opening frame was white text on black: Once, the world wouldn’t let us love.

The second line: But we’ll hold each other tight in the crowd and kiss with all our hearts.

Just those two lines stirred Liang Shi’s emotions. She lowered her gaze and watched quietly.

The film told the story of two girls falling in love in university. One was a dance major specializing in ballet, a quintessential campus goddess, radiant and dazzling, the object of countless boys’ affections. She competed in every competition and collected awards effortlessly. “Campus beauty” was practically her label.

The other female lead, by contrast, seemed perfectly ordinary. She was timid and insecure. Though beautiful, she rarely showed her edge, and because she didn’t know how to dress, she looked rather unfashionable. On the first day of school, the two moved into the same dormitory and became roommates.

The insecure girl clumsily imitated the shining one.

She wanted to become a second version of her, to be just as popular.

But she always drifted on the margins. When the dorm had group dinners, they left her out. When everyone went traveling, they left her out too.

They talked about clothes, bags, and cosmetics; she could only stand by quietly as an observer.

The moment she mustered the courage to interject, she’d kill the conversation. The cheerful atmosphere would go cold in an instant.

Gradually, she stopped trying to insert herself into these topics and kept to herself.

And the one isolated alongside her was the shining one.

Because she was too outstanding, she was seen as attention-seeking, too out of place among ordinary people, and became the target of everyone’s dislike.

Their bond began over a song. Because they both loved it, they shared a meal together.

Slowly, they came to know each other more deeply. One was a dancer; the other could play elegant piano.

Between them grew a unique, wordless understanding. Going out, holding hands, linking arms, acting sweet with each other, whatever needed to be done, a single glance was enough.

The goddess rejected all her suitors and remained alone.

Rumors started swirling that the two were a couple, that the goddess didn’t date because something was wrong with her orientation.

The gossip grew worse and worse. The insecure girl pulled away voluntarily, suppressing her feelings, moping by day and lying awake at night, yet unable to stop caring about her: who she’d eaten with, how many classes she’d attended, who she’d gone to see.

This stiff, frozen dynamic lasted for months.

Until one day, on a bus, the goddess was groped by a stranger. For the first time, the insecure girl stood up bravely. She berated the man from the moral high ground and took her hand.

In that moment, their fingers interlaced.

It was the bravest moment of her life.

After getting off the bus, by the azure seaside, the insecure girl mustered her courage and asked, “Can I kiss you?”

The film reached its minor climax here. It was a restrained yet intimate kiss.

The film’s color palette was very pleasing. The kiss scene, set against such a backdrop, carried a tragic grandeur. The two leads had different looks: one striking and bold, the other fresh and innocent.

The innocent one, seized by hidden desire, leaned in with abandon and passionate fire.

The one who seemed bold could only respond clumsily.

The kiss lasted two minutes. The bullet comments on screen were going insane.

Liang Shi found them distracting and turned them all off.

To break the mood a bit, she hadn’t been immersed in the two leads’ emotions at all. She was watching the camera work.

As an actress, she knew exactly how kiss scenes were filmed.

With over a dozen cameras set up around them and dozens of crew members on set, when filming close-ups, the actors were actually kissing toward the camera. So this kind of image didn’t stimulate her all that intensely.

The film’s pacing picked up at this point. After the kiss came the lights-out scene.

This director’s command over this type of footage was so masterful that Liang Shi once suspected this person had come up shooting Category III films. Before this particular lights-out scene, she’d even looked it up and found that wasn’t the case.

The director came from serious documentary filmmaking, specifically documentaries about cultural relics. Midway through, he’d switched tracks and decided to make films instead, and this was his first after the change.

You had to admit, this director had some real talent.

A lights-out scene shot so pure and so sensual.

A close-up of fingers unbuttoning, a heart pounding with nervousness, breathing that couldn’t settle down, all centered on the second and third buttons of the shirt.

The lead’s fingers were slender and long but fumbled clumsily with the buttons, stretching the audience’s anticipation.

The other lead, growing impatient with how slow she was, reached over to help.

The moment their fingers touched, it triggered another round of kissing.

Then the camera cut to a close-up of the lamp, pulling slowly back, while the sounds in the earpiece didn’t diminish.

Sounds like these were usually voiced by professional voice actors, matched closely to the actresses’ own voices.

In moments like this, no camera could match the imagination.

After the scene cut, there were close-ups of the characters. One blanket wrapped around two people, a passionate bedroom scene.

Liang Shi was hesitating over whether to skip this scene. Her finger hadn’t yet touched the screen when a weak voice came from beside her: “Water…”

Xu Qingzhu was half-asleep, her throat so dry and hoarse she could barely speak. Even pushing herself to say one word felt like her throat had been scraped raw by sand, and it hurt terribly.

She frowned, the pain in her body not yet fully subsiding.

Liang Shi immediately put down her phone and got up to fetch a glass of water.

Then she walked to her side and helped her sit up to drink.

Like a traveler crossing the desert, utterly parched, Xu Qingzhu’s warm, damp palm brushed lightly against Liang Shi’s hand holding the glass.

She gulped down the entire glass, water droplets still lingering at the corners of her lips.

But those lips, moistened by the water, glistened like a sunlit sea.

It easily brought to mind a rippling ocean surface, as if ten thousand acres of sunset light had spilled across it, lustrous and gleaming.

Even half-asleep, she politely murmured her thanks.

Liang Shi had originally expected her to wipe the water from her lips herself and go back to sleep, but clearly, she wasn’t in any state to think of that. She simply lay back down on the bed, her palm still resting on the back of Liang Shi’s hand, and tugged her downward.

Liang Shi’s heart seemed to drift somewhere lost, her thoughts scattering. She was pulled down without any resistance at all.

By the time Liang Shi realized it, her ear was only a hair’s breadth from Xu Qingzhu’s. Those water-slicked lips looked like they might brush against her ear in the next instant.

She could feel the warm dampness on her ear, like a sea breeze brushing past.

The warm yellow lamplight stretched this tender moment to its absolute limit.

Like a trap made of light; one wrong move and you’d fall in.

And once you fell into the light, you’d quickly be wrapped in gentle desire.

But Liang Shi straightened up quickly. She took a deep breath.

She pulled her hand free from Xu Qingzhu’s grip and fanned her burning cheeks.

She’d been so restrained for all these years. How had she become so flustered just a few days into this place?

As if a long-dormant desire had sensed the arrival of spring and was desperate to break through the soil.

But she’d crushed it down hard.

Liang Shi set the glass aside and glanced at Xu Qingzhu, who was sleeping soundly again.

The water at the corner of her lips still gleamed. Liang Shi, who had a bit of a compulsion about this sort of thing, reached over and wiped it away.

Her thumb brushed against those vivid red lips. The sensation of skin on skin became startlingly real in an instant. Even though she tried to suppress her urges, physiological responses were hard to overpower through sheer will. Liang Shi turned her face to look at her.

After a long moment, she turned away and pressed her hand over her own face.

Her ears were already burning.

Liang Shi got up and went to the bathroom to take a shower.

It was… honestly quite hard to endure.

When she came out, her whole body carried a cool chill. After clearing away the jumble of thoughts in her head, she felt more lucid.

She returned to the bed and deliberately pushed the bunched-up blanket closer to Xu Qingzhu again, claiming just a small patch of space for herself before resuming the movie.

On the phone screen, two people were entangled.

In the world of this book, the requirements for filming sexual content in film and television weren’t heavily censored. The evidence showed that audiences loved watching it, especially well-done scenes, which drove box office numbers sky-high.

So this film had no shortage of intimate scenes.

The earlier segment she’d watched used cutaway shots: when it was time for the lights to go out, the screen simply switched to a nighttime cityscape.

This was a technique directors commonly used for such scenes.

But this time was different. The scene was shot in all its raw, exposed glory.

In the dim room, one bed, fingers tracing the softness of each other’s bodies.