After shaking off that group, the car kept driving straight ahead until they realized they were nearly at the edge of town.
Night had fallen, and a quiet lavender haze enveloped the surroundings.
Behind them stretched a pitch-black, empty highway, while all around came the distant, rolling thrum of drumbeats—wild and restless.
They pulled the car over to an unfamiliar street side, where the shadows of trees, cast by the dim streetlights, fell across the vehicle.
While Amanda and Zhu Muzi fumbled around at a nearby convenience store to buy some food, Nicole lowered her gaze and explained the whole story to the others.
This time, Nicole was exhibiting on her own, and the organizers had put her up in a town motel. Without a guardian along, she had been worried something might happen, so she’d spent the entire previous night and all of today holed up in her room.
It just so happened to be Town Celebration Day, and the town was hosting festive evening events. The motel owner had told her it only came once a year, with activities you couldn’t find anywhere else, and it’d be a shame to miss them. So she’d thought she’d step out for a look.
Instead, she’d run into that pack of blond thugs—skinny, scrawny types clustered at the mouth of an alley, squatting on the ground snorting who-knows-what, looking down their noses at passersby.
They were crouched there when a white guy walking past gave them a dismissive once-over from head to toe.
Then they spotted Nicole going by. They flung down their cigarette butts and started hurling “fucking” this and “cunt” that, mocking her for being “not normal” and daring to walk around, ruining their “sacred” Town Celebration Day. They said anyone on the main street had to pay a toll to normal folks like them.
After shoving and pushing for a while, they’d run into Zhu Muzi and the others, who stepped in to help. At first, Amanda had frowned and tried talking nicely, even discussing with Zhu Muzi about calling the cops to make the blond thugs apologize to Nicole.
The rest could be imagined. Getting a bunch of foul-mouthed thugs like that to apologize was harder than making them eat shit.
Another barrage of filthy words followed.
Amanda reached her limit and started cursing right back at them, letting fly with a few “fuckings” of her own. Compared to the thugs, who just repeated the same tired swears, Amanda’s vocabulary was far richer. And Zhu Muzi wasn’t one to hold back either—she picked insults they couldn’t even understand.
Then came the slap that Fu Tingli and the others had witnessed, along with Amanda’s swollen, red face.
“Should I not have… gone out tonight?”
Recapping the whole ordeal again, Nicole’s mood sank low.
“After all, the exhibition starts tomorrow. Causing this kind of scene isn’t good.”
“Of course not!”
Fu Tingli shot down the idea immediately. She was applying medicine to the woman’s scraped arm.
Even her nose scrunched up at the words.
“Bad people do bad things—why should good people blame themselves for it?”
One hand held a cotton swab, the other the ointment. As she said it, her movements grew a bit fervent, both hands drifting over.
She wanted to pat Nicole’s shoulder for reassurance, but her hands were full.
So she wrinkled her nose instead, obediently pulling both hands back. The woman was leaning against the car, her nearby arm resting on the seat—stretched out straight, the slender, pale forearm marked by a raw scrape.
The blood that had just oozed out had been cleaned, leaving only the ointment to apply.
“But…” Nicole seemed hesitant, as if she had more to say.
“But what?” Fu Tingli focused intently on treating the woman’s wound. Staring at that long, skinned abrasion made her a little anxious.
And yet the woman hadn’t made a sound the whole time—silent from start to finish—until just moments ago, after… that kiss the three in the back seat had been egging on…
Only then did her eyelashes quiver faintly, and she slumped softly against Fu Tingli’s shoulder. Damp strands of hair scattered fluffily against Fu Tingli’s neck, the tips poking crookedly into her collar at her chest.
She hadn’t even had time to feel the itch.
Then she heard the woman exhale slowly beside her ear, as if merely settling into a calm breath.
But blood trickled down all the same.
It fell hot into the crook of her arm, spreading languidly, as if to seep into her every limb and vein.
Thinking back to what had happened, Fu Tingli felt a belated shiver of fear. She stared at the woman’s wound, now no longer bleeding, applying ointment while blowing on it gently a few times.
Just like before—if she’d skinned her knee somewhere, she’d go red-eyed, whining about the pain while making Qiao Lipan blow on it for her. Before sixteen, Qiao Lipan had always treated her like a kid and indulged her; after sixteen, she’d toss the medicine over with an exasperated huff, saying Fu Tingli was too old to have her mom blowing on it anymore—”What will your friends think? Having a daughter who acts like she’s eight.”
Fu Tingli never got mad. She’d just apply the medicine herself and blow on her own scrapes.
And now, here she was, blowing on someone else’s wound, treating another person like a child.
After a few puffs, her hair swayed and fell, draping over her face and making her skin itch, half-obscuring her view with that golden strand.
She wrinkled her nose and shook her head to flick the annoying lock away.
A soft laugh sounded—clearly from the woman right in front of her.
Fu Tingli looked up.
The woman had raised her other hand, slowly tucking the fallen strand behind Fu Tingli’s ear with steady care.
Then she extended her injured hand a bit closer, fixing Fu Tingli with her gaze.
“Why’d you stop blowing?”
Fu Tingli caught the playful amusement in the woman’s smiling eyes—a teasing glint.
“The ointment’s all on.”
Fu Tingli swiftly wrapped a bandage around the woman’s hand, packing away all the tools and medicine into the first-aid kit without granting her wish.
“Fair enough.”
The woman said so, but she didn’t pull her hand back. She kept it resting on the car, the bandaged hand still held open before Fu Tingli.
Fu Tingli glanced at it and pursed her lips. Noticing Nicole had gone quiet for a while, she turned her head.
But then the woman slowly raised her hand as if examining the wound under the dim streetlight.
So Fu Tingli, head half-turned and unable to fully look away, swung back around.
She watched the woman’s movements closely, afraid she might do something rash. In a warning tone, she said, “Don’t move it around.”
The woman laughed again, glancing at her. Her long hair was tousled by the wind gusting from all directions.
She casually brushed it back from her neck and shook her hand, making the bandage flutter.
“What’s this?”
She was pointing at the knot Fu Tingli had tied at the end of the long strip of gauze:
One end long, one short, looped in the middle. The tail swayed gently in the breeze, like it was flying.
“There’s a way to tie knots like this?”
“Little Bird knot—world peace.” By now, Fu Tingli had turned away, flashing a peace sign into the air behind her back.
She spun around to meet Nicole’s thoughtful gaze appraising the two of them.
“We’ve always tied them like this at home. Mom taught me—it was something Grandma taught her.” She explained.
The woman behind her fell silent. But Fu Tingli could still hear the rustle of wind in her hair.
That wasn’t important, though. What mattered was Nicole’s unfinished sentence from before.
She fixed Nicole with a stare. Switching to English, her tone steady and upbeat: “What was that ‘but’ about?”
“Oh, I meant…” Nicole’s eyes lingered on Fu Tingli’s back.
Fu Tingli tilted her head up slightly to meet her gaze.
Blood smeared her face from who-knows-where, and she looked ragged all over.
But those hazel-tinged irises still gleamed softly in the night, like two translucent amber glass beads.
And behind her, that stranger they’d only just met—the tall woman wearing what must be Fu Tingli’s T-shirt, her slim waist hidden in the hem, the fabric smudged with faint bloodstains, equally disheveled.
Yet she held herself ramrod straight, hand raised, staring fixedly at the little bird knot in the bandage.
Her eyelashes drooped slightly, trailing hazy light, fluttering faintly. Who knew what she was thinking.
In a way, these two were stark opposites. One sowed warmth and affection with open-hearted softness; the other was so detached she barely cared about her own injuries.
Yet somehow they’d collided, setting off on this shared road together. At first, Nicole hadn’t trusted this dangerous-looking woman, fearing Fu Tingli would get hurt.
But now, since the woman had gotten injured because of her, Nicole had no choice but to rethink her prejudice.
“If I hadn’t come out…” Nicole said slowly, “then you all wouldn’t have gotten hurt.”
“I’m not hurt,” Fu Tingli emphasized. She could see the guilt in Nicole’s eyes.
So she looked up earnestly at the woman who towered over her and launched into a earnest speech.
“It’s got nothing to do with you. Don’t you know you’re doing something really great?”
“Once you really become a famous model, there’ll be more girls like you who can get accepted into these industries. If you hadn’t come, if you hadn’t stepped out like this…
The other girls would still be locked up at home, and we never would have run into such an amazing stroke of luck.”
“If you start blaming yourself now, that big fight we had earlier will have been totally pointless.”
With that, Fu Tingli rose slightly on her tiptoes and gently patted the back of Nicole’s head.
“Don’t overthink it.”
Only after she’d done it did she realize this was a gesture the other woman had often used on her. She slowly withdrew her hand and glanced at the woman leaning against the other side of the car.
The woman seemed to be smiling, her laughter drifting lazily on the breeze. Her clear brows and eyes curved upward slightly, as if she’d seen right through her.
Nicole’s low mood finally began to lift. She reached out toward the woman and said,
“Thanks for what you did today.”
She meant it. If this woman hadn’t acted so decisively, Fu Tingli probably would have gotten hurt.
Fu Tingli was the purest, most innocent person Nicole had ever met, and she didn’t want someone like that getting hurt because of her.
Did that mean this stranger wasn’t pure and innocent? Nicole puzzled over the logic for a moment… Well, probably. At least the woman looked pretty tough.
With her injury wrapped in gauze and her long black hair hanging limply, she looked just like the kind of female lead in a road movie who might snap at any moment and go tearing off in a car.
