Beyond the showroom’s floor-to-ceiling glass, the last client’s taillights swung out of the parking lot. Shen Manzhi smoothed the signed contract flat, her fingertip pressing over the crease the client had left. She had chased this deal for half a month; every time that potbellied executive came to look at cars, his hand would “accidentally” brush the back of hers whenever she handed him documents, and the last time he simply laid his palm on the small of her back — to any onlooker just “showing the way.” She stepped back half a pace, smiling — professionally, flawlessly. Seven years of selling cars had taught her waist, her hands, and this thirty-five-year-old body of hers, still drawn tight, to hold their composure under such touches. Endure it, and the deal was hers.
She rose to switch off the spotlights over the display platform, her heels clicking across the polished tiles, the sound scattering into emptiness. The whole showroom was hers alone now. The stocking-wrapped calf drew a smooth arc; as she bent, her hips stretched that dark-grey pencil skirt into a full curve, the hem cinching at the plushest part of her thighs, and below it a stretch of stocking pulled taut to a sheen. She was thirty-five this year, one-sixty-eight tall, sixty-two kilos all settled where it should be — slim waist, broad hips, thighs so full they brushed with a faint whisper of friction as she walked. She thought herself heavy; the clients’ eyes never agreed.
【Lu Xun · Dealership Owner】
He stood behind the glass partition on the second floor, watching her turn off the lights, watching for a long time.
Lu Xun held a cup of tea gone cold and did not drink it. His dealership had been open eleven years; Shen Manzhi had been here seven. In those seven years the big deals she signed for him could carpet an entire floor of the showroom; clients asked for her by name, calling her “steady, sharp, easy on the eyes.” He knew better than anyone what that “easy” in their mouths meant — the two faint lines at the corners of her eyes when she smiled, the bottomless valley that fell open at her collar when she bent to hand over a pen, the hips, almost absurdly full, that her skirt cinched tight when she sat. She treated all of it as a tool, smiling as men copped a feel, then tucking the commission into her pocket. And he, the man who watched all of it, had endured a full seven years.
Tonight he no longer wanted to watch anyone else paw at her. He set down the teacup and walked down the stairs.
Shen Manzhi heard the footsteps and turned, saw it was him, and instinctively drew her collar up higher. “You haven’t left yet, Mr. Lu? I’m about to lock up.” Her voice was the kind worn soft by countless client dinners, courteous with a measured trace of distance.
Lu Xun said nothing. He walked straight to the front door and reached up to slide the bolt of the glass door home. A soft click — and yet the empty air of the showroom thickened all at once. He reached out again and killed the row of main lights overhead, leaving only a single floor lamp in the corner, its dim yellow glow crawling along the ground, stretching the two shadows long and full of suggestion.
【Shen Manzhi · Inner Voice】
Her heart skipped a beat.
Locking the door, killing the lights — what those two acts meant together, she was thirty-five; there was no way she didn’t understand. The showroom fell so quiet she could hear her own breathing. She wanted to laugh it off, to wave the meaning aside — she was so good at waving things aside; in seven years she had waved aside countless hands — but the look in Lu Xun’s eyes when he turned to face her made her swallow the deflection already at her lips. It was not the furtive, daylight-shy coveting of a client. It was a beast, after the lights went out, finally no longer holding back — a raw, unblinking hunger.
She knew that hunger. On many a deep night after a client dinner had broken up, facing the mirror with her makeup wiped away, she had even faintly longed for a hunger like this — not a groping hand, but a gaze that truly wanted her, one too impatient even to pretend. She had simply never imagined it would be him. That it would be tonight.
Lu Xun stepped closer, one step, two. Manzhi backed away until her calf met the edge of the leather sofa in the reception area. Nowhere left to retreat.
“Manzhi.” He called her by name, without her surname, without her title. In seven years he had never called her that.
Her knees went half soft.
“Mr. Lu, I… my husband’s still at home waiting for me.” She trotted her husband out, the way she flashed her wedding ring at the most perilous moment of a client dinner — her habitual, last line of defense. But the words came out, and even she could hear the hollowness in them — not a refusal, more a hesitant deflection with a door left ajar.
Lu Xun stopped in front of her, only a palm’s width left between them. He could smell the faint scent on her, clean still despite a whole day steeped in client dinners. He did not touch her; he only lowered his head, his voice pressed low: “Then let him wait a little longer.”
【Zhou Li · The Husband】
In an apartment on the other side of the city, Zhou Li was carrying a bowl of just-warmed white-fungus soup to the dining table, then carefully sealing it under a layer of cling film. Manzhi worked in sales; her mealtimes were never on time, and he had long grown used to keeping a light on for her, keeping something hot.
He took out his phone and glanced at the time — nearly nine. On the screen was a photo of the two of them at the seaside last year, her eyes crinkled into crescents with laughter. Zhou Li hesitated and did not call — she was probably with a client again, and a call at this hour would only disrupt the rhythm of someone’s deal. He understood her hardships too well: a woman clawing her way through that world, hemmed in by clients, plied with drink, taken advantage of in ways careless or deliberate, who never said much when she got home, only laid the commission slip in front of him, too worn out to keep her eyes open.
He sent her a message: “Kept the soup warm for you. Take your time on the way back, no rush.” Then he laid the phone face-down on the table and sat on the sofa to wait, the TV on with the volume turned low. He thought that when she came home, he would rub those feet that had spent all day in heels.