【Zhou Min · The Wife】
The crystal chandeliers in the banquet hall were dazzlingly bright. The host lifted the microphone and shouted, “Ten years since graduation — a toast to the youth we can never get back,” and the whole table cheered and drank along. Zhou Min raised her glass too, smiling exactly like everyone around her. She was thirty-two this year; you could still make out in her face the girl who used to laugh so easily, except now the laugh stopped dead at the corners of her mouth, like a machine that clocks in on schedule. She looked down at her phone: in the family group chat her husband had sent “did you sign the oldest one’s homework,” followed by a photo of the two kids turning the living room into a disaster zone. She flipped the phone face-down on the table and picked up her glass for another sip. Everything she remembered from these years wore someone else’s name — the two kids’, the company’s, her husband’s. In the column that should have been her own, there was nothing.
She had almost not come. Taking time off, finding someone to pick up the kids, prepping her husband’s dinner in advance — just prying herself off that never-stopping conveyor belt at home for one night cost her half her life. But when someone in the old dorm group chat @’d her and said “Aqiao’s coming too,” her finger paused on the screen for a beat, and then she typed back “Okay.”
Aqiao. That name she hadn’t said aloud in her own head for years. Through four years of college they were practically glued together — one department, two classes, always the same row of seats in the library. The other girls teased them, “more of a couple than an actual couple,” and she never bothered to argue. Aqiao understood every one of her silences — one frown from her and he knew whether it was her period or a chewing-out from an advisor; one blank stare and he knew whether to hand her milk tea or just shut up. The year they graduated he went south, she stayed in this inland city, and an unspoken almost-something was dragged cold by two thousand kilometers. Later they married other people, sank into their separate lives, and even stopped liking each other’s posts.
【Aqiao · The Male Bestie】
Aqiao arrived right on the half-hour mark after it started. He didn’t much care for occasions like this, a room full of people measuring who’d made it bigger, whose kid got into the more expensive school. He swept the room once, and his gaze stopped on Zhou Min — she’d changed her hairstyle, wore a navy-blue dress, sat as prim as if she were at a parent-teacher meeting, the smile hung on her face never reaching her eyes. Ten years on, other people had changed their looks; only her he recognized at a glance, that tiredness tucked beneath the respectability.
He didn’t rush over. First he shook hands with a few old classmates, made small talk, got two drinks pressed on him. Only after everyone scattered off to visit other tables did he pick up his glass and slowly stroll over to the empty seat beside her. “Class rep,” he called her by the old nickname, “is this seat taken?” Zhou Min looked up, and in that instant the light in her eyes was something he’d remembered for years — it really brightened, not the social kind. “Aqiao,” she said, her voice half a note lower than the one she used with everyone else, “you still know how to time your entrance.”
They talked lightly, like being twenty again. He asked about her work; she said it was fine, and laughed at herself the moment she said it, because he heard right away that “fine” was a lie. He asked about her two kids; the little light in her eyes dimmed again, and she said the oldest was a handful and the younger one clingy, that she was on her feet all day. He didn’t say anything pretty, just filled her glass and said, “That’s hard on you.” Just those words, and the hand holding her glass trembled once, her eyes going hot. He turned his head and pretended not to see, but inside him a string that hadn’t been touched in a long time was plucked back into sound by this one night.
【Zhou Min · The Wife】
When the banquet broke up, a big rowdy crowd wanted to move on to karaoke. Zhou Min was supposed to go — she’d calculated the last high-speed train, calculated getting home right as the kids fell asleep. But Aqiao lagged behind, straightened the coat draped over the back of her chair, and said quietly, “You didn’t finish saying what you had to say tonight.” She didn’t argue with that, just followed the flow of people out the door, and in front of the little bar across the street that still had its lights on, without a word between them, they both slowed their steps.
“Just one,” she said, as if giving herself an out, “and after we talk I’ll catch my train.” Aqiao smiled and pushed the door open. “One.” Inside they found the place unusually quiet, warm yellow light, wooden booths, soundproofing so good you could hear each other breathe. One drink became two, two became a bottle. She poured out all the things she’d bottled up with nowhere to say them these years: the nights the kids ran fevers and she kept watch alone until dawn while her husband snored beside her; the layoffs at the company where she dreaded being next every day; her parents growing old, till even going back home had become a luxury. Aqiao didn’t interrupt, only laid his hand over the back of hers on the table whenever she couldn’t go on. That hand was very warm. She stared at it for a long time — long enough that the train time quietly slipped past.
The alcohol burned her cheeks hot, yet her mind was strangely clear. She knew she should leave, and knew she didn’t want to. Outside the window the lights of the last train streaked by far off; she didn’t move. Aqiao asked, “Can you still make it?” She shook her head, her voice so soft it was almost inaudible: “Not anymore.” He looked at her, said nothing, only tightened the hand covering hers. Something in the air shifted with a soft click. For the first time in thirty-two years a crack opened in her days, and on the other side of the crack was the road she hadn’t finished walking at twenty.
【Aqiao · The Male Bestie】
He’d booked a room ahead of time. In that half-hour before the party wound down, he had quietly reserved the hotel at the end of this street on his phone, telling himself it was “in case someone drinks too much and needs a place to crash.” He hadn’t dared imagine more — and it wasn’t that he hadn’t dared to imagine it. Right now she sat across from him, eyes bright, cheeks flushed with drink, her guard peeling away layer by layer, like sand revealed after the tide goes out. He knew that once he stepped over this line there was no turning back, but he knew even more clearly that if he let her get on that train alone tonight, all the “could-have-beens” piled up over these ten years would go owing for another ten.
“I booked a room,” he said, plainly, without dancing around it. “If it’s not okay with you, I’ll walk you to a cab.” He put the choice into her hands, deliberately not pressuring her. Zhou Min didn’t answer right away. She looked down, turning her glass, the beads of water on its side sliding off one by one. After a long while she raised her head, and in her eyes was a look he’d never seen — reckless and yet as relieved as a burden set down. “Aqiao,” she said, “tonight I don’t want to be anyone’s wife, anyone’s mom.” His heart skipped a beat. He stood, and quite naturally took her hand. Her fingers curled once in his, and then closed back around him. The bar door shut behind them, sealing the city that belonged to Zhou Min — along with her two kids, her husband, her never-stopping conveyor belt — outside.