【Her · Auntie】
It was in the doorbell’s ring at dusk that Lin Man first realized how quickly time moves on other people. She looked out through the peephole and saw, under the corridor light, a young man so tall he had to bow his head, his shoulders filling out that washed-thin T-shirt, a bulging suitcase in his hand. It took her two seconds to place him — this was her husband’s sister’s son, Gu Shizhou. The last time she had seen him was years ago, when he was a boy thin as a bamboo pole, too shy even to lift his eyes when he spoke.
“Auntie.” The door opened and he spoke first. His voice was low, carrying a hoarseness that had settled all the way down, the voice of a grown man, utterly at odds with the shrill child in her memory. For a moment Lin Man did not know how to answer; she only stepped aside mechanically to let him in. “Come in — you must be tired from the trip.”
When he bent to take off his shoes, the line of his nape drew taut, the hem of his T-shirt lifted at one corner, baring a stretch of firm waist and belly that rose and fell with his movements. Lin Man looked away without thinking. She was thirty-six this year, had taught high-school English for more than a decade, was used to boys of seventeen or eighteen — but this young man before her, twenty-three, fresh out of college, come to this city to study for his graduate exams, had something about him she had not felt in a long time: a surging vitality that seemed ready to burst through his skin.
【Him · Nephew】
As Gu Shizhou dragged his case through the door, his heart was in far greater turmoil than his face. The last time he had seen his auntie he was still half a boy, and in his memory she was a gentle, good-looking grown-up who would pick food for him at the table. But the woman standing before him now, in a plain light-colored dress, showing a length of fair calf and slender ankle, had in her brow and eyes a stillness he could not find in girls his own age. Suddenly he did not dare look straight at her, and could only bow his head to undo his laces, pressing down that unnameable restlessness.
“Your uncle went out of town for a conference this week; he won’t be back until next week.” Lin Man led the way ahead of him, her voice unusually clear in the quiet apartment. “I’ve tidied the guest room. Settle in and study with an easy mind. If you need anything, just tell your auntie.” He answered with a low sound and followed behind her, his gaze slipping, beyond his control, to the curve of her waist as she walked, then hastily pulling away.
【Her · Auntie】
Having settled him into the guest room, Lin Man went back to the kitchen to reheat the food. With her husband away on business, the long summer nights when she was the only one in the house had suddenly gained another person’s breathing and footsteps, and the place had come alive. As she dished out the rice she thought of her marriage — eight years wed, her husband nine years older, long past the age when he would spare her a glance. They had slept in separate rooms for nearly two years now; when he had last touched her, she had to strain even to recall. She wrote it all off as “that’s just how life is,” but her body would not accept the reasoning. A body of thirty-six is exactly ripe, like fruit that hangs heavy on the June branches with no one to pick it, swelling night after night, aching sour.
At the table Gu Shizhou ate with relish, bowl after bowl. He spoke of his four college years, of the field he was sitting the graduate exams for, of why he had wanted to come to this city. Lin Man listened with her chin propped on her hand, answering now and then, but her gaze kept drifting to the hand that held his chopsticks — the knuckles well-defined, faint blue veins across the back, the hand of a grown man, the kind that could gather a person whole into an embrace with ease. Startled by her own thought, she picked up her glass of water and drank to cover it.
【Him · Nephew】
Gu Shizhou noticed that his auntie said little tonight, yet the way she listened to him was earnest, her eyes bright, nothing like the perfunctory listening of his mother. All his life he had been surrounded by people his own age; this was the first time he had sat so close, at the same table, eating and talking with a mature woman. When she smiled there were very faint lines at the corners of her eyes, and yet he found that made his heart race more than the face of any girl his age. He did not dare let the thought go any deeper, and quickened his eating, as if to fill his head with something else.
【Her · Auntie】
That night Lin Man lay in her own room, and through a single wall she could faintly hear the sounds from the guest room — the soft creak of the boards when the young man turned over, the pad of bare feet on the floor when he went to the bathroom, and very, very late, the rush of the tap as he showered. She stared at the ceiling, and without warning an image rose in her mind: that stretch of firm waist and belly, water beading and running down it. She squeezed her eyes shut, turned over, pulled the blanket higher — but her heartbeat would not be pressed down no matter what.
She told herself: this is her nephew, her husband’s sister’s child, a junior she ought to care for the way an elder should. That word — nephew — was like a fence, keeping the thoughts she should not have on the outside. But a fence can hold back thoughts; it cannot hold back the body. She could feel, clearly, that the place below her that had been silent for too long was now, because of the presence of a twenty-three-year-old man on the other side of the wall, faintly, shamefully warm. She pressed a hand to her lower belly; her fingertips were icy, but the place beneath them burned frighteningly hot.
The whole night through she scarcely slept. Outside the window the summer insects shrilled, the room was stifling, and her body woke inch by inch in the dark, woke until it frightened her. It was near daybreak before she drifted into a hazy sleep, and in the dream the wall was gone, leaving only a blurred, young, scorching outline drawing closer to her bit by bit. She started awake in the morning light, drenched in sweat, sticky and wet between her thighs. She lay without moving, for a long, long while, before cursing herself under her breath — Lin Man, you have lost your mind.
【Him · Nephew】
Gu Shizhou did not sleep well that night either. Lying back down after his shower, he could smell, in this apartment, the faint scent that belonged to his auntie — laundry soap mingled with skin. Through a single wall was a mature woman with no blood tie to him, yet an elder in name. He knew he should not think it, but a young body will not be disciplined, and in the dark it ached, hard. He gritted his teeth and tossed and turned, until at last he could only bury his face in the pillow and tell himself: it is only three months of lodging, and once the exam is done he will leave, and nothing will happen. He did not know yet how long this summer would be, nor how thin that wall was.