【I·Younger Man】
Kai talked this dinner up like it was a big deal. He was chasing a girl and needed me to be his wingman—his exact word, wingman, said as if I should feel honored. “You just sit next to me, be the contrast,” he said, straightening his collar in the elevator, “let her see what kind of people my friends are, and it’ll set me off as the main event.” I said sure. I always say sure—that’s probably why I’m always the one they call to be the wingman.
The private room was on the second floor of an old restaurant in the city’s old quarter, the wooden threshold worn smooth and shiny. Su Qing had arrived first. She was two years older than us—a fact Kai kept stressing, as if her age were a wall he had to climb over. But the moment she stood to greet us, that wall looked more like it stood on my side. She wore a navy dress with a neckline cut neither too deep nor too shallow, just enough that you’d glance and have to look away, then find yourself looking again. Her air was that of someone who speaks with steadiness, yet between her brows and eyes floated something hard to name—not sultriness, but ripeness, the ease of a woman who knows she’s good-looking and knows you’re looking too. Kai later described her to me as “a little worldly-worn.” At the time I wanted to argue, but later I understood he wasn’t putting her down—he was hooked by that very quality and just couldn’t find a better word for it.
Only after we sat down did I realize being a wingman is no easy job. Kai talks nonstop when he’s nervous, nonstop with no landing point, carrying the topic single-handedly from cars to watches to where he went skiing last year. Su Qing listened, laughed now and then, but that laugh was polite—polite enough that even sitting beside him I felt my own chest tighten for him. What actually brought the table to life were the few things she said turning to me. She asked what I do, what I usually read—nothing deep, but every line landed right on the mark, and when you finished answering you felt your words had been genuinely caught. That’s a very dangerous talent. She was like too good a listener, the kind that fools the speaker into thinking he’s interesting.
【Su Qing·Older Sister】
Kai is a good kid—warm, quick on his feet—his flaw is wanting too badly to be seen as good. I’ve met plenty of men like him; they treat a dinner like a job interview, taut the whole way through, terrified one wrong answer will cost them points. I don’t dislike him, I just feel nothing. And feeling—that’s not something you can earn with effort.
The wingman he brought along, though, was a little interesting. Barely talked all night, smoothed things over for Kai, peeled shrimp for me, refilled my glass without making a show of it when it ran empty, clean eyes—he looked at me too, but once he’d looked he took it back, not clinging to you the way some men do, unwilling to leave. Younger men are mostly rough and hasty; he wasn’t. When I asked him something, he answered slowly, and in that slowness there was a sense of measure. I admit I was a little curious—curious whether he knew he’d been cast as the foil, curious why, cast as the foil, he made me want to look twice more than the main event did. At the table I passed him a few more openings than I should have; Kai didn’t notice, but he did—the tips of his ears went a little red, and he pretended not to care. That small bit of embarrassment made me want to laugh more than all of Kai’s performing ever did.
【I·Younger Man】
It was Kai who poured the drink down his own throat. He probably felt the mood wasn’t hot enough, toasting one glass after another, until his tongue went slack and he started repeating himself. Su Qing tried to stop him twice; he wouldn’t listen, insisting on proving he could hold it. By closing time he could barely stand, one arm slung over my shoulder, the other still reaching to pay—his card was declined twice, and in the end I paid. This dinner where I played the wingman, the wingman settled the tab too.
“Taking him home would be too much trouble,” Su Qing said, looking at Kai collapsed into a puddle, then at me. “My place is nearby—come sober up at mine first. You won’t catch a cab at this hour anyway.” She said it so naturally I had no reason to refuse. I propped Kai up while she led the way ahead, her heels striking the flagstones of the old street—tap, tap, tap—each strike landing on my heart a beat closer than the last.
【Su Qing·Older Sister】
Bringing them home was a spur-of-the-moment idea. I’d already lined up the excuse for myself: I couldn’t send Kai back like that with a clear conscience, and as the elder I’d look after him. It sounded perfectly proper—so proper I nearly believed it myself. I put a kettle on and went into the bedroom to change—a thin nightgown, everyday fabric, nothing you could call deliberate, yet I knew perfectly well that even everyday has its everyday choices. Who I changed for, I knew myself.
When I carried out the sobering-up things, that younger boy visibly froze, his gaze racing over me in a quick circle before hurrying away, his Adam’s apple bobbing. That was it. The harder he tried to pretend he hadn’t seen, the more honest that little unhidden reaction became. Kai was already dead to the world, slumped on the sofa. The only ones truly awake in that living room were him and me.
【I·Younger Man】
When she came out in the changed clothes, I didn’t know where to put my eyes. The nightgown’s fabric was thin; under the lamp it went translucent, the outline of her body showing through, and I forced myself to stare at that cup of sobering broth on the tea table, staring as if to bore a hole through the cup. She sat down across and to the side of me, one leg crossed over the other, and that stretch of calf was dazzlingly pale. We talked in fits and starts—about what kind of person Kai was, about how we’d met—and somewhere in the talking I found I’d forgotten I’d come to be the wingman.
Kai had left his phone in the restaurant’s private room. He was dead asleep, and I was afraid the place would close and lose it, so I said I’d cab back and get it. Su Qing saw me to the door and suddenly said, “Let’s add each other on WeChat—so I can let you back in without ringing the bell and waking him.” She held her phone out, its screen light lit up her face. My fingers shook a little as I added her, and the “ding” when she accepted the request rang especially clear in the quiet hall.
【Su Qing·Older Sister】
In the stretch while he was gone to get the phone, Kai woke for a little while. The alcohol lent him a muddled kind of courage; he grabbed my hand and said a few things—nothing but that he liked me, that he wanted to be with me, that he thought we suited each other. I drew my hand back, gently but clearly, and told him: thank you, but I’m not right for this. He froze there, and in that moment he was perfectly sober—sober enough to grasp the weight of those words. I hated to do it, but hating to isn’t a reason. Feeling, as I’ve said, can’t be earned.
After turning someone down, a space opens up inside me instead. The phone was lit—it was that WeChat I’d just added, the avatar a casual snapshot of the sky. I stared at the name a while and suddenly wanted to send him something, then held back. The night was long. Some things needn’t be rushed; rushed, they lose their grace. I poured myself a glass of water and sat back down on the sofa, waiting for that boy who’d played someone else’s wingman yet ended up kept in my heart, to come back to my door carrying someone else’s phone.