Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Something is wrong with Wei Ying. She feels so twitchy, lately. Touchy, Jiang Cheng says, when they go out for chicken wings and she snaps at him for ordering regular spicy instead of extra-spicy, but what does he know?

She tries to Baidu her symptoms: an ache like growing pains in her muscles, tight-itchy skin, cravings for…something (but not for sweet youtiao or cheese tea or even Lan Zhan’s scallion pancakes, rolled so thin they’re translucent—Wei Ying’s tried all of those). Baidu tells her she might have cancer, which is useless. The internet is always telling you you have cancer.

Probably she is getting a flu, she thinks, and whines to everyone about it.

A-jie calls her ‘my poor A-Xian,’ over the phone, which is nice, and tells her to eat well. She sends a recipe for soup, but it has such a long ingredients list that Wei Ying doesn’t try to make it.

Wen Qing tells her to drink more water and stop being so dramatic. Wei Ying scolds Wen Qing for her terrible bedside manner—a doctor should have more sympathy, she says. Wen Qing sends her a picture of a tumor she helped remove from someone’s lung. Your  flu isn’t worth any, she writes. Don’t be ornery.

When she tells Lan Zhan about her Very Serious Flu or Whatever, Lan Zhan listens intently, pronounces Wei Ying to be tense, and invites her to the children’s yoga class she will be leading on Sunday, which is an awful thing to do. It makes Wei Ying think about Lan Zhan with children. About how her solemn face goes soft when they talk, about how she asks them really good questions.

And even worse: about the way Lan Zhan looks in the clothes she wears for yoga, sleek black leggings and a high-necked top, the clean lines of her body on display. The way she snakes her braid into a knot, exposing the pale stretch of her neck, her nape, all the fine feathery hairs there. The way those hairs are damp with sweat when Lan Zhan comes back.

Wei Ying thinks really hard about Lan Zhan’s baby yoga class, and swallows once, roughly. Her mouth is desert dry.

“Lan-er-jiejie,” she wails, because wailing is better than whimpering like a begging dog, “You know I’m not stretchy enough for that.”

Lan Zhan looks at her flatly, mildly disapproving. She puts her hand to Wei Ying’s forehead, like she’s checking for a fever. “Could learn to be,” Lan Zhan says, and Wei Ying wrinkles her nose and presses up into her big warm palm. She is almost certain she does not have a fever, but she’s greedy for Lan Zhan’s touch, now and all the time.

Lan Zhan puts up with her for a little longer, and then she takes her hand away. “You are fine,” she says, and Wei Ying nods obediently, like she really is.

Once Lan Zhan has left for her evening poetry seminar, Wei Ying sits at the kitchen table, not moving, listening to the fridge hum. After a while she gets up and fills a glass from the tap. She finishes half of it and pours the rest of the water down the sink. She takes a picture of the empty glass for Wen Qing.

see, she types, captioning it, not ornery, i’m such a good patient for qing yisheng

The message status changes from sent to read, but there isn’t any reply

!!! Wei Ying sends, and after a moment Wen Qing reacts to her message with a single thumbs up, because she is cruel.

Wei Ying starts a text to Huaisang, who is just as cruel but at least knows how to react properly to Wei Ying’s nonsense. She has been keeping them updated on her symptoms, and each time she sends a new one, they reply with a question about some detail of her imminent funeral.

my muscles ache she sent this morning, and Huaisang replied, so What colr shld the coffin Be? like i m assumng Black but maybe Not? O wait u prbably want 1 f those mushroom suits tht eats u i Know u yingying

i’m so sick she types, now, for the dozenth time. She wants to hear more about Huaisang’s plans for her funeral flowers. Earlier they suggested recycled newspaper lilies and black hellebores, so dead-Wei Ying could piss off Aunt Yu one last time.

While Wei Ying decides which emojis convey the most suffering, her ancient phone, a hand me down from some Jiang cousin, blinks from 12% to 1% battery. The screen goes black as she’s searching for the charge cord.

Wei Ying’s skin turns hot and prickly with sudden irritation. She wants to throw her phone at the wall. She feels—so bad. So weird. Her hands are shaking. She wants Lan Zhan to hold her forehead again.

She wants, stupidly, to throw herself at the wall and see if she cracks. See if she can shake the muddled electronics of her body up hard enough that she’ll start working right again.

This is a symptom, too. She tells herself it’s a good thing she can’t Baidu it. She puts her dead phone in her pocket and wonders if she should try to cook A-jie’s soup after all.

It has carrots, she thinks, and ginger, and lots of other stuff she doesn’t remember. Coconut milk, maybe. Cilantro. Surely those things are in the fridge, in Lan Zhan’s neatly stacked snap-lid containers.

But the process of sorting through the containers, gathering the ingredients, chopping them up, cooking them in the right order, making sure all Lan Zhan’s containers get back to their proper places—ah, it’s exhausting. Just the thought drains the prickly anger right out of her.

Wei Ying gives up on the soup and wanders out of the kitchen, suddenly drowsy and heavy-limbed. She’ll just take a nap, she thinks. A-jie would approve of that. Even Wen Qing couldn’t argue with a little extra sleep.

She’s almost reached her room when she remembers this morning and the frantic rush of energy she’d had. Like a buzzing under her skin. She hadn’t known what to do with it so she’d cleaned—her floor and her closet and her bed, which is stripped bare now. Her only set of sheets, and her one comforter cover, and all but one of the ugly frog-printed pillowcases Jiang Cheng gave her for her eleventh birthday are sitting in a damp mound in the washer downstairs.

Wei Ying clenches her jaw. No big deal. She can go downstairs and switch her things into the drier and take the stairs back up, all five hundred of them. Or she can take the elevator and hope that creepy Su She is not in it, lurking in the corner the way he often does. She can nap on the couch until her things are dry, and then she can make her bed, and by that time it will be late enough that she can just go to sleep for real.

Or, or, (Wei Ying is very clever!), she can just forget about her laundry and borrow Lan Zhan’s bed. She has slept in Lan Zhan’s bed before, so it is a thing that is allowed. The first time she had been so drunk she cried when Lan Zhan wouldn’t let her take the bunnies out of their pen at three in the morning. She had wanted to hold them so much, and Lan Zhan had told her no, very gently, and led her to her sandalwood-smelling room. Wei Ying doesn’t remember much after that. She’d woken up wearing Lan Zhan’s blue pajamas, but Lan Zhan was already gone. Running, maybe.

The second time, Wei Ying had been sick from an especially bad core transfusion. Lan Zhan had needed to give her an almost continuous stream of spiritual energy to keep her from curling up, from biting at her own knees, from crying out. Lan Zhan had carried her to bed, her hands never leaving Wei Ying’s body. She had stayed all night. She had been there in the morning.

Now, Wei Ying turns and slips into Lan Zhan’s unlocked room. She inhales the familiar sandalwood scent, the perfumed incense that clings to Lan Zhan’s hair and clothing. Lan Zhan’s room is cool. The window above her spotless desk is propped open with a small stack of books.

Lan Zhan’s bed is made, but not too strictly. All her bedding is white, delicately creased, thick and soft like a bank of summer clouds. Wei Ying finds the charger on Lan Zhan’s little bedside table and plugs her phone in before clambering under the comforter. Her legs and arms are bare and she shifts them around just to feel the crisp rustle of Lan Zhan’s sheets against her skin.

Lan Zhan’s bed smells even more like Lan Zhan than her room, and Wei Ying pushes her face into the soft pillows and inhales, thinks about what of Lan Zhan is here. Her skin cells, her sweat.

Wei Ying’s phone buzzes, the single dull tone that means it has woken itself back up, and she reaches out blindly for it. The screen is too bright and she has to blink a few times until it comes into focus.

She sends a stream of texts to Huaisang: im so sick its not even fair and its homophobic huaisang and have you ever seen a cicada wriggling around trying to get out of its husk thing? and thats what i feel like, do you think thats a sign of cancer??? 

Wei Ying only has to wait a moment before Huaisang’s blue speech bubble pops up. sangsang is typing, Wei Ying’s phone says. Huaisang’s little dots undulate, flickering back and forth as if they’re teasing her.

Wei Ying drops her phone onto her chest. She wonders if it’s actually called a husk. Maybe a cicada’s skin is called its shell, or, like, its armor. She squirms in Lan Zhan’s bed, restless even through her drowsiness. She digs her heels and her elbows into the thick mattress, rubs herself into Lan Zhan’s sheets like a cicada scraping its old shell away on a piece of rough bark so it can hatch out, be reborn.

It feels good, moving the way her body wants her to, not really thinking about it, arching her back and rolling her neck, tensing and releasing all her muscles. When she’s done, she feels better. Looser. She pulls the comforter up over her head to block the weak afternoon light from the window. The underside is a different fabric, white printed with pale blue swirly clouds. Lan Zhan’s blue, Wei Ying thinks, fuzzy-brained and warm in her small dim cocoon. It makes her smile.

Somehow she manages to find her phone again. Huaisang still hasn’t finished their message. husiang she types, with her eyes half closed. hsuiang! and ugh sangsang and then her fingers are too clumsy and her eyelids are too heavy and she’s falling asleep, right there, under Lan Zhan’s secret blue clouds.

☾♡☽

Wei Ying wakes just as Lan Zhan is arriving home. She makes Lan Zhan’s bed (pulls up the covers, at least), and goes to meet her in the kitchen, where she is heating water for tea. Her back is turned away from Wei Ying, and Wei Ying takes a moment to observe her shoulders and the waterfall of her hair, still wavy from the braid she wore to class.

Wei Ying creeps forward on tiptoe to drape herself over Lan Zhan’s back, hooking her chin on Lan Zhan’s shoulder. “I slept in your bed, er-jiejie,” she teases, whispering it near where Lan Zhan’s ear is hidden under her hair.

Lan Zhan shakes her off, not with any real force, but Wei Ying stumbles back, dramatic, gearing up for a pout. Lan Zhan turns to watch her. She looks unmoved by the pouting.

“Did you,” Lan Zhan says, as if it is a statement. Lan Zhan is so good at saying questions like that, like she already knows the answer, like why would she even bother to change her inflection.

“Ah,” Wei Ying says, trying to look very wounded. “I’m sick. It was an emergency. Lan Zhan, your bed is so soft.”

Lan Zhan dips her chin. “You may sleep in it tonight,” she says. “If it will help you feel better.”

Something about the way Lan Zhan looks, her gray sweater and her black trousers and her sock feet, her hair soft and untidy, her eyes almost shy. Wei Ying shivers and wraps her arms around herself. “Ha,” she says. “Lan Zhan, don’t be silly. Where would you sleep? I’ll be fine in my own—oh, shit, I forgot. I need to get my laundry.”

“I moved it for you,” Lan Zhan says. “On my way up.”

“Zhan-jie, did you really? Ah, of course you did. Lan Zhan is too good. How will this poor Wei Ying ever repay her?”

Lan Zhan blinks at Wei Ying. The slow, catlike blink that Wei Ying has learned to interpret as an eyeroll.

“Sit at the table,” she tells Wei Ying, and Wei Ying does as she’s told and folds herself into her chair, legs crisscrossed, knees resting on the chair’s arms. She expects Lan Zhan to tell her to sit properly, and it’s nice when she does, like a puzzle piece slotting into place.

“Feet on the floor,” Lan Zhan says as she passes Wei Ying her cup of tea, and Wei Ying performs a sharp little huff and unfolds her legs.

They drink their tea and Wei Ying asks Lan Zhan to tell her about awful Jin Zixun, who has wormed his way into the same exclusive poetry seminar as Lan Zhan through pure nepotism.

“What did he do this time?” Wei Ying asks her, and Lan Zhan, who does not gossip, as a rule, makes a pained expression and says, “I called him a gender essentialist and he thanked me.”

“Oh, oh no,” Wei Ying says. “Jiejie, are you okay? Did you hit him?”

“Choose restraint before imprudent action,” Lan Zhan recites primly, and Wei Ying laughs into her mug, honeyed tea sweet on her lips.

Lan Zhan covers a yawn with her own mug and Wei Ying realizes that it’s late, that Lan Zhan would normally be getting ready for bed by now. She wonders why Lan Zhan is staying up just to make tea for Wei Ying, just to make her laugh with stories about awful Jin Zixun.

She is about to tell Lan Zhan to go to bed when Lan Zhan’s phone lets out a series of shrill notes. Lan Zhan retrieves it from her pocket and turns off the timer. “Your laundry is dry,” she tells Wei Ying. “I will come with you.”

“You don’t have to,” Wei Ying says, on instinct. “I can go alone, Lan Zhan. You’re tired.”

“I will come,” Lan Zhan says again. “Su She may be there. I am better at intimidating him.”

It is true that Lan Zhan is a skilled intimidator of creepy men, Su She included. So Wei Ying tells her she’s hired, she can be Wei Ying’s bodyguard for the time it takes her to collect her bedding.

They take the stairs down to the basement level of the building and Lan Zhan stands in front of the laundry room, keeping watch as Wei Ying piles her things into her basket. Somehow, Su She is already waiting in the elevator when they step into it, but Lan Zhan gives him such an icy greeting that he mumbles something about forgetting his coat and slinks back into the hallway without even looking at Wei Ying.

As soon as the doors close, Wei Ying drops her basket and sits in it, peering up at Lan Zhan. “How do you do it?” she asks. “Teach me your secrets, jiejie.”

Lan Zhan shakes her head. “Su She is the one who requires a lesson,” she says firmly. “He should not bother Wei Ying.”

Wei Ying feels a little dizzy. Her face is hot. She cups her cheeks with her hands and squirms around in her laundry basket nest, trying to get comfortable. The elevator jolts upwards and lurches to a stop and Lan Zhan says, “Wei Ying? We are here. Are you feeling unwell again?”

“No!” Wei Ying says, not moving. “No! I’m so good, Zhan-er.”

“Mn,” Lan Zhan says. She hooks her arms under Wei Ying’s and pulls her up, and for a moment they are very close together, nearly chest to chest, Wei Ying’s head at the level of Lan Zhan’s shoulder. Lan Zhan smells like sandalwood and like wool.

Lan Zhan takes Wei Ying’s laundry basket and refuses to return it, even when Wei Ying argues that she can carry it herself. Wei Ying has to trail after her with nothing to fill her fidgety hands. She thinks about the gears in her room, the spare parts Mingjue-jie lets her take home from the bike repair shop. Maybe she’ll build something tonight. She wants to be busy.

Back in their apartment, Wei Ying finally manages to convince Lan Zhan that she doesn’t need any more help. “Go to bed, Zhan-jie,” she says, and Lan Zhan, her dark eyes soft and a little dazed, nods and says, “You can wake me if you need to, Wei Ying.”

A hazy image flickers through Wei Ying’s mind—herself, slipping into Lan Zhan’s room in the dark, almost invisible, finding her way to Lan Zhan’s bed by touch. Waking Lan Zhan just enough that she can make room for Wei Ying to curl up beside her, to lay her head on Lan Zhan’s chest.

“I will, if I need to,” Wei Ying lies. “Go have sweet dreams of bunnies, Lan Zhan.”

Lan Zhan leaves Wei Ying’s laundry outside her bedroom, in the hallway, and slips into the bathroom. Wei Ying listens to the faint sounds of Lan Zhan brushing her teeth and washing her face as she rinses their tea mugs and dries them carefully.

When she’s finished, she flicks off the lights in the kitchen and goes to make her bed. She pulls on the fitted sheet and the frog pillowcases and wrestles almost half of her comforter into its cover. She pauses, a little out of breath, when Lan Zhan knocks at her half-open door.

“Aiy, don’t be so formal,” Wei Ying says, turning to face her, and Lan Zhan edges into her room. Her hair is braided again and her face is pink and dewy with whatever expensive night cream she patted into it. Her oat-colored linen shirt is unbuttoned, baring her collarbones and a tender white strip of her belly and the curve of her breasts in her pale blue bra.

“Lan Zhan?” Wei Ying says, and her voice is a rasp.

Lan Zhan tilts her head, owlish, and says “You left your phone.” She passes it to Wei Ying and Wei Ying holds it as if it is an alien artifact, something she has never seen before.

“Thank you,” she says at last, and Lan Zhan nods stiffly and leaves Wei Ying’s room, closing the door behind her.

Wei Ying perches on the edge of her bed and stares at her own reflection, pale and warped in her dark phone screen. She presses the home button and the screen lights up. There are two text notification from Huaisang.

The first message reads: yingyinggg i canNOT believ u sent me a Bug Description pls never do tht again BUT i will help u bcaus you rlly need it & i m a kind & good frend…u Do Not have cancer! congrats!

The next message reads: dont sue the messenger u kno but you have…horniness. yingying u are Horny. u need to get laid!!! 

Wei Ying chokes out a strangled laugh. She clicks her phone off and pulls her legs up to her chest. She sits in the middle of her half-made bed, her tangled comforter bunched up under her.

She isn’t horny, Wei Ying thinks. She doesn’t need to get laid. She…takes care of things! She’s self-sufficient!

Huaisang is projecting, probably. Wei Ying should ignore them. She has a flu, that’s all. What else could explain the dull ache in her muscles, the twitchiness, the leaping flame of her temper, the squirminess, the longing for touch, the…oh. Oh.

Maybe Wei Ying is really, really dumb. Like, as dumb as Jiang Cheng used to say she was, back when they were kids and fighting was easy. 

Maybe she isn’t sick at all. Maybe she’s actually just so sexually frustrated that she’ll feel like this, raw and wanting, until she gets the frustration fucked right out of her.

A little tremor works its way up her spine, shivery and sweet at once. Her skin feels tight and tingling, and she thinks again of a cicada. Unhusking itself. Baring all its softness to the world.

She flops sideways into the mess of her bedding and breathes humid, frantic breaths into the empty corner of her comforter cover. Wei Ying has never had sex with another person. She has never needed it, not like this.

She tries to imagine it. Giving her body to someone else, letting them see how messy and needy she can get. Letting them touch the rough purple scar splitting her abdomen, letting them hear the pitiful crying-like noises she makes when she feels good—but it’s too much, her mind skips, and she imagines instead the pink flush of Lan Zhan’s fresh-washed face, the gentle weight of her eyes, the powdery blue of her bra against her white-jade skin.

If it was Lan Zhan, Wei Ying thinks, it would be easy.

She digs her fingernails into her palms, thinks, wow, Wei Ying, how dumb can you get?

Wei Ying should know better. It doesn’t matter if she wants, if she needs. It doesn’t matter if Lan Zhan makes her feel good and safe and like a summer-hatching insect, tender and eager. It won’t ever be Lan Zhan.

It won’t ever be Lan Zhan, she tells herself, again, again, hoping her stubborn brain will understand this time.

☾♡☽

Huaisang sends Wei Ying a flurry of hookup app recommendations over the following days, and Wei Ying downloads a few of them, just to see. Between classes, she flicks through profiles, trying to feel something. Some kind of spark, maybe. A magnet tug that means you, okay, I could let you fuck me.

She tries really hard, actually. She makes herself think one nice thing about each profile, makes herself notice when the people on her phone screen have kind eyes or good hands. But she can’t make herself care about any of them enough to swipe right, to entertain the possibility of sleeping with them.

The problem is that she let Jiang Cheng talk her into watching too many romance movies when they were growing up. The problem is also, relatedly, that a part of her wants her First Time (like that, with capital letters—Wei Ying a little embarrassed, but mostly she blames heteropatriarchal purity culture) to be with someone she loves, who loves her, too.

The problem is that she looks at each profile and wonders if the person in it would be gentle with her, would kiss her until she didn’t feel scared, would look at her scars and her messy hair and her sharp elbows in the right way—whatever that means. Maybe there is no right way, Wei Ying thinks. She thinks that this is something the other person would have to know: how to look at her, how to help her bear being looked at. 

But she isn’t delusional! She knows all of that is too much to ask of a stranger.

And she knows it’s silly, to desire gentleness. Wei Ying is tough. She has never expected gentleness from any other part of her life, so why should she need it now, when it comes to this?

☾♡☽

She tries to explain her problem to Wen Qing on Monday evening, sitting on the Wens’ living room couch, eating day-old pineapple buns from the bakery where Wen Ning works.

First she has to endure the mortifying ordeal of telling Wen Qing about Huaisang’s diagnosis. Before she can even finish explaining, Wen Qing murmurs “acute horniness,” and sends herself into an extended laughing spell. Wei Ying hopes the laughter is more about the fact that Wen Qing had one and a half sour-cherry edibles after her pharmacology class than it is about the fact that Wei Ying’s life is a joke.

“So that means,” Wen Qing says at last, clearing her throat, “the ‘cure’ is…having sex?”

Wei Ying nods, her neck hot and her ears still ringing with the words ‘acute horniness.'

Wen Qing smiles slyly. “My professional opinion is that Huaisang is very wise and should consider pursuing a medical career,” she says.

“Qing-jie,” Wei Ying whimpers. She should have expected this sort of betrayal. “I need real medical advice!!! Isn’t it your duty to help me? I’m suffering!”

Wen Qing shrugs. “Sex makes many people feel good, Yingying. Of course, the way you handle your…issue is up to you, but finding a partner to help you out could be fun, and healthy.”

Wei Ying curls deeper into her corner of the couch, deflated. “I don’t think I can sleep with someone from a dating app,” she says, tearing her pineapple bun into bite-sized bits, spilling crumbs across her lap. “If I wasn’t a virgin, I’d just pick someone to fuck me and get it out of my system, but I have…ah, this is so embarrassing. I have too many inhibitions, Qing-jie.”

“Virginity is a construct,” Wen Qing offers sagely, in the same superior voice Wei Ying has heard her use while explaining the elegance of laparoscopic surgery to skeptical cultivation healers.

“I know!” Wei Ying says. She isn’t a baby. She knows it’s all made up. That’s why it’s so frustrating, that she can’t still the fluttery, eager little part of her heart that wants her to be taken care of like her first time is something special, like she’s something special.

She stares at the Wen’s small television set, which is haunted, but only a little bit. It turns on at random, and only ever plays Wen Popo’s classic 80’s dramas. Popo won’t let Wei Ying exorcise the TV because she’s fond of the friendly ghost who appreciates Dream of the Red Chamber as much as she does.

Wei Ying wills Popo’s ghost to do its trick now so that she can be distracted from her own pitifulness.

The television remains dead, but Wen Ning, messy-haired and holding a wooden spoon, pokes his head out of the kitchen. “Jie,” he murmurs gently, “Don’t be mean to A-Ying. Virginity is a construct, but we shouldn’t dismiss her feelings about it.”

Wei Ying feels a rush of gratitude for him.  “How did your brother get to be so good?” she asks Wen Qing, and Wen Qing looks at Wen Ning fondly and says, “I don’t know, but I take full credit for it.”

Wen Ning blushes and clutches his spoon to his chest. “And Wei Ying doesn’t have to have sex with another person if she doesn’t want to,” he says, determined. “Being ho—, um, being aroused isn’t necessarily the same as wanting to have sex with someone.”

“Come here,” Wei Ying says, and he shuffles awkwardly to the couch so that she can hug him. He smells like honey and herbs, and his newly-short hair tickles her cheek. “Ning-di, you’re so smart and nice,” she says, into his shoulder, and he laughs a little and mumbles something that ends with “…don’t want other people to feel the way I did before I knew being asexual was an option.”

Wen Qing slides across the couch to wrap her arms around both of them. “This is a lot of emotions for a Monday,” she says dryly, leaning her head against Wei Ying’s.

They stay like that for a while, squashed together, breathing quietly. It’s too warm and close to be comfortable, but Wei Ying doesn’t mind. It reminds her of how she and A-jie and Jiang Cheng used to share a bed whenever one of them had a nightmare. Mostly she was the one waking them up, screaming and kicking, trying to shake the bad memories from her head. On those nights, they slept one on either side of her, crushing her between them so that her body would know it was safe.

The sweet herbal scent in the air sharpens and Wen Ning pulls away from their little huddle. “My syrup,” he calls, hurrying back into the kitchen.

Wen Qing is still slumped into Wei Ying’s side. Wei Ying wonders if she has fallen asleep, until Wen Qing says, softly, “But you aren’t ace, right?”

Wei Ying shakes her head. For a while she had kind of thought—but then she met Lan Zhan, and some wanting part of her that had mostly been dormant decided to wake up. Wei Ying’s had…dreams, since Lan Zhan. She never did before.

“It’s not about having sex,” she tells Wen Qing, hoping if she starts talking she’ll stop thinking about Lan Zhan.

Wen Qing makes a soft listening noise that reminds Wei Ying so much of A-jie that she has to blink quickly to prevent herself from crying. She misses her sister. It’s been a long time since she was able to see her in person.

“It’s so stupid,” she says. “It’s just because it’d be my, ha, I keep trying to say it like it doesn’t matter—but it would be my first time. And I don’t want to care about it, but I do care and I can’t just turn the caring off. Ugh.”

She bites the tip of her tongue. She hadn’t meant to say so much. It makes her want to slide off of the couch and roll right under it until she’s lying in the dark, her mouth and her nose full of dust bunnies because Wen Qing hates cleaning in general and Wen Ning hates the sound of the vacuum, specifically.

Wen Qing, who must be properly stoned by now, pats at her cheek. “What will you do?” she asks, gently curious.

“Ah,” Wei Ying says. “I mean, nobody’s ever died of being horny. I guess I’ll just keep taking, uh, really long showers. Or maybe—I don’t know. Maybe I’ll do some kind of sex ritual.”

“What kind of sex ritual?” Wen Qing asks, her voice slower than usual but still decidedly suspicious. She is such a doctor, Wei Ying thinks, and she’s not even a doctor yet!

“A normal one!” Wei Ying says. “Just a normal sex ritual, not a demonic cultivation one…come on, Wen Qing, who do you think I am? I know better than to mess around with the dark path, now. I’m past all that.”

It had been a little bit more than messing around. Following the pull of her own resentment, turning all the bad stuff into power—that had been intoxicating, at first. And then she had learned that it was harming her core, poisoning the only thing keeping Jiang Cheng alive. So she’d stopped. And she’s past it. No more tricks for Wei Ying.

Skeptically, Wen Qing repeats, “A normal sex ritual…”

“Yeah,” Wei Ying says, working it out as she speaks. “If virginity is a construct, like, constructed, then losing it is, too. I’m going to construct a losing-my-virginity ritual. And then I’ll be ready to get fucked by someone from Huaisang’s hookup apps because I won’t have any more hang-ups about it being my first time.”

Wei Ying is very proud of this plan. “Wen Qing!” she says, wanting praise, and she thinks Wen Qing says “Hmm,” but when she looks over at her she realizes that it must have been a snore.

Wen Qing’s head is tipped back and her mouth is very slightly parted. She lets out another whistling breath. Wei Ying sighs. “You missed my good plan, Qing-jie,” she whispers as she clambers out of her corner of the couch. She finds a soft knitted blanket, one of Wen Popo’s, and drapes it over Wen Qing’s lap.

Outside, the sky is dark and the city lights have flickered on. If it were another night Wei Ying might stay over, beg Wen Ning to watch a horror movie with her and then curl up in Wen Qing’s oversized bed. She’d plug in the moon-shaped nightlight Wen Qing bought for baby A-Yuan’s visits and sleep like a baby herself, dreamless and deep.

Except tonight is Monday, which means that Lan Zhan is waiting up for her. On every other day, Lan Zhan cooks for both of them, but on Mondays they cook together. Wei Ying pictures Lan Zhan sitting in their dim kitchen, in front of her laptop, with only the blue light of the screen to keep her company.

She hopes—it’s dumb and mean, but she hopes Lan Zhan is a little lonely without her. Probably she’s fine. But if she is lonely, Wei Ying has just a few minutes’ walk back to their building, where she’ll run up the stairs and open their apartment door too loudly and turn on all the lights and tell Lan Zhan she’s home and ready to chop whatever ingredients Lan Zhan wants her to chop.

Wei Ying is still thinking about saving poor lonely Lan Zhan as she scribbles a quick soothing talisman into the dust on top of the television, to keep Popo’s ghost from causing too much trouble, and recovers her coat from the hooks in the hallway.

She goes to the kitchen to say goodbye to Wen Ning before she leaves. He is standing over the worn wooden table, ladling thick, dark syrup into heated glass jars. The syrup smells richer now, medicinal, all ginseng and loquat and honey.

“Who is it for?” Wei Ying asks.

Wen Ning looks up. He swipes the back of his hand over his cheek and leaves a sticky smear of syrup behind. “Xiao…Mo Xuanyu,” he says, his face turning pink. “There is a cold going around his dorm.”

“Ohhh,” Wei Ying says, barely teasing. She considers saying more, but Wen Ning is very shy, and whatever he has with Mo Xuanyu is too new and fragile to poke at.

Wei Ying swallows her curiosity and changes the subject, picking something she knows Wen Ning won’t mind discussing. “What about Qing-jie? Has she figured it out, yet, about Mianmian?” she asks. Wen Ning twists a lid onto a full jar and drops his ladle neatly into the pot of syrup.

“No,” he says, long-suffering but fond. “I have told her that the edibles aren’t just a ‘medical student/law student commiseration thing,’ but she doesn’t listen.”

Wei Ying shakes her head. “All the formaldehyde must be damaging Qing-jie’s brain,” she says. “Tell her I’ve known Mianmian since high school and she’s never offered me her gummies. But she buys sour-cherry flavor specifically for your jie. Specifically, Wen Ning!

“I will pass that information along,” Wen Ning says dutifully.

“What’s next,” Wei Ying goes on, ranting like she’s Jiang Cheng. “Dinner dates at nice restaurants for ‘medical student/law student commiseration’ purposes? Holding hands for stress relief? Hooking up to avoid the hours of homework they’ve inflicted on themselves?”

“Uh!” Wen Ning says, and slaps his hand over his mouth.

Wei Ying doesn’t understand, at first. And then she does. She takes a step towards Wen Ning. “Ning-di,” she says, trying to sound appropriately threatening, “You don’t mean—”

Wen Ning slides his remaining hand over the top half of his face and shakes his head. One of his big brown eyes peers out at her from between his fourth finger and pinky.

“Sibling code,” he whispers, “Wei Ying, don’t make me break the sibling code.”

That’s enough of an answer for Wei Ying. She drops her act and slumps against the kitchen wall, feeling oddly dizzy and almost…lost.

“Everyone’s in love all of a sudden,” she says to Wen Ning, who has emerged from behind his hands again. She means for it to be a joke, but it comes out small and sad in the quiet kitchen.

“Yingying,” Wen Ning says gently, trailing off into silence.

She shakes her head, embarrassed at herself. Wen Ning looks down at his feet politely, giving her enough time to sniffle into her sleeve and wipe her damp eyes.

When she’s gotten herself back together, he presses one of the jars of syrup, still-warm, into her hands.

“It’s good for healing lots of things,” he tells her. “Not just colds.”

Outside, in the dim cool night that smells like raw soil and cigarette smoke, Wei Ying holds the heated jar against her heart and hopes Wen Ning is right.

☾♡☽

The rest of the week passes in a blur.

Wei Ying goes to her classes and gets into arguments with most of her professors, which is not unusual.

She works at the bike shop, picking up two extra shifts when Nie Zonghui calls in sick. She does her repairs efficiently enough to impress Nie Mingjue, who comes out of her office to praise Wei Ying gruffly and tell her to take a long lunch break. Wei Ying doesn’t know what to do with herself, so she carries the thermos of stew and the container of rice Lan Zhan packed her outside and eats it in the scrubby strip of grass behind the shop, her fingers still stained dark with bike grease.

Wei Ying calls her sister, who is in the terrible morning-sickness part of being pregnant but insists that she is completely fine. Then Wei Ying calls her sister’s peacock, to confirm that A-jie is actually alright and isn’t just pretending to be fine because she thinks she needs to be pleasant and accommodating even when she is growing a whole new person inside of her. Jin Zixuan promises that Yanli is well and tries to give Wei Ying some nonsense advice about investing in cryptocurrency, at which point she hangs up on him without saying goodbye.

Wei Ying goes to more classes and takes tests she hasn’t studied for and tries not to argue with the few professors who still like her.

She visits the art museum with Huaisang to see a new collection of hand fans, and afterwards they drag her into a pet shop to watch them berate the owner for keeping his budgies in a too-small cage. The owner is so stunned by Huaisang’s lecture that he sells them the budgies at half price, and then Wei Ying has to help smuggle all fourteen birds into Mingjue-jie’s house without getting caught.

She runs into Xiao Xingchen, who is the TA for her gui-suppression class, in the university library, and he asks her to join a group of student volunteers who are studying the city’s urban bat colonies. Wei Ying knows very little about bats, but Xiao Xingchen promises it doesn’t matter and shows her pictures of tiny, velvety bat pups until she gives in and promises she’ll help.

All week, Wei Ying keeps herself busy. She doesn’t give her brain time to get twisted into knots. But still, she feels wrong. She feels like she is a not-Wei Ying creature pretending to be Wei Ying. She feels like she is running right out of her own skin.

On a rare early evening at home, she pulls out her dizi while Lan Zhan is practicing her guqin, and they try to play together. Normally it is easy to play with Lan Zhan, but this week Wei Ying cannot make her music behave. They begin in synch, but soon Wei Ying’s notes come faster and faster, high and wild and out of control. Lan Zhan stops playing first, setting her fingers across the guqin strings to choke the last low, full note.

“Wei Ying?” she asks.

Wei Ying drops her dizi from her lips. She shakes her head. “I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know, Lan Zhan. I can’t play.”

“Are you feeling ill again?” Lan Zhan asks, and Wei Ying shakes her head once more, and then shrugs. She can’t focus, she can’t be still. It’s like all the atoms of her body are vibrating at once.

She thinks Lan Zhan could make her be still, maybe.

Wei Ying blinks and imagines Lan Zhan teaching her how to play her own dizi, kneeling beside Wei Ying, moving her fingers into the correct positions. It doesn’t make sense—Lan Zhan can’t play the dizi, but it’s nice to imagine her training Wei Ying like that, patient and gentle.

“Hey,” she says, thinking mostly that she wants to be close to Lan Zhan, close enough to smell the sandalwood incense in her clothing, the sweet-almond oil in her hair. “Zhan-er, meditate with me, hmm? I’ve been so busy. I’m—I want to be calm.”

Lan Zhan nods and stows her guqin back into its soft case. Wei Ying joins her on the floor, her knee pressing into Lan Zhan’s. She wriggles around a little bit, trying to get comfortable, and Lan Zhan says “Wei Ying, focus.”

Wei Ying focuses. She closes her eyes and feels the place where Lan Zhan’s knee is touching hers. She listens to Lan Zhan’s slow, even breathing and tries to match it.

She thinks about how she is still…acutely horny. Still wanting. She’s downloaded even more of Huaisang’s hookup app recommendations and matched with a few people. But she hasn’t messaged any of them yet. In between her classes and work and her sister and the Wens and Huaisang and Xiao Xingchen and Xiao Xingchen’s bats and Lan Zhan (Lan Zhan!) she has been trying to think about her sex ritual, which she is perhaps 70% serious about.

Maybe she could create some sort of anti-virginity talisman. She imagines painting it directly onto her own body instead of the yellowed rice paper she normally uses. Cinnabar-colored ink on her belly, on her thighs. The thought makes her shiver.

“Focus,” Lan Zhan says again, and Wei Ying sighs and tries to clear her mind.

☾♡☽

Early on Friday she goes to the hospital for Jiang Cheng’s transfusion. When they were kids, they used to stay in the same room, their cots close enough that they could reach out and hold each other’s hands. But not anymore. Now, Wei Ying doesn’t let Jiang Cheng see her at all on transfusion days. At best, she’s pale and shaky afterwards. She doesn’t have the energy to look at his guilty face and pretend she’s not in pain.

It goes well, this time. She stares up at the white ceiling while the doctor pushes her gown up to her ribs and does something Wei Ying tries not to think about with a long shining needle. She used to watch, when she was little. It hurt a lot more back then. Now the skin of her lower stomach is numb and cool, desensitized from all the times she’s had this done to her.

The doctor says “Hold still,” even though Wei Ying is not moving, and then there is a tugging feeling in Wei Ying’s abdomen, a spreading coldness. Like her half-core is turning to ice. Her lungs are suddenly empty and she gasps for air, choking on nothing.

“A little more,” the doctor says evenly, and Wei Ying bites her tongue and tenses the muscles in her neck and her shoulders.

Then the needle is sliding out of her and she wraps her arms around herself, presses both of her palms down hard over her belly, smearing the warm trickle of blood from the needle into her skin, but she doesn’t care.

The doctor fills a glass vial with the golden fluid, with Wei Ying’s core. Wei Ying closes her eyes and listens as she leaves the room, as the door clicks closed behind her.

The doctor will carry the vial down the hallway, to Jiang Cheng’s room, where it will be injected into his arm with a much smaller needle. And then—it’ll keep his body from rejecting the core transplant the doctors did when he was eight and Wei Ying was nine. It’ll keep him alive and well for another month, until the next transfusion.

Wei Ying’s room is silent for a little while, and then nurse Song comes in and pulls the sheets up over Wei Ying to cover her abdomen and her bare legs. She likes nurse Song. He never talks but he has cool, gentle hands. He reminds her a bit of Lan Zhan, especially when he brings her a mug of hot water and watches, hawk-eyed, until she’s drunk all of it.

Wei Ying is tired, and she lies back in her bed. The mattress has a waterproof protector on it that crinkles as she shifts. She dozes until nurse Song returns to help her get redressed and walk outside, to the back entrance where Wen Ning is waiting to drive her home.

Nurse Song lifts her into the passenger seat and buckles her seatbelt, which should make her feel embarrassed but mostly just makes her feel relieved. Her fingers are numb and clumsy, and she’s not sure she could have managed it herself.

Wen Ning, who is good and kind and has done this many times before, doesn’t make her talk to him in the car. He puts on the radio and they listen to a segment about how to forage for wild greens and mushrooms, which apparently you can do even in a city as big and gray as theirs.

When they get to Wei Ying’s building, Wen Ning walks Wei Ying inside and rides the elevator upstairs with her. He doesn’t speak until they’re standing in the entrance of Wei Ying’s apartment, taking off their shoes.

“Do you want me to stay, or would you rather be alone?” he asks, and Wei Ying says, “I can manage by myself.”

Wen Ning, still good and kind but also horribly perceptive, makes a face like he’s thinking about pointing out that managing alone is not the same thing as wanting to be alone, but Wei Ying yawns forcefully and he says instead, “Let me get you to your bed, then.”

Wen Ning carries Wei Ying to her room on his back, pretending that he just wants a chance to show off how strong he’s gotten since he joined his new gym. He tucks her into bed with too many blankets, piling them on top of her until she feels pinned in place. Wei Ying thanks him and apologizes for taking up half his day and he shakes his head, smiling sadly. “Don’t say that, Yingying,” he tells her, and goes to the kitchen to heat up a bowl of soup even though she tells him she’s not hungry.

Later, when Wen Ning has left and the soup on Wei Ying’s bedside table has gone cold, Wei Ying tries to feel her core. She knows it’s not gone, not all of it, but sometimes after a transfusion the only thing left is the ache, the hollowness.

She puts her palm on her belly, under the loose T-shirt she packed to change into after the hospital. When it’s strong, her core hums like a living thing, like a whole hive of bees waking up in the summer and smelling nectar in the air. She searches for that hum, for the sun-warm glow of her core, but there’s nothing.

Her thumb scrapes over a rough spot. It’s the wound from where the needle went in, already scabbed over. She catches the edge of the scab under her nail, thinks about picking it off. But the T-shirt is borrowed, Lan Zhan’s, and she doesn’t want to bleed on it.

Wei Ying touches the scab lightly, prodding at it, trying to figure out without looking what shape it is. Such a small thing. So weird that she has such a big hollowness inside of her and all she can blame it on is this little scab.

She leaves the scab alone, eventually. It will be healed by Monday. But she keeps her hand where it is, low on her belly.

She’s wearing Lan Zhan’s sweatpants. A pair of sweatpants that Lan Zhan owns, at least. Wei Ying has never seen her wear them.

The waistband is loose and Wei Ying slips her fingers under it easily. She’s not wearing underwear. Her stomach is too sore to.

Wei Ying thinks about her dwindling core. Wonders if it’s even her core, really, if half of it is in Jiang Cheng and the rest of it is for Jiang Cheng and Wei Ying can’t even feel what she has left most of the time.

Wei Ying thinks about how she’s so so lucky she gets to save her didi’s life.

Wei Ying thinks about next month, and the month after, and the month after that. All the months of her life.

She thinks about the way the doctor didn’t even pull her gown back down to cover Wei Ying’s body when she was done. She thinks about how she didn’t, either. Like her own body didn’t matter. Like it was just—the husk, the thing that gets left behind.

Wei Ying doesn’t want to be the husk. She wants to be the cicada, soft and strong and ready to fly off dizzily into a warm green world.

She moves her palm further down, until she's cupping her mound, feeling the rough sparse hair and the humid softness of her skin. She shifts a little, widening her hips, and curls two fingers over her folds.

She strokes and spreads herself with her bike shop-rough fingers. She does it clumsily, pretending it’s the first time and she’s so new she has to discover everything, map out all the parts of herself. She finds the firm little bud of her clit and taps at it, rubs it with her thumb and wills her body to be good, to feel good.

A buzzing heat tingles along her inner thighs, like Wei Ying’s sluggish nerves are just waking up. She slides her fingers over her folds in a slow and halting rhythm, as if she’s surprised at discovering her own body, at discovering how tender and soft she is.

She lets her fingers still and hitches her hips up into empty air, into nothing. She's hardly touching herself, and the movement feels good in a clean electric way that isn't really about sex. It feels good enough that she does it again, jolting, trying to let it be an instinct, trying to let it be something she doesn’t have to think about too hard.

Still without thinking, she slides a finger inside, where she’s hot and tight, just slick enough to take it without any burn. She tells herself to clench and she does, bearing down on her finger, feeling the grip of her muscles. 

More wetness, and she nudges the tip of a second finger against her entrance. She presses her fingers together and rocks them into herself until she’s full enough. She pulses around the fullness and her pleasure builds, swelling, and it’s the opposite of what happened to her in the hospital room. It’s like something warm and heavy and golden is pouring back into her, filling her up. 

Wei Ying is panting, whimpering out loud in her quiet room, her hips still twitching, the muscles in her stomach beginning to tense up. Heat sparks at the base of her spine, traces down her legs. She rubs at her clit, hard and clumsy, pinches it between her thumb and finger

She feels all of herself, she feels alive. She’s going to come, she thinks. And it’s a surprise, a real one, because she never comes this quickly, this easily.

She lets her eyes flutter closed, fucks herself down onto her own fingers messily, hastily, and waits to fall apart. She’s trembling all over and she’s going to come, she’s going to, she’s going to—and then the pleasure slips away, like the sun ducking behind a cloud, and her nerves go dull again.

Wei Ying doesn’t realize at first that she’s stopped feeling good. She keeps moving, grinding against her palm, curling her fingers clumsily inside of herself.

And then her throat catches. She tries to swallow but there’s too much spit in her mouth and she doesn’t feel good anymore, she doesn’t feel anything, she isn’t going to come.

Wei Ying goes still. She sinks into her bed like she’s made of bricks. Her hips ache and her stomach is sore and her bedsheets are rough against her hot damp skin. She bites her lip and slides her fingers out of herself. She clenches a last time, around nothing, and it hurts. A raw, distant pain that makes her want to cry.

Wei Ying is sticky and messy and so frustrated with herself, with everything. She presses her legs together and rolls onto her side, pulling her knees up towards her chest.

She curls her wet fingers into a fist and tucks it against her belly, presses her knuckles into her scar, into her worn-out core.

☾♡☽

Wei Ying sleeps until late afternoon. She feels a little better when she wakes. The sun is coming in through her window in dappled blobs, in bubbles of light that spill out across her blank walls and dull wood floor.

Lan Zhan is waiting for her in the kitchen. She gives Wei Ying a bowl of spicy congee with pickled vegetables, a boiled tea egg. Before Wei Ying has time to ask for them, she passes her the chili oil and the jar of lao gan ma.

Wei Ying thanks her, and Lan Zhan watches, resigned, as she stirs enough chili products into her congee to turn it red.

As soon as Wei Ying’s mouth is full of congee, Lan Zhan speaks. “You did not tell me today was a transfusion day.”

Wei Ying swallows. “Yeah,” she says, “I didn’t.” Her voice is a little raw, but she sounds mostly fine.

“I respect your privacy,” Lan Zhan says carefully, “but I would have liked to be with you, afterwards. Or at least—here. Near you. Wen Ning texted me yesterday. He was worried about leaving you alone. I was worried, too, when I heard you were alone.”

Wei Ying cuts her tea egg into halves, into quarters. She eats a piece of yolk, crushing it against the roof of her mouth before swallowing. “I was okay,” she says. “Don’t worry about me, Zhan-jiejie.”

Lan Zhan makes a frustrated noise. “Wei Ying,” she says. “What has changed?”

Wei Ying knows what she means. She used to tell Lan Zhan when she was going to the hospital.

Lan Zhan never came with her, for a lot of reasons, but she waited at home to take care of Wei Ying when she got back. She fed her clear broth and watched nature documentaries with her and transferred spiritual energy into Wei Ying so that Wei Ying barely hurt at all.

Wei Ying looks at the flat line of Lan Zhan’s upset mouth and thinks about how unfair it is that Lan Zhan is mad at Wei Ying, when this is all her fault. Her fault for taking such good care of Wei Ying all the time, her fault for getting Wei Ying used to being coddled like a baby, her fault for making Wei Ying think that maybe Lan Zhan wanted her.

Lan Zhan’s fault that Wei Ying is acutely horny and also sad about it. Lan Zhan’s fault for not wanting Wei Ying, for leaving Wei Ying to plan a whole depressing sex ritual for herself, for making her have to find a stranger to fuck all the messy feelings out of her.

Wei Ying’s brain is slushy like congee, rice-soft. She wants Lan Zhan to take care of her, but not in the dutiful Good-Lan way she always does. Wei Ying wants Lan Zhan to take care of her because Lan Zhan wants to, because she thinks Wei Ying is pretty and smart and strong and hot. And if Wei Ying can’t have that kind of care, she doesn’t want the other kind, either.

She’s being responsible, here. A real grownup. She’s drawing a boundary.

She eats another bite of the egg Lan Zhan made for her and okay, she’s a hypocrite. But it tastes good. After this, she’ll draw the boundary.

“Will you tell me next time?” Lan Zhan asks. “So I can help?”

She’s so nice Wei Ying is a little bit sick of her. She thinks about last night, about her sore stomach and her sweaty skin and the way she couldn’t even make herself come. Meanly, she wants to tell Lan Zhan all about it. Wants to ask Lan Zhan if she would’ve helped her with that, too. If she would’ve touched Wei Ying when she needed it, if she would’ve made Wei Ying’s body feel good.

She wants to make Lan Zhan say it out loud: that she doesn’t think of Wei Ying like that. That her kindness is tainted with pity, that Wei Ying is actually some kind of community-service project for her. An extra-credit opportunity for perfect Lan girls: take care of one (1) messed up roommate.

“You don’t have to take care of me, Lan Zhan,” Wei Ying says after a while.

“I do not have to,” Lan Zhan replies, and Wei Ying can’t tell if it’s one of her weird questions.

“Yeah,” she says, swirling her spoon through her congee like it’s a sand garden. “You got it.”

☾♡☽

Wei Ying spends Saturday in bed, sleeping and listening to a forensic linguistics podcast and filling four online shopping carts with expensive baby clothes. She sends the links to Yanli’s peacock, not really expecting a reply, but he messages her back almost immediately to say the frog hoodie was especially good. i ordered all of them.

By Sunday, the scab on Wei Ying’s belly has fallen away, leaving only a small pink mark, like an insect bite, behind.

Her anger from Friday has fallen away, too, and she’s forgiven Lan Zhan. It’s not Lan Zhan’s fault Wei Ying wants to cling to her like a kudzu vine and never let go. It’s not Lan Zhan’s fault she has a sensible brain and good taste and knows better than to mess around with Wei Ying.

After breakfast, Wei Ying goes on a perfectly friendly morning run with Lan Zhan, which means she follows her to the nearest park and naps on a bench while Lan Zhan does her usual laps. Afterwards, they feed the ducks in the pond with mostly-thawed peas and corn Lan Zhan brought from home.

“Don’t they like bread?” Wei Ying asks, just so that Lan Zhan will make a serious face at her and say, “Bread is not healthy for them.”

Wei Ying likes her so much. Her friend Lan Zhan. Lan Zhan, registered duck dietitian. Of course Wei Ying doesn’t need any more than what they have. What they have is good, is perfect.

She asks Lan Zhan where she got her degree, and Lan Zhan tells her very seriously about her duck health-sciences university and the courses she took and the nutritional profile of various pondweeds.

Wei Ying wishes she could record her, save some proof that Lan Zhan is really like this, so silly.

The grass is wet under their shoes and the sun is still pale and watery. The park is just starting to fill with people. Runners and dog-walkers, a few ambitious moms with early-rising children.

Wei Ying feels good. She thinks that the weather will be warm every day, now. No more seesawing between winter and spring. She tilts her face up towards the sun, squinting the blue sky into a tiny sliver, like if she can get it small enough she can tuck it under her eyelid and keep it forever.

She feels Lan Zhan watching her and smiles, scrunching up her nose, playing cute.

Wei Ying is cute. She’s cute and it’s spring and she wants to feel good and her body is her own again for a whole month.

So what if she’s still a horny mess? So what if she’s maybe in love with her best friend? She’s a good problem solver! She’s going to do her sex ritual soon, as soon as she knows how. She’s going to lose her virginity and then she’s going to fuck someone from Huaisang’s hookup app and she’s going to get over her acute horniness and her Lan Zhan-heartsickness all at once.

It might be the cleverest plan Wei Ying’s ever thought of. And right now it doesn’t even matter too much. Right now, all Wei Ying has to do is stand in the sun with Lan Zhan next to her, and the ducks in the pond in front of them dipping and diving for the last few kernels of corn.