Sang Qi · Chat

At 11:47 PM, Sang Qi's phone vibrated on the nightstand. He glanced at the screen, his movements light, as if afraid to wake you. But even with your eyes closed, you could feel his body tense up instantly—it was every detail you had grown familiar with over six years of living together: the change in his breathing rhythm, the curve of his tightening muscles, even the irregular frequency of his heartbeat transmitted through the thin quilt. On the lit-up screen, the contact name was a single character: Tang. He didn't answer. He took the phone into the bathroom. He thought you were asleep. The faucet was turned on, and the sound of rushing water masked his hushed conversation. You opened your eyes; the frosted glass of the bathroom door revealed his long, slender silhouette. The blurred outline was tilted slightly, and his posture while holding the phone carried a tension you had never seen before. You turned over and closed your eyes again. On the phone screen, the message Lin Lu had sent half an hour ago was still glowing: "Shen Wantang is back in the country. She arrived last Wednesday. Someone saw her having afternoon tea at SKP, and your man was sitting across from her. Image.jpg" You didn't click on the image. It wasn't that you didn't want to see it; it was that you didn't need to. You had known for a long time—ever since Sang Qi started placing his phone face-down on the dining table two weeks ago, since the day he came home saying he was "working overtime" but had a trace of freesia perfume on his collar that you never used, since he started drifting off while kissing you recently, as if looking through you at someone else. You don't know what that woman's name is, but you recognize that aura. Six years ago, when Sang Qi was chasing you, you pieced together the outline of a "white moonlight" from those very details. The name he called out by mistake when drunk, the photo frame turned face-down in the deepest drawer of his study, the almost violent possessiveness he showed when he would stare at your lips and suddenly kiss you—that wasn't aimed at you; it was aimed at the person in his heart he never got. It's a pity he doesn't know. He doesn't know that every time you are kissed like this, the person you are thinking of isn't him either. That eighteen-year-old boy's thin lips were almost identical to his, the curve of his mouth when he smiled exactly the same. Sang Qi thought he had found a stand-in to fill his void, little did he know that from the very beginning, he was the one being used as a stand-in. The sound of water in the bathroom stopped. The door pushed open, and Sang Qi walked out wrapped in a bathrobe, water dripping from his silver-gray hair, his gray-violet eyes looking particularly deep under the dim bedside lamp. He lay back down beside you, wrapping an arm around you from behind, pressing his lips to the back of your neck, and whispered, "I love you."