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“Show me the picture of the villa again,” Wei Ying demands, and Yanli indulgently pulls up her itinerary. The honeymoon is the only portion of wedding planning that doesn’t make Yanli go white at the edges of her lips when she thinks about it. Same is true for Wei Ying, but for different reasons.
The entire wedding apparatus makes Wei Ying feel vaguely nauseous and not at all like she’d felt when they’d been young and discussing their dream weddings under the covers when Wei Ying couldn’t sleep. Wei Ying blames the groom. It’s not even Jin Zixuan’s fault, it’s just his existence. In their childhood dreams, the wedding had a groom, but he was there mostly as a prop and he didn’t come with feelings, or worse yet, family. Planning as children was about them and what they thought; planning today is about other people. Madam Jin wants the banquet at Yi Ban, right on the Thames, never mind how annoying it’s going to be to ferry all of the guests there. “The only people going to both bits are family,” she’d argued, “and family will accept some inconvenience.” What about Yanli? Should she be that inconvenienced? She won’t be able to eat at all, Wei Ying worries. They don’t even live in London, they live in Manchester. All of Yanli’s friends are in Manchester, why should the wedding be in London at all? It feels awfully like Jin Zixuan’s family is coming in to take Yanli away. But Madam Yu just nodded and the topic was closed. Wei Ying tried to bring it up with Yanli, but she doesn’t want to upset anyone — doesn’t want to do anything that will put off the marriage. Wei Ying doesn’t understand why Uncle Fengmian and Madam Yu, who never let anyone tell them what to do, are so willing to concede on every point. Wei Ying knows from long experience that there’s no amount of suggestions she can give that will be accepted, so why is everything so conciliatory now?
It feels like the Jins are pushing into their family and the Jiangs are happy enough to let them.
Wei Ying wakes up gasping, imagining being stabbed with pins for rose gold dress fittings.
Jiang Cheng finds her in the kitchen at three in the morning whisking egg whites with a hand mixer over a water bath on the stove. “Could you be any louder,” he says. She’d apologise, but she knows Madam Yu takes sleeping pills and Uncle Fengmian wears earplugs to block her snoring, so she was only ever in danger of waking Jiang Cheng up.
“How can you sleep at a time like this?” she asks, keeping her eyes on the stove. Keeping eyes on the stove is critical since the Great Fire Incident. She’d had to wheedle for months to be allowed back in the kitchen, which was a hardship beyond any reasonable limit since baking is her only true joy in life. She’d taught herself to bake using Youtube tutorials and from books taken out of the library and every time she’d turned the oven on Yu-ayi had looked at her like she was setting the timer for a bomb. But she’d only ever started a fire once! The rest of the time she’d turned out quite decent cakes and treats.
Jiang Cheng cranes around the edge of the stove to look her in the face, eyes bleary with sleep but still managing to look her over critically. “What’s working you up?”
Wei Ying makes a noise somewhere between a snarl and whimper and gestures helplessly. She means to encompass the wedding and how no one is looking out for Yanli, but Jiang Cheng takes it differently.
Jiang Cheng sighs. “Why are you even living here? I know it twists you up.” Wei Ying stares at him. That is a question, isn’t it. There’s no real reason for her to live here, not since she turned eighteen. She’d already been off at uni and living in student accommodation arranged by her college. She’s been graduated for months now, though, and no one is leaping out of bushes to arrange anything for her. Even Uncle Fengmian had been surprised when she’d moved back in, breezily putting her books back on the shelf of a room that smelled more like a guest room than hers. They wouldn’t send her away, she doesn’t think. Who would force a single woman to live on her own in the city? It’s not that she ever felt entitled. She is grateful and tries to show it, but it feels different now than when she was young and trying but failing to stay out of trouble. If she got into a fight with Sarah on the football pitch and Madam Yu had to come collect her, she felt guilty, but she’d take the punishment. If she did something now, it wouldn’t be anyone’s responsibility to come collect her at all. A smell comes to her nose and she whips her head back around to paw at the stove dial and turn the gas off. Then she leans over and opens the window for good measure.
“Why do you live here?” she retorts. Weak, but it is the middle of the night.
“I don’t. I’m just here for the wedding and then I’m off for my banking internship.” Wei Ying notes, with not a little fondness, the proud rise of his shoulders when he says it. She’d forgotten, though. His prestigious internship, the leadup to his return for a Master’s in finance.
It’s just Wei Ying who is drifting.
***
The wedding is beautiful and Wei Ying only cries a little. Okay, she cries a lot, but not as much as Jiang Cheng, who sobs his way through drunkenly attempting to karaoke 讓我歡喜讓我憂. Truly an embarrassment.
The other amazing thing is that Lan Zhan is at the wedding! Wei Ying hasn’t seen Lan Zhan since Wei Ying left for Cambridge. She looks, if possible, taller, which is unfair because Wei Ying is actually wearing heels, some little strappy gold sandals to go with her rose gold slippery dress.
But it’s the way Lan Zhan carries herself, so straight and tall in the neck and shoulders, the product of years of dance. You can almost see the string coming out of the top of her head that connects her to the sky and allows her to spin and spin, perfectly stable. Wei Ying used to crash her dance recitals, was thrilled every time by the contrast of the ethereal way she could float across the stage and the loud thump it made every time she landed. Her eyes and her ears were telling her two separate things. Her eyes said ‘this is elegant and ethereal’ and her ears said ‘this is raw and effortful.’ The physicality of the artistry did her head in.
It’s the same way now. Lan Zhan looks effortlessly elegant in her blue dress and done-up hair, her small silver earrings that match her necklace, but Wei Ying spent three hours getting beaten into submission by a professional hair and makeup person and she knows just how much work goes into looking as put together as Lan Zhan does right now. It’s not that Wei Ying is a slob! It’s just that she only thinks about finishing touches on her bakes, not her body. She’s not a petit-four, she’s a person. But Lan Zhan looks good enough to stand pride of place in any patisserie window.
Later, she’ll wonder if that’s what gave her the idea.
“Lan Zhan!” Wei Ying exclaims.
“Wei Ying,” Lan Zhan says and Wei Ying shivers. Before she can say anything else, it’s her turn for the karaoke machine, imperious wave letting her know that she’s already late. But she’s not ready to be done with Lan Zhan yet so she grabs her hand and drags Lan Zhan with her.
***
The next morning she wakes up hungover in her hotel room. Her head pulses with the slow awareness that Yanli is on a boat sailing her way to the Mediterranean. For a moment it feels like she’s the one at sea, like this bed is the only thing steady in a world that’s sliding from side to side.
The ground never settles fully after that. She stumbles her way back to Manchester and she watches at angles as Jiang Cheng packs himself up and heads to London a week later. He takes a bit of her with him, tucked somewhere in amongst his ridiculous suits and unnecessarily heavy pens. She’s not sure what, exactly, is missing now, but it feels like the matching hole to the one that opened up in her when she went to university for the first time. She imagines them inside of her, the parabolic curve of their emptiness. How many more of these could she fit inside before she lost structural integrity and cracked into her component parts?
Well, I’m dramatic in the mornings, she thinks and spits out her toothpaste.
She goes back to her room. Today is probably a good day for her grey shirt, the one with the embroidered smiley face on it. She paws through her drawers briefly before remembering that it was in her suitcase, still packed from the wedding. All my favourite things are in there, she thinks. Fancy that.
Her fingers pick up her phone almost without conscious thought.
***
The next day she’s standing in St. Pancras station, fingers clutching the handle of her rollerbag with one hand and her phone with the other, standing up on the tip toes of her trainers and searching for Lan Zhan. She’s there early enough, having put in a significant amount of buffer time in case Avanti West Coast decided to put some excitement into her day with rail delays. It was a quick hustle from Euston station to St. Pancras and now she has nothing to do but wait. Needless to say, it’s been a long day, and she’s already a little bit sweaty and rumpled. It’s amazing that the simple act of getting on and off a train should be so exerting.
Looking for Lan Zhan turns out to be pointless because it is immediately obvious when Lan Zhan appears. There’s something about her that gets the crowd to part, putting a small bubble around her as the crowd subconsciously shifts to one side or the other. Possibly they can’t believe someone this beautiful can exist. She’s in a sensible travelling outfit of jeans and a blue windbreaker, but on her it looks high fashion. People must ask to take her picture for their streetwear Instas all the time.
It’s not that Wei Ying looks bad! She made an effort for the trip, wearing a sundress with strawberries on it because even though she’ll be travelling for the entire day, she knows people on the continent tend to dress smarter and she wants to start off right.
“Let’s go,” Wei Ying says. She knows the platform. They can stand there and wait, maybe get some packaged sandwiches or something if they’re feeling the need.
“Is Nie Huaisang already there?” Lan Zhan asks in her melodic voice. Wei Ying freezes.
She remembers now. Her message last night had read: GIRLS HOLIDAY!!!! 💖✨💖✨When? Tomorrow! Let’s go to Paris 🥖🇫🇷🥐🗼
They’d gone back and forth for a bit for Wei Ying to prove she wasn’t joking and when Lan Zhan had seemed interested, Wei Ying may have implied that Nie Huaisang was also going. In her defense! She’s pretty sure she meant to also invite Huaisang but then she forgot. It was a bit of a blur of booking things, she couldn’t be expected to keep track of all the details.
“She couldn’t make it,” Wei Ying says, strangled. “Too busy.”
Lan Zhan nods. She doesn’t seem too broken up about it or like she’s about to turn around and walk out, so Wei Ying decides to breeze past this hiccough.
They start walking. Wei Ying’s bag bumps and skips along the ground. “Have you ever taken the Eurostar? Or gone to France? I haven’t. It’s silly, isn’t it? With it being so close and all? I realised I’ve only taken big trips, the whole family flying to China.” She realises she’s babbling and cuts herself off. There had been quite a few coffees involved in making her get up on time for the train.
“I have been to Paris,” Lan Zhan says. “I went with classmates who wanted to study the art.”
“Oh, like in the Louvre?”
Lan Zhan’s eyes cut to her. “Musee D’Orsay mostly,” she corrects.
Wei Ying feels herself flush. “Right, of course. Better art there, for sure.” They get to the platform. Wei Ying likes the big glass arch of the space. It’s impressive now and she thinks about how impressive it must have been when it was first built and people weren’t used to things made out of glass and steel. She wonders if they thought it would fall down on them, or if they trusted the math involved. Arches are very stable, exceptionally elegant and simple — of the 3D volumetric shapes, the one that is the easiest to graph out.
She gets so caught up in her thoughts and the mindless shuffle of the border control line she almost bumps into the automatic passport reader gate. “European citizens only,” the uniformed man says and she holds up her British passport weakly. Horrible visions of getting detained by the Home Office enter her mind, but she manages to scramble and get it scanned.
***
Their hotel is walking distance from the Gare du Nord. Wei Ying basically did a Google search for hotels within a radius, found one that accepted next day online bookings and, poof, hotel.
The three straight flights up a spiral staircase are dizzying and not ideal, but she supposes that’s what to expect on something booked at the last minute. She uses her key to open the room door and — “Oh no.” Lan Zhan cranes around her. The room itself is fine, pretty dingy. There’s a water stain on the ceiling and the carpet is brown and rough, but the major issue is — “They made a mistake. There’s supposed to be two beds.” It’s important that Lan Zhan knows she didn’t do this on purpose.
She rushes back down, one hand on the wall to keep herself from spinning off into space, but when she gets down there the clerk is gone. There’s a handwritten sign that she thinks means he’s out for dinner. Well, that’s great. What if there’s a burglar?
Wei Ying trudges back up the stairs, which haven’t improved on her ninth flight of them. They get so narrow at the centre that they’re shorter than even her small feet.
She’s panting slightly when she gets back. Lan Zhan, for her part, is looking around the room. Her lips are pursed slightly.
The room on second look is even more pathetic than Wei Ying remembered.
“No luck?” Lan Zhan asks.
Wei Ying shakes her head. “I’ll try later.”
Lan Zhan nods and casually says, “You can take a shower while you wait.”
Wei Ying wants to shower desperately. She’s sweated through her dress and she can feel it sticking between her thighs, under her breasts. If she was at home she might just roll up a towel and shove it under there, give them a bit of a break, but she’s in a terrible hotel room in Paris with Lan Zhan, who looks like if her body even dared to sweat it would be more of a glisten than anything else.
“Oh, I couldn’t possibly…” She trails off under Lan Zhan’s gaze and turns around and goes straight into the bathroom.
The less said about the bathroom, the better.
She comes out wrapped in a towel and Lan Zhan takes two strides over to her and presses — oh, her phone. Yu-ayi is calling. She swipes up with fingers that are cold from the water.
The lecture is comprehensive. How dare Wei Ying leave the country with only a note? She’ll make people think that Wei Ying is uncared for. And what if something happened to Wei Ying alone, far from home?
“I’m with Lan Zhan,” Wei Ying manages. She’s shrunk into herself, sitting on the bed with her knees up to her chest. Lan Zhan is sitting at the foot of the bed, delicately looking away, a polite fiction considering the size of the room.
Yu-ayi pauses. “Lan Qiren’s niece?”
Wei Ying nods. Then she pulls in air to say, “Yes.”
Another pause. “I remember her being very sensible.”
“She is, she’s so sensible.” Lan Zhan is getting her Master’s in music composition, something she’d said she’d do as soon as she’d started uni. Lan Zhan made a plan and did it. She’s doing everything Wei Ying was supposed to do and didn’t.
“Send me the address and phone number of the hotel you’re at. And I want a text every day,” Yu-ayi says.
“Of course,” Wei Ying says, stomach cramping with relief.
“If it was ‘of course’ you would have done it in the first place,” Yu-ayi says, sharp.
“Yes, right, I’m sorry.” Wei Ying is more than happy to agree.
Yu-ayi humphs. But she ends the call.
Wei Ying lists sideways. She lets her fingers go a bit limp on the phone, it falls but Wei Ying isn’t looking, she’s got her eyes closed.
“Wei Ying,” Lan Zhan says.
Wei Ying cracks an eye and Lan Zhan is very close, like very, because she’s dropping her windbreaker on Wei Ying’s torso. This could not get more embarrassing. Obviously when she laid down her towel slipped. She’s been flashing Lan Zhan her tits and she’s been airing all of her family laundry.
“Whoops, sorry,” she says, and wraps the jacket around her. “Well,” she says, and stops.
“You should sleep,” Lan Zhan says. “You’re tired.”
Wei Ying is tired. “Where?” She gestures at the room and shares a self-deprecating smile.
Lan Zhan sighs, and Wei Ying cannot disappoint her. She thinks harder. “Wait,” she squeaks. “You mean here?”
Lan Zhan nods and walks over to her suitcase, flipping it onto its side and pulling out pajamas. She walks off into the bathroom with them and her toothbrush and leaves Wei Ying, naked aside from her windbreaker, on the bed. Their bed, Wei Ying supposes. Lan Zhan can’t come back and find her like this, so she gets up and finds her pajamas. They’re just a pair of cotton shorts and a tank top because she can’t sleep if she gets too warm.
Then she figures she shouldn’t be hovering next to the bed, waiting to invite Lan Zhan into it — come in, I’ve turned it down for you. She shudders and flips the cover down to slide inside. The rough fabric catches and pulls at her clothes and she straightens her shirt straps where they’ve been pulled out of place.
Once she’s lying down, the exhaustion does catch up to her, a tiredness that cannot be explained by the paltry distance she has travelled.
She hears the water turn off and she struggles to open her eyes and acknowledge Lan Zhan, but she barely gets a glimpse of a water drop falling from Lan Zhan’s hair to her collarbone before Lan Zhan presses a hand to her shoulder. “Shh,” Lan Zhan says, “you can sleep,” and Wei Ying does.
***
When she wakes up she has three realisations in quick succession:
- She never asked Lan Zhan which side of the bed she likes, she just took hers like an inconsiderate jerk.
- It’s bright in the room so it’s probably late in the morning, way later than Lan Zhan, who runs for fun, tends to get up.
- Which is a problem, because she has absolutely wrapped her arms and legs around Lan Zhan, basically holding her hostage to Wei Ying’s sleep schedule.
“Mrrp,” Wei Ying says and attempts to retract her arms.
“Morning, Wei Ying,” Lan Zhan says and she’s laughing at Wei Ying, the jerk. Lan Zhan lifts Wei Yings arms and rolls out of bed, stretching her arms above her head. The muscles of her shoulders bunch and flex as she does it. Lan Zhan looks over her shoulder at Wei Ying, a piece of her hair falling into her eyes. “What do you want to do first?”
“Oh,” Wei Ying says. She swallows.
***
Wei Ying wants breakfast from one of the little open window boulangeries that she’s heard about. “You just walk up and get a coffee and a croissant!” It’s all very straightforward, though the lady is less than impressed with her heroic attempt at French. “Une croissant, s’il vous plaît,” she says and the lady snorts and hands it all over. Wei Ying doesn’t care. She rips into the croissant rather than biting it, counting the layers.
“What are you doing?” Lan Zhan asks. Wei Ying starts, but the question isn’t judgmental, just curious.
“The more laminated the dough is, the more layers, so I’m just seeing how well constructed this one is,” Wei Ying explains, pointing at each layer to show Lan Zhan, worrying them apart with her pinky finger so they really stand out.
“How is this one?” Lan Zhan takes a bite of her own croissant. A crumb falls onto her shirt. It’s a baby blue slightly cropped top that she’s paired with a high-waisted A-line skirt, so there’s only the barest sliver of skin that sometimes flashes at her waistline.
Wei Ying considers. “It’s all right.” Slightly disappointing, but perhaps a random stall wasn’t the place to check for world-class croissants. “Better than Pret.”
“What do you want to do next?” Lan Zhan asks, a very reasonable question.
Wei Ying chews on the corner of her bottom lip. One of the — many — issues with an impromptu trip is that absolutely nothing is planned. If this was a lads holiday she presumes they’d spend the entire time drinking, possibly getting high depending on their location, and being the reason British tourists have an absolutely shit reputation. She cannot imagine doing that with Lan Zhan.
“Some touristy stuff?”
Turns out the line to get into Notre Dame is very long and no one has time for that. But Sainte-Chapelle is gorgeous, floor to ceiling stained glass on three sides. Wei Ying tries to take pictures of it for her Insta, but she can’t capture the quality of the light, the way the air seems to glow with colour. She tunes out the guide’s explanation and his disdain for the cocks inlaid in the floor and walks from place to place.
She’s still thinking about it when they stumble out into the warmth. It’s early lunch for Paris but peak lunch for tourists, so the crowds have thickened, people crowding onto patios and lurking in clumps waiting for their turn.
Eating in a touristy place is for chumps, so they take the train to the Eiffel Tower. In Wei Ying’s defense, she thought that it would be less crowded. She didn’t realise the Eiffel Tower was part of a massive park and constituted a food desert. They haven’t even gotten to the tower and she’s feeling a little grouchy already. She decides to buy a Coke and it’s five euro? She understands that the tourist industry is about sucking out the maximum amount of money — which is what the aunties say before they drive for an hour away from any tourist destination in Beijing before they’ll let anyone out. Still!
She sips from her bottle resentfully.
“Are you hungry?” Lan Zhan asks. Wei Ying is feeling sweaty again but Lan Zhan seems as unruffled as yesterday. It’s distinctly unfair.
“No, I’m fine,” Wei Ying says stubbornly. She’s not going to be the one who makes them pull over — Jiang Cheng — because of low blood sugar. “Don’t you sweat?”
Lan Zhan raises an eyebrow. “I sweat,” Lan Zhan says and Wei Ying yanks her train of thought away from that. “Here,” Lan Zhan says and reaches into her purse and pulls out a packed container of almonds.
They do the “I couldn’t possibly” — “I insist” dance and then Wei Ying is happily munching on almonds. They stand on a patch of grass and snack together, fingers tangling in the container as they chase individual nuts around the edges. Thus fortified, Wei Ying is ready to brave the Eiffel Tower.
Tickets aren’t too expensive. “I’m a youth, Lan Zhan,” Wei Ying says with some delight, craning her head to read the sign as the line inches forward. But once they get to the front Wei Ying’s poor planning crashes into them again. “Not for three hours?” Wei Ying gasps. She can hear the people behind her in the line shift angrily. She knows she’s holding them up and it makes her heart beat faster. Three hours is so long. She’s going to make Lan Zhan wait that long.
“Lan Zhan,” she starts, “maybe we shouldn’t —”
“Do you wish to see the top?” Lan Zhan asks and Wei Ying is too discomfited to demur, so she says yes and Lan Zhan buys the tickets, tapping her card against the reader before Wei Ying realises what’s going on.
They walk off, tickets acquired and three hours to kill.
She sighs.
“Wei Ying,” Lan Zhan sounds uncharacteristically tentative. “We do not have to return to the Eiffel Tower.”
Wei Ying blinks. “But we bought tickets.”
“You seemed unsure and I—” Lan Zhan still sounds a little off. Wei Ying wants to give her a hug but refrains. “I was forceful. If I pushed you, I apologise.”
Wei Ying laughs and reaches out to squeeze Lan Zhan’s hand. “Oh, don’t worry! It was helpful, sometimes I get a bit silly.”
Lan Zhan looks like she wants to argue. Wei Ying squeezes her fingers in reassurance. “You want to go up to the top?” Lan Zhan asks to confirm.
“Well, yeah,” Wei Ying says. “I mean, it’s romantic, isn’t it?” She realises she’s still holding Lan Zhan’s hand and drops it. She clears her throat. “Well, we’ve got three hours, what do we do?” She takes a moment to send off her ‘I’m alive!’ text to Yu-ayi.
In the absence of anything specific to do, they start walking east. They consider walking along the Seine, but if they end up back at Notre Dame Wei Ying thinks she will lose it from the inefficiency, so they walk vaguely southwards as well, deeper into the 15th arrondissement. They’re meandering past buildings, a lot of whom seem very similar to each other. Wei Ying had perhaps been expecting more architectural variation from a city that is considered to be beautiful but they haven’t gone very far. Or maybe they have — it feels like an odd city to tell distances in.
Wei Ying casually looks at the shops as they walk by. There are so many bakeries and cafes and shops that seem to sell only umbrellas. She wonders what it would be like living here, having this quality and variety of baked goods at her fingertips. Would she have wanted to bake more or less?
Lan Zhan touches Wei Ying’s elbow gently and Wei Ying pauses. “Yes?”
“You want to go in,” she says.
Wei Ying can only stare. Yes, that particular bakery did look especially tempting, but how did Lan Zhan know? Even Wei Ying isn’t sure why she’s interested. The awning is a plain grey, the tasteful yellow and black sign proclaiming it the Maison Landemaine.
They step inside and Wei Ying is blinded by the array of pastries and breads. It’s like being back in Sainte-chapelle, breads of every colour shining and reflecting back at her.
The proprietor looks up at them when they come in but doesn’t say anything.
“Which one do you want?” Lan Zhan asks and Wei Ying realises she’s reached out her hands. The proprietor startles slightly when she speaks.
Wei Ying’s eyes dance between tarts, and palmiers, and baguettes, and pain du chocolat. She looks up at Lan Zhan, unsure. Lan Zhan isn’t looking at the pastries, she’s looking at Wei Ying. Maybe she can use whatever psychic powers she used to figure out that Wei Ying wanted to come in to tell what Wei Ying wants.
“What do you want?” Wei Ying flips the question back at her.
Lan Zhan walks up to the counter and starts pointing at things. She picks out an apple tarte, the apples arrayed like rose petals. She points at something called a Kougloff, and to two others, a chocolate choux confection and a pain aux raisins. It’s too much. “You’re hungry,” Lan Zhan says when Wei Ying stares at her.
Wei Ying orders some avocado toast, doing excessive pointing. Possibly the proprietor speaks English, but Wei Ying isn’t taking her chances. They have to have a savoury to go with this gluttonous display.
There’s nowhere to sit inside, so they retreat to a park across the street from the train stop.
They sit on the floor and before Wei Ying can stop her, Lan Zhan takes off her cardigan and lays it on the grass as a makeshift blanket to cushion their baked treasures from the dirt.
“You’ll get cold,” Wei Ying warns, despite the way exertion has made her feel overheated. She looks closely at Lan Zhan. There is a slight pink edge to her cheeks, but Wei Ying resolves to keep a close eye on her, make sure that she isn’t shivering, that her skin doesn’t start to go tight from the chill.
Wei Ying reaches for the Kougloff. She wants to tear into it and see what the crumb is like. Lan Zhan touches her wrist. “Do you want to take a picture for Instagram first?”
“Oh, good idea, I always take pictures of baked goods.”
“I know,” Lan Zhan says and then she shifts minutely. Wei Ying stares at her arms, searching for gooseflesh, but there isn’t any.
Wei Ying pauses. “You don’t follow me on Insta.” Wei Ying checked. They’re Facebook friends, have been forever, but no one posts anything real there.
“You link to your posts, sometimes. When you bake things.” Lan Zhan shifts again but she still doesn’t seem to be cold.
That’s true. If she’s especially proud of a sticky rice and pork strudel, or a chili and honey biscuit, she’ll post it. “Oh, you can add me now! Then I’ll follow you back.” Immediately she realises what a bad idea that is. Lan Zhan has been off her phone all day, dutifully looking around the city instead of scrolling through apps, but if she opens up Insta she’ll see that Nie Huaisang has updated her story with a series of ‘experiments’ she did to see if there was a way to get toast to land butter side up. All of them are captioned ‘I’m so bored 🤪’ and if Lan Zhan sees that, the jig is up.
“Er, let’s do that after, I’m going to eat now.” She snaps a couple of perfunctory pics and then reaches into the cardigan of delight. At the last second her hand swerves to the pain au raisin. It’s spiralled up, more like a palmier than a croissant, and Wei Ying can see the layers from here. Her eyes shine. “See, Lan Zhan? The layers? I’ve got something similar to this at home but it took so long and my shaping wasn’t nearly this skilled.” It had sort of fallen out of its curl and been a bit more blob shaped, but it still tasted good, according to Yanli.
Lan Zhan picks up the chocolate one. Wei Ying would not have guessed that Lan Zhan is the one with the sweet tooth and she’s delighted. Lan Zhan takes a small nibble before putting it down.
“Wei Ying, you love baking, why not pursue it?”
“It’s just a hobby,” Wei Ying explains. She likes to bake, likes that it’s a thing with no expectations on it. Does everything have to mean something? It’s the one thing no one is watching her do. She laughs. “Can you imagine, though? Wei Ying, maths graduate from Cambridge, taking a catering course? Yu-ayi would adopt me just to disown me.”
Lan Zhan looks stubborn. “Cherish Finden is a pastry chef and she’s successful.”
Wei Ying’s laugh stutters, chest turning cold. “That’s different.”
“How is it different?”
Her laughter dies like a door slamming shut. “It is and you know it.” She’s annoyed and she doesn’t want to be annoyed with Lan Zhan. "I'm not supposed to be a pastry chef."
"What are you supposed to be?"
That’s the problem, isn't it. She doesn't know.
With her math course, she put up with endless jokes that her career would be presenting on Countdown. It’s true that the course wasn’t particularly practical, but it didn’t seem that many of them were, and no one ever gave the students studying psychology or biology the same treatment. There was something about Wei Ying loving the elegance of figures that made her a curiosity worth laughing at. If she tried to explain, it was worse. When are you going to give up this ridiculous course? she would be asked. And she’d tried to say that it was beautiful, that math was a puzzle, that other disciplines were built on its work, but only on the shallowest levels. Physics and Computer Science relied on mathematical principles, but only an advanced mathematician knew that the maths as those other disciplines understood it could be further manipulated or broken down. When Wei Ying approached a problem, she turned the universe inside out. How could she be satisfied by simply learning the rules and applying them to situations when she could work through them, twist and shape the rules into something new? She’d have been wasted on the law — yes, she liked arguing, that wasn’t an argument, Jiang Cheng. She could argue with math better than she could with the baroque legal system.
And it had been enough. It had been "And this is Wei Ying, she's studying at Cambridge," and the aunties had oohed. But now it was "And what, Wei Ying, are you going to do with the rest of your life?"
Rest of her life? She can't even plan the rest of this trip. She bites into the pain au raisin viciously. It shatters in her mouth, shards of pastry seeking out her gums and lips.
***
The Eiffel Tower is an exercise in jostling and tightly packed spaces, but Wei Ying has elbows and years of training, so they get through it pretty easily. Part of the trick is to not get separated, so they keep a hand on each other at all times, the small of the back, the elbow, grabbing a purse strap if all else fails. Wei Ying keeps an eye on Lan Zhan and on Lan Zhan’s purse, helpfully reminded by all the ‘beware of pickpocket’ signs plastered in several languages.
When they get to the top, Wei Ying can’t help herself: she rushes up to the mesh cage and tangles her fingers in it, pressing her face close. “Oh, wow,” she says. Lan Zhan stands behind her, pressed along her back in deference to the crush of people. Wei Ying shivers, the heat of Lan Zhan so extreme against the sudden chill of the wind from up top. “You can see the shadow.” She points at the ground. The dark echo of the Eiffel Tower stretches all the way to the Seine.
Paris is so interesting from up here. Wei Ying has been taken to enough of the fancy bars in the Shard by an anxious Jin Zixuan looking to impress to have a good sense of what London looks like from a bird’s eye view. London is a chaotic mess of spikes and spires and random gaps. Paris, in contrast, looks like a big wheel. The buildings are big uniform white blocky things and the roads are massive, like several elephants could walk down them abreast comfortably. It’s an interesting topological effect.
“Give me your hand,” Wei Ying says. Lan Zhan sticks her hand up. Wei Ying makes half a heart, her thumb pointing down and fingers curling over and waits. Lan Zhan’s hand floats in the air, unmoving. “No, like this,” Wei Ying says, and carefully curls Lan Zhan’s hand into position. Wei Ying takes a picture like that, the two halves of their heart pressing together, Paris below them.
***
This time Wei Ying thinks it’s okay to walk along the Seine. She still doesn’t have any ideas of what to do, and it feels a bit late for a museum or other culturally enriching affair, but the city is pretty enough. Especially in this golden light as the sun starts to kiss the horizon, turning the sky orange at the edges.
The edge of the water is all concrete and there are these occasional big crescents in it, like small amphitheatres or fingernail gouges made by a giant. Wei Ying looks down into them as they walk. There’s a bookseller in one, tables laid out with paperbacks. Another has some people painting, maybe it’s a class. The next one they hear before they see it, slightly flattened bass coming out of a boombox. Wei Ying doesn’t recognise the music; it sounds like salsa or something Latin, but she can tell it’s for dancing.
She’s right. There’s a group of people, maybe about twenty, all pairing up and moving together, hands in hands and on waists. Wei Ying can tell who’s in charge, a woman with thighs that barely fit into her jeans, the sort that could crush a watermelon if she put her mind to it. She’s speaking with a few people, moving around the groups and offering some notes. Then she taps a random man on the shoulder and he turns and suddenly they’re dancing. Wei Ying doesn’t know how it happened, the transition invisible.
“Wei Ying?” Lan Zhan asks. Wei Ying was chatting happily about something random, not really paying attention, and then she stopped.
She can’t tear her eyes away.
The dancing woman, the leader, makes eye contact with Wei Ying and she feels pulled in. She starts to step down the big stone steps. “Bonjour,” Wei Ying tries.
Pretty quickly Wei Ying’s French is outclassed, and it turns out the woman’s name is Pilar and she speaks Spanish so they give up on language altogether. But they don’t need it. Pilar shows her some basic moves, where to put her hands and when Wei Ying gets it, she spins her out and into Lan Zhan’s arms.
“You caught me,” Wei Ying says.
They’re very close together. Lan Zhan’s eyes bore into Wei Ying’s, bright and glowing and Wei Ying can’t quite see herself in them, can only see Lan Zhan. Lan Zhan takes a step forward and Wei Ying barely manages to take the step back. Right. They’re dancing. She has to stay on her toes.
Lan Zhan makes it easy for her, tugging and twisting to the heavy beats. Their bodies drag and bump as they move and Wei Ying can feel her skirt press against her legs and Lan Zhan slides one slightly in-between.
And that’s a slow song. The next one is faster, more drums with the bass and they move and move together. There are people around them and Wei Ying worries about a mid-dance collision but Lan Zhan’s got her, steering her around and through the space.
The sun sinks a little, catching sparks in Lan Zhan’s hair, orange glow on the black.
It doesn’t feel like long at all until the music cuts off, song fading out into nothing. Even in the silence they stay pressed together for a long moment. “See,” Lan Zhan says, “I sweat.” She smiles, wicked, all with the left side of her mouth.
She does. There’s a bead of sweat dripping down Lan Zhan’s temple, tracing a path as it comes to rest in the now shiny hollow of Lan Zhan’s throat.
They disengage.
The group is apparently going to head to a bar to drink. Wei Ying perks up. They haven’t done any nightlife or wine or whatever it is people do in Paris. She looks over at Lan Zhan. And then she thinks about how Lan Zhan gave her almonds, and got her to the top of the Eiffel tower, and picked out the pastries Wei Ying wanted. She’d go with Wei Ying to drink, but she wouldn’t like it.
So Wei Ying demurs and shares her regrets and she and Lan Zhan walk off in the twilight.
***
After dinner they head back to the hotel.
Their hotel is in an old building, inasmuch as anything in Paris is old — it’s a shockingly new city in many ways. Didn’t the Romans live here? Why is everything built in the last two hundred years? Lan Zhan probably knows.
“I’ll just tell them we need a second room,” Wei Ying says when they step into the lobby, pleased with herself for remembering before the receptionist decided to step out again. Lan Zhan frowns.
It’s basically like checking in again and Wei Ying fills in the forms. When she reaches into her purse to give them her credit card so they can pre-charge the room, her fingers fumble against each other in the space where her wallet should be. No, she thinks and starts to search her purse more desperately. She ends up turning the whole thing out on the counter while the receptionist eyes her. Fuck. Her wallet is definitely gone. She pulls out her phone, she just has to see —
Oh no. Her eyes blur a little looking down at her banking app, and her one, very maxed out credit card.
By this point Lan Zhan can tell something’s wrong. “My wallet,” Wei Ying says. “My credit card.”
Lan Zhan’s brows are furrowed and her lips are slightly parted. Wei Ying wants to rush forward and collapse against Lan Zhan’s chest. No. She’s an adult. She can hold it together. She wraps her arms around herself. “I can’t pay for the room,” she whispers.
This catches the attention of the receptionist.
“I will pay for the room,” Lan Zhan says. And to the receptionist, “you already have my card on file,” and then she bundles Wei Ying up the endless spiral staircase.
Wei Ying’s feet and fingers are numb by the time Lan Zhan unlocks the door. “I have to call the bank,” she says through buzzing lips. She unlocks her phone and taps the ‘call us’ button in her app, pushing through the automated phone tree as best as she can. “Compromised credit card,” she says. And then again when the machine doesn’t understand her, the words coming out too garbled.
The phone asks her to read out her client card information and she tries to talk back to the robot, like it can hear her, “No, see, I lost my wallet, I don’t know the number, I —”
That’s when Lan Zhan stands in front of her. “I can’t do it,” Wei Ying says. Lan Zhan puts out her hand and Wei Ying slaps her phone into it. She’s going to have to tell everyone that she couldn’t hang onto her possessions, that she got herself pick-pocketed.
Lan Zhan handles the questions efficiently, which is slightly surprising since they are Wei Ying’s security questions. Lan Zhan easily answers Wei Ying’s birthdate, her primary school, and her mother’s maiden name — what an obvious question to anyone who doesn’t come from a tradition of marital name changing. Lan Zhan explains that she, Wei Ying, is abroad and her card was compromised. Wei Ying can’t hear the other side of the conversation, but she strains for it and she can tell it isn’t going as easily as Wei Ying would want it to when Lan Zhan shifts. “Yes, I am in Paris,” she says. “No, I did not go to Disneyland. Those are not my charges.” They’re arguing with her? Of course they don’t believe her, of course Wei Ying’s purchase history makes her look like someone who would go to France to max out her card at Disney. Wei Ying’s eyes burn and she tunes the rest of the conversation out.
Lan Zhan hangs up.
“Did they reverse the charges?” Wei Ying asks, prepared for the answer.
“Yes,” Lan Zhan says and Wei Ying bursts into tears. Lan Zhan’s eyes widen and Wei Ying turns away. She presses her hands against her mouth, trying to be quiet, but she knows she’s making these little high-pitched noises that would hurt an animal’s ears.
It feels like everything is landing on her. Months of not knowing what to do with her life, the palpable disappointment wafting off of everyone she knows when she tells them that. Everyone wants her to have it figured out, to have goals and a plan for reaching them. To have a career. Two months ago she was cramming to write final papers and somewhere in there she was supposed to line up the next forty years of her life. She doesn’t know how to do that. And the worst part is, everyone else around her seems to. Yanli got married, and Jiang Cheng got a job, and one by one her classmates are off to bigger things, except for Wei Ying.
Lan Zhan pulls Wei Ying down to sit on the edge of the bed, sits next to her, close enough that it warps the mattress and Wei Ying slides in a little closer to her.
“Wei Ying, what’s wrong?” Lan Zhan asks and Wei Ying is so pathetically grateful that Lan Zhan didn’t tell her to calm down, didn’t tell her that everything is okay, that it all just spills out.
“I’m so good at all of these useless things,” she says, encompassing music, and school, and sport. Everything she’s wanted to pick up she’s been good at, good enough to be cheeky about it. And for so long that had been good enough, everything she’d excelled at she was measured against. Even as Yu-ayi resented it, hers were the types of accomplishments that go approving nods when they were listed out: top of her class, football captain, grade eight flute. Who could ask for anything more? And that was true for twenty years. True, until it suddenly wasn’t. Now, “Good at stupid stuff that doesn’t matter because I’m so terrible at life.” Now she’s falling behind at all these measures she didn’t know existed. People are getting married, and leaving, or being actual doctors and working a thousand hours a day but pleased with it and she’s just… stuck. Even this trip, this tiny hop across water that is so small people can swim across it, she’s struggling.
“I couldn’t even ask you to come with me, like a normal person,” she says, sobbing again into Lan Zhan’s shoulder. “I made up this whole thing about it being a girl’s trip, and lying that Huaisang couldn’t come, and any minute now you’ll check your Insta and see she’s just lounging on her couch trying out all of the new dairy free Ben and Jerry’s flavours she got shipped to her. Why am I so useless,” she sobs harder. Lan Zhan had to make the phone call for her! She couldn’t even talk to her own bank!
“You are not useless,” Lan Zhan says firmly. Wei Ying can’t hear that. She burrows into Lan Zhan’s shoulder. “I wanted to come because you were going, not because it was a girl’s trip. And Wei Ying —” Lan Zhan pushes Wei Ying back by her shoulders until Wei Ying is forced to lift her head. “It’s been fun. I don’t regret it. You have made it fun.”
Wei Ying stares at Lan Zhan dumbly. Has it been fun? It had some fun moments. Dancing was fun. Eating pastries was fun. Even parts of the Eiffel Tower were fun, though Wei Ying is convinced this is where she got robbed, so it does take a bit of the shine off. Wei Ying sniffles.
“Okay,” she says. “Wait.” Her brain is slowly catching up. “You wanted to come because of me?”
Lan Zhan shifts in her seat. It’s minute but Wei Ying can feel it, still pressed up against her. “Wei Ying,” Lan Zhan warns, but Wei Ying has to see. She pushes back, hands on Lan Zhan’s thigh. Lan Zhan looks exasperated, that usual little twist of her lips to the right. “You must know.”
Lights are going on in Wei Ying’s brain. She wipes her eyes with both hands but she knows she’s a puffy mess. She has that constitution where she goes blotchy. Yanli taught her about a trick for crying that involved putting a damp towel on her eyes while she did it to reduce swelling, but Wei Ying had been too busy trying to sleuth out who had made Yanli need to learn that to have ever perfected her own beauty crying style.
She thinks she does know. She thinks —
She leans in, slowly, eyes flicking between Lan Zhan’s lips and her eyes. Lan Zhan doesn’t stop her. She presses their lips together, testing. Lan Zhan parts her lips, soft and warm. They’re kissing. Lan Zhan tastes sweet and every time their lips brush together it works away the taste of salt water, rain on the salt flats filling in the cracked parts with cool relief. It’s Wei Ying who darts her tongue out first, a daring dash, but it’s Lan Zhan who groans and grips Wei Ying by the arms and pushes her into the bed and kisses her all over, the corners of her eyes, the edge of her jaw, the place where her hair brushes her temple. It’s Lan Zhan who presses her body on top of Wei Ying’s and lets Wei Ying feel the weight of her, the sparks where the soft points of their bodies connect.
They kiss like that for a long time, until each kiss feels like a bite of spicy food, a small sting with each press of oversensitive lips.
They break apart, nuzzling at each other, both of them unwilling to quit.
“Is that what you meant, Lan Zhan?” Wei Ying asks, breathing hard and rough. Lan Zhan leans in to kiss her again and Wei Ying stops her with the press of a finger. “You have to tell me, I’m very stupid.”
“Wei Ying!” Lan Zhan says. “You are very smart and talented — and you are baiting me.”
“Yes,” Wei Ying says, “I kind of am.”