ToW | Chapter 3

What was Jiang Qingzhou doing it for?

Ten years ago, she went to Ai Shihui’s banquet and supported him without taking money. Ten years later, with a shrug of her shoulders, she shrugged off the fact that she had missed her chance at an international blockbuster lead and tossed it behind her. She would not deign to beg for it. Other people managed business with their brains and love with their hearts; she managed livelihood with the attitude she used for love.

Spontaneously, passionately.

How did Jiang Qingzhou treat love? Right now she was driving south, and if everything went smoothly she would reach Los Angeles in six hours.

Ten years ago, she met Ai Xiaosan at Ai Shihui’s banquet. More precisely, she met her an hour before the banquet, when Ai Shihui personally came to pick her up and talked with unmistakable pride about his daughter Ai Xiaosan all the way there.

At the time, Jiang Qingzhou thought, What an unruly woman.

Yet the instant they met, she felt that Ai Xiaosan had her breath tucked away, carried herself with a proper fit, maintained a just-right sense of distance, and fooled all the uncles and aunts at the banquet, but she did not fool Jiang Qingzhou’s eyes.

Ai Xiaosan, with her bright eyes and white teeth, held a wine glass and smiled obediently in front of a man in his fifties, smiling in the manner of a proper young lady. But the moment she turned around, she rolled her eyes so hard they nearly went up to her forehead.

Jiang Qingzhou was talking with Ai Shihui and caught that scene in her peripheral vision. Her smile was like ink soaking through paper, impossible to hide, so she simply lifted the corners of her mouth. “That must be your daughter?”

Before the banquet, she had listened to Ai Shihui chatter all the way there, but it still could not compare to that one eye roll on the turn of a body for making Jiang Qingzhou want to know her.

Jiang Qingzhou had never been a rule follower. She had become famous for two years and made a pile of money. Back then, actors in mainland television dramas were not making huge fortunes yet, but their income was already decent. She took that money and ran to the United States to get a degree, and by the time she graduated, she had spent most of it.

Outsiders would think she was restless, addicted to thrills. How could that be? Jiang Qingzhou thought. Clearly, when she was young, a fortune teller had said her life belonged to water, water without form, water in motion, water that adapted wherever it went.

Much later, she thought that she and Ai Xiaosan were both not the sort to follow the rules, but Ai Xiaosan was fire, a blaze shooting up into the sky, burning into a prairie fire. Water and fire, both shapeless and boundless, yet the former adapted wherever it went, while the latter never missed its mark.

—

Jiang Qingzhou stopped to refuel an hour and a half outside Los Angeles. The tires were coated in a yellow-gray layer of sand. She had come again to this place as dry as fire.

She stared at the trembling fuel nozzle and, beneath her sunglasses, let a sarcastic curve form at the corners of her mouth. Even the city she had fled from belonged to water, with its winter rains lasting endlessly and its coldest summers.

——Is Africa very dry too?

She leaned against the car door and sent Ai Xiaosan this completely random sentence.

——Where are you now?

As always, Ai Xiaosan ignored every question she did not want to answer. Their conversations often had a flavor of each of them talking past the other.

——Almost there. Don’t wait for me.

—

“Africa? Why would you suddenly think of going to Africa?” Jiang Qingzhou asked Ai Xiaosan over the deafening music. The two of them had just met at the banquet three days earlier.

“Huh? There are some opportunities over there.” Ai Xiaosan swayed her body, graceful and alluring.

Jiang Qingzhou was a little tired. She did not much like this kind of place. In the afternoon she had received a message from Ai Xiaosan inviting her to a pub that night, along with other friends, of course.

If it had been anyone else, Jiang Qingzhou would have refused. First, she did not like noisy places. Second, an invitation made on the same day always lacked sincerity. But because it was Ai Xiaosan, she somehow agreed.

She went down to the floor and kept sipping that drink. Men and women gathered around Ai Xiaosan. She had a kind of magic, as if wherever she went, she became the center of it.

Jiang Qingzhou was a little surprised. The ABCs and Americans here did not know her, and Ai Xiaosan had replaced her as the super star here.

She frowned slightly. In the moment she sipped her drink, her eyes brushed over Ai Xiaosan’s profile, and that silhouette was outrageously full of curves……

A lush fullness swayed with the beat of the music and the rhythm of her body moving. Jiang Qingzhou’s gaze burned, and she pulled it back, focusing intently on the drink in her hand.

The scent of Noir de Noir drifted close. Jiang Qingzhou looked up and met Ai Xiaosan’s hazy eyes.

“What’s wrong? Don’t feel like playing anymore?” She attached her lazy voice, and her arm, to Jiang Qingzhou.

“Ah, a little tired, it’s fine.” Jiang Qingzhou did not touch her. Like a beast sensing danger, though alcohol was already moving quickly through her blood, trying to occupy every cell.

“Then I’ll take you home.” Ai Xiaosan showed no intention of letting go.

After a bit of back and forth, Jiang Qingzhou got into Ai Xiaosan’s car. They kissed passionately in the back seat. In Jiang Qingzhou’s eyes, intoxication and surprise crossed and tangled. Even drunk, she knew the other person was a woman.

And yet shamelessly, she wanted to have this woman, and wanted to be had by this woman too. It was an unfamiliar desire she had never seen clearly in her twenty-seven years of life.

By the time they tumbled onto the soft bed, that desire came crashing down like a mountain and a sea, unstoppable, without hesitation.

—

The car stopped in front of the booked hotel, and after handing it over to the valet, it was already nine at night. The stretch into Los Angeles had indeed been brutally jammed, leaving them an hour later than expected.

Exhausted. Jiang Qingzhou washed her hair and body clean, and she knew Ai Xiaosan might be waiting for her... but tonight she did not dare to see her, did not dare. Maybe it was the traveler’s shrinking heart at returning home, after all, it had been ten years since they last met, ten years.

Or maybe, all the way south, she had simply been driven by feeling, yet still had not understood what exactly this trip to see her was for.

What exactly had happened these past two days? The Hoffman brothers had pulled their investment, causing the film to lose half its budget and die before it was born. The Oscar best actress potential project she had endured in the United States for more than ten years to finally encounter could not be made. Su Qi told her Ai Xiaosan had returned to Los Angeles, and she did not want to look for Ai Xiaosan...

Even though she should have been able to afford those forty million dollars, even though this investment should have been a sure profit with no loss. But yesterday Ai Xiaosan sent her a message saying, 「I miss you.」 And so Jiang Qingzhou set off.

Heavens. Jiang Qingzhou gently closed her eyes on the bed and thought: What am I even doing? What do I want?

Her phone rang, and Jiang Qingzhou jumped. She picked it up to look, and it was Ai Xiaosan.

“Jiang Qingzhou, hurry up and open the door!”

“Jiang Qingzhou, I’m at your room door.”

Author’s note:

Move my favorite one to the beginning...