It had been three months since we broke up.

When I saw my ex-boyfriend Yu Baijin again, he was lying sideways on my bed, propping his head up with one hand in the pose of a drunken imperial concubine, greeting me: “Hi.”

I stood frozen at my doorway, rooted to the spot, still carrying a canvas shopping bag from the supermarket on my shoulder and ridiculously clutching a coconut in my arms. 

A few seconds later, I snapped back to reality, raised my hand and swung the coconut at his head. 

Unfortunately, I missed—he dodged it easily, and it flew straight through the broken window behind him, plummeting from the fourth floor. 

Glass shards scattered across the ground below, faintly glimmering with the moon’s ghostly light.

I said: “Get out.”

“Baby,” he put on a pitiful act, “I’m injured.”

“Even if you die today, you’re dying outside.”

Though I was unwilling to admit it, his arrival triggered some kind of muscle memory in me. My hands were shaking a little, and so was my voice. 

A chill seeped out from the gaps between my bones. “Don’t force me to get physical with you.”

“You won’t.”

The old bed frame let out a hoarse, low groan, like a thin needle pricking at my nerves. 

He stood up and walked toward me from the darkness. 

His silhouette was still tall, just thinner than before.

 A leather jacket draped over his shoulders, his tight white T-shirt already stained red with blood over most of it. You could smell the pungent scent of blood from ten meters away. 

“Someone’s been trying to kill me.”

“Then how come you’re not dead?”

“So heartless.”

“When you chose that line of work, you should have expected this day would come.” I turned my face away, unwilling to meet his eyes. “Just go. I won’t tell anyone about your whereabouts…”

“Is this why you broke up with me?”

“It’s been three fucking months, and you’re only losing it now?”

“But I still love you.”

“We’re both liars.” I said, “Stop the act. There’s no need.”

His hand dropped, and his smile faded with it.

“Maimai.”

He said: “Rong Wanqing has disappeared.”

My heart sank abruptly, and I looked up at him. He quickly added: “It wasn’t me.”

“Who’d believe that?”

“‘Those people’ came after me too.”

He took off his jacket and threw it on the floor, hooked a chair over with his foot, and sat down among the broken glass all over the ground. 

He fished out a crumpled pack of Pall Mall cigarettes from his pants pocket, pulled one out and stuck it in his mouth, then beckoned to me. “Baby, lighter.”

I grabbed a one-yuan plastic lighter from the shoe cabinet and tossed it to him. 

He caught it precisely and lit it up, mumbling through the cigarette: “Can’t you come a little closer so I can see you? I’m already disabled, I can’t pull any tricks.”

“Say one more word like that and I’ll pull out all your teeth.”

I stomped on the floor mat beneath my feet. 

“I can see fine from here. So tell me, what characteristics did the people looking for you have? Clothing, weapons, operating style—did they seem like professional assassins or gangsters?”

“Assassins? No one’s more professional than me.”

The night was dim. 

His silhouette was wrapped in white smoke, appearing hazy and unreal, like a hallucination that could dissipate at any moment. 

The tobacco soothed his nerves. Between inhales and exhales, he stretched out his two excessively long legs, his voice low and suppressed, almost pleading.

“I’m afraid you’ll be next.”

After a long standoff, I was the first to give in. 

I unloaded that ridiculous backpack from my shoulder and threw it in the entryway along with my shoes, rolled up my sleeves, went straight into the bathroom, washed my hands, and took out the first aid kit from the closet that I hadn’t used in a long time.

“How badly are you hurt?”

I asked Yu Baijin. 

As I passed through the living room, I flipped on the light and scanned around. 

The furniture and decorations in the room weren’t significantly different from when I’d left home. For now, I didn’t notice any traces of fighting or tampering. “How did you know where I live now?”

As soon as I asked, I realized it was a stupid question. 

Anyone Yu Baijin wanted to find, even if they were a corpse, he could dig three feet into the ground and rake up their ashes. “I just had to think of you to find you.”

Sure enough, he had no intention of answering this question directly. 

The overhead light suddenly blazed bright, making him squint from having stayed in darkness too long. His black hair, overdue for a trim, fell to one side. 

An ambiguous expression appeared on his face, somewhere between a smile and amusement. “I really can’t move anymore… it hurts.”

“Then endure it.”

Probably still out of habit, I didn’t hesitate much and knelt down in front of him. 

He was startled instead and quickly reached out to support me: “Wait, there’s glass all over the floor, it’ll cut your feet… hey, you’re not being careful at all.”

With his pulling and tugging, I ended up sitting on his lap while holding the first aid kit high, hit by a wave of bloody smell and dust mixed with all those memories I’d been trying to peel away from my brain, pressing against my pounding heart.

“Maimai.”

He held me, burying his face in the center of my chest and taking a deep breath. “I’ve missed you so much… Once this matter is resolved, you can hate me all you want, okay? I’m begging you. You don’t know what kind of life I’ve been living…”

“Do you know what kind of life I’ve been living?”

I threw the first aid kit onto the bed. Gauze, scissors, and alcohol bottles all tumbled out. 

I grabbed his chin with one hand and pulled up my own shirt with the other, exposing a surgical scar on my lower left abdomen.

“You shot a hole through my stomach. My employer got injured in the leg and was admitted to a nursing home. My mission failed. I couldn’t get any jobs for three months. Now I’m fucking trimming dogs’ nails at a pet shop. And you have the nerve to say you missed me?”

He was momentarily speechless, forced by me to look at that roughly five-centimeter-long suture scar. 

His eyes flickered, and his smile dimmed, muttering in confusion and disbelief: “That’s impossible. The bullet I used, the distance, and the position I aimed at were all calculated. It couldn’t have caused a ‘cavity effect’…”

He tried to touch me but I slapped his hand away, leaving a wronged red mark on the back of his hand.

“I had to keep your blood as ‘evidence’ to make my employer believe I killed you—even if I didn’t succeed, it was enough to threaten Rong Wanqing’s father and make him back off for a while.”

He calmly put his arms around my waist, just like when we were still together, his fingers interlaced behind my back, his tone gentle and soothing even while saying the cruelest things. 

“You know, when it comes to killing people, if you don’t succeed the first time, never try a second time. That’s God’s warning to you. I voluntarily gave up the other half of my payment beyond the deposit and told my employer I’d failed. But Rong Wanqing was critically injured and hospitalized, which also dealt a heavy blow to his political enemy, so he agreed to let it go and not interfere with my life anymore. He’s a man of his word, and he hopes I am too.”

“So you think the people who attacked you weren’t him.”

I had him lift up his own shirt, exposing his tight, solid chest and abdominal muscles, along with two or three narrow, pointed-ended cuts below his right ribs. 

Not too deep, and the bleeding had almost stopped, but there was some dirt stuck around the wounds. 

Without careful cleaning, they could easily get infected. I sneered: “When did you become so naive? You believe a politician’s words? What if he wants to kill you to silence you?”

“Then there’d be no need to wait three months before making a move… hey, hey, hey, be gentle!”

I unscrewed the entire bottle of alcohol and poured it onto the gauze, soaking about a palm-sized area. 

Catching him off guard, I pressed it against his wound and scrubbed hard. 

He arched his back with a gasp, buried his face in my shoulder, and groaned in pain while biting my collar: “Ah… baby… it’s too intense, I can’t take it…”

“Just go die.” I rolled my eyes.

***

After stripping off his upper body T-shirt that looked like a rag, rolling it into a ball and stuffing it in his annoying mouth, I quickly cleaned up the blood around the wound, used the only tetanus shot in the first aid kit, mixed a cup of salt-sugar water and made him drink it. 

Only then did I prop up one of his arms and help him to the sofa.

Yu Baijin was nearly six feet three inches tall with a slender frame. 

He looked thin to the naked eye, but his actual weight was substantial. 

After completing all the aftermath work, my forehead was covered with a thin layer of sweat. 

Finally, I stripped the dirty sheets from the bed and stuffed them into the washing machine along with both our clothes. 

I let out a sigh of relief, sat down next to him, and lit a cigarette.

Before the cigarette end was fully lit, he crawled up to hug me but I was quick to grab his neck and press him back down, his head pillowed on my lap, full of endless resentment and shamelessness.

“I…” He tried to say something again but I coldly interrupted: “Shut up.”

“Be quiet for a few minutes. Let me think.”

He took the opportunity to seize my right hand, briefly claiming it as his own, sometimes cushioning it under his chin, sometimes lightly touching the thin, hard calluses on my thumb and the webbing of my hand with his lips. 

This time I didn’t stop him, only asking: “When did you discover Rong Wanqing was missing?”

“Last night at midnight. I was coming home from work and happened to pass by the nursing home she was in. I thought since I was already there, I’d go in and take a look… ow!”

“You’re the last person who should be visiting her,” I grabbed his ear, “three months ago you were trying to take her life!”

“She was my target.”

Strictly speaking, she was mine too.

The difference was that I was Rong Wanqing’s personal bodyguard, and Yu Baijin was the assassin hired to kill her.

***

That night I slept on the floor, giving up the not-so-spacious bed to Yu Baijin. 

I lay on the cold, damp floor of the old rental apartment, and after a long absence, I dreamed back to six months ago when I was specifically assigned as Rong Wanqing’s personal bodyguard to escort her abroad for a six-month exchange study program.

The beloved daughter of a powerful politician, the apple of his eye, who had lived under her father’s protection for over twenty years and had never traveled far from home. 

She knew nothing of the dangers and cunning of the outside world. Like a freshly peeled egg, she was translucent and fragile. 

Such a person, upon our first meeting, had greeted me with an guileless smile, held my hand and said, “Jian Mai, what a lovely name. You’re about the same age as me—would you like to study with me?”

I said sorry, I only went to middle school before dropping out. 

My father owed gambling debts. 

My mother and sister were trapped at home and burned alive by debt collectors, while I escaped by sneaking onto a southbound train overnight. I was taken in by a tomb raider who later became a boss, and I became his bodyguard. 

After he died, I worked for his mistress, a D-list actress. I successfully rescued her from a group of gangsters who were trying to force her to make pornographic films, killing seven people and crippling eight. 

My reputation gradually grew from that point. 

Your father hired me because I’m loyal, cold, lack desire for power and sex, and am a monster more cruel than any beast. I’m far more terrifying than you imagine. 

She was stunned and silent for a long time, then finally said, “I hope you’ll be my friend.”

I agreed.

During her study abroad, both our identities were kept secret. 

She said her mother was a pianist (which was true) and that she came abroad to study classical music. 

I was supposedly her distant cousin who came along to keep her company, only one year older than her, hoping her classmates and new friends would include me in their activities. 

None of them objected, and neither did I. 

Anyway, each day I just routinely took her to class, waited where I could see the classroom for her to finish, accompanied her shopping, went to Chinatown to wait in long lines to buy a serving of spicy chicken skewers or stir-fried rice cakes that her father absolutely detested, ate street food with her, watched her cry from the spiciness and gulp down ice-cold beer, video called her friends back home, crying and laughing, then carried her back to our place, put her to bed, and covered her with snow-white quilts.

Within a month, I’d learned to use makeup remover wipes to remove a woman’s makeup, distinguish cheese varieties and their uses, throw parties at her little villa, entertain her half-genuine, half-fake friends, and while they were grilling meat in the courtyard, go alone to the second-floor balcony to smoke while checking the security measures set up around the house.

Unexpectedly, one of her friends was also there. 

A tall, thin Asian male with black hair, moles at the corners of his eyes and mouth, who smoked Pall Malls and smiled with unrestrained passion.

The international students all called him “A Bai.”