I Ran His Biggest Hate Account, Then Became His Live-In Assistant novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Take Fourteen

On his first day Yao gives the actor gentle notes aloud and savage ones by DM, and is asked to read the very scene he roasted.

Yao stared at the message until the screen dimmed.

Then he did the sane thing, which was to assume it was a trap.

"Nice try, Hu-jie," he typed. "Tell the boss the Police don't give interviews."

The answer came a few seconds later.

"Not Hu Qiaoling. She would never write please."

A second message followed it.

"Please."

Yao lay very still under the blanket.

A man who owned three awards and a perfume contract was saying please to a stranger on a burner phone.

The man was also forty feet away, in the north room, awake.

Yao pressed his lips together.

He could block the account and delete the page and move to Tianjin.

Instead he looked at the word "wrong," and the worst part of him woke up.

"Fine," he typed. "Three notes. One, you finish every sad line half a second early, like you're afraid the director will stop you."

"Two, you walk like you're avoiding a puddle. Three, you only smile when you think nobody's filming."

He sent it and put the phone on his chest.

The reply took a full minute.

"Thank you."

That was all.

Yao did not sleep for a long time.

At seven, he found a yellow sticky note on the refrigerator in careful handwriting.

"1. Eat before nine. 2. Honest notes every night. No being nice. 3. Nothing about work after midnight."

Under it, in smaller writing, someone had added, "(Rule 3 is for me.)"

Xie Lanzhou stood at the stove in a grey sweater, stirring a pot of porridge.

"Rule two," Yao said. "Honest notes about what?"

"Me." Lanzhou did not turn around. "Everyone gives me the polite version. I want the one you'd say if I weren't paying you."

"That's a lot of power to give a stranger."

"You said I hold my breath before sad scenes. I tried it in the mirror last night. You're right."

His ears had gone a little pink at the tips.

Yao looked away and saw his tote bag hanging flat on a chair.

It had held eleven bags of dried mango the night before.

"I unpacked your bag while you were in the shower," Lanzhou said calmly. "They were going to get crushed."

"You touched my snacks?"

"I put them in a bowl."

The bowl on the table was cut glass, and it held all eleven bags of mango, arranged by color.

Yao sat down with a thump.

Breakfast was porridge, salted egg and Lanzhou watching him eat.

At ten, Yao carried the laundry basket across the courtyard.

Frost had come overnight, and the old stones were slick as soap.

His foot went out from under him.

A hand closed around his elbow and held him upright, hard and warm through his hoodie.

Lanzhou had crossed the whole yard in two strides.

"You're not allowed to die before the contract is over," he said.

"That's not in the contract."

"Clause eleven. I wrote it myself."

He should have let go by then.

He did not let go, and Yao felt each of five fingers through the cloth.

It lasted a quiet beat.

Lanzhou looked down at his own hand and took it back.

"Don't carry things on the stones," he said, in his flat on-camera voice. "Go around."

He went inside.

Yao stood in the frost with a basket of towels and an expensive, unfamiliar feeling in his chest.

He told himself it was the cold.

The afternoon went to errands, a delivery of scripts, and a phone call during which Lanzhou said "mm" a dozen times in ten different tones.

Yao was impressed, against his will.

He had a notebook ready by the time dinner was over.

"Notes," Lanzhou said, setting down his chopsticks. "Today's mirror scene. Honest."

Yao had promised himself he would be kind.

This was a man who ironed his own socks and left the good mango for a stranger.

"It was good," he said. "Maybe less chin."

"Less chin."

"You lead with your chin like it has a speaking part."

Lanzhou wrote it down in a small black notebook, seriously, under the heading "Chin."

Then he looked up.

"That's gentler than I expected."

Yao's stomach dropped to the floor.

"Than what?"

"Than rule two." Lanzhou closed the notebook. "Never mind. You can be meaner tomorrow."

He stood and brought a thin stapled script from the sideboard.

It was dog-eared, and Yao recognized the cover before he could stop himself.

"My usual reader quit on Monday," Lanzhou said. "Tonight you read the other part, opposite me."

He opened it to a page with a paper clip on it.

Scene twenty-two, the goodbye at the gate.

It was the exact scene Yao had roasted for a hundred and forty thousand likes.

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