Chapter 12: Terms, Captain

The couch was a metre and a half long, and Captain Ji was a metre and eighty-seven.

Wanning stood in the bedroom doorway at midnight and listened to him try.

She heard the cushions shift and the springs complain.

Then came a soft thud as his feet gave up and hit the floor.

Her new red quilt smelled of sun and cotton and his mother's soap.

Above her head the ducks swam on their silk, with the bare corner showing in the lamplight.

She lay on her back and told herself he was fine.

A cough came through the wall. Then another, shorter, the kind a man gives when he is trying to swallow a sound.

She got up.

He was sitting on the edge of the couch in the dark, in his undershirt.

One hand was clamped over his left shoulder.

"I woke you."

"What happened to your shoulder?"

"Nothing. I lifted my mother's trunk up the stairs."

"By yourself."

"Luo had a cold."

"Luo is twenty-four and strong enough." She turned on the small lamp. "Take your shirt off."

He looked at her.

"Wanning."

"My grandmother kept a box of plasters under every bed. Your mother put one in the bedroom drawer, I saw her."

She fetched it, a long strip with a medicinal smell.

"Sit still."

He had not moved.

After a moment he pulled the undershirt over his head and sat with his back to her.

She saw the whole broad length of him in the lamplight.

There was an old white scar low on his ribs, and a darker bruise rising across the shoulder blade.

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