Chapter 6: Candidate Seven

Xie Zhaoran lay with his eyes shut and counted the footsteps leaving the room.

His grandmother's cane went first, tapping slowly toward the door.

It paused once at the threshold, and then it was gone.

She had tapped his heel and he had moved.

He did not know what that meant, and he knew better than to hope.

"She's gone," whispered Lin Zhi. "That was the worst thing that's ever happened to me, and I've been to a loan shark's wedding."

Zhaoran opened his eyes.

Lin Zhi was kneeling by the foot of the bed, holding a towel.

He looked up with an expression of pure outrage.

"You moved," he said.

"She hit me with a stick."

"You could have not moved," said Lin Zhi.

"I'm nineteen months out of practice at not moving when I'm hit."

Lin Zhi opened his mouth, closed it, and then, helplessly, began to laugh.

It was a quick, silent laugh with his whole face in it, and it made the small mole under his left eye jump.

Zhaoran watched it with the same hunger he had felt on the second night, when he had first heard that laugh in the dark.

That night, Lin Zhi had told the empty room about a toddler at his mother's stall.

The child had thrown a whole bowl of noodles on the floor and then, solemnly, apologized to the noodles.

Zhaoran had been awake for six weeks by then.

He had not heard anyone laugh in nineteen months, not even the nurses.

He had lain there with his eyes shut and the sound going through him.

He had thought, with perfect clarity: that one.

He had not been thinking of marriage.

He had been thinking that if he was going to be murdered in a bed, he wanted someone around who laughed.

Now it was dangerous, because the plan had been simple, and the plan did not include this.

He had not been touched kindly in nineteen months.

This morning a man had washed his wrist slowly, and had taken care over it.

His body had answered before his mind could stop it.

He had never been so humiliated in his life, and he would have done it again.

"Rule two says hands to yourself," said Zhaoran.

Lin Zhi stopped laughing.

"It says nothing about my mouth," said Zhaoran. "Come here."

"Is that an order, Mr. Xie?"

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