Chapter 4: Somebody Close

At six in the morning, Yao found the script waiting on the kitchen table.

A red circle sat around a speech on page forty-one.

In the margin, in careful handwriting, someone had written "this part is dead?"

A pen lay across the page, and the dried mango bowl had been refilled.

Yao looked left and right.

Then he heard a voice in the hallway and crept to the doorway to look.

Xie Lanzhou stood in front of the long mirror in his grey sweater, facing his own reflection.

"Smile," he whispered.

His face went warm and open and nearly hopeful.

"Now the glacier."

The smile vanished, and the face became the one on every poster, cold, elegant and far away.

He tried it again and then again, tilting his chin a little less each time.

"Less chin," he murmured, and Yao put a fist against his mouth.

The famous icy actor was running his own face.

Lanzhou turned, caught sight of Yao in the doorway, and went still.

"Market research," he said, in the glacier voice.

"Of course."

"Breakfast is ready, Assistant Qin."

His ears were pink again, and Yao decided never to mention it.

Over congee, Lanzhou opened his phone and began to read the comments under his latest photo.

He read them aloud, in voices.

The Harbor fans came out squeaky and breathless, and he gave them a tremble of joy.

"He is so beautiful I cannot breathe. Boat, I would die for your eyebrows."

Then he scrolled to the other kind and dropped his voice to a gravelly growl.

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