He Kept Me as His First Love's Stand-In, but I Saved Him First novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Where in Shipu

At a dinner for three the stand-in says where he comes from, and the first love follows him into the kitchen to ask which jetty.

Nobody moved in the hall for a long moment.

Jiang Yu laughed first, wet-eyed and shaky, with his forehead against Hanjing's collar.

Then he looked over Hanjing's shoulder and saw Zhe in the doorway.

His smile stopped halfway.

"So that's him," he said.

Hanjing did not let go of him. "Lu Wen's arrangement. He tunes pianos. He's leaving soon."

"He has my face."

"Less every month," Hanjing said, and Yu laughed again, pleased.

Zhe bowed his head a few degrees and said nothing.

Dinner was set for three, because Yu asked for three.

"I want to look at him," he said. "I've been told about him for a month."

Hanjing shrugged, which was how he gave permission.

The long table in the lake room had a white cloth and a view of nothing but rain.

Hanjing pulled Yu's chair out himself.

He had never pulled out a chair for anyone, in Zhe's three years of watching.

He served Yu the fish with his own chopsticks and took out every bone.

Zhe ate his rice at the far end of the table and looked at his bowl.

"What's your name?" Yu asked him across the candles.

"Ning Zhe."

"Ning Zhe." Yu tried it over, tasting it. "Where are you from?"

"Shipu."

Hanjing's chopsticks paused above Yu's plate.

It lasted less than a second, but Zhe saw it.

"Shipu is a small town," Hanjing said slowly. "I never knew you came from there."

"You never asked," Zhe said.

It was the only sentence all evening that had no training in it.

Hanjing's eyes came up and rested on him, puzzled.

Then Yu touched his wrist, and the look went away.

"Isn't that funny, Han? Of all the towns. He must be a sign."

"Maybe," Hanjing said, and smiled at him, and Zhe watched the smile.

It was the smile he had been taught.

It had been copied from this one, off a face that was real, and it was far better on the original.

At the other end of the table Yu's collar sat open.

The whistle lay in the hollow of his throat, with the candle in the dented silver.

Zhe looked at it.

He did not mean to.

"Don't stare at his neck," Hanjing said, quietly, without turning his head.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Shao."

"You look at his hands, not his neck. You always know that."

"Yes."

Yu said nothing.

He picked up his tea and held it in both hands, and over the rim of the cup he watched Zhe with a very careful face.

After the fish, Hanjing wanted music.

"Play the second one," he said. "The slow one he used to hum."

Zhe sat at the Steinway and played, and Yu sat on the sofa with his feet under him and hummed along.

He was a quarter-tone flat in every phrase.

Hanjing sat beside him with his head tilted back and his eyes shut.

It was the face he wore for the music, the one that belonged to a man listening to a boy he had lost.

Zhe played the whole piece without a wrong note and without lifting his eyes.

A man could stand a great deal, he found, if he looked only at his hands.

When it ended, Hanjing opened his eyes and looked at Yu, not at the piano.

"Same as the guesthouse," he said, rough. "Exactly the same."

"Exactly," Yu said, and kissed his cheek.

Zhe stood and bowed and went out through the side door.

The kitchen was dark and cold, with the dinner dishes stacked by the sink.

He did not turn on the light.

He ran the tap and washed one cup, and watched his hands do it.

They were steady.

That was the strange part.

For nine years he had wondered who the boy was, and whether he had lived.

The boy had lived here with him for three years, one staircase above the piano.

Behind him the door opened without a sound.

"You stared at it for a long time," Yu said.

Zhe turned the tap off.

Yu stood in the doorway with his arms folded and the whistle outside his shirt now, lying on his chest.

He wasn't smiling.

Without the smile, his face was only tired, and thin, and afraid.

"Which jetty?" he asked.

"What?"

"In Shipu. Where did you grow up? North or south?"

Zhe held his gaze.

"North," he said.

Yu's mouth tightened.

He said it very softly, as if the walls could hear.

"Han has had nine years to decide who pulled him out of that water. He decided a long time ago."

He pushed away from the doorframe.

"So think about who he will believe, Ning Zhe, before you open your mouth."

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