Chapter 8: Scene Thirty-One

Yao answered the DM at one-thirty, and it took him four tries.

The first was too mean, the second was too soft, and the third was a sentence he deleted with a small noise.

The fourth one he sent.

"Look at the person, not the lens. And stop leaning like you're signing something. Lean like you're late."

The little light behind the cranes went out a minute later.

Yao lay awake until three, listening to a man he had almost kissed breathe on the other side of a painted screen.

The rooftop set stood in a back lot behind a wall of fake brick.

Two snow machines hummed, and a cold wind came straight off the hills.

Yao stood behind the monitors with Hu Qiaoling, holding a thermos and a pair of gloves.

"Don't talk," Hu said. "If it fails he'll do it eleven more times and catch a cold."

"I won't talk."

"I mean it, he's hopeless at this." Hu glanced at him. "You've been near him all week. Is he all right?"

"He's practicing the face in the mirror," Yao said, before he thought.

"What?"

"Nothing."

On the monitor, Lanzhou walked into frame in a long dark coat, with snow in his hair.

The lead actress stood waiting for him at the rail.

The director called quiet, and the crew went still.

"Action."

Yao had watched this man for two years through a screen, and he thought he knew all his faces.

He did not know this one.

Lanzhou took two steps toward the rail, and his face was open, afraid and eager all at once.

"I told you I would never leave," he said.

He did not say it to the lens.

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