He Kept Me as His First Love's Stand-In, but I Saved Him First novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Light on His Jaw
A tycoon turns his stand-in's face to the lamp on the night his lost first love comes home, and the first love arrives wearing the whistle the stand-in lost when he pulled a drowning boy out of the sea.
Shao Hanjing's hand closed on Ning Zhe's jaw and turned his face toward the lamp.
Zhe let him.
Three years had taught him exactly how still to be.
"You look less like him lately," Hanjing said.
Zhe smiled the way he had been taught, the left corner first and the eyes a beat late.
Hanjing's thumb pressed under the cheekbone, hard enough to leave a mark.
"No. Not like that. You've started smiling with your whole mouth."
"I'll fix it," Zhe said.
"Fix it tonight."
Hanjing let go and wiped his thumb on a handkerchief.
The music room of the lake villa was dark except for the lamp over the Steinway.
Rain ran down the glass, and past it West Lake lay black and flat.
The cologne sat on Zhe's collar, sea salt and cedar and a little lime.
It came from a green bottle that Lu Wen refilled every month, mixed to match a scarf in an old photograph.
Zhe had not chosen one thing he wore in three years.
"His plane landed at six," Hanjing said. He was at the window now, with his back turned. "He's in the car."
"I know. Lu Wen told me in September."
"Then you know the rules. Not the grey sweater. He hated grey."
"Yes."
"You don't touch the piano while he's in the room."
"Yes."
"And when I say his name tonight, I mean him." Hanjing's voice did not change. "Not you. Don't turn your head."
Zhe's face stayed exactly as it was.
"I won't turn my head."
"Good." Hanjing looked at him in the glass. "That's why I picked you. You never wanted anything."
A knock came at the open door.
Lu Wen stood there with a leather folder against his chest, his eyes on the carpet.
"Mr. Shao. The papers you asked for."
Hanjing took the folder and held it out without turning around.
"Two million, transferred tonight. You can be out of the house before he comes through the gate."
Zhe looked at the folder and did not take it.
"The contract runs to the thirtieth of November," he said.
"I'm releasing you early. Be grateful."
"With half the completion fee."
"Half is more than you're worth to anyone who isn't me."
"The completion fee is four million," Zhe said. "I signed for three years, and I'll take all of it on the thirtieth."
For the first time that evening, Hanjing turned around.
He looked at Zhe.
"You want to be here when he's home."
"I want what I signed for."
Lu Wen's eyes had not left the carpet.
Hanjing held the look a moment longer, then let the folder drop onto the piano lid.
"Fine. Thirty-nine days of staying out of sight, then. You move to the annex tomorrow."
"Yes, Mr. Shao."
"Tonight you sit here and play his piece. Clair de lune. Loud enough that he hears it from the hall."
"Yes."
Hanjing went out without looking back.
Zhe sat down at the Steinway.
His hands knew the first bar without him.
He had played it perhaps nine hundred times, for a man who listened to it with his eyes closed and a different face in his head.
Tonight the notes came out clean and slow and exactly as taught.
He did not let his mouth smile.
Headlights swept the wet windows.
A car door shut. Then there were steps on the gravel, and a voice at the front door that Zhe had never heard before and knew at once.
It was soft and a little hoarse:
"Han."
Zhe's hands stopped.
He got up and crossed to the music room doorway, because the hall was the only place to look from.
Hanjing had opened the front door himself.
He stood on the threshold with the rain blowing in over his good shoes, and his face was open in a way Zhe had never once seen.
The young man in front of him was thin and wet, in a camel coat that hung off his shoulders.
He had a narrow jaw and a long neck and a mouth that smiled with only one corner.
Zhe could see why a man would pay to have that mouth copied.
"Yu," Hanjing said, and the name came out of him like a breath he had held for nine years.
He took the stranger by both shoulders and pulled him in.
The camel coat fell open between them.
Something swung out on a thin chain and caught the hall light.
It was a silver whistle, no longer than a finger.
Hanjing saw it too. His face broke.
"You kept it," he said. "The whistle you saved me with."
Zhe could not feel his hands on the doorframe.
The whistle was dented along the barrel, where he had dropped it on the quay at fourteen.
It was his father's. It was his.
He had lost it nine years ago, on the night he pulled a drowning boy out of the sea.
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