I Ran His Biggest Hate Account, Then Became His Live-In Assistant novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Camera Is Not Your Ex

Close on Lanzhou: a line Yao says aloud in the house appears word for word on the hate page at 12:50 am, and the actor decides to say nothing.

Lanzhou had expected Qin Yao to read like a temp.

Instead the boy sat cross-legged on the floor of the north room with the script on his knee and read like a person with something to lose.

"Go, then," Yao said, in the heroine's part. "I won't ask you to stay."

His voice dropped on the last word, cracked a little and went on without apology.

Lanzhou forgot his line.

The gate scene was the hardest in the whole drama, and he had done it twenty-nine times on set.

Nobody on set had ever made him forget it.

"Your cue," Yao said, looking up.

"I never left," Lanzhou said, and turned to the window as if the window were the gate.

He said it to the invisible lens in the corner, the way the director liked.

Yao set the script down and chewed the end of his pen.

"Honest?"

"That's the rule."

"You look at the camera on that line. You hold it for two whole seconds." Yao shrugged. "The camera is not your ex. Look at him."

Lanzhou stood perfectly still.

Nobody had ever told him that.

Everyone had said "beautiful" and "raw" and "the director cried."

"Good note," he said. His voice came out a little rough.

"I know," said Yao, and reached for the dried mango.

Lanzhou went to bed at eleven and did not sleep.

At twelve-forty he was still lying on his side with Boat Two tucked under his chin.

Boat Two was a stuffed carp the size of a loaf of bread.

His grandmother had given it to him before she died, and nobody on earth knew it slept in his bed.

His east window faced the courtyard.

Through the paper panes he could see the east wing, and a thin blue light glowing in the window of the small room.

He had noticed it the first night.

At twelve-fifty the light flickered, and his own phone buzzed on the pillow.

A notification, the kind he had turned on three years ago and never turned off.

He knew what it was before he opened it.

"Reminder for actors everywhere: the camera is not your ex. Stop making eye contact with it. Look at him. Love, the Police."

Lanzhou read it five times.

Then he looked at the blue light across the yard, which was going out.

The note was word for word what Qin Yao had said on the floor of his sitting room at nine-fifteen.

There had been nobody else in the room.

He thought of the way the boy had come up his steps on the first night, thumb down on a phone, at the moment the roast appeared.

He had told himself it was a coincidence.

He did not tell himself that now.

He sat up slowly and held Boat Two in his lap.

His whole body had gone warm and strange, and he waited for the anger.

It did not come.

What came instead was something light and frightening.

For three years a page had told him the truth.

He had saved the posts that stung worst.

Nobody else had told him anything real since the first award.

His manager said "perfect," his co-stars said "brilliant," and his fans sent flowers to fix a face they thought was sad.

The page said he cried like a man remembering the stove, and he had stopped breathing for a minute, and then he had gone and learned how to cry again.

That one still hurt.

He would not think about that one tonight.

The page was a person, and the person was asleep across the courtyard in a hoodie that said "Do Not Disturb Me."

The person ate dried mango with his whole face, and gave gentle notes aloud while writing savage ones in the dark.

Lanzhou was twenty-six years old and had never been kissed by anyone who was not hitting a mark.

He had never slept with anyone, and he had never wanted anyone to look at him closely.

He wanted, now, with alarming clarity, this one to do it.

He put his feet on the floor.

If he said anything, Yao would pack his tote bag by dawn.

If he said nothing, the honest voice stayed in his house, a few steps away, writing about him.

He opened a folder on his phone titled "Notes from the Police."

It held four hundred and twelve screenshots.

He scrolled to the top and then to the bottom, and added the newest.

Then he walked to the kitchen in his socks and turned on one small lamp.

The script for scene twenty-four was on the sideboard.

It was the worst scene in the second half, a long confession on a bridge, where his character explained his feelings in a speech nobody would say aloud.

He had known it was bad for a week.

He circled the speech in red and wrote "this part is dead?" in the margin.

He set a pen on top of it, in the middle of the table, beside the bowl of mango.

Then he turned off the lamp and went back to bed to wait for the page to find it.

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