Chapter 7

Chapter 7

I drove out to the outskirts of the city and, in the icy night, slapped the flimsy door of the shipping container until it rattled.

Utterly insane.

If this place hadn’t been surrounded by open wilderness, the kind of thing that would definitely have had the neighbors calling the police.

With an ear-splitting scrape, the door opened.

The man on the other side braced one hand against the doorframe. He was bare-chested, a pair of washed-out, gray-white boxers hanging loose on his hips. Beneath his messy short hair, his foxlike eyes were damp and hazy.

Before he could possibly lose his temper, I held up the little blue booklet.

“Is this yours?”

He pinched the ID in his palm, and when he opened his mouth, his voice was tired and hoarse.

“Did you have to bring it over in the middle of the night?”

“Yes. Because I have to work during the day.”

I wasn’t lying. I did have my own design studio downtown, the kind that could independently support a small team.

He said nothing else. He took the little booklet, and he didn’t seem inclined to shut me out, either. He just stood there, silently sizing me up.

I really had never seen eyes like his before. Beautiful and deep. They were the black eyes of an Asian man, yet far more aggressive, like a beast lying in wait in the dark.

It suddenly occurred to me: showing up at a man’s door in the middle of the night like this carried a certain implication of delivering myself to him.

And his silent acceptance of it all seemed, in some way, like an invitation.

After a long stalemate, I was the first to speak.

“Is there somewhere around here to drink?”

There really was.

After passing through the vegetable patch and a few sparse clumps of wild trees, the scattered lights up ahead suddenly multiplied. In the damp, cold wind drifted a few strands of decadent music, and I could faintly hear fragmented bursts of laughter, murmuring, coughing.

Unbelievable. Behind the vegetable garden were so many shipping containers of all sizes, an astonishing number of them, looming in the late night like ghostly shadows.

They also looked like a pile of trash the city had abandoned.

I followed Zhao Muzi as we wove between the massive, dimly lit boxes. After circling around for at least a kilometer, the space ahead abruptly opened up into something as tall as a two-story building…

Of course, it was still a shipping container.

We walked in between walls stacked full of liquor bottles, and somehow, this really was a bar. The kind with an American retro vibe that influencers would come to check in at.

Behind the shabby bar counter, a young girl with a knit cap wrapped around her head was playing on her phone. Zhao Muzi knocked on the counter. “An iced lemon drink.”

She looked up, her eyes lighting up. “Muzi-ge!” Then she saw me beside him, and her tone took a nosedive. “Who’s this?”

He didn’t answer her. Instead, he turned to ask me, “What are you having?”

“Anything alcoholic.”

The girl curled her lip, but she still put down her phone and mixed me a new-style mojito. Then she watched with her own eyes as we took our glasses and sat down in a dimly lit corner.

A menu was pasted to the corner of the table. When I saw the prices, I was stunned.

A highball was only eighteen?

“Yeah.”

The man surnamed Zhao, who was usually a man of few words, now seemed rather eager to talk.

“Because everything here is shipping containers, the rent is low, prices are low, and business is decent.”

“Oh.”

His lips moved slightly. Those foxlike eyes watched me in silence, calm and faintly distant.

From the look of it, he really wanted to chat with me about something.

But I didn’t want to.

On a dazzling, blurred night like this, perhaps a single woman ought to laugh loudly, ought to dance wildly, ought to wind herself from one man’s arms to another’s. The one thing she should not do was sit quietly in a corner, weeping alone.

But I couldn’t control myself.

After all, I was nearly thirty, and I had lost everything overnight.

One glass of icy mojito went down, slicing recklessly through my stomach like a knife. Soon, it turned into scalding liquid that surged out of my eyes, streaming freely over cheeks that had long since gone cold.

I was submerged in my own grief, unable to pull myself free, my mouth dry, my throat parched, nearly dehydrated.

“More alcohol, please.”

“You’re drunk.”

At that moment, he was sitting across from me, his cuffs rolled back to reveal a smooth, well-defined forearm. His distinct, knuckled fingers rested on the slender stem of his glass, sliding over it gently, carrying a slow, unhurried sort of sensuality.

“Don’t drink anymore.”

His tone, as if he were some close and understanding friend, made me want to laugh.

So I really did laugh. Under his startled gaze, I nearly doubled over, laughing until I was dazed and drained of strength. Only then did I collapse onto the table and murmur softly,

“You want to sleep with me, don’t you?”