The Color of Home
Title: The Color of Home
Pairing: Huang Zitao//Fan Bingbing, Wu Yifan
Rating: PG
Warning: do I actually know things about Fan BB? nope. do I care? no, because she's gorgeous and I ship her with Mr. Gorgeous.
Disclaimer: I don't own anything, written just for fun.
Summary: Fan wears loneliness like a pair of silver earrings and everything Tao is is golden.
A/N: For bluedreaming . I owe her a lot of magazines, including one of these: Fan Bingbing for Grazia The story is inspired by the ones with the earphones. Also I looped this song while I wrote it: Zhou Mi's "Lovesick"
Fan is an industry veteran, the dangles of her heavy silver earrings gunmetal cold against the ramrod column of her neck. She's been around the block and then some, jogging the promotion treadmill as spring rains streaks the windows with the humid green blur of summer and the crunch of autumn rust lining the sidewalks outside the filming studio crackles into dirty ice beneath her boots. Blockbusters billboards, indie film posters printed on cheap grainy pulp paper, designer perfume spreads which flash her gilt lipstick to match the golden labels--you name it, Fan's face has been on it. The mesmerizing mix of raw boned beauty and refined composure that defines her features is familiar to most eyes in the nation, whether or not their owners know her name or anything about the color of the soul slipping between her parted lips with every exhale, and returning as she sucks in the chemical concoction of city air.
This far established into her career, Fan should be one of those gracefully aging ladies who line the edges of the conversation circles at after parties and awards galas, ankles unwavering in outrageous Jimmy Choo's and champagne flute like an extension of her manicured fingers. Fan should, but she blends into the crowds of well groomed supporting actresses and back-up vocalists as well as Cubist accent mural in a Gothic Revival themed sitting room.
Yet here she is, heels slick against the waxed floor in a corner of a ballroom. She’s crowded into a corner of a crowded room, trapped in discussion with a greasy haired director she only tolerates and a newly debuted idol with a squeaky laugh. Fan doesn't even feign nonchalance as she peers over the dandruff dusted shoulders of the director to scan the room for her manager. She spots him backed up against the grand piano under the grander chandelier, ensnared in a similar clump of party guests. It isn't difficult to catch his eye with her sad-lipped scowl, but Yifan just shrugs at her. He’s had his fill of the party and it’s cheap champagne if his stiff browed expression is any indication, but he inclines his head in a slight shake.
No, his eyes flash in warning as Fan’s pout deepens into crevices at the corners of her mouth. We’re staying til it’s over, he had warned her on the ride over.
Fan drops her gaze to the rim of the glass in her hand. The crystal is growing clammy against the loose grip of her palm, the initial coolness that soothed her fingers at first touch now faded, along with any enthusiasm she had for this evening. Her drink isn't empty enough to warrant breaking through the circle to flag down a waiter with a collection tray. The level of the champagne left in the flute, though, is only high enough to reach her lips if she plunges her head back all the way.
Not the way a respected lady behaves at elegant parties, as Yifan reminded her on the way here.
Fan had rolled her eyes and swung a sharp left. Anxiety and the crushing speed of mental inertia threw her hellbent on driving them to the venue as fast as she could possibly get them there in rush hour.
Now that she’s standing at the fringes of the scene she’s been dreaming every night for a week she doesn't dare complain and make a scene by going home early. Yifan would be seething if she tried. He'd lecture her in the parking lot and then all the way back in the car, his mortification multiplying times every speed limit she broke in her panic to fly home and melt into the nest of blankets strewn on her mattress. How it’s her own stubborn fault they're both suffocating under the glare of the chandelier while the breeze flies free across the bay just outside. How she is the one who demanded he pull the strings to get the nation’s favorite perfume model on the nation’s favorite ballad singer’s VIP guest list.
His nagging couldn't deter her early departure since the keys in her clutch belong to a vehicle licensed in Fan’s name. She won't do that, though, won’t stalk out like a nervous wreck and the gossip of the evening. They aren't parallel in the soulmates sort of way, but Yifan has been her manager so long now that their existences have twined into the quiet sort of understanding between family members. Yifan’s mortification would still sting though she doesn't give a flying fuck for her saving her own face.
She doesn't care much about her image in general, her face will continue selling magazines regardless of how gracefully she imbibes cheap lukewarm champagne at private parties, though the stakes of this evening are higher than usual at least by her reckoning. It's not a script tha’ts on the line tonight--it's Fan's heart, or what parts of it she's allowed to indulge in this reckless fantasy.
Fantasy, that's all it is, she berates herself, clicking a manicured fingernail against the stem of her glass as loudly as she dares. It was ridiculous to presume she could invite herself to someone's party, waltz in, and sweep the guest of honor off his nimble feet.
Fan peers over the other shoulder of the director, refusing herself the luxury of slicing her teeth into the waxy layer of lipstick coating her mouths in case of the small chance that the person she came here for, the one she is enduring this bitter champagne and inane small talk for, might notice her.
He doesn't, of course. If Fan and her manager are both ensnared by talkative guests, the young man at the center of the dance floor is besieged. If he were as petite as some his seniors in the idol hothouse company she wouldn't be able to see him at all. As is it, with clusters of folk jostling at his elbows for attention, one after another, she can only see the column of his proud neck and the sweep of his winged brows and the orchid purple eye makeup feathered out from the corners of his cat's eyes.
He's just as gorgeous in person as he is on his album covers. That realization makes the edges of Fan's throat flutter around a dry swallow. A shudder tears through her as she reconsiders the insanity of her personal quest in coming here--greeting him in person, perhaps fitting her sweating palm into his, meeting his professional smile with melting one of her own. Well, at least she hopes she could force her lips to curve into something like a smile, though she might be too overcome in the moment to do much more than gape with her soul wide open and slipping far between her rows of teeth.
"Actress Fan! More to drink?"
"I'm sorry?" The lights flash against the backs of her retinas when Fan blinks. The director is holding out another glass to her. This one is full but the pale amber liquid looks just as flat and lukewarm as the shallow drip of champagne lining the glass cradled in her hands. The waiter balancing a tray at the edge of their circle hovers, his blank face a careful construct of pleasant boredom. He shifts in his shoes and Fan eyes the spreading gap in circle where he's left an opening.
Fan seizes her chance.
"I'm sorry, dear director! If you don't mind I’ll just...I'm feeling a bit faint..." Fan presses the back of her hand to the slope of her cheekbone and steps toward the opening. Not the tottering, baby giraffe steps of a newly debuted idol nor the traipsing gait of a producer's second wife. Fan strides with the ease of someone well accustomed to the weight of the stilettos fettering her feet and the confidence of one who won't let her shoes set her pace.
"Oh, oh of course. Oh dear," the director frowns, stumbling backwards til his shoulders brush the gold printed wallpaper.
As Fan glides free of the circle and she feels instantly lighter, as if she can hear the social bonds snapping from her wrists like rusted chains.
“Is she leaving?” the director asks, the question addressed to the squeaky girl on his left and not the one in the questions themselves.
"Probably off to the washroom to check her powder." The inane young actress whispers just loud enough for Fan to hear as she strides off. "Just like a shallow model with a princess complex."
Fan can't slow her steps the closer she draws to the doors and to freedom. She skirts the refreshments table, avoiding eye contact so she won't be roped into another round of comments about the weather and camera lens filters and who the producer of the latest Gong Li film is fucking this month. She doesn't exit through the double doors leading to the crowded atrium and the ornate restroom complete with marble floors and sink counters. She swings around to the back, where the doors are cracked open. Fan sighs in relief as the first whisper of cool night air greets her as she slips out onto the balcony.
The suffocating rush of chatter zaps to a barely audible buzz as she glides to the end of the balustraded walkway, like hearing static on a TV in another room of the house. It's not a proper terrace, but the balcony has enough depth to allow for a few pieces of deck furniture crowded in at the ends. Only the chairs, though, not the tables, and the floral cushions are dark with faded rain.
It rained the night before but it won't rain today. The lights of skyscrapers looming over the water across the bay burn against the clear sky like the stars that their polluting glow render invisible. A clenching of her chest makes Fan begrudge the city for clouding the stars for a moment, but she slips her hand past the magnetic snap of her clutch and the cling of thin plastic against her fingertips releases the knot in her chest.
She doesn’t pull the pack of slims from her purse. Yifan would glare if she returned to the party with a heady haze of earthy tobacco clinging to her shoulders like a gauzy silk shawl. Fan rarely smokes anyway, less often than her manager does, the chain smoking hypocrite, but he claims it’s different because he’s a man. Not that he judges her for the habit but he’s hyper aware of that fact that the public does.
Fan doesn’t care if the act roughens her image, but she’s so used to sneaking smokes behind buildings and in empty bathrooms since she light her first cheap cig in middle school. She can’t properly enjoy a smoke without feeling jumpy if there’s a chance someone could walk by with a disapproving glare.
The night smells like rain but it’s the end of summer and the monsoon clouds have abandoned the city to lie wretched in the remnants of the season’s heat, even under the cover of darkness once the sun has retreated behind the portcullis of twilight. The air smells earthy and alive, like dew damp loam underfoot even though Fan’s stiletto’s are balanced on whitewashed concrete. The air is thick and Fan wants to thicken it with the deep green smell of her cigarettes bleeding into the midnight blue of the bay.
She pulls out her earbuds instead of her lighter, a white pair old enough that the cord has been fingerprinted a smoky gray. They’re not the headphones she usually carries, the trusty pink pair plugged into her phone that keep her company while jogging or browsing the dish and laundry detergent aisles of the local super at 3AM on sleepless Sundays. These are just the ones that were on her dressing table this evening. She jammed them in her clutch half consciously along with the scattered collection of her belongings as Yifan scolded her over the phone in his sleepy voice for running late.
You’re the one that wants to go, he had said, so then, let’s go. Get a move on, BB.
She pops the plug into the jack of her iPod. It's an old one, a generation four incapable of OS updates any longer, and there's a crack splitting the screen at an angled divide. Fan hasn't replaced it, though, because the dingy silver back fits into her palm with time conditioned perfection. Calming in the same way the plastic clinging to the cardboard pack of cigs in her clutch seals against her fingertips like a benediction heard whispered every night in the dark.
The screen flashes to life and the queued melody leaks from the wires through her ears, forming the pearls of relief beading at the corners of her eyes. It's the same song she's had on repeat for weeks now, exclusively looping it for the past five days or so. That in itself is not unusual. Once the thrum of a certain bassline or the sparkle of a pop song's hook embeds itself in her consciousness she plays it until it absorbs her, thrumming in her gums and the beds of her nails and at the roots of her hair long after she's shut off the player and is wrapped in the stillness of her empty apartment.
This song is no different, the violin strains in the chorus and the texture of the harmonies washing in lyrical waves the backs of her eyelids aren't any more transcendental or special than the ballad that stole her heart in April--except that it is.
Fan's been trying to put her finger on it for weeks now, and the frustration of her failure is bitter at the back of her throat. This single is a soft summer ballad, without even a music video to tantalize her with haunting impressions of the singer's lips curving around his careful vocalizations. (But she's imagining the way his brows slant like the wavering meniscuses of falling raindrops and how colors of his eyes shatter on the chorus like geodes breaking open to as the music invades her spirit and reforms it like the silk of a woven dream).
Fan isn't the only one entranced by the nation's favorite ballad singer, Huang Zitao. Maybe she's an actress. Maybe her star power has enough gravitational pull to allow her to orbit in the same room as the young flower voiced crooner. Maybe she's secretly his biggest fan. Well, she doesn't own any posters of his toned abs and mournful eyes, but she's sure she's as obsessed as any girl or boy or person in the nation.
Even so, this all is still not enough to grant her fulfillment. She's dying to meet him just to hold his hand for a moment. She wants to tell him she thinks his voice is starshine and his eyes are the sparkle of city lights over the mournful blue of the bay. He’s so beautiful it was nothing to beg Yifan, Fan begged him to let her come tonight, and here she is hiding on the balcony.
Fan tips her head back, leaning into the waft of breeze ruffling the hems of her loose linen trousers where they tickle at her ankles. She lets the music consume her again as it has for nights on end, blotting out her insomnia and the bone deep ache of pretension she's steeping in with every frivolous photo shoot. She inhales until the soaking pulse erases the very primordial web of veins lacing up the insides of her eyelids and holding the vision of her memories and imaginings in place, safe inside her skull where they belong and can't leak out to betray her heartbeat.
Her gaze doesn’t stray from the pulse against her sealed eyelids until minutes later, after she's mouthed her way through the lyrics three and half times and the strange rotting freshness hanging around her in the air doesn't feel quite as oppressive. She doesn't look up until minutes later, the music still consoling and consuming her being as the waves of sound roll into her.
She hadn't noticed the arrival of the presence now leaning on the same burnished railing of the same narrow balcony as Fan. His lips are quiet in the shadows and his eyes flame with questions that sing against Fan's skin as he watches her. A yellow cigarette lighter is transfixed by his fingertips, burning amber in the lights of the city spread out below and above them. She is immersed in the sound of his voice and he's transfixed by the way her dark red lips trace his lyrics in the glitter of skyscraper lights from across the bay.
Fan slips the earbuds from her ears and the wash of waves and wind comes rushing back against her lungs like deja vu. Her mouth opens and nothing comes out, her tumble of emotions echoing against the bowl of her skull in the strains of remembered melody.
"Hello," he says, and his fingers slide along the railing to rest beside hers. "It's a little chilly out here."
Fan nods, the pins securing the chignon at the nape of her neck pulling her hairline tight against her scalp. Everything is shrinking in on her like a fine film of preserving plastic, the wind, the water stirring below the concrete beneath her feet, the sharp teeth of his tentative smile.
"The loneliness, I mean. It's chilling to the bone, the kind that seeps right in and--"
"Makes you sneeze," she says, her jaw clenching, "yeah. It's like influenza, just as catching."
"And once you've caught it, there's nothing to be done but hole up and wait out the fever." His eyes flash glassy in the light of false stars as his chin dips into the open collar of his silk jacket.
"Maybe," Fan says. They are both surprised by the laugh that escapes her lips and shimmers in the thick air like the opalescent skin of a soap bubble. "But isn't the recovery faster when you let someone take care of you?"
"You can't fix loneliness with chicken soup." Tao's fingernail sings across steel as his hand edges nearer to hers.
"That's funny," Fan whispers as her gold lacquered nails graze the incline of his wrist peeking from the too-short sleeves of his cuff linked tuxedo shirt. He's gorgeous up close, the mesh of his long lashes the exquisite lace web of a mayfly's wings on a magnolia leaf. "My cousins call me Chicken Soup. Soup for short, or Chicken Stew if it’s my birthday."
He doesn't laugh, even though everyone else does when they hear that. She quit telling people the day she started sneaking cigarettes into the school bathroom for that reason. But Tao doesn’t laugh just like she knew he wouldn't.
"Chicken soup," he says as he turns her hand over in his with gentle fingers. He studies her palm as if he's contemplating the meaning of spring rain or comparing the curve of her thumbs to roundness of the sky. "Tell me more?"
And Fan opens her mouth, this time as sure of the melody that slips through her lips as she is of the color of home. Her ankles unwavering and face to the breeze, she tells the boy who lets his fingers tangle in hers. She has been longing for someone bright like the stars to share the echoes of her whispered soul secrets. Maybe Tao is the one, or maybe he’s not. It will take ages to tell everything, too many pent up silences to spill out in one night. She thinks he’s worth the time it will take to try.
"One secret at a time," Fan says, and Tao smiles until the corners of his mouth ripen gold with understanding.
They start with their favorite flavors of soup.
Pairing: Huang Zitao//Fan Bingbing, Wu Yifan
Rating: PG
Warning: do I actually know things about Fan BB? nope. do I care? no, because she's gorgeous and I ship her with Mr. Gorgeous.
Disclaimer: I don't own anything, written just for fun.
Summary: Fan wears loneliness like a pair of silver earrings and everything Tao is is golden.
A/N: For bluedreaming . I owe her a lot of magazines, including one of these: Fan Bingbing for Grazia The story is inspired by the ones with the earphones. Also I looped this song while I wrote it: Zhou Mi's "Lovesick"
Fan is an industry veteran, the dangles of her heavy silver earrings gunmetal cold against the ramrod column of her neck. She's been around the block and then some, jogging the promotion treadmill as spring rains streaks the windows with the humid green blur of summer and the crunch of autumn rust lining the sidewalks outside the filming studio crackles into dirty ice beneath her boots. Blockbusters billboards, indie film posters printed on cheap grainy pulp paper, designer perfume spreads which flash her gilt lipstick to match the golden labels--you name it, Fan's face has been on it. The mesmerizing mix of raw boned beauty and refined composure that defines her features is familiar to most eyes in the nation, whether or not their owners know her name or anything about the color of the soul slipping between her parted lips with every exhale, and returning as she sucks in the chemical concoction of city air.
This far established into her career, Fan should be one of those gracefully aging ladies who line the edges of the conversation circles at after parties and awards galas, ankles unwavering in outrageous Jimmy Choo's and champagne flute like an extension of her manicured fingers. Fan should, but she blends into the crowds of well groomed supporting actresses and back-up vocalists as well as Cubist accent mural in a Gothic Revival themed sitting room.
Yet here she is, heels slick against the waxed floor in a corner of a ballroom. She’s crowded into a corner of a crowded room, trapped in discussion with a greasy haired director she only tolerates and a newly debuted idol with a squeaky laugh. Fan doesn't even feign nonchalance as she peers over the dandruff dusted shoulders of the director to scan the room for her manager. She spots him backed up against the grand piano under the grander chandelier, ensnared in a similar clump of party guests. It isn't difficult to catch his eye with her sad-lipped scowl, but Yifan just shrugs at her. He’s had his fill of the party and it’s cheap champagne if his stiff browed expression is any indication, but he inclines his head in a slight shake.
No, his eyes flash in warning as Fan’s pout deepens into crevices at the corners of her mouth. We’re staying til it’s over, he had warned her on the ride over.
Fan drops her gaze to the rim of the glass in her hand. The crystal is growing clammy against the loose grip of her palm, the initial coolness that soothed her fingers at first touch now faded, along with any enthusiasm she had for this evening. Her drink isn't empty enough to warrant breaking through the circle to flag down a waiter with a collection tray. The level of the champagne left in the flute, though, is only high enough to reach her lips if she plunges her head back all the way.
Not the way a respected lady behaves at elegant parties, as Yifan reminded her on the way here.
Fan had rolled her eyes and swung a sharp left. Anxiety and the crushing speed of mental inertia threw her hellbent on driving them to the venue as fast as she could possibly get them there in rush hour.
Now that she’s standing at the fringes of the scene she’s been dreaming every night for a week she doesn't dare complain and make a scene by going home early. Yifan would be seething if she tried. He'd lecture her in the parking lot and then all the way back in the car, his mortification multiplying times every speed limit she broke in her panic to fly home and melt into the nest of blankets strewn on her mattress. How it’s her own stubborn fault they're both suffocating under the glare of the chandelier while the breeze flies free across the bay just outside. How she is the one who demanded he pull the strings to get the nation’s favorite perfume model on the nation’s favorite ballad singer’s VIP guest list.
His nagging couldn't deter her early departure since the keys in her clutch belong to a vehicle licensed in Fan’s name. She won't do that, though, won’t stalk out like a nervous wreck and the gossip of the evening. They aren't parallel in the soulmates sort of way, but Yifan has been her manager so long now that their existences have twined into the quiet sort of understanding between family members. Yifan’s mortification would still sting though she doesn't give a flying fuck for her saving her own face.
She doesn't care much about her image in general, her face will continue selling magazines regardless of how gracefully she imbibes cheap lukewarm champagne at private parties, though the stakes of this evening are higher than usual at least by her reckoning. It's not a script tha’ts on the line tonight--it's Fan's heart, or what parts of it she's allowed to indulge in this reckless fantasy.
Fantasy, that's all it is, she berates herself, clicking a manicured fingernail against the stem of her glass as loudly as she dares. It was ridiculous to presume she could invite herself to someone's party, waltz in, and sweep the guest of honor off his nimble feet.
Fan peers over the other shoulder of the director, refusing herself the luxury of slicing her teeth into the waxy layer of lipstick coating her mouths in case of the small chance that the person she came here for, the one she is enduring this bitter champagne and inane small talk for, might notice her.
He doesn't, of course. If Fan and her manager are both ensnared by talkative guests, the young man at the center of the dance floor is besieged. If he were as petite as some his seniors in the idol hothouse company she wouldn't be able to see him at all. As is it, with clusters of folk jostling at his elbows for attention, one after another, she can only see the column of his proud neck and the sweep of his winged brows and the orchid purple eye makeup feathered out from the corners of his cat's eyes.
He's just as gorgeous in person as he is on his album covers. That realization makes the edges of Fan's throat flutter around a dry swallow. A shudder tears through her as she reconsiders the insanity of her personal quest in coming here--greeting him in person, perhaps fitting her sweating palm into his, meeting his professional smile with melting one of her own. Well, at least she hopes she could force her lips to curve into something like a smile, though she might be too overcome in the moment to do much more than gape with her soul wide open and slipping far between her rows of teeth.
"Actress Fan! More to drink?"
"I'm sorry?" The lights flash against the backs of her retinas when Fan blinks. The director is holding out another glass to her. This one is full but the pale amber liquid looks just as flat and lukewarm as the shallow drip of champagne lining the glass cradled in her hands. The waiter balancing a tray at the edge of their circle hovers, his blank face a careful construct of pleasant boredom. He shifts in his shoes and Fan eyes the spreading gap in circle where he's left an opening.
Fan seizes her chance.
"I'm sorry, dear director! If you don't mind I’ll just...I'm feeling a bit faint..." Fan presses the back of her hand to the slope of her cheekbone and steps toward the opening. Not the tottering, baby giraffe steps of a newly debuted idol nor the traipsing gait of a producer's second wife. Fan strides with the ease of someone well accustomed to the weight of the stilettos fettering her feet and the confidence of one who won't let her shoes set her pace.
"Oh, oh of course. Oh dear," the director frowns, stumbling backwards til his shoulders brush the gold printed wallpaper.
As Fan glides free of the circle and she feels instantly lighter, as if she can hear the social bonds snapping from her wrists like rusted chains.
“Is she leaving?” the director asks, the question addressed to the squeaky girl on his left and not the one in the questions themselves.
"Probably off to the washroom to check her powder." The inane young actress whispers just loud enough for Fan to hear as she strides off. "Just like a shallow model with a princess complex."
Fan can't slow her steps the closer she draws to the doors and to freedom. She skirts the refreshments table, avoiding eye contact so she won't be roped into another round of comments about the weather and camera lens filters and who the producer of the latest Gong Li film is fucking this month. She doesn't exit through the double doors leading to the crowded atrium and the ornate restroom complete with marble floors and sink counters. She swings around to the back, where the doors are cracked open. Fan sighs in relief as the first whisper of cool night air greets her as she slips out onto the balcony.
The suffocating rush of chatter zaps to a barely audible buzz as she glides to the end of the balustraded walkway, like hearing static on a TV in another room of the house. It's not a proper terrace, but the balcony has enough depth to allow for a few pieces of deck furniture crowded in at the ends. Only the chairs, though, not the tables, and the floral cushions are dark with faded rain.
It rained the night before but it won't rain today. The lights of skyscrapers looming over the water across the bay burn against the clear sky like the stars that their polluting glow render invisible. A clenching of her chest makes Fan begrudge the city for clouding the stars for a moment, but she slips her hand past the magnetic snap of her clutch and the cling of thin plastic against her fingertips releases the knot in her chest.
She doesn’t pull the pack of slims from her purse. Yifan would glare if she returned to the party with a heady haze of earthy tobacco clinging to her shoulders like a gauzy silk shawl. Fan rarely smokes anyway, less often than her manager does, the chain smoking hypocrite, but he claims it’s different because he’s a man. Not that he judges her for the habit but he’s hyper aware of that fact that the public does.
Fan doesn’t care if the act roughens her image, but she’s so used to sneaking smokes behind buildings and in empty bathrooms since she light her first cheap cig in middle school. She can’t properly enjoy a smoke without feeling jumpy if there’s a chance someone could walk by with a disapproving glare.
The night smells like rain but it’s the end of summer and the monsoon clouds have abandoned the city to lie wretched in the remnants of the season’s heat, even under the cover of darkness once the sun has retreated behind the portcullis of twilight. The air smells earthy and alive, like dew damp loam underfoot even though Fan’s stiletto’s are balanced on whitewashed concrete. The air is thick and Fan wants to thicken it with the deep green smell of her cigarettes bleeding into the midnight blue of the bay.
She pulls out her earbuds instead of her lighter, a white pair old enough that the cord has been fingerprinted a smoky gray. They’re not the headphones she usually carries, the trusty pink pair plugged into her phone that keep her company while jogging or browsing the dish and laundry detergent aisles of the local super at 3AM on sleepless Sundays. These are just the ones that were on her dressing table this evening. She jammed them in her clutch half consciously along with the scattered collection of her belongings as Yifan scolded her over the phone in his sleepy voice for running late.
You’re the one that wants to go, he had said, so then, let’s go. Get a move on, BB.
She pops the plug into the jack of her iPod. It's an old one, a generation four incapable of OS updates any longer, and there's a crack splitting the screen at an angled divide. Fan hasn't replaced it, though, because the dingy silver back fits into her palm with time conditioned perfection. Calming in the same way the plastic clinging to the cardboard pack of cigs in her clutch seals against her fingertips like a benediction heard whispered every night in the dark.
The screen flashes to life and the queued melody leaks from the wires through her ears, forming the pearls of relief beading at the corners of her eyes. It's the same song she's had on repeat for weeks now, exclusively looping it for the past five days or so. That in itself is not unusual. Once the thrum of a certain bassline or the sparkle of a pop song's hook embeds itself in her consciousness she plays it until it absorbs her, thrumming in her gums and the beds of her nails and at the roots of her hair long after she's shut off the player and is wrapped in the stillness of her empty apartment.
This song is no different, the violin strains in the chorus and the texture of the harmonies washing in lyrical waves the backs of her eyelids aren't any more transcendental or special than the ballad that stole her heart in April--except that it is.
Fan's been trying to put her finger on it for weeks now, and the frustration of her failure is bitter at the back of her throat. This single is a soft summer ballad, without even a music video to tantalize her with haunting impressions of the singer's lips curving around his careful vocalizations. (But she's imagining the way his brows slant like the wavering meniscuses of falling raindrops and how colors of his eyes shatter on the chorus like geodes breaking open to as the music invades her spirit and reforms it like the silk of a woven dream).
Fan isn't the only one entranced by the nation's favorite ballad singer, Huang Zitao. Maybe she's an actress. Maybe her star power has enough gravitational pull to allow her to orbit in the same room as the young flower voiced crooner. Maybe she's secretly his biggest fan. Well, she doesn't own any posters of his toned abs and mournful eyes, but she's sure she's as obsessed as any girl or boy or person in the nation.
Even so, this all is still not enough to grant her fulfillment. She's dying to meet him just to hold his hand for a moment. She wants to tell him she thinks his voice is starshine and his eyes are the sparkle of city lights over the mournful blue of the bay. He’s so beautiful it was nothing to beg Yifan, Fan begged him to let her come tonight, and here she is hiding on the balcony.
Fan tips her head back, leaning into the waft of breeze ruffling the hems of her loose linen trousers where they tickle at her ankles. She lets the music consume her again as it has for nights on end, blotting out her insomnia and the bone deep ache of pretension she's steeping in with every frivolous photo shoot. She inhales until the soaking pulse erases the very primordial web of veins lacing up the insides of her eyelids and holding the vision of her memories and imaginings in place, safe inside her skull where they belong and can't leak out to betray her heartbeat.
Her gaze doesn’t stray from the pulse against her sealed eyelids until minutes later, after she's mouthed her way through the lyrics three and half times and the strange rotting freshness hanging around her in the air doesn't feel quite as oppressive. She doesn't look up until minutes later, the music still consoling and consuming her being as the waves of sound roll into her.
She hadn't noticed the arrival of the presence now leaning on the same burnished railing of the same narrow balcony as Fan. His lips are quiet in the shadows and his eyes flame with questions that sing against Fan's skin as he watches her. A yellow cigarette lighter is transfixed by his fingertips, burning amber in the lights of the city spread out below and above them. She is immersed in the sound of his voice and he's transfixed by the way her dark red lips trace his lyrics in the glitter of skyscraper lights from across the bay.
Fan slips the earbuds from her ears and the wash of waves and wind comes rushing back against her lungs like deja vu. Her mouth opens and nothing comes out, her tumble of emotions echoing against the bowl of her skull in the strains of remembered melody.
"Hello," he says, and his fingers slide along the railing to rest beside hers. "It's a little chilly out here."
Fan nods, the pins securing the chignon at the nape of her neck pulling her hairline tight against her scalp. Everything is shrinking in on her like a fine film of preserving plastic, the wind, the water stirring below the concrete beneath her feet, the sharp teeth of his tentative smile.
"The loneliness, I mean. It's chilling to the bone, the kind that seeps right in and--"
"Makes you sneeze," she says, her jaw clenching, "yeah. It's like influenza, just as catching."
"And once you've caught it, there's nothing to be done but hole up and wait out the fever." His eyes flash glassy in the light of false stars as his chin dips into the open collar of his silk jacket.
"Maybe," Fan says. They are both surprised by the laugh that escapes her lips and shimmers in the thick air like the opalescent skin of a soap bubble. "But isn't the recovery faster when you let someone take care of you?"
"You can't fix loneliness with chicken soup." Tao's fingernail sings across steel as his hand edges nearer to hers.
"That's funny," Fan whispers as her gold lacquered nails graze the incline of his wrist peeking from the too-short sleeves of his cuff linked tuxedo shirt. He's gorgeous up close, the mesh of his long lashes the exquisite lace web of a mayfly's wings on a magnolia leaf. "My cousins call me Chicken Soup. Soup for short, or Chicken Stew if it’s my birthday."
He doesn't laugh, even though everyone else does when they hear that. She quit telling people the day she started sneaking cigarettes into the school bathroom for that reason. But Tao doesn’t laugh just like she knew he wouldn't.
"Chicken soup," he says as he turns her hand over in his with gentle fingers. He studies her palm as if he's contemplating the meaning of spring rain or comparing the curve of her thumbs to roundness of the sky. "Tell me more?"
And Fan opens her mouth, this time as sure of the melody that slips through her lips as she is of the color of home. Her ankles unwavering and face to the breeze, she tells the boy who lets his fingers tangle in hers. She has been longing for someone bright like the stars to share the echoes of her whispered soul secrets. Maybe Tao is the one, or maybe he’s not. It will take ages to tell everything, too many pent up silences to spill out in one night. She thinks he’s worth the time it will take to try.
"One secret at a time," Fan says, and Tao smiles until the corners of his mouth ripen gold with understanding.
They start with their favorite flavors of soup.