Chapter 27: The Shape of Water

In Ji Kai's fictional short story titled "The Shape of Water" which explores the world of espionage in the Chinese Republican Era, there was an opulent hotel located at the Shanghai Bund, in the International Settlement, known as "The Bonham House Hotel". Entering through the revolving glass doors, one would find a French restaurant to his right. Dining at La Lune Bleu required patrons to make a reservation months in advance, otherwise one would be apologetically turned away at the entrance.

Walking into the restaurant, I instantly felt as if I had walked onto a drama set at Hengdian World Studios. Diners dressed to the nines revelled in the elegant art deco glamour in their surrounds with classical jazz playing in the background, engaging in merry conversations, savouring their food and clinking glasses with the finest libations.

"This place is famous for its entrecôte steak. You can select their signature butter-based sauce or the classic black pepper sauce." Ji Kai remarked as he described the menu which was either in French or traditional Chinese characters to me. I could read the latter but I didn't wish to interrupt his enthusiasm.

My eyes scanned the words printed on fancy paper, finding the whole experience more and more intriguing. "And what are you getting for your main course?"

"Probably the duck confit," he said with a smile before raising his hand elegantly to call a nearby waiter: "Sir, please."

As Ji Kai recited our orders, I looked at him in surprised. I had forgotten that waiters would always check with diners how they would like their meat to be cooked. To think that Ji Kai actually ordered the doneness that I had stubbornly sworn to stick by for life.

With happy indifference, he lifted his glass of wine, sniffed it before taking a small sip. Feeling my awestruck eyes on him, he gazed at me through the glass.

"Sorry, are you alright with a medium steak? I had just ordered it because I thought that you would only ever eat that." He set down his glass and inquired belatedly.

"Yes, but how did you know?" I asked in a low tone. Only my family and friends with whom I had had beef steak dishes with would know of my staunch dislike of raw meat.

Ji Kai folded his hands on his lap and swallowed. As if he had known that this moment would come sooner or later, he drew in a deep breath. "Your best friend, Zhang Xiaorong, told me about it about two years ago."

"Xiaorong?" I frowned in disbelief. "Since when were you friends with her? Back in high school, the both of you barely spoke at all."

He scratched the side of his head, unable to maintain eye contact with me. "Somehow we are connected on Diandian?"

I looked at him with increasing astonishment. Zhang Xiaorong was a friend that I made in the second year of high school and had became my closest friend ever since. We even went to the same university, albeit different courses, and even rented a flat together. When she discovered that I was well-acquainted with Ji Kai in our third year of high school, she joined the one-member fandom for Ji Kai and I to end up in a relationship one day. She had never turned back since.

"She has never told me that she has been in contact with you!" I exclaimed, but lowered my voice when I realised the setting we were in. "You cut off all contact with me, but you've been talking to her this whole time?" I felt a sense of betrayal from Xiaorong for keeping me in the dark for so many years.

"No, no—no! Don't misunderstand," Ji Kai straightened and shook his head in alarm. Suddenly becoming aware of our surroundings, he quickly lowered his volume as I did earlier. "She has just been sending me regular updates about you for the past few years. I've read them all but I've never replied any of them."

"Xiaorong is such a weirdo," I scoffed, horrified at the thought of my private life over the past few years being revealed to Ji Kai behind my back. In a chiding tone, I said: "And so are you."

"Me? Why?" His lips curved into a smile and he chuckled softly.

"You—you read all those updates about my personal life... You didn't have to. No, you shouldn't read them at all!"

"But I wanted to. How else would I be able to know how you've been doing?" Ji Kai looked pointedly at me with his jet-black pupils slightly trembling. "It pained me that I had made that childish decision to cut off contact with everyone. I do regret it. You have no idea how much I—I mi—"

His suddenly stuttering voice trailed off as he broke eye contact again. He reached out to pick up his glass of water and took a big gulp but he did not finish his sentence even after drinking. Mirroring his actions subconsciously, I took small sips of water, feeling the chilliness refresh my parched throat.

It must have been the heat from the lighting in the restaurant that caused me to feel warm all over. It must have been the alcohol in the wine that made my face flush. Or it could have just been because of my overthinking brain going into overdrive.

The two words that Ji Kai had stopped short of uttering, my sixth sense told me that they would have been—if he had enough courage to give voice to them—'missed' and 'you.'

***

Outside the front door of hotel stood a boy who looked about twelve years old, in his hands a bunch of red roses with their stems bundled together with newspaper. The child approached an affluent-looking European couple who was walking out onto the streets ahead of us.

"Would you like to buy some flowers, Sir?"

The man glanced at his female companion who laughed in a demure and bashful manner. To impress her with his generosity and charitable heart, he said in heavily accented Mandarin: "I'll buy the whole bunch of roses. It's very late now, you should hurry along home."

The grateful young boy thanked the man profusely as he received a silver coin with both hands. The shiny metal gleamed under the gentle light from the lamp posts.

"I would have done the same," I muttered under my breath after we had strolled some distance away. "We're rich in this world."

Ji Kai scratched his nose and looked at me in a puzzled way. He laughed, "excuse me, you're talking about my money in this world."

I placed my hands behind my back and stuck my nose in the air. "You didn't even earn that money. Surely you can spare me some."

"But you don't even like roses—just leave them to others who can really appreciate them," he rejoined.

Feeling slightly offended and having misheard the word 'roses' for the word 'flowers', I glowered at him. But he simply shrugged with his hands in his pockets.

Looking at my shoes at I placed one feet in front of the other in a straight line, I tucked a lock of hair behind my hears. "It's not that I can't appreciate flowers. It's just that I've not met the someone who can gift me the type of flowers I want."

"The type of flowers you want?" Ji Kai repeated, his eyes unfocused as he looked deep in thought. Then his pace picked up as he advanced forward with larger strides. "Let's hurry up. We still have somewhere else to go for a post-dinner walk."

"Didn't you say that we are going somewhere? Why are we back here?" I asked Ji Kai who was fumbling with a bundle of keys while trying to unlock the front door of his house.

"Hold on," he said with immense concentration while trying to find the key which would fit into the lock. "I've forgotten which is the right key to the front door."

"Well, hurry up. It's getting chilly out here."

"Chilly?" Ji Kai echoed with a startled expression just as the door unlocked with a 'click'.

I pushed against the door to open it, just as Ji Kai stretched out a hand to hold me back. But before my brain could register his warning, I had already taken a step into the house. In a literal blink of an eye, the interior of the house had morphed into a completely different environment. Wrapping my arms around myself, I shuddered as it felt as if I had entered a refrigerating chamber.

A gust of crisp wintry wind blew in through the opened door. Ji Kai hurriedly closed the door behind us.

Turning around to peer at him, I gestured to our new surroundings in bewilderment. "Where are we now?"

It seemed that he had teleported us into a humble hut in the middle of winter. Judging from the traditional and rustic furnishing of the house, we were either in a remote village or in another story with a historical setting.

"Sorry, I didn't expect this place to be winter right now." He rushed towards a wardrobe that stood beside a bed and rummaged through it. Pulling out two traditional winter fur cloaks, he returned to tie one around me before pulling the hood over my head. Ji Kai surveyed me from head to toe before running off to fetch a pair of boots. "These are men boots so they may be large for you, but you'll have to make do with them."

"Is this the place that you said we should hurry to for a post-dinner walk?" I asked, my eyes narrowing into slits.

"This is another story in my book." Ji Kai stood by the door, watching as I changed my shoes. "This place is called 'Valley of Ten Thousand Trees' and I'm the master of this valley. This is a xianxia genre story, so the trees are flowering 365 days a year."

I nodded politely, but could not help but raise my brows in bemusement. "What's so special about this place? Did you want to see snow?"

Using both hands, Ji Kai pushed against the double front doors in a dramatic fashion. As the wooden doors swung open, a swirl of pink and white unfolded before me.

Unable to conceal my delight, I stepped out onto the porch and into the vast forest. A layer of pink petals covered the pristine white snow which crunched beneath my feet with my every step. As far as I could see, we were surrounded by a sea of cherry blossom trees. Above my head, pale pink petals floated down, riding the frosty air like sailboats.

"I wrote this place into my book," Ji Kai said as he came up behind me, "as a gift to you."

I whirled around, a thousand swarming my head. "What do you mean?"

"I know that you like cherry blossom flowers in particular but they only bloom once a year. So I created such a place—so that you can see your favourite flowers any time you want."

"Did Xiaorong tell you that my wish is to retire in a village and plant a field of cherry blossoms trees?" I chuckled at Ji Kai's serious and sincere expression.

He coloured a little, and nodded slowly. "It was in one of her reports."

"I don't know what to say." I laughed again, this time with a tone of unconcealed scorn. "Everything you know about me—they are based on what other people have said. How can you be sure that what they say about me is a hundred percent accurate?"

Ji Kai's breathing became uneven as he looked at me with gloomy eyes. His mellow voice deepened with affection: "Every time I hear your name or news about you over these few years, my thoughts spiral out of control and my heart feels tormented. I even attended two symposiums where you had presented on your research papers. Once was on international criminal justice and the other was on international family law. I remember watching you from the audience, speaking confidently and clearly on stage. In those moments, I felt that we were so close, yet so far. I couldn't approach you as the Association would be watching you. I always wondered, what if I had not run away from my family's mission? What if we had gone to university together? Would we have become closer? Would I have been able to confess my feelings earlier?"

My own breathing hitched upon hearing his implied confession and my heart pounded faster in my chest, uncertain where this conversation was leading. Indeed, I had the opportunity of presenting in two symposiums in my final year of university. But on both occasions, I took little notice of the audience, except for those who were posing questions.

"So are you solely expressing your regret, or are you trying to make amends moving forward?" I replied somewhat coldly while looking past him at the shades of pink, unable to maintain eye contact.

Ji Kai paused to take a deep breath before answering, "I want to get to know you directly, starting from now. Not just as friends, but as someone with whom I can walk with towards marriage."

My scalp prickled. And I felt my face flushed immediately. In the middle of a wintry setting, I was actually starting to perspire.

Seeing that I was shocked speechless, Ji Kai stepped towards me. With clenched jaws and uncertain eyes, he leaned downwards and whispered: "What do you say, Yuhan?"

Memories of us from high school surfaced in my mind. I glanced up at him, studying his face and wondering if this truly happening. It was only after we had completed the gaokao that I gradually became aware that I liked Ji Kai. I had hoped that I could confess to him if we could attend the same university. But Ji Kai had to pull a disappearing act and cut off all contact with me. I asked around our mutual social circles to see if anyone had information about him, but my efforts were for naught. Eventually, I decided that I would forget that Ji Kai ever existed.

But now he had returned, and even had the cheek to tell me that he had been keeping tabs on me for the past five years, and even secretly visited me in person. It was not fair that I had zero updates about his life when he knew about mine.

"I say," my voice came out slightly airy, "In the time that you get to know me, you'll have to tell me two times as much information about yourself. Otherwise, how would you be able to make up for your absence of five years from my life?"

A smile spread across Ji Kai's face and reached his eyes. It was the first time ever since I had met him for the first time in The Eighth Verse that I had seen him looking so genuinely happy.

"Yes, I'll surely make it up to you." He grinned from ear to ear, eyes sparkling as he gazed down at me indulgently. "I promise I'll never let you be hurt again."

"You better carry out what you promise." I returned his smile, finding a profound joy. "And that includes you letting me read your book."

In the middle of the Valley of Ten Thousand Trees located somewhere in a fantasy universe, we gazed at each other as pink petals rained down on us, smiling and smiling, quite unable to stop.

***