In countless midnight awakenings, what clenched Wen Jin's heart was neither the pale white mourning cloth hanging at his parents' funeral nor the damp, peeling walls of their old apartment building.
It was his older sister, Lin Ya.
The woman wore no makeup, her beauty sharp as a blade. She leaned against a wooden window with peeling paint, a long cigarette between her lips, her gaze sweeping over the disheveled sheets.
After a long silence, she snatched up the ashtray from the bedside and hurled it at him.
"You slept with the sister who raised you for seven years. Wen Jin, you must be so proud of yourself."
Wen Jin didn't dodge.
Blood trickled down from his brow. He casually wiped it away, then knelt straight down among the shards. He tasted iron on his tongue, but a dark fire burned in his eyes.
"Sis, when someone's starving to death and sees the only bread in front of them, how could they not take a bite?"
Trembling, he leaned closer and took the dying cigarette from between Lin Ya's fingers into his mouth. He pressed a bloodstained mark onto the filter her lips had touched, smiling in a way that was both shattered and reckless.
"You can smash me as many times as you want. As long as I can still breathe..."
"I'll crawl back to your bed."
*
In the years after Lin Ya cut off all contact with Wen Jin, she often lit a cigarette late at night and thought about it over and over.
She thought until the sky turned pale, until her temples throbbed, but she could never figure out when everything had started to go wrong.
Was it when he was fifteen, squatting by the sink and silently washing the underwear she'd taken off, his ears burning red?
Or on a rainy night when he had a fever, his burning forehead pressed against the back of her neck as he mumbled, "Sis"?
Or even earlier, when she led him home from the chaotic funeral hall where she'd found him, his palm ice-cold and his grip so tight it hurt?
The cigarette burned down to her fingertips, its choking smoke filling her lungs.
Lin Ya coughed until tears came to her eyes.
Perhaps from the day she brought him home, some things were destined to sprout, to break through the earth, to grow into the bloody, tangled mess that would bind them to one another until death.
Reader Advisory:
1. Female lead is not a virgin; male lead is. Four-year age gap. They are not registered under the same household.
2. Their lives get better and better. Happy ending.
Theme: Growing through struggle
