Chapter 45

One afternoon two weeks later, Ning Shu was on the sports ground watching Gouwa play basketball.

Naturally the show-off was there too.

Out on the court he was all dash and swagger, and every move he made drew eyes. When he jogged past the girls on the sideline they tucked their hair behind their ears and tried to look as if they weren't looking.

Only in a crowd did the girls dare stare at Lu Zheng so openly. He gave off far too much glare. Glare like that drew attention, and it drew the unclean things too.

Before Ning Shu arrived he had been playing at half strength. In the second half he suddenly turned it on and ran the other side ragged.

Every time he scored he tipped his chin towards where Ning Shu was sitting and shot a look across.

The girls around her shrieked, each wave louder than the last.

Showing off, Ning Shu thought. What is he trying to prove.

Fang Ruoyun beside her was no better. "Lu Zheng, you're gorgeous! Lu Zheng, I love you!"

"Keep it down," said Ning Shu.

Yi Qiu said, "Tell me honestly. When the goddess Nüwa was pinching people out of clay, don't tell me she never played favourites. Otherwise why are some people ugly and poor, like me, and some people rich and handsome, like my Lu Zheng."

Yang Qing said, "Forget Lu Zheng. When has he ever looked at a girl properly? You'd do better keeping an eye on the good-looking ones playing beside him. That sunny little one, say."

The sunny little one Yang Qing meant, Ning Shu realised, was Ye Yingjun.

Ye Yingjun saw her, jumped up and waved. "Over here! Look at me, look at me!"

Three heads turned to Ning Shu as one.

Ning Shu put a hand over her eyes. "That idiot is my brother."

"No way! Introduce us!"

"Your brother's cute!"

Just then a cold female voice came from the side. "Pathetic, the lot of you."

Ning Shu glanced over. A girl with long straight hair was raking them with a look of contempt.

"Who's that?" she asked Yi Qiu.

Yi Qiu had contempt of her own to spare. "The class beauty in Lu Zheng's class. Qin Linyue. Good marks, good family, and her family does business with his. People say she'll end up Lu Zheng's fiancée."

Fang Ruoyun said, "So that's why Lu Zheng kept looking over this way. He was looking at his fiancée!"

Ning Shu pressed her lips together and said nothing.

The game ended and Gouwa came running over, dripping. "Sis! Was I cool or what!"

"Coolest thing on earth." She took out wet wipes and mopped his face.

"Cooler than Big Brother Lu?"

"Ten thousand times cooler."

Lu Zheng ignored the girls holding out bottles of water and walked straight for Ning Shu.

Qin Linyue, standing in his path, saw him coming and lit up. She held out a can of Pepsi. "Lu Zheng. Well played."

He didn't so much as glance at her. He stepped round her and kept walking.

Her face fell. It was a humiliation.

Yi Qiu had her hand over her mouth. "He's coming over! Aaah!"

Fang Ruoyun: "Don't panic. Wait, did I put make-up on today? Did I? Did I?"

Yang Qing, coldly: "You didn't."

"!!!"

Lu Zheng came up to Ning Shu and, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, took the bottle of iced tea out of her hand.

She gripped it. No.

He pulled.

No! He pulled harder. She held on harder.

The two of them stood there wrestling for one bottle of iced tea, neither giving an inch.

Yi Qiu and the others were stupefied. Qin Linyue was more stupefied still. Lu Zheng wanted to drink her water, and she was refusing him? Who did she think she was?

"That's for my brother," Ning Shu said through her teeth.

Gouwa went straight into the professional sucking-up pose, hands waving. "Not at all! Big Brother Lu's my own brother. It's only right I look after him."

A few days ago he had been Big Brother. Now he was my own brother.

What on earth had Lu Zheng been feeding him.

In the end Ning Shu let go. Lu Zheng stumbled back a step, steadied himself, twisted the cap off in the same movement and tipped his head back to drink.

Easy and unhurried, a trickle of water spilling at the corner of his mouth.

Even drinking water, he made a performance of it.

Fang Ruoyun jabbed Ning Shu with her elbow and looked at her hopefully.

Ning Shu knew an introduction was being begged for. "These are my roommates. Yang Qing, Fang Ruoyun, Yi Qiu."

"Hello," said Lu Zheng.

Fang Ruoyun said, "Hello! Hi! Hello, Lu Zheng! Um, I didn't know you and Ningning knew each other. Forget everything I said just now, ha ha!"

Lu Zheng looked at Ning Shu with a gentle expression. "She's from the country. She doesn't know how anything works. I'd be grateful if you'd look out for her. I'll take you all to dinner sometime."

"Aaah!"

"Of course!"

"Ningning's our own little sister! We'll take care of her!"

Ning Shu put her hand over her eyes again. What was he playing at.

Qin Linyue, watching Lu Zheng get on famously with a pack of girls, was already out of temper, and the girls around her, who had no eyes in their heads, kept chattering.

"What's going on? Doesn't Lu Zheng never talk to girls?"

"Exactly. He barely gives Linyue the time of day. What's he got to say to the Class 3 lot?"

"And look at him smiling."

Qin Linyue could not let it go. She set her jaw, walked up and said sweetly, "Lu Zheng, it's my father's fiftieth tonight. Your family's invited. You'll be there, won't you?"

Her father's birthday. His family invited.

One plain sentence with everything inside it. It told everyone the two families went back generations, and it told everyone which pair here actually matched.

Lu Zheng didn't give her that much.

"Busy."

One word, and no face left to save. No hesitation, no consideration.

How heartless this man could be, how hard, Ning Shu never wanted to find out.

She didn't need to look to feel the hostility coming off Qin Linyue.

Aimed at her.

She didn't much care. Schoolgirls squabbling over a boy. What harm could it do?

"What do you want for dinner?" Lu Zheng asked her.

She looked at him. He was smiling, open and easy.

Before she could say no he went on, "Tell you what. Bring your friends. My treat. You choose the place."

"Aaah!"

"Ningning! Say yes!"

Yi Qiu and Fang Ruoyun looked at her with pleading, starry eyes.

Gouwa rubbed his stomach. "Sis, I haven't had hotpot in ages."

Ning Shu said nothing.

She had his method worked out. When he got nowhere with her, he went for the people around her.

"No." Flat.

Dinner when you say dinner. Together when you say together.

Everything on his say-so. Just like the first life, where what they were to each other and how they lived was whatever he decided. Lu Zheng was used to being in control, and all Ning Shu had been was the woman he kept.

From the day he pulled her out of the water he had kept her beside him, and she had had no say in it.

She would admit it: by then she had given up on everything. There was nothing better on offer. She was going through the motions, one day after the next.

Lu Zheng gave her a new life, and everything she had wanted before and never got.

Money she could never spend to the bottom of. From the bottom rung to the top. Everything she had worked for and never reached, he had only to lift a finger and it was laid out in front of her, and it dazzled her.

Whatever she wanted, he gave her. All she had to do was behave. Stay home, good as gold, like a little bird, and sing for him when he came in each evening. Whatever he wanted, however he wanted it.

No dignity, no self-respect, in the end no self at all. Her whole world had to be Lu Zheng.

She had traded the most valuable thing she owned, her independence, for what he gave her.

Each got what they came for. Neither had any right to complain.

Now she had been born again, and she was not going to be led by the nose.

She had refused him, and her friends couldn't very well push, so they let it go. Only Gouwa, over fried rice at the food stalls outside the school, kept muttering.

"Sis, Big Brother Lu was really upset today."

"I know."

"But he told me to tell you…"

"Don't want to hear it."

"He told me to tell you he wasn't upset." Gouwa got it out fast, then bent over his bowl and didn't dare look up.

Ning Shu picked the bits of beef out of her rice and put them in his bowl. "Oh," she said, not much interested.

"Sis. Big Brother Lu really is a good person."

"That's what you see."

"Everyone sees it. And I know he's soft on you. The way he looks at you isn't how he looks at anyone else." Gouwa shovelled rice and talked through it. "I know why he's so good to me. It's because of you. Someone with his money wouldn't look twice at me otherwise."

She ruffled his hair. "Don't run yourself down. Work hard. We can't be born rich, so we'll be the ones who make it."

He nodded, took another mouthful, and realised she had steered him off the subject.

"No, hang on, my point is, he likes you."

"That's enough," said Ning Shu. "He says it once, you say it once, then I go back to the dorm and a roomful of gossips says it again. I've heard it till my ears are sore."

"One question, then. Any chance he ends up as my brother-in-law?"

"None." Not a flicker of doubt. "The heir to the whole Lu empire, and you think he'd take a country lump like you for a brother-in-law? He wouldn't agree to it, and his family certainly wouldn't."

Gouwa thought about it and nodded. "Fair enough. I've heard the really rich ones either don't marry at all, or marry each other. Some rich girl from a family just like theirs."

"Got it?"

"Got it."

"And stop hanging off people's coat-tails. If you need something, come to me. Every favour gets paid back, and what you owe Lu Zheng, I'm the one who'll have to pay."

"I understand, Sis. I'll keep my distance from now on." He promised it solemnly.

"Good boy."

Ning Shu thought that the luckiest thing about coming back wasn't learning the trade, or the heavenly eye opening. It was that the people she loved most were beside her, growing up with her, and would never be parted from her again.

Two days later she saw Gouwa swaggering about with a brand-new iPhone X. "Big Brother Lu said it was buy one get one free. This one's mine!"

So much, she thought, for everything she'd said.

"Go and ask the Apple shop! The X is sold out everywhere! Buy one get one free my foot!"