Mistakenly Marked – Chapter 8
by Little PandaFirst Meeting
“Beg me.”
The rain was growing louder by the second, flung against the window in sheets, streaking the glass.
Bo Suiqing rose, picked up the mask and sunglasses she had set down at the entryway when she came in, and put them on without a word.
She brushed past Xu Jialuo.
Almost the moment she stepped out, the door behind her swung shut.
She’d kept to a last courtesy — no deliberate slam to startle anyone — but the draft it stirred up still sent a chill down the spine.
Through the door, a phone rang.
Xu Jialuo answered at the door.
Zou Wan’s voice blared out. “You free? I’m treating you and Liang Xiao to dinner.”
She sounded like she was out walking, the noise of wind and rain on every side; to make sure Xu Jialuo caught every word, Zou Wan was talking loudly —
“I’ll be passing your place in a bit, so I’ll swing by and pick you up. Let me see… I should reach you in about an hour.”
The door panel filtered her voice down to an indistinct woman’s murmur, and one scattered phrase — there in an hour.
“Okay,” Xu Jialuo said.
Then, as a reminder: “The rain’s about to come down hard. Take it slow on the road — be safe.”
The voice drifting faintly through the door was gentle. Considerate.
Nothing like the person she’d been minutes ago.
It was broad daylight, and the corridor lights were off.
The gloom of the storm clouds pressed into the corridor; darkness invaded.
It swallowed the slender silhouette at the door whole, burying her in a corner where the light had gone out.
At the far end of the corridor a window stood open, the crash of the rain filling the empty hall.
Bo Suiqing lifted her gaze to that window, to a view already turned to full storm.
She stood in silence for a few seconds, then lowered her head, took out her phone, and sent a message.
Then she walked toward the elevator.
The residential complex’s underground garage.
The driver, daydreaming behind the wheel, heard the message chime and hurriedly took out his phone, about to drive out and pick her up —
then stopped, and turned toward the passenger seat. “Assistant Xiao Nan — am I taking you home, or somewhere else?”
“Hm? No need.” The girl waved a hand. “Just take Suiqing-jiejie back like usual. You can drop me off anywhere along the way.”
The driver shook his head, explaining. “The young miss just sent me a message. She said she’s staying a while longer and will make her own way back after. She told me to drop you off first.”
“Oh, I see…” Xiao Nan nodded and gave him an address. “Then please take me here.”
Rain gathered into rivulets down the floor-to-ceiling windows.
Xu Jialuo had changed out of her sleepwear and leaned back against the sofa, eyes on the picture mirrored onto the TV screen.
A newly released R-rated horror film — strong word of mouth, full marks on the scare scale.
Chilling sound effects wove through eerie, gory visuals; on screen, people screamed and scattered in every direction.
Flickering light washed over Xu Jialuo’s cold-pale face, expressionless.
Faced with the thing they feared, some people schemed every possible way to escape and hide — and others put themselves through it again and again, almost masochistically, brute-forcing their own desensitization.
Xu Jialuo was the latter.
The film reached another pivotal beat; the eerie score was building, note by careful note, when the phone suddenly rang.
Xu Jialuo hit pause, picked up her phone, and glanced at it.
Not Zou Wan. The property management’s number.
“Hello — is this the resident, Miss Xu?”
“Speaking.”
“Miss Xu, sorry to disturb you. Here’s the situation: one of our security guards on patrol found a woman downstairs in your building. She says she’s a friend of yours…”
“A friend?”
Had Zou Wan arrived?
“Yes. The lady was caught in the rain, and she seems to have had some kind of fright; she looks quite unwell. We asked whether she needed us to take her to a hospital, but she insisted she didn’t.
“She gave us your unit and phone number and said just to get in touch with you.
“We’re in the security room downstairs right now — could you come down and confirm?”
“All right.” Xu Jialuo was already on her feet, striding for the door. “I’ll be right down.”
“This way, please… it’s this young lady here.”
Xu Jialuo followed the property staffer in through the door at a quick pace.
“Zou—”
The name cut off the instant she saw who was on the bench by the door.
In the small room, a woman sat curled on the bench, head buried against her knees, arms wrapped around them.
Her beige trench coat was soaked through; water slid from the disheveled hem, dripping to the floor one drop at a time, gathering into a small puddle.
The green jade hairpin in her hair had slipped askew, her ink-black tresses — thick as storm clouds — spilling mostly loose.
That porcelain-white profile, always so healthy, always flushed with a lovely faint rose, had gone pale as paper with cold, streaked with trails of black where the temporary hair dye had bled in the rain.
No sunglasses on her face now — and still no one had recognized her.
Then again, hardly anyone could have linked a figure this wretched to the polished star so often seen on the big screen.
A hospital was out of the question. One photograph, and there was no telling what absurd speculation would erupt.
The staffer pointed. “There — see? This lady here.”
Xu Jialuo stopped in her tracks.
Before Xu Jialuo could move again, a hand in white lace gloves reached out, its trembling fingertips climbing along her hanging hand.
Head still bowed, the fingers closed lightly around her wrist.
“Well, if she’s your friend…” Seeing so intimate a gesture, the staffer breathed out in relief. “We’ll leave her in your hands, then.”
“…”
Xu Jialuo said nothing, lashes sinking low.
Her gaze slid along the nape of Bo Suiqing’s neck — slender, smooth, tangled with wet strands of hair — and settled on the hand clamped over her wrist bone, trembling as it tightened.
“Everything ready?”
“When you go up to present the rings, remember…”
The emcee and the priest ran through the final instructions while several makeup artists crouched on the grass, straightening the flower girls’ skirts.
Around the platform erected on the lawn clustered flowers of every variety, all flown in for the occasion.
Overhead hung five hundred and twenty1 roses, pieced into a double red heart — gaudy, perhaps, yet blazing red with romance.
It was the first time Xu Jialuo had seen with her own eyes what a Western-style wedding was.
Her mother Jiang Yi’s wedding.
Before the ceremony began, fifteen-year-old Xu Jialuo stood stiff-limbed amid the grass, all her green helplessness stuffed into a corseted dress far too tight.
She was already that thin — and still the dress they’d put her in, buried in ruffles, ran one size too small.
The waist cinched so tight she couldn’t sit down. All she could do was stand at the edge of the guests, drowned over and over by a faint sense of suffocation and the crowd’s unguarded gossip.
She stared at the back of the priest’s head and silently thought of the curly-haired dog at the edge of the village — the one that loved to bark wildly at her.
Until some girl or other, one of Xu Yunxing’s little friends, came rushing over and yanked her from behind on purpose, sending her sprawling onto the ground — touching off a burst of squabbling laughter.
She was still swallowing the pain, face and ears burning — and in the next second, the noise around her abruptly died.
Something or other had caught the onlookers’ attention; the crowd parted of its own accord, opening a gap.
When Xu Jialuo raised her head, a figure was just then coming through that gap.
First came the halo of a blinding sun.
Then a gemstone necklace at a porcelain-white throat, dazzling enough to sting.
Last, the girl’s face — more radiant than all of it combined.
Long, cool-brown curls pinned back with a diamond hair clip, falling to her waist. A haute couture gown without a single needless crease. And beneath its hem, calves fine as snow, without half a scar to be seen.
As she passed, she didn’t dip her head — only let her eyelids drift down, unhurried.
Then, as if sidestepping a patch of filthy mud, she pinched up her skirt in pale fingers, and amid cries of alarm from Xu Yunxing’s friends, one glossy patent leather pump came down squarely on the dust-dulled hem of Xu Jialuo’s dress.
The flame that had smoldered in her chest all this while burst, all at once, into a blaze. Xu Jialuo’s hand shot out and seized that ankle.
Only then, forced to a stop, did the girl finally lower her head.
One look — just one — and Xu Jialuo etched those eyes deep into her memory.
Rare silver-pale irises. Clear as water in color, yet they seemed fathomless; everything in them was unknown.
And Xu Jialuo hated nothing more than the unknown.
It was like the bog hidden beneath that lush, inviting turf — the one that had swallowed whole an uncle from the next village over, out cutting firewood.
When the girl looked at her, her expression was flat, unruffled. The way one looks at a stray dog by the roadside, too trifling to matter.
Then, the next second, she pulled her ankle free — and, turning to exchange pleasantries with Xu Yunxing, broke into a smile brilliant enough to blind, light rippling across her eyes.
…False. Fickle. Unknowable.
Fifteen-year-old Xu Jialuo clutched the trampled hem of her skirt and thought: this was exactly the sort of person she despised most.
From the very first meeting.
Despised most.
For the rest of her life.
Xu Jialuo crouched down.
Gazing at Bo Suiqing curled on the bench, her bold brows arched cold and sharp, she said, in a voice only the two of them could hear, “You want me to help you.”
“Beg me.”
She knew it would never happen.
She only said it to repay the offense she’d been dealt earlier.
But in the next instant she was caught off guard by a pair of reddened eyes awash in shattered light.
As the first tear rolled free, a low, hoarse voice answered: “…I beg you.”
“…”
“Miss Xu?”
Having caught none of what passed between them — only the sight of Xu Jialuo going abruptly still — the staffer couldn’t help venturing, softly, “Still, we’d have to trouble you to take your friend away first…”
“She’s not.”
The words came out as she shot to her feet, fast enough to look almost flustered.
Her arm rose and, merciless, she wrenched her wrist free of the fingers locked around it — just as that girl had once drawn herself away and left, all those years ago.
Cut loose from that palm, the slender, lovely fingertips in their white lace shuddered, then dropped, strength gone, and cracked unbraced against the leg of the bench.
“…?”
The staffer froze, startled.
The downpour outside was nearing its end, only a thin, fragmented patter left.
Into that sound, a cool, melodious voice issued its correction: “She and I are not friends.”
The figure on the bench flinched, the faint light in the depths of her eyes going out, spark by spark.
Only to freeze stiff, head to toe, the very next second.
Under the astonished gazes in the room, Xu Jialuo bent down, brow furrowed.
Her arm slid beneath the woman’s rain-soaked knees, gathered her in, and lifted her, cradled sideways in her arms.
Then she turned and walked out.
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