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Sha Hualing is not a nice girl.
She's got no inclination to be one, either. Nice girls are obedient, quiet, and dutiful, and in her experience these are mostly traits that make one especially amenable to being taken advantage of, without even the token inconvenience of complaining about it. She has never made a secret of this opinion, or hesitated to laugh in the faces of men who expect her to, at some later point in their relationship, stop being the massive bitch she invariably is at the start of it.
Considering that, she is honestly baffled as to why Luo Binghe called her for his current... whatever this is.
Sha Hualing likes Luo Binghe well enough most of the time. He has a big dick, and just like her he also is a big dick, although he goes to much greater lengths to convince others that he isn't. With her he sometimes contrarily plays at being a bigger dick than he actually is too, which she finds amusing. Yes, he's obviously desperate for some kind of approval, but that vulnerability usually just provides a nice contrast to his domineering personality and general competence. It's just enough of a blemish that it comes around the other side to be attractive, like that birthmark on Mingyan's hot older brother.
Usually.
Right now Luo Binghe is sitting on her bed, holding his phone and weeping, because Shen Fucking Yuan has left him on read or something.
Sha Hualing doesn't bother to mask the disdain in her own expression.
The fake dating situation that has been unfolding in their social circle was kind of amusing when it first began, but mostly for the other end of the equation. Mobei Jun's family has been doing business with her family since before either of them were born. Sha Hualing had been forced to attend many wretchedly dull company parties back when she was still young enough to be intimidated into 'behaving', and had suffered in solidarity alongside Mobei Jun, which sort of qualified as them friends, in the way that people who had survived the same battlefields generally came out of the experience with a sense of solidarity. They'd never ruined their camaraderie by fucking, either, because even though Mobei Jun was hot enough that Sha Hualing would have, he was also very very gay.
She thought for a while that he was in love with Luo Binghe, but that was before she saw him mooning over Shang Qinghua.
Shang Qinghua, so far as Sha Hualing knows, is just... some guy? He's almost aggressively mediocre. She has the vague idea that he writes novels for a living, but he doesn't give off the impression of being particularly intelligent or insightful. He's not even a hot librarian type. If there's some hidden appeal to the guy then she hasn't ever noticed it. He's not even rich, not that Mobei Jun would care, the man's made of money and will only get more whenever someone finally bumps off his evil uncle. But anyway, figuring out what the gays see in pathetic little sad sacks isn't her hobby. She doesn't share Mingyan's fascination with that stuff. What's enough is to know that Mobei Jun has been hopelessly pining over this random loser for years and it is hilarious.
Shang Qinghua, apparently, in the meanwhile, had something going on with Shen Yuan. Some kind of love-hate chemistry deal. Mingyan went into it once but Sha Hualing didn't pay attention, because she didn't really care. Shen Yuan was hot in a sexy librarian kind of a way, at least, when he wasn't doing more of the wilting twink routine, but the second thing was a byproduct of him being chronically ill and Sha Hualing wasn't quite enough of a bitch to drag a guy for how he looked while he was getting cancer treatment. Or whatever was wrong with him. She didn't actually know.
That Mobei Jun was willing to pay Luo Binghe to seduce Shen Yuan away and give him an opening to sweep in and eat up Shang Qinghua was pretty amusing, was the point. Sha Hualing had never known Luo Binghe to show an interest in guys, so there was that extra layer to it as well. She wasn't expecting it to go well, but mostly she was thinking that Shen Yuan would be upset, and then his family would probably try to sue Luo Binghe or something (that Shen family were a bunch of sharks), and Luo Binghe would be a huge dick about it while also trying to come across like he was the real victim, etc, etc, plus if Shang Qinghua found out there was a chance he'd get all pissed off too, and Sha Hualing was curious if he would actually get angry or if he wasn't even the type to care. Mobei Jun had abs, after all. Mobei Jun could probably break hot librarian twink Shen Yuan in half.
So she hadn't been expecting this shitshow to go well but Luo Binghe weeping on her bed about it is still a weird outcome.
"What the fuck," she says, because it must be said.
"I think... I really like Yuan-ge..." Luo Binghe pathetically confesses.
Sha Hualing's expression of disgusts deepens.
"Why did you call me?" she wants to know. She's had men mistake her for some kind of free therapy before, but usually just the ones who didn't know her and just automatically assume that anyone with tits will give a shit about their feelings.
Luo Binghe heaves a big, shuddering sigh.
"You're the hottest woman I know," he says. "I thought I'd just..."
He gestures in such a way that Sha Hualing immediately understands that he'd meant to fuck her and somehow return to his normal, infamous playboy self.
She is very hot. That's true. The compliment is appeasing enough that she decides to take pity, and doesn't immediately shove him out of her door to either weep in the hallway, where she won't have to listen to it, or stumble his way home with his mascara running down his face.
"What the hell happened?" she asks instead, feeling a lot of the same morbid interest she would at hearing about someone's weird and unexpected death. Metaphorically speaking, this could be even bloodier than the time one of the Qin heiresses got eaten by sharks. Actual sharks, in the ocean and everything.
Luo Binghe sniffs.
"We had sex," he admits. Then his face crumples. "It was really bad. I think I cried on his dick."
Okay, now Sha Hualing is fascinated.
"So he tossed you out of bed?"
Luo Binghe shakes his head.
"No. I left," he admits.
Here she was assuming that Shen Yuan had found out about the fake dating or something, but all this and he hadn't even run Luo Binghe out?
She laughs, meanly. Luo Binghe tries to glare at her, but any effectiveness it might have once had has evaporated along with his dignity.
"What am I doing here?" he asks himself.
"I don't know. What are you doing here?" Sha Hualing counters. She does know, he was trying to reaffirm his identity or something, but she's not going to encourage this sort of behaviour by being all understanding about it now. She has a reputation to maintain. Once you feed a dog at the table it's just going to keep coming back for it.
But she supposes she owes Luo Binghe a couple of favours by now. He did break her father's nose that one time, after all.
She yanks the phone out of his hand. He's gone into some kind of internal debate and barely seems to notice. Opening up his contacts, she finds Ning Yingying's number as the third down. His mother is the first number, but 'Shen Laoshi' has impressively risen up to number two. She's five, below Mobei Jun but above Mingyan. Ha. Suck it, Liu bitch.
Yesterday she'd have been offended at ranking below Mobei Jun and the ditz, let alone Mr. Sexy Librarian Slash Tragic Damsel, but yesterday she thought Luo Binghe was a mostly suave ladies man, not a hapless clown. In the grim light of her favourite mood lamp and whatever the hell kind of sexual identity crisis this is, she's fine with fifth place and above Mingyan.
She calls the Ning family chick.
"A-Luo?" the young woman answers, sounding a little surprised. Not to be unexpected. Luo Binghe has basically been ghosting everyone for the past month of this whole 'fake' apparently-not-so-fake dating scheme. Sha Hualing hadn't cared when she thought it was because it was a scheme, but in hindsight it was probably telling that Ladies Man Binghe hadn't so much as tried to arrange a hook-up to take the edge off of playing infatuated over a guy he wasn't supposed to be genuinely attracted to.
"No, it's Ling-er," she replies, adopting a false, sugary tone out of reflex. "A-Luo is having some kind of meltdown. He's at my place. Come get him before I throw him out the window."
There's a pause, then the sound of someone getting up from a noisy chair.
"I'll be there soon. Don't be mean to him, okay?" Ning Yingying requests, in a tone that implies she had at least some inkling that something like this was on the way.
Sha Hualing replies to that request with the derisive snort it deserves, and hangs up. Luo Binghe looks betrayed.
She raises a challenging eyebrow at him.
He picks himself up, and oh apparently now he has some dignity to preserve? Maybe he realized that selecting his least sentimental hook-up for this kind of thing had some disadvantages too. 'Hottest woman he knows', sure. Sha Hualing likes the title but filtered through the context of the current situation, she's not stupid enough to take it at face value. He picked her because he wasn't worried about breaking her heart if he couldn't deliver. And he was right, but she's not letting him get out of the door without a reminder that there are other reasons to avoid pissing her off. She won't cry; she'll sneer and throw it back at him.
He dresses under her derisive gaze, flushed and clearly angry, but maybe more angry at himself than at her. It's better than the weeping, anyway. It takes a while to find all his clothes - things had been uncommonly wild and urgent before it all went south. She had thought it was because he was pent up, had been happy to help him work off the steam, but now it's just kind of sad. She's not sure if he's bisexual or gay or what, but at this point she's leaning towards 'gay'. It definitely re-contextualizes his stamina.
By the time Luo Binghe is snatching his phone back from her, Ning Yingying has arrived. Or at least, Sha Hualing assumes it's Ning Yingying, right up until she opens the door and finds Shen Yuan standing there.
Damn.
She can't help but laugh again.
Did Ning Yingying send him? Seriously?
Even being a bitch on purpose can't top that woman being a bitch by accident, can it? She used to think that Yingying was just a really good actress who secretly hated Luo Binghe's guts for all the running around he did on her, what with the way she managed to make trouble for him. Some days she still wonders.
Anyway, Sha Haling didn't arrange it, but she's pissed enough that she still lets Shen Yuan in. Luo Binghe freezes like a deer in headlights.
Shen Yuan swallows, and looks like it's a struggle for him to not stare at the floor. He doesn't even shoot her so much as a jealous glare, just goes all red and flustered instead, and after a moment of internal debate, Sha Hualing decides she's not going to resent him for whatever the hell his part in this is. If she was all that inclined to jealousy she'd have killed half the female population of the city by now, given how Luo Binghe sleeps around. Slept around? Whatever. Probably remains to be seen if he's found 'true love' or is just about to become a gay slut instead of a straight one.
A good person would probably give them a minute alone. Sha Hualing grabs a pack from the pocket of the coat she left hanging by her door, lights a cigarette, and leans on the door frame to witness the catastrophe instead. Maybe she didn't get laid, but she'll take dinner and a show as compensation for her time and the use of her apartment to stage this melodrama.
"I'm sorry," Shen Yuan blurts, breaking the silence first. "I know I'm probably the last person you want to see right now, but Yingying said it was an emergency, and she doesn't own a car, and I thought... I don't know what I thought."
Luo Binghe looks like a man who has spent most of the night crying. It's not a good look for him, even if his version of an ugly mess is still pretty hot.
"Shen Laoshi doesn't have anything to apologize for," he says, too formal and awkward. It makes Shen Yuan look like he's being very slowly stabbed and trying not to let anyone else know.
"Right," he says. "Um. I guess I should at least apologize for interrupting your hot date...?"
He glances at her, but not long enough for Sha Hualing to decide if she'll react or not. She's contemplating being offended that he hasn't even thanked her for letting him in when Luo Binghe gives her an exasperated look.
"Hualing, could you put some clothes on?" he asks.
She reflexively glares.
"This is my place," she points out. And it's not like he even managed to get her completely naked before he had his little meltdown, she's still got her panties on. But now that she's noticing, Shen Yuan does seem to be having troubles looking at her. Aww, he's shy? He darts another glance her way. She winks at him and he spooks, immediately covering his eyes and nearly knocking his glasses askew.
"I'm not looking, honestly, I wouldn't! I wouldn't look! I'm not interested!" he swears.
"Why not?" she asks, just to further stir the pot. "Aren't Ling-er's looks to Shen Laoshi's tastes?"
Luo Binghe looks like he might bite her head off for that. At least he found some of that spine he lost somewhere when she wasn't paying attention. He opens his mouth, but Shen Yuan replies first.
Very quietly, he says:
"Miss Sha, you're of course extremely beautiful, but it's wasted on me."
She doesn't feel bad, but she does find herself taking just the littlest bit of pity on him.
She exhales a mouthful of smoke, aimed towards her ceiling, and saunters off to go put something a little less sexy than just her skin on. They had better appreciate that she's doing this much, all things considered. It's not like she arranged any of it, Binghe called her, and she called Yingying, so the fact that she's being made to put on layers is an extra imposition to her already-strained tolerance.
She's rewarded when she hears Shen Yuan say from the next room:
"I know Mobei Jun paid you to date me."
Ohohoho?
She pauses in dressing and leans closer to the door.
"Yuan-ge, it's not what you think..."
"It's fine! I get it. Binghe's had to earn all of his money since the beginning, I know that. I remember how it used to be when we were younger too. That's why I accepted, I thought I could simply go along with faking the whole thing, and then Binghe would get paid, and in the meantime... I'd have an excuse to spoil you a little bit as well. I didn't mean to, to let it get... what happened, it was just, ah, I know it was just... Binghe was letting me save face..."
"No, that's not it-"
"It was my fault. I, I imposed on Binghe-"
"You didn't!"
Uh, what? Sha Hualing gives the prospect of sexual assault serious consideration for all of half a second. True, Luo Binghe is fair-faced, but he's also tall, strong, broad-shouldered, and athletic. Shen Yuan is several inches shorter, has some kind of chronic health thing, and is roughly as skinny as she is. He's a waifish little twink. But that doesn't always make things go the expected way. Liu Mingyan is built like a martial goddess and kicks like a horse and Sha Hualing still had to get some reedy pervert in an ahegao shirt to leave her alone by throwing a cocktail directly into his eyes on two separate occasions. With different creeps. She wouldn't have bothered except that both times the guy was obnoxious and Mingyan was taking the long road to getting rid of him instead of just donkey kicking his dick into his spine.
Ordinarily she wouldn't expect Luo Binghe to share any such reservations if some suicidal little man tried it with him, but that was before.
However, she decides it's still not likely that Shen Yuan just up and started molesting him. That just isn't the vibe she's getting off the interactions here, not even now.
"You don't have to make excuses for me. Binghe spent all that time sparing my reputation by at least not touring his other partners, he was pent up, and I took advantage..." Shen Yuan says.
"Yuan-ge, please, that's not what happened..."
"Even if you plan to forgive me, at least let me apologize for it!"
"Don't apologize for it! It's not like that, and if anyone should be apologizing it should be me!"
They argue for a bit about who is supposed to be groveling to whom for forgiveness. Ugh. Barf. Sha Hualing finishes pulling on a dress, picks her cigarette back up from the side of the ash tray, and goes back out to poke at the tiger with a stick again.
"If neither one of you is going to fuck the other properly tonight, I have a strap-on and I'm willing to demonstrate," she goads.
Shen Yuan looks like he's two seconds away from clutching some invisible pearls, while Luo Binghe looks like he's about two seconds away from throwing down a gauntlet. She's seen him get mad at people trying to infringe upon his dates or test their luck with his patience before, but this is a lot more raw, a lot less egotistical. For half a second Sha Hualing feels a little wistful, actually. No one's ever gotten that sincerely riled up over her, and probably no one ever will.
She mentally waves goodbye to the feeling as it passes, and is glad to see it go.
"What?" she asks instead, feigning innocence that no one in the room is convinced by. Then she laughs. "Men are so sensitive about these things. If I had an identity crisis every time I ate out some hot chick, I wouldn't even have time to enjoy it. If you want a tutorial on how to do someone up the ass I can oblige, but I'm not much of a voyeur for whatever this shit you're doing right now is, so if you're hanging around in hopes of having an audience for your tearful fumblings then I'd suggest knocking on the Liu family's door instead."
Luo Binghe looks even more irate.
"As if!" he protests, with more vehemence than she might have expected from a guy who once had a threeway with both Qin sisters. Before one of them got eaten by sharks, of course.
"Qingge definitely has no interest in that kind of thing," Shen Yuan mutters, cheeks pink and voice kind of faint.
Sha Hualing raises an eyebrow. She meant Mingyan, but whatever. Apparently Miss High and Mighty has never shared her 'literature hobby' with Luo Binghe. That's vaguely interesting, perhaps, though she can't decide why just yet. Come to think of it though, these two definitely look like they could be on the cover of one of her trashy novels. They're both improbably pretty, one of them has biceps, and the other looks like a strong breeze would knock him over on a bad day. Except that in Mingyan's books it's always the bigger guy who takes charge and the skinny bitch who cries at everything.
At the mention of Liu Mingyan's hot brother, Luo Binghe looks somehow even more worked up.
Holy shit. What's she been missing there? Does she even want to know?
"We don't need an audience, or any demonstrations," Luo Binghe firmly declares, moving closer to Shen Yuan. "Yuan-ge, we should finish this discussion someplace else."
Shen Yuan nods.
"I understand if you don't want to go back to the apartment-"
"Let's go back to the apartment."
"It's fine if you don't want to."
"I want to."
"But it-"
"Unless Laoshi disapproves of letting me into his home again?"
Shen Yuan purses his lips, then finally relents.
"Of course I don't disapprove of you coming home, Binghe," he says, like it's a big deal or something.
Sha Hualing waits to see if there are going to be any more dramatic revelations, teary confessions, or sexual overtures, but apparently her attempts to rile things up have riled them all the way back out of her door again. That's fine though, she's somewhat enjoying the show but ultimately, if the focus isn't going to be her, she doesn't really want it eating up her evening.
The silence that follows Luo Binghe getting the hell out and taking his new personal revelations with him is a relief. Sha Hualing casts a glance across her apartment, the chair still overturned from where she'd been backed against a wall, the bedroom door open, bed curtains drawn aside and sheets still visibly mussed. A slithering agitation crawls under her skin. She checks her nails, flicks her cigarette into the nearest ash tray, and wishes she had something to sink her teeth into.
Did she get attached to Luo Binghe? That would have been stupid. She doesn't really think so, but they've been pretty steady on-and-off-again companions for a few years now, so maybe a little of that is inevitable as well. It was fun to fool around with him, and she's got the strong impression that he won't be up for it again, and even if he was, after that pathetic display he'd have to work pretty hard for her to even let him try it.
The sound of the old analogue clock that she keeps around because she likes the look of it is the only thing disturbing the quiet for a while.
Sha Hualing smokes her cigarette down to the butt, laughs unkindly at herself, and then goes and retrieves her phone. She heads into the kitchen to procure a tub of ice-cream, sits on the counter, and cracks into it while she opens up her texting app with her thumb and scrolls through her roster of hookups. To her dismay, she has to admit that the pickings are slimmer than they used to be. She's not old, not yet, but time has made her more discerning, and she's dropped a lot of guys in the past couple years. She doesn't miss any of them, but she's disarmed to realize that the few bad experiences and close calls she's had over the years have made her more wary about picking up new toys, too. The ones left are all fine, to a certain degree, but no one she would actually want to talk to after they finished having sex.
Luo Binghe was good like that. She didn't have to worry about him catching feelings, and they understood the shape of one another's anger at the world, at least, even when they didn't share a whole lot of other interests.
...Fuck.
Sha Hualing abandons her phone. A minute later she picks it up again, and without thinking too hard about it, reopens the texting app and this time just picks Mingyan off of her contacts. Miss White Knight.
Luo Binghe's gay, she texts.
She's not entirely expecting a reply. It's pretty late, after all, and Mingyan's one of those obnoxious morning people who gets up at the crack of dawn and jogs. It's not unreasonable for her to be asleep in the middle of the night, so there's every chance she won't get a response until 5 am. In which case Mingyan won't get her reply until 10.
But it only takes a few minutes for her phone's message alert to go off.
Instead of being shocked, or confused, or having any other sensible reaction, Liu Mingyan's response is to text 'I KNOW!!!!!' with a half dozen starry-eyed emojis.
Sha Hualing considers that somehow, she might have been the only person on Luo Binghe's top ten contacts who hadn't figured out that he was gay before now.
She throws her phone at the fridge so hard that the screen cracks.
~
Two weeks later, Sha Hualing runs out on a crappy date and ends up climbing over the fence to the Liu family's home.
The place is not quite big enough to qualify as a manor, but still too big to suit the usual description of a house. There's a fence, security gate, and an intercom, a driveway big enough for several cars, and a stretch of decorative lawn and bushes that looks bigger than it is. But the building itself is a four-bedroom home with two baths, a modest kitchen, and a garage full to the brim of old work out equipment and a half dozen hobbies abandoned by Liu senior over the years. The dining room is home to a rowing machine and a stair climber, and Mingyan's bedroom on the second floor still looks like the lair of a teenager, strewn as it is with posters of idols and battered romance novels and a dartboard with the latest arch enemy's face taped to the middle. When they were actually in highschool, Sha Hualing's photo had held that coveted position for three years running, before that little Hua family princess showed up and supplanted her position as 'most obnoxious bitch in the district'. Sha Hualing would have been jealous, but honestly, a person's standards had to reach the earth's crust to match 'Xiao Gongzhu', and she could accept that she was not the actual worst.
Anyway, these days the dart board is mostly graced with images of politicians and celebrities who have offended Miss White Knight's moral sensibilities.
Sha Hualing doesn't recognize the latest mark liberally split open with dart holes, but the picture-perfect beauty looks like an actress, so that's probably why. Who can keep track of every new celebrity to try and make a name for themselves? She doesn't even bother to watch television these days. Maybe another one of Mingyan's conspiracy-theory 'no he's gay and in love with his costar I swear' targets got married, or maybe someone has been caught endorsing eugenics or kicking puppies again. She internally shrugs as she hoists herself up through the window, accidentally knocks over a stack of books on the nearby desk in the process, and then starts to poke around. Mingyan should be home, but of course being home and being in her room are two separate things.
Her laptop is on, though, so she probably didn't go far. She's logged in. Sha Hualing grins and picks up the lightweight, lavender-coloured computer, and settles cross-legged onto the bed with it. There's an open document, cursor blinking at the end of a half-finished sentence. A quick scan of the text reveals that someone named 'Bingge' is busily railing his weeping college professor in front of a full auditorium. Sha Hualing quirks an eyebrow at a few questionable euphemisms before she minimizes the document to go spy on Mingyan's photo album.
There's nothing new. She's about to check her eternal rival's email when the bedroom door swings open.
Liu Mingyan blinks at her. She's not wearing her mask, or much of anything outside of a towel. Surprise suffuses her features for half a second. She looks uncommonly vulnerable like that. At least until she lunges across the room and smacks the laptop shut.
No, even then Sha Hualing decides, she's still got it going on - the towel goes askew, her hair is curling at the edges from what had to be a pretty steamy shower, and the ire in her gaze is definitely undermined by how flushed her skin is.
"Sha Hualing!" she grits out.
"Liu Mingyan," Sha Hualing returns, far more cheekily. The laptop is swept away. She feigns a pout. "Ah~, Ling-er was enjoying that story!"
Liu Mingyan storms over to the desk and shuts the computer into a drawer, before fixing her with an unimpressed glare.
"You don't like my writing. You were snooping," she accuses.
Sha Hualing raises both of her hands.
"So suspicious!" she replies. "Maybe I've had a change of heart! Your writing has gotten better lately. I'm glad you stopped calling dicks 'pistols of love', I think 'throbbing hot spear' is an improvement. I'd still throw any man out of bed if he tried to call his that but I've definitely known men who would try it. Women too."
The glare intensifies.
Then Mingyan lets out a gusty sigh and heads over to her closet.
"I have to change. Go wait in the hall," she demands.
Sha Hualing pouts again.
"We're both girls, why bother?"
Mingyan points at the door.
"It's not like I haven't seen it before..."
The pointing intensifies.
Finally Sha Hualing gives up and goes, slumping against the wall in the hallway, oh the injustice of it all. Really these Liu people have no idea how to treat guests. They don't entertain people very often. She checks her nails and then her phone, then takes note that the light fixture over the stairs is broken again. Who did it this time? Probably someone kick-flipping their way down to the first floor, so it could be any of these lunatics. The gods graced the Liu family with beautiful faces, vast athletic skills, substantial wealth, high pain tolerance, and after all of that there was nothing left to waste on all the other parts of human nature. Their belongings tend to suffer the most for it, especially the furniture. She's seen Mingyan accidentally break a mini-fridge by wrenching the door too firmly and then stare at the wreckage as if wondering how it even happened.
A lot of objects get destroyed in this house, is the point. Sha Hualing thinks it might be one of the reasons they've never bothered to move anywhere fancier, even though they could afford it.
After a few minutes the door opens. Mingyan hasn't replaced the mask she habitually wears, but she's thrown on a pair of flower-pattern shorts and a t-shirt with some cartoon man and bunch of purple roses strewn across the front.
"Is that Naruto?" Sha Hualing asks, pointing. She has no idea what a Naruto even is outside of being some stupid Japanese cartoon thing but it always makes Mingyan's face scrunch up like she's being fed a mouthful of worms when she asks.
"No,"she replies, clipped, and sulks back into her room. "What are you doing here?"
"Can't I visit my dearest arch enemy whenever the mood strikes?"
"...I guess."
Mingyan's gaze narrows, assessing.
"What's wrong?" the other woman asks.
Sha Hualing feels a kernel of unease at being spotted.
"Nothing's wrong. I just had a bad date and thought I would come torment you for fun instead."
"Bad date?"
"Uh-huh. Dull."
"Did he do something?"
She laughs.
"Like what? If I'd had to use pepper spray on him, it would have livened things up a bit, believe me. No, he didn't do something. He was just boring. Mingyan, your poor Ling-er's bored~!"
"So go to a movie or something!"
Sha Hualing latches on and grasps her eternal rival by the arm, and adopts and exaggerated pout.
"By myself? That won't be less boring! Unless you're offering to take me out...?"
Liu Mingyan's face reddens in anger.
"As if!" she snaps. She's rigid in Sha Hualing's grasp, but doesn't attempt to reclaim her arm, instead only glaring. Tsk tsk, no wonder she's always getting harassed, looking angry just makes her look even prettier and fun to tease. Sha Hualing retains her grip as Liu Mingyan stomps back into her bedroom, and so she's more or less pulled along.
"What did you look at on my computer?" Mingyan demands. "Did you read my e-mails again?"
Sha Hualing's pouting intensifies.
"Ling-er's innocent! She was only reading about the handsome men having sex in public, like a good girl!"
She gets shrugged off and dumped unceremoniously onto her rival's plush rose-coloured rug. Some creature stares up at her from the fibres with uncannily huge eyes, and a microphone gripped in one cartoonish paw. She rolls over so she won't be subjected to the unerring creepiness of the hyper-cute. Some of the act drops off of her as Mingyan fails to rise to the bait.
"Hey, about that stuff. I've always wondered," she starts instead. "Which one is supposed to be you?"
Liu Mingyan slumps down at her desk and shoots her a wary glare.
"Which one what?" she asked.
Sha Hualing makes an airy gesture with one hand.
"You know, of the guys in the stories. There's always some big strong aggressive one who's like a beast, and some wimpy wilting flower who gets fucked until he's begging and crying. But which one does Mingyan imagine herself as? The big dick werewolf or the tender snack being gobbled up?"
Liu Mingyan looks at her in bewilderment.
"What makes you think I imagine myself as either?" she asks instead of answering.
Sha Hualing raises an eyebrow and laughs.
"You must! Why else write them?" she counters. "It'd be too boring to write about something that has nothing to do with you or what you want. Since the sex is always the same, it must be something you're after, right? Come on, you can tell me. I won't make fun~!"
Liu Mingyan gives her blatant lie the disregard it merits, but she does look... uncomfortable, all of a sudden, in a way that she usually doesn't.
"It's not like that," she insists.
"No? You just want to watch instead?" Sha Hualing suggests.
"It's not like that either!"
"Then what is it?"
"It's not anything! You don't get it!"
Sha Hualing spreads her hands.
"No need to get so embarrassed! Whichever case it is, I don't care. I just think it's interesting. What does my White Knight want from her own lovers, that compels her to write about these kinds of things?"
Liu Mingyan glares hotly down at her.
"I don't want lovers," she says. Then she stops, and Sha Hualing is given to the sudden insight that she hadn't meant to say that much about it at all.
She quirks an eyebrow.
"None?" she wonders.
Mingyan doesn't reply, and instead turns back towards the desk. But she hasn't even opened her laptop back up. She's just staring at it sullenly.
So she doesn't want lovers. Sha Hualing puzzles it out. She had always thought that Liu Mingyan was interested in Luo Binghe, at least. That was ostensibly the source of their rivalry, or it was according to most outsiders, despite the fact that they'd been sworn enemies since before either one of them properly met him. Still, it had been a point of contention between them. But Sha Hualing was pretty sure that Liu Mingyan and Luo Binghe had never actually slept together.
She thought it was something to do with maidenly virtue or Mingyan not wanting to disappoint her family or something, the usual reasons why young women don't put out with dates they were otherwise interested in, but perhaps she'd gotten it wrong. Everyone knew that Mingyan was one of Luo Binghe's flings... and considering how rarely they bothered to do anything together, that was a little strange, wasn't it?
Unless this whole Shen Yuan situation isn't Luo Binghe's first time pretending to date someone.
It would be a good cover, Sha Hualing admires that right away. With the number of women who had pursued and pined over the infamous playboy, who would question Luo Binghe adding beautiful Liu Mingyan his list of conquests? And in the meanwhile, it wouldn't do any hardship to Luo Binghe's reputation either, to be seen as the stallion who mounted the untouchable blossom of the Liu family. He probably landed even more women with that kind of notoriety drawing interested eyes, the sorts of women who only liked a man when they knew another woman wanted him, when they measured themselves by the kinds of women they were, through him, put on equal ground to. After all, if Luo Binghe could be on a date with THE Liu Mingyan, but instead he's on a date with you, aren't you also a beauty to be reckoned with? You must be.
Sha Hualing knows the type. She's chewed them up and spat them out often enough to recognize the taste. A lot of them dated Luo Binghe.
And in the meanwhile, nobody would raise an eyebrow at Miss White Knight rejecting her scores of other suitors. They'd just shake their fists and curse Luo Binghe's name for 'ruining' yet another maiden.
"Is it just men you don't want? But then why write about them?" Sha Hualing wonders.
Liu Mingyan stands up in a hurry.
"I'll take you to a movie if you stop asking about this," she says.
"Oh?"
"I'll even pay."
She laughs.
"You're that desperate to avoid such simple little questions? My my. What if I want to keep asking? Would you beg me for mercy?" she teases.
Mingyan frowns.
"I could always just throw you out of the window instead," she threatens. She seems nearly mad enough to do it, too, so Sha Hualing gives in. She raises her hands in mock surrender.
"If those are Ling-er's only option, of course she'll let Jiejie spoil her instead~!" she coos.
Liu Mingyan, face reddening once more, chases her back out of the room while she gets changed into fresh clothing again.
~
"We should pretend to be dating," Sha Hualing suggests, on a late weekend night, after Liu Mingyan has bemoaned a cousin's impending wedding and the unwieldy preponderance of suitors that are going to chase her skirt at it. It's been six months since Luo Binghe unofficially outed himself and made a mockery of half the young women and a quarter of the MILFs in the country, doing his level best to discredit any last vestige of his previous playboy persona by basically turning into Shen Yuan's doting housewife. It's hysterical, both in the sense of being funny and also in the sense of making Sha Hualing feel insane.
Liu Mingyan's eyebrows frown at her from over the top of her mask. Her ears are red. Sha Hualing discretely sniffs at her glass, but it still seems to be just the regular passion fruit smoothie she ordered. The night market is noisy around them, their bench a slightly-removed harbour from the food stalls and attractions assembled beneath the glittering lights of the city. The acrid scent of the city air has been chased away by the sizzle and smoke of cook tops, and her mouth still tastes like the sauce from her satay.
"What?" Mingyan blurts. "Dating? Did you say we should be dating?!"
"Pretend to be dating," Sha Hualing reiterates, playing with the straw of her own smoothie. It's too sweet, she's found, so she hasn't bothered to have much of it. But she likes how the deep red colour looks in the shine of the artificial lights.
Mingyan's frown deepens.
"Why would we do that?" she demands, suddenly sour.
"Weren't you pretending to date Luo Binghe?" Sha Hualing asks.
She can tell by the quality of silence that ensues that she's surprised her eternal rival.
"Who told you that?"
Liu Mingyan's tone is flat and angry.
"Binghe of course," Sha Hualing lies.
"He wouldn't!"
"Ha!" she laughs and flips her hair. "No, he wouldn't. I just guessed. But that pretty much confirms it anyway."
"...Conniving," Mingyan mutters.
Sha Hualing winks.
"Well, so, obviously you don't want to be hassled at this event, and you can't keep pretending to date him," she continues. "But you should still pretend to date someone if you don't want to actually date anybody. You are after all a hot commodity." Just last week she'd had to go report more fake nudes that had made it onto the sketchier parts of the internet. They weren't very good, but if anyone was going to slander Liu Mingyan's reputation, obviously it would be her and not some dickless weasel who was mad that he couldn't get a date with the world's most unattainable beauty.
Said unattainable beauty grunts in dissatisfaction.
"And you think people will believe I'm dating you?" she retorts.
"Why not? It's a classic story, isn't it? Don't most of of your little stories involve someone suddenly catching feelings for their arch nemesis?"
Mingyan grunts again, ears going red. For a split second it looks as though she's seriously considering it, but then she shakes her head.
"It won't work. We're both women."
"So?"
"So, have you ever been on a lesbian dating site?"
Sha Hualing raises an eyebrow.
"No. Have you?" she wonders, intrigued.
To her disappointment, Mingyan shakes her head again and doesn't even look flustered. Boo.
"Not myself. But I've heard things about it," she says. "There are always men on there anyway. They aren't dissuaded."
Sha Hualing waves dismissively.
"That's the internet. Obviously they think they can get away with muscling in on someone else's girl or arranging a threesome because no one's there to punch their throats in. Don't worry, Jiejie, if you agree to be my woman, I'll defend your virtue~!"
A crowd passed by on the street, people talking and laughing. A man in it reaches over to try and covertly snatch Sha Hualing's purse. Before she can do anything about it, Mingyan grabs the man by the wrist in what is very definitely a bone-crushing grip.
"Drop it," she orders, icily.
The guy drops it.
"Tch," Sha Hualing tuts, and moves her purse onto her lap. Liu Mingyan, merciful do-gooder that she is, lets the would-be purse snatcher go. He vanishes into the throng of bodies while the crowd moves on, largely unaware of what exactly happened.
"Pay more attention," Liu Mingyan scolds her.
Sha Hualing makes a show of pouting.
"I was going to kick him, you just got to him first," she argues, then coos. "Jiejie's so strong, maybe she should date Ling-er to protect her from the bad men instead~?"
She takes the opportunity to reach over and squeeze her rival's bicep.
Mingyan's eyebrow betray her frowning as she bats the groping hand away.
"Don't be stupid," she says. "We're not going to fake date one another. It's a bad idea. Seriously, no."
"Fine, be that way. Grouchy."
Sha Hualing sighs.
Liu Mingyan gets up and mumbles something. A few minutes later she comes back with a smoothie that actually tastes good, and deposits it in front of Sha Hualing with a visible roll of her eyes.
~
"This is only temporary. Just for this one event," Liu Mingyan insists.
Sha Hualing holds her arm and bats her eyelashes up at her. She's done herself up in her best little red number, and it even looks like a match for Mingyan's rich purple dress.
"Of course, baby," she coos. "Just leave it all in Ling-er's hands! We'll have them so convinced that we're madly in love, you'll be an old maid before anyone thinks you're on the market again."
Mingyan's face goes bright, bright red.
She laughs and delightedly squishes that strong arm more firmly between her cleavage.
Fake or not, somehow this is the most excited she's been for a date in ages.