Su Wanning was crouched outside a convenience store, eating a rice ball, when she received the call confirming their collaboration.
Her phone buzzed three times before she managed to free up a hand to answer. She still had a bite of tuna rice ball in her mouth when the person on the other end said, “Congratulations, Ms. Su. The bookstore’s brand identity has been assigned to you. There is one additional condition, though.”
She swallowed the rice ball. “What condition?”
“The spatial designer wants the brand identity to be highly integrated with the building’s architectural language, so you’ll need to work closely with the architect, Lu. That includes the on-site measurements, material and color selection, and wayfinding system. You’ll have to discuss all of it together.”
Su Wanning froze for two seconds.
Architect Lu.
The man who had sat in the conference room with his shirt cuffs folded as precisely as if they’d been measured with a ruler. The man who had looked up at her after she arrived fourteen minutes late, his eyes holding something she couldn’t decipher.
“No problem,” she said, her voice far steadier than the hesitation in her heart. “When do we start?”
“Two o’clock the afternoon after tomorrow, at the construction site. Architect Lu says he’ll arrive early.”
Su Wanning hung up, stuffed the other half of the rice ball into her mouth, and stared at the call log on her phone for a long time.
Arrive early.
Of course he would arrive early. That man probably even breathed half a beat ahead of schedule.
She opened her calendar and entered under two o’clock the afternoon after tomorrow: Bookstore site, Lu Shixing. Then, after thinking it over, she added a line above it: Leave at one. Absolutely do not be late.
She arrived seven minutes late.
It wasn’t because she’d overslept or forgotten the time. She’d left promptly at one, checked the route in advance, and even allowed time for red lights. But when she passed the coffee shop at the end of the alley, her feet stopped on their own.
She remembered that day in the conference room, when there had been a black coffee in front of Lu Shixing. There were no sugar stains on the side of the cup, and the surface was as still as a dark mirror. She didn’t know why she remembered that detail, but her hand had already pushed open the coffee shop door.
Two Americanos, no sugar.
Waiting for the coffee took four minutes. She spent the remaining three running through the last two intersections.
When she pushed open the iron gate to the bookstore construction site, her breathing still hadn’t settled. The scent of cement mixed with sawdust hung throughout the site. The scaffolding had not yet been completely dismantled, and afternoon sunlight slanted through the window frames where no glass had been installed, drawing grids of light and shadow across the floor.
Lu Shixing stood in front of the wall at the very back.
He wore a light gray jacket, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, revealing a long, slender tendon along his forearm. He held a tape measure in his right hand and braced his left against the wall while measuring the height of a corner. His posture was intensely focused, like a doctor listening to a patient’s chest—not looking at the wall, but listening to the structure inside it.
Su Wanning stood in the doorway and watched him for several seconds.
His back was perfectly straight. Not the deliberate straightness of someone forcing himself upright, but a verticality that seemed to have grown from deep within his bones, like a building’s load-bearing column quietly supporting something invisible.
“You’re here.”
He didn’t turn around, but his voice traveled precisely in her direction.
“I’m late.” Su Wanning walked in and lifted the two coffees in her hands. “But I brought something to make up for it.”
Only then did Lu Shixing turn around. His gaze landed on her face first, lingering for less than a second before moving to the coffee cups in her hands.
He didn’t take one.
“I don’t drink coffee bought by other people.”
Su Wanning’s hand froze in midair.
“Why?”
“Because I don’t know whether they remembered that I take it without sugar.”
His tone was perfectly even, as though he were stating a law of physics. It wasn’t pickiness, nor was he deliberately making things difficult. It was simply a habit confirmed through years of experience—he accepted no variable that hadn’t been verified.
Su Wanning lowered her eyes to the cup in her hand.
Then she smiled.
“I didn’t add sugar either.”
She extended the cup another step. It wasn’t forceful, but a natural invitation, like opening a door without pulling someone through it.
Lu Shixing looked at the coffee.
The silence lasted about three seconds. During those three seconds, Su Wanning noticed his gaze move from the cup to her fingers. Indigo paint from the sketches she’d worked on the night before still clung beneath her nails, and there was a small bandage on the second joint of her middle finger where she’d nicked it with a utility knife.
He took the coffee.
He didn’t say thank you, but he took a sip.
Su Wanning thought she heard something crack. Very softly, like stepping into a puddle covered by thin ice on a winter morning—not shattering, just a nearly invisible line appearing across the surface.
“There’s a problem with the curve of this wall.” Lu Shixing set the coffee on the windowsill and picked up the tape measure again, his tone switching back into work mode. “The construction team shifted it by one and a half centimeters. If your visual design is going to follow the wall, this error will affect the overall proportions.”
Su Wanning walked over beside him and looked at the wall.
She couldn’t see a one-and-a-half-centimeter deviation. Honestly, even if it were off by three centimeters, she probably wouldn’t notice. But she saw something else—the curve of the wall resembled the posture of someone turning slightly to one side. It wasn’t a perfect arc, but a hesitant bend, as if it had something to say but hadn’t spoken yet.
“I think the curve is great,” she said.
Lu Shixing frowned. “It doesn’t match the plans.”
They spent nearly three hours at the construction site.
Lu Shixing measured every wall, the distance between the columns, and the ceiling height, recording each number in a black notebook. His handwriting was so neat it looked typeset. Beside him, Su Wanning sketched the way light fell at different angles, the paths dust drifted through the air, and a white butterfly that had flown in from who-knew-where and landed on the scaffolding.
At one point, she became so absorbed in drawing that she didn’t notice Lu Shixing walk up behind her.
“What are you drawing?”
She jumped, and her sketchbook nearly fell to the floor. He caught it with a quick movement, as if he’d anticipated that she would let go.
“Dust,” she said, turning the sketchbook toward him. “Look. The dust at three o’clock drifts differently from the dust at four. At three, the wind comes from the south, so the dust slants. After four, the wind stops, and it falls straight down.”
Lu Shixing studied the two pages. The one on the left showed slanted fine lines; the one on the right showed short vertical dots. Between the pages, she had lightly written in pencil: After the wind stops, even the dust becomes quiet.
He handed the sketchbook back without commenting. But Su Wanning noticed that when he returned it, his fingers lingered on the cover for one extra moment—that pause was so brief she wasn’t sure she hadn’t imagined it.
“You notice things very closely,” he said after a while, his tone like an engineering assessment. “But are these things useful to the design?”
“I don’t know,” Su Wanning answered honestly. “But I think if a space pays attention even to the way dust drifts, the people living in it will feel well cared for.”
Lu Shixing didn’t argue. He turned and walked back to the wall to continue measuring, but his pace was just a little slower than before. Su Wanning wasn’t sure whether that was her imagination.
“So it should stay.”
Su Wanning crouched down and pulled her sketchbook from her backpack. She flipped to a blank page and quickly drew several lines—not straight lines, but curves with subtle rises and falls, like the rhythm of breathing recorded on paper.
“Look.” She held the sketchbook up beside the wall. “If this wall had a perfect curve, it would just be a wall. But this deviation gives it a turn. When people get here, their line of sight will naturally be guided over there—” She pointed to a recess at the end of the wall. “A reading light would fit perfectly there. Someone walks in, follows the wall, reaches this spot, and the light comes on. They’ll stop.”
When she said “stop,” she looked up at Lu Shixing.
He was looking at her sketchbook. His expression hadn’t changed, but the hand holding the tape measure had lowered.
“Not one of your lines is straight,” he said.
“Straight lines are your job.” Su Wanning stood and brushed the dust from her knees. “I’m responsible for the curves.”
Lu Shixing didn’t answer. But he put the tape measure into his pocket, which, to Su Wanning, meant some kind of concession—he wasn’t planning to treat that one-and-a-half-centimeter deviation as a problem for the time being.
They spent nearly three hours at the construction site.
Lu Shixing measured every wall, the distance between the columns, and the ceiling height, recording each number in a black notebook. His handwriting was so neat it looked typeset. Beside him, Su Wanning sketched the way light fell at different angles, the paths dust drifted through the air, and a white butterfly that had flown in from who-knew-where and landed on the scaffolding.
They barely spoke. But the silence wasn’t awkward. It was two people each focused on their own frequency, occasionally intersecting, like two parallel lines drawing briefly closer on a bend.
By evening, the light had changed. The sunlight cutting through the window frames shifted from white to orange, and the dust inside the site turned into golden particles, slowly rotating in the air.
Su Wanning stopped drawing and watched the light.
“Do you ever feel,” she said suddenly, “like time moves more slowly here?”
Lu Shixing was checking the numbers in his notebook. He raised his head and followed her gaze toward the window.
The setting sun had just reached the roof of the old apartment building across the way, setting the entire sky ablaze in shades of orange. Far away, someone was gathering laundry from a rooftop, moving slowly, like an old film playing frame by frame.
“The speed of time is constant,” he said. “It’s people’s perception that changes.”
“Then what about your perception right now?”
He didn’t answer.
Su Wanning didn’t press him. She lowered her head and continued sketching, adding a small line of text beside the white butterfly from earlier: 5:47 p.m. The light turns amber.
What she didn’t know was that in the few seconds while her head was lowered, Lu Shixing drew his gaze back from the window and let it fall on her profile.
The sunset turned the loose strands of hair across her forehead translucent gold. Her lashes cast a small shadow over her cheek, and the pencil moving across the paper made a soft rasping sound, like some ancient way of measuring time.
On the blank space at the back of his notebook, he wrote a line. Not data. Not a measurement.
The words she had just spoken.
Time seems to move more slowly here.
After writing it, he looked at the line for two seconds, then turned back to the previous page and continued checking the distance between the columns.
By the time Su Wanning packed up to leave, it was already dark. The construction site had no temporary lighting installed, leaving only the faint glow of streetlights filtering in through the windows.
“Same time tomorrow?” she asked.
“The day after tomorrow,” Lu Shixing said. “I have to go to another site tomorrow. Two in the afternoon.”
“Okay.”
She reached the doorway, then suddenly turned back.
“Your coffee is still on the windowsill.”
Lu Shixing glanced at it. The coffee had gone cold, and a thin layer of condensation had formed on the outside of the cup.
“If it’s cold, I don’t drink it.”
“Then the day after tomorrow—I’ll bring you another cup.”
He didn’t refuse.
Su Wanning pushed open the iron gate and walked out. The air outside was cooler than it was inside the construction site, dry with the scent of early autumn. After a few steps, she tucked her sketchbook into her backpack. As she pulled the zipper closed, her fingers brushed against the tube of indigo paint.
She remembered the look in his eyes when he saw the paint still clinging beneath her nails. It hadn’t been disgust or curiosity. It had been more like he was identifying something—as if a watchmaker were examining the wear on a gear and calculating from those marks how many times it had turned.
She shook her head and quickened her pace toward the bus stop.
Behind her, Lu Shixing still hadn’t left the construction site. He stood beside the windowsill, picked up the cold coffee, and glanced at the bottom of the cup.
No sugar.
She really hadn’t added any.
He set the cup down, picked up his jacket, and closed the iron gate of the construction site. The click of the lock echoed once through the quiet alley before being swallowed by the sound of traffic in the distance.
He walked in the opposite direction.
The two figures split apart at the mouth of the alley, one heading left and the other right, like the two hands of a clock starting from the same mark and moving in different directions.
But the hands of a clock always overlap again.
It simply wasn’t time yet.