Su Wanning was three minutes late.
Even she was startled.
From fourteen minutes to seven, then to three—she had never deliberately kept track of the numbers, but her body seemed to have remembered something on its own. Every time she left the house, her hand automatically reached for that ring of keys, her feet automatically avoided the slippers blocking the entryway, and the thoughts unfurling all at once in her mind would gather around a single voice at some point: Two o'clock in the afternoon. The bookstore construction site.
That voice wasn't an alarm or a calendar reminder.
It was the way Lu Shixing had said, "The day after tomorrow, two in the afternoon." Calm, without a trace of expectation, as if he were reporting the temperature. But precisely because it held no expectation, it made people want to respond.
When she pushed open the metal gate, Lu Shixing was standing in front of the curved wall from yesterday, holding an unfolded blueprint. The blueprint was huge, its two ends pinned down by a toolbox and a bottle of mineral water. Wind blew in through the window frame, making the paper ripple faintly, like a lake held in place.
He heard the gate, but didn't look up.
"Three minutes."
Su Wanning froze for a moment. "What?"
"You were three minutes late today." His eyes remained on the blueprint, his tone like he was reading a figure off a dashboard. "Last time was seven minutes. The first time was fourteen."
"You've been keeping track?"
"I remember all the times."
He finally looked up as he said it. His gaze swept over her and stopped at the coffee cups in her hands—she had brought two again. This time, he didn't hesitate. He reached out and took one directly.
The motion was completely natural, as if it had already been written into some procedure.
Su Wanning watched him take a sip of coffee, then place the cup on the windowsill—in the same spot as last time, the bottom aligned with the edge of the window frame, precise as if it had been measured with a ruler.
She couldn't help laughing.
"You even have a designated spot for putting down your cup."
"When things are kept in fixed places, you don't have to look for them when you need them."
"But sometimes looking for things is fun, too. Don't you think? You find things you've forgotten about, and then remember things you normally wouldn't have thought of."
Lu Shixing glanced at her. There was a faint trace of confusion in his eyes, like someone accustomed to walking in straight lines being told for the first time that taking a detour was also a choice.
"I don't take detours," he said.
"I know." Su Wanning placed her own coffee at the other end of the windowsill, deliberately leaving it unaligned with anything. "That's why you need me."
Only after saying it did she realize what the sentence sounded like. But she didn't take it back, because she was talking about work. At least, that's what she told herself she was talking about.
Lu Shixing didn't respond. He turned and walked back to the blueprint, tapping a section of the paper with his finger.
"This is the circulation path from the entrance to the main reading area. The contractor followed the original drawings, but I think the corner is too hard. When people come in, their line of sight will run straight into the side of the bookshelves. There's no transition."
Su Wanning walked over and stood beside him. The distance between them was about the length of an arm—not close, but close enough for her to smell him. It wasn't cologne, but a clean scent of laundry detergent mixed with paper, like a sheet of white paper fresh from the printer.
She lowered her head to study the blueprint.
Architectural floor plans were like a foreign language to her—she understood every symbol, but when they were put together, she could only understand half of what the lines were saying. Still, she saw the corner Lu Shixing was talking about. On the blueprint, it was a clean, definite ninety-degree angle, utterly unambiguous.
"How do you think we should change it?" she asked.
"Add a curve. Make the wall concave at the corner so that people's sightlines are guided naturally as they approach. It won't feel like they're walking into a wall."
Su Wanning pulled a sketchbook from her backpack, flipped to a blank page, and quickly drew a few lines in pencil. It wasn't an architectural drawing, but the path of a person walking—from the entrance, footsteps following a slight curve like river water flowing around a stone, then pausing at the corner as something caught their eye, their body turning with their gaze.
"What if we put a small mirror here?" She tapped the corner with the tip of her pencil. "We wouldn't have to change the wall. When people reached this spot and saw their reflection, they'd naturally slow down. Everyone slows down when they see themselves."
Lu Shixing looked at her sketch.
He was silent for a few seconds.
"A mirror would increase cleaning costs."
"But it would make people stop."
"The bookstore's circulation path is designed to keep foot traffic moving, not to make people stop."
"The whole point of a bookstore is to make people stop."
Their eyes met for an instant. It wasn't a confrontation, but two entirely different systems of logic meeting at the same intersection, each with its own green light shining.
Lu Shixing looked away first. He picked up a pencil and drew a tiny square beside the corner on the blueprint, writing the character for "mirror" inside it.
"Let's try it," he said.
Su Wanning didn't cheer or say, "I knew it." She simply finished drawing the figure at the corner in her sketchbook—the person stopped in front of the mirror, head tilted slightly, as if trying to determine whether the self in the mirror was really them.
They continued working.
The afternoon light shifted across the window frame like a slowly turning hour hand, sweeping from the eastern wall to the western one. After Lu Shixing finished measuring every dimension in the entrance area, he began working on the spacing between the bookshelves. His method of calculation was unusual—he didn't just measure the distance between one bookshelf and the next. He would also stand between two rows of shelves, spread his arms, and sense whether the width allowed two people to pass at the same time without brushing against each other.
Su Wanning watched from the side, then suddenly said, "You're measuring the distance between people."
"I'm measuring the width of the passageway."
"No, you're measuring how much space people need between them before they feel invaded."
Lu Shixing lowered his arms and looked at her.
"Isn't that the same thing?"
"Not at all. The width of a passageway is a number. The distance between people is a feeling. The same ninety centimeters can feel too narrow when two strangers pass each other, just right when two friends pass each other, and two—" She paused. "—people who are very close might find it too wide."
She didn't say lovers. But the omitted word was like a pebble tossed into water, its ripples spreading silently outward.
Lu Shixing didn't respond. He picked up the tape measure again, measured once, and recorded the number. Then he did something Su Wanning hadn't expected—he walked over to her and stood with her between the two rows of bookshelves.
The distance between them was about forty centimeters.
Not the ninety-centimeter width of a passageway, not the arm's-length distance of work. Forty centimeters. Close enough for her to see a faint scratch on the second button of his shirt, close enough to feel the slight rise and fall of his chest as he breathed.
"How about this?" he asked. His tone was still as steady as a temperature report, but Su Wanning noticed that he wasn't looking at her. He was looking at an imaginary point on the bookshelves ahead.
"Too narrow," she said, her voice softer than she'd expected. "Two people would bump into each other."
"Then we'll add five centimeters."
He stepped away and returned to the blueprint, writing a new number beside the spacing between the bookshelves.
Su Wanning stood where she was, feeling her heartbeat collide with her ribs in an irregular rhythm. She lowered her head to her sketchbook and discovered that, at some point without her realizing it, she'd drawn two parallel lines along the edge of the page—very close, almost touching, but never crossing.
She turned the page.
Toward evening, they had an argument over the color scheme.
It started with the color of the bookshelves. Lu Shixing had chosen a dark gray wood-grain laminate because it was stain-resistant, easy on the eyes, and unified with the concrete palette of the overall space. Su Wanning looked at the color swatch for three seconds, then shook her head.
"It's too cold."
"A bookstore doesn't need warmth."
"Of course a bookstore needs warmth. People come to a bookstore to stay, not to sightsee. If you were going to stay somewhere, would you want to stay somewhere cold?"
"I would."
Su Wanning looked at him and suddenly realized he might actually mean it. This man could probably spend an entire day in an all-gray space, as long as its dimensions were precise, its lighting controllable, and its temperature constant. He didn't need warm colors to feel wrapped in comfort, because his sense of security didn't come from his surroundings. It came from order.
But readers weren't him. The people walking into a bookstore weren't architects. They were ordinary people: office workers looking for somewhere to sit after work, mothers bringing their children to flip through picture books on the weekend, people nursing broken hearts and looking for a book to keep them company through the night.
"Use this." Su Wanning dug her own color swatches out of her bag and pointed to one—a shade somewhere between gray and brown, like the color of mist condensed on a window at winter dusk after the sunlight shone through it. It wasn't warm, but it wasn't cold either. It had the kind of temperature that made people think, I can stay here.
Lu Shixing looked at the color for a long time.
"That color isn't in the standard swatches."
"I know. It has to be custom-mixed."
"A custom color will increase the cost and the schedule."
"But it's right."
They looked at each other. This time, longer than ever before. Su Wanning didn't back down, and neither did Lu Shixing. The construction site was quiet, broken only by the occasional sound of a scooter engine from the distant street.
Finally, Lu Shixing spoke first.
"How do you know it's right?"
Su Wanning thought about it.
"Have you ever walked into a place and felt your body relax before you even had a chance to see anything clearly? Not because the sofa was soft or the music sounded good, but because the color of the space made your shoulders loosen on their own?"
She paused.
"That's the color I want. The color that makes people's shoulders relax."
Lu Shixing didn't answer immediately. He took her swatch, glanced at the color number on the back, and then tucked it into his notebook.
"I'll ask the supplier if they can mix it."
It wasn't agreement. But it wasn't refusal either. It was his way—confirm feasibility first, then make a decision. Su Wanning had already learned to read his language: when he said "No," he meant no; when he said "I'll check," it meant he was already seriously considering it.
While packing up, she realized that she'd drawn twice as many pages in her sketchbook as usual that day. Not because there was more to draw at the construction site, but because her hand had kept moving—drawing the spacing between the bookshelves, the curve of the corner, the angle of light passing through the dust, and the way he stood between two rows of shelves with his arms spread wide.
On the final page, she drew two cups of coffee. One was aligned with the edge of the window frame, while the other sat crooked beside it. The distance between the two cups was about thirty centimeters.
Beneath them, she wrote a line: His cup is always in the same place. Mine never is. But they're both on the same windowsill.
When they left the construction site, it still wasn't completely dark. A thin strip of orange lingered in the western sky, like someone had drawn one last stroke of pale watercolor across a blue-gray canvas.
"When's next time?" she asked.
"Wednesday, same time."
"Okay."
She had taken a few steps when something suddenly occurred to her. She turned back.
"Lu Shixing."
He was locking the door. At the sound of his name, he stopped.
"You said you remember all the times."
"Mm-hmm."
"Then do you remember how long we stayed at the construction site last time?"
Without even thinking, he answered, "Three hours and seventeen minutes."
Su Wanning smiled. It wasn't the polite kind of smile, but one that rose from deep in her chest, touched with the faintest hint of heartache.
"You even remember that."
"I told you, I remember all the times."
"Then did you feel like those three hours and seventeen minutes passed especially quickly?"
Lu Shixing didn't answer.
He fastened the lock, turned, and walked toward the other end of the alley. After about ten steps, his voice drifted back through the dusk, very soft, as if he were saying it for the wind to hear.
"I did."
Su Wanning stood where she was, watching his back disappear around the corner at the end of the alley.
She glanced down at her watch.
6:23 p.m.
She silently committed the time to memory. It was the first time in her life she'd chosen to remember an exact moment—not because she was afraid of being late, but because she wanted to remember it.
She turned and walked toward the bus stop, her steps a little slower than usual.
She wasn't being late.
For the first time, she felt that slowing down could also be a way of being on time.