After Being Dumped by the Film Empress, My Acting Skills Soared - Chapter 45

Chapter 45

Shao Niannian stared at the WeChat interface, which remained devoid of any messages from Jiang Yan. She slowly exhaled a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. After quickly replying to everyone else inquiring about her condition, her hand uncontrollably sought out Jiang Yan’s contact info in her chat list once more.

Her finger hovered over the screen, tapped in, then retreated in a fit of hesitation.

Back and forth, over and over.

It felt as if all her courage had been depleted during the first major turning point of her life—switching from Chinese painting to acting—leaving nothing left for this moment. Since that change, her life had been a series of following the script, until she joined this production.

Whether it was a lingering effect of the concussion or simply the complexity of her thoughts, Niannian felt a rhythmic, throbbing pain spreading from her temples to her fingertips.

Her vision blurred as she cycled through her indecision. Finally, she admitted that Wen Jing had a point: every intersection she’d had with Jiang Yan so far was because she had taken that very first step.

“Just try it, what if?” Niannian thought. The idea of love growing over time didn’t have to be a myth. During their time together, she had felt a rare sense of comfort; perhaps Jiang Yan felt it, too.

Niannian adjusted her posture, sitting up with a solemnity that bordered on ritual. She muttered fragments of lines she had memorized from scripts and bits of love letters she had once helped Gu Yizhi ghostwrite.

She pressed the call button. The long ringing tones seemed to stretch out, flattening the erratic spikes of her heart rate. Just as her breath was about to give out, the call was finally answered.

Both sides were so silent that even the sound of breathing was absent.

Niannian instinctively checked her screen. The timer was indeed ticking upward. A faint tremor ran through her body like a weak electric current. She pulled the duvet up slightly, covering her chin and lips, and pressed the phone to her ear.

“Hello?” she whispered softly.

She had imagined a thousand scenarios: Jiang Yan might not want to hear a word she said, considering they were just colleagues who met on set; she might just hang up; or she might be so overly professional that Niannian would panic and lose her train of thought entirely.

Fortunately—or perhaps unfortunately—while Niannian was clutching the bedsheets in agony, the person on the other end was equally paralyzed.

The moment the phone had started ringing, Jiang Yan’s expression had turned gravity-deadly serious. She sat bolt upright on her sofa. She had handled high-stakes business calls with less tension than this. She waited until the very last ring, dropped the dice she had been fidgeting with, and picked up.

The protracted silence almost made Jiang Yan think it was a prank. In the past, she would have hung up without a second thought. But this time, she didn’t. Instead, a strange stubbornness took hold: she wanted to wait for Shao Niannian to speak first.

Predictably, Niannian was the one to break.

After that “Hello,” it felt as if the coins had finally dropped into the slot of a romance game.

“Are you… are you okay?” Jiang Yan asked.

“I’m fine, really. It looked scary, but the injuries aren’t deep.” Niannian chose to ignore the raw abrasions on her arms and the nauseating dizziness of her concussion. She bit her lip repeatedly, her anxiety manifesting in the way she twisted the duvet into a mountain of wrinkles.

“Um…” Niannian started.

“Mh?” Jiang Yan hummed in response, a sound that effortlessly broke Niannian’s “spell.”

Niannian’s right eye twitched. Her grip on the sheets tightened. Her mind went blank; all those poetic lines she had once transcribed vanished. Her surging hormones seemed to leave her with nothing but the most primitive human urge to describe love. After nearly a minute of silence, she finally caught the last train of spring—an emotional journey ten years overdue.

“Um… I like you. No, I mean… what I mean is…”

“If I wanted to… to be with you… do you have any plans for your upcoming schedule? I mean… do you have an opening… uh, a…”

Niannian made a complete mess of it, stuttering so badly she had to pinch her thigh under the covers to stay grounded. It was more painful and awkward than her first acting audition.

Jiang Yan, who had been holding her breath, felt a wave of instinctive relief. Finally, it’s here.

There was no immediate sound from Jiang Yan’s end.

Niannian had already guessed the outcome. When the rejection and the click of the hang-up finally happened, she blinked rapidly. She rubbed her stinging eyes, trying to hide the redness.

“What’s there to cry about… it was expected,” Niannian whispered to the black screen. She forced a smile, trying to convince herself that being rejected by a goddess was only logical. She couldn’t find many merits in herself—beyond a somewhat useless diligence and a beauty that had earned her a “top-tier vase” label. She had often told Gao Hui that having fans who truly loved her was a blessing from a past life.

Despite her self-comfort, tears splashed onto the phone screen. She tried to wipe them away, but they only smeared, and more followed. Eventually, a surge of self-loathing rose up. She hated her incompetence, her weakness, and the way her first instinct after failure was to retreat. If I never touch it, it won’t hurt, right?

Niannian pulled the duvet over her head and sobbed in secret.

The words “I’m sorry, I can’t agree to that” became a curse echoing in her ears. She thought bitterly that if someone offered her a role in a tragic art film about unrequited love right now, she wouldn’t even need to prep—she’d just cry a bucket of tears on command.

Back at the coast, Jiang Yan sat on her sofa. The phone in her hand felt cold, but her ears were a vivid red, “scorched” by the heat of Niannian’s confession.

The moment she had voiced the rejection, Jiang Yan felt a sense of relief and hung up instantly. One second longer and she feared her aching heart would betray her, forcing her to say yes.

But… this wasn’t right.

The phone suddenly felt like a hot coal; she tossed it away in a perfect arc. She scrambled to find the dice she had dropped, rolling it in her palm until the sharp edges stung. The pain kept her mind clear—clear enough to realize her psychological state was tilting toward Niannian at an uncontrollable speed.

If the phone had rung for one more second… she couldn’t guarantee she could have said no again.

When it came to “liking” someone, Jiang Yan fell in easily and withdrew just as fast. She usually avoided dragging innocent people into her orbit; her past flings were mostly calculated exchanges of interest.

But Shao Niannian was different.

Jiang Yan tugged at her pajamas irritably. The air conditioning was on, but it couldn’t cool the inner heat. The void and sense of loss following the rejection were so intense that she headed for the bathroom, desperate for a cold shower to wash away the damp, stifling misery of her own making.

Standing before the mirror, she looked at her reflection. She smiled; the reflection smiled back. She turned cold; the reflection mirrored the ice.

Inside and out, it was her, yet it wasn’t. Jiang Yan could no longer tell who she was, what role she was playing, or what kind of person she was even capable of loving.