Hormones That Can't Be Hidden - Chapter 30

The guests had scattered and the air was still, leaving only the emptiness and fatigue that followed cleaning and disinfection. Dong Junhao was conducting a routine check of the final area’s private rooms.

Passing “Bitao Pavilion” the room usually reserved for the star technician, Yang Xuejiao a sudden, suppressed sobbing sound, as if squeezed from the depths of a throat, made him stop in his tracks.

Yang Xuejiao was the recognized “Number One” of the second floor. She was the most beautiful, the most skillful, the most requested by guests, and earned the highest income. In Dong Junhao’s prior perception, she was the most adept survivor in this “dye-vat of vanity” always perfectly made up, smiling like a flower, the kind of “smart woman” who knew exactly how to use her advantages to play men like toys.

He should have turned and left, but the despair in that weeping was too real, worlds apart from the “professional performance” he had witnessed during the day. Acting on some inexplicable impulse, he knocked lightly and then pushed open the unlocked door.

The room was dimly lit by a single floor lamp in the corner. Yang Xuejiao sat with her back to the door on the edge of the massage bed. Her usually straight back was slumped; one strap of her thin work uniform had slipped, exposing a small patch of pale skin. Her chestnut curls were scattered messily, trembling with her suppressed sobs like bird feathers drenched by a storm.

Hearing the movement, she turned her head in alarm. Tears mixed with smeared eyeliner covered her face, and her carefully painted red lips had been bitten until they lost color. Those eyes, usually swirling with a charming glow, were now red and swollen, filled with naked fatigue, humiliation, and a near-childlike helplessness.

Seeing it was Dong Junhao, she frantically used the back of her hand to wipe her nose, even trying to force a smile, but only managed a grimace that looked more painful than her crying.

“Hao… Brother Hao… you, why haven’t you left yet?” Her voice was raspy with a heavy nasal tone. “I’m fine… just, just a little tired.”

Dong Junhao stood frozen at the door, momentarily at a loss for words. Facing this woman who had suddenly removed all her armor to reveal the thousand-holed wreck beneath, his criticisms about “hypocrisy” and “gold-digging” instantly became pale and powerless. After a long while, he managed to squeeze out a few dry words: “Don’t… don’t cry. Did a… did a guest bully you?”

These words were like a chisel breaking through a frozen dam. Yang Xuejiao’s tears burst forth. She shook her head while nodding desperately, covering her face as her broken cries spilled out intermittently: “When… when have they ever treated us like humans… summoned at a whim, dismissed with a wave… hands and feet everywhere, mouths full of filth…”

“But we still have to keep smiling… we still have to say ‘Thank you, Boss, for the tip’ with gratitude…”

She raised her tearful eyes, looking blankly into the void. “All of this… I accepted. I chose this path myself; I have to swallow the bitterness. How the people outside see us, calling us cheap, vain… I accepted that too. It’s my own fault for not studying hard back then and cutting off my own future I deserve it!”

Her voice suddenly rose, sharp pain mixing with her trembling. “But why?! Why does even my own family prefer to believe those rumors over me?!”

“My mom just called me, crying and screaming at me. She said the neighbors are all saying I’m a ‘working girl’ out here, that she can’t hold her head up, that my brother is being pointed at in school. She said if I keep this up… I’ll never be able to get married, that I’m the family shame, that I’ve humiliated them completely!”

Those final words were like a red-hot, blunt knife stabbing into her most vulnerable spot. A massive wave of grief and powerlessness made her whole body go soft. She stood up abruptly but stumbled, as if the only thing left in the world to lean on was this silent yet upright man before her.

Without a thought for decorum, she threw herself forward. Her forehead slammed into Dong Junhao’s sturdy chest, and her hands gripped the front of his work shirt with a death grip. She buried her tear-soaked face into him like a child who had found a piece of driftwood after being abandoned by the whole world, and began to cry aloud.

“I endure the disgust of those pigs out here… every cent I earn I send home… I grit my teeth to support this family… but in the end, even my closest relatives use the filthiest words to stab my heart… Brother Hao, what am I even living for…?”

The crying was heart-wrenching, filled with the despair of a double betrayal the contempt of the outside world could be endured by gritting one’s teeth, but the misunderstanding and scolding from one’s own kin were enough to destroy the final mental fortress.

Dong Junhao’s arms hung stiffly at his sides, not knowing whether to lift them or leave them. The warm, soft body in his arms was shaking like an autumn leaf in the wind, and the scalding tears quickly soaked through his thin work shirt, searing his skin.

In a sudden, almost violent way, it melted the layer of ice in his heart built of prejudice and moral judgment, creating countless cracks. Behind those stylized, flirtatious smiles he had once despised was not just a tooth-grinding endurance, but a loneliness so profound they couldn’t even turn back to cry. Behind that naked desire for money he had once criticized was not just a heavy shackle dragging a family through the mud, but a humble plea to buy back a shred of dignity and recognition.

Those fantasies of “climbing high” that he had once dismissed were perhaps the only visible, piteously weak lights of floating wood in a pitch-black sea. They were the final obsession with the faint hope that “maybe one day, I can make my family proud.”

Yes, what else? A heavy voice echoed in the depths of his soul. If there were even a slightly brighter, slightly more dignified path to take, what decent girl would be willing to lower her face and endure the strange looks and the gossip behind her back? To put her youth, her smiles, and even the safety of her body on a market filled with alcohol, desire, and contempt to be consumed, critiqued, and even bullied?

Under every seemingly “vain” choice might be a soul driven to the edge of a cliff by life. He had been standing on the dry bank with a self-righteous loftiness, seeing only the gaudy oil on the surface of the water, never thinking that the people beneath the surface might be choking to death on their own tears. The weight carried by this profession was far more suffocating than he had imagined.

The crying in his arms gradually turned into intermittent, exhausted sobbing. Yang Xuejiao seemed to finally catch her breath from the edge of a breakdown, realizing her current lack of decorum and her overstepping. She let go of him as if burned, stumbling back two steps. She lowered her head, not daring to look at Dong Junhao, her fingers twisting the hem of her shirt helplessly. Her voice was as thin as a mosquito, still thick with a crying tone: “Sor—sorry, Brother Hao… I… I’m so embarrassed… I let you… see me like this…”

Looking at the girl before him stripped of all her exquisite pretense, a mess and as fragile as glass that would break at a touch all of Dong Junhao’s sharp judgments vanished in an instant. His throat felt tight. He shook his head stiffly and went silent for a few seconds before using the softest tone he could manage.

“It’s okay… I understand. Life isn’t easy, especially for people like us. Take a moment, wipe your face. Life… has to go on.” He paused, his voice turning deeper. “You aren’t what they say. At least, not to me.”

He said no more, turning and gently closing the door, giving her back the space filled with salty tears and endless fatigue.

Walking through the empty, luxurious corridor, the carpet remained soft and the air remained sweet, but Dong Junhao’s perception had been completely refreshed. The figures of the female technicians in their qipao, smiling and charming, were no longer flat, contemptible symbols. They became Yang Xuejiao; they became Lin Wei, Su Xiaoxiao, Song Qian… they became living “people” with names, backs bent by the heavy burdens of life, yet still using all their strength to try and stand straight, breathing with difficulty in the narrowest of gaps.

Without realizing it, his understanding of this small world so easily viewed through a tinted lens had completed a transformation from blunt criticism to heavy empathy. And because of this empathy and understanding, he himself was being drawn deeper and more unavoidably into the complex textures and dark currents of this world.

He himself was he not walking a similarly narrow path? Simply because he was a man, the outside looks and pressure might be slightly less, but they existed nonetheless. The only thing he could do, perhaps, was to hold tight to that bit of authenticity and his own bottom line within this murky vortex, figuring out what he truly wanted and what he was willing to pay.

But a new challenge would soon descend again in an unexpected way.