The Whole World Is Waiting for Me and My Ex-Girlfriend to Remarry (Entertainment Industry) - Chapter 37

“Let’s do it. I heard this can relieve stress.”

When she woke up completely for the second time, it was already past noon. This time when Dong Huaci got up, her head didn’t hurt, but her stomach did.

Zhong Qing was lying beside her, fully dressed and even changed into a new set of pajamas. She was intensely focused on playing with her phone, as if she were the type of person who never needed sleep.

A small expression from Dong Huaci upon waking was enough for Zhong Qing to realize her situation: “Is your stomach still uncomfortable?”

“It’s alright. It shouldn’t be gastroenteritis; it’s just that I didn’t eat much last night, and then I ate a bit too aggressively. My diet has been irregular lately.” Dong Huaci reached for her phone, asking naturally—as if after a night of intimacy, their relationship had shifted from avoiding each other upon meeting to ten years of cohabitation—”Do you have stomach medicine, Zhong Qing?”

“Stop looking, your phone is with me.” With a beautiful display of core strength, Zhong Qing sprang out of bed with an agile leap. “I’ll go get it for you.”

“Wait,” Dong Huaci said softly but urgently, “Why did you take my phone again?”

“You had the nerve to spend the night at your ex-girlfriend’s house, so why is your courage so small now? Did you commit a crime using your phone?” Zhong Qing spoke her nonsense with righteous confidence. When she returned, she carried a glass of warm water and two boxes of medicine. “One for pain, one for treatment. See how you feel first; if it’s really bad, I’ll have your assistant take you to the hospital.”

Dong Huaci said weakly, “Have her come here to pick me up? I see now, you really don’t have any sasaeng fans, Zhong Qing. You’ve been living the good life for too long.”

Zhong Qing sat leaning against the edge of the bed. “How could I not? They just haven’t found their way here yet.”

Dong Huaci didn’t take the medicine, nor did she drink the water. She simply stared at Zhong Qing, her back already soaked in cold sweat. “Give me back my phone. I’m afraid there might be messages.”

“I’ll give it back after you take the medicine,” Zhong Qing said.

Dong Huaci took the water, unwrapped the medicine, and completed the task in one smooth motion; her manicured nails didn’t hinder her fluency in the slightest.

“Just the painkiller is fine,” Dong Huaci said listlessly. “I don’t want to mix the stomach powder; it’s so annoying. My phone—”

Upon hearing this, Zhong Qing proved to be quite untrustworthy. She didn’t hand over the phone; instead, she went back out to tear open the packaging, mix the powder, and place a cup of medicine that smelled objectively terrible on the nightstand.

The painkiller worked truly fast. Dong Huaci regained enough strength to challenge Zhong Qing: “How can you go back on your word?”

Zhong Qing said, “Don’t look at your phone when you’re sick; it drains your spirit.”

After saying this, she directly kissed Dong Huaci again. She kissed her, and at the moment when emotions ran deep, she coaxed and half-tricked her into taking the cup of medicine, feeding it to her while cradling her neck. Dong Huaci drank it abruptly; she wasn’t truly being so temperamental as to give no face at all, though she couldn’t help coughing twice at the end. Just as she was about to say something, Zhong Qing pressed against her again and engaged her in a deep kiss.

This kiss nearly left her breathless. When it ended, Dong Huaci didn’t say a word, only panting for air.

Zhong Qing pulled the phone from her pocket. “Guan Feili really is your good friend.”

She had looked at the chat records.

Dong Huaci didn’t have the habit of deleting recent chat history, and now she regretted it a little. Back when she was dating Zhong Qing, she used to selectively and regularly delete parts of it because Zhong Qing’s occasional possessiveness and questioning made her feel extremely suffocated. Toward the end, she truly felt exhausted facing some of Zhong Qing’s demands.

Dong Huaci took her phone back and said, with very little momentum, “Zhong Qing, we are not together.”

She added, “I honestly don’t know if you want me to get better or if you want me to get sick enough to run a fever.”

She was referring to the kiss that followed.

Zhong Qing smiled and said nothing. She knew Dong Huaci didn’t find it repulsive; on the contrary, it made her feel safe.

Sometimes, when people have known each other for a long time, there comes a point where they share a mysterious intuition—knowing instantly what the other is thinking and what they need.

Dong Huaci rolled over, turning her back to Zhong Qing, without getting out of bed. “You don’t have a schedule today? You should be very busy.”

“I just finished releasing the new album, so the company gave me a few days off.” Zhong Qing didn’t leave; she just sat on the edge of the bed and spoke.

After Dong Huaci finished handling her messages, she buried her head and said muffledly, “Alright then.”

“What about you?”

“Me? I don’t have a schedule. You know what happened.” Relying on her relationship with Zhong Qing, Dong Huaci didn’t even bother to fake it; she couldn’t even force a smile because of the stomach pain. “I offended someone. I didn’t expect that skipping a single dinner party would offend such a big figure.”

“You would have been the stupid one if you went,” Zhong Qing said. “They are suppressing you because you didn’t go; so if you had gone, can you guess what would have happened?”

“I’m not a child, and I didn’t go,” Dong Huaci sighed, turning back over to pull on Zhong Qing’s hand. “It’s just… sometimes, it hurts.”

Zhong Qing looked at Dong Huaci with obvious pity.

If Zhong Qing’s fans wanted Dong Huaci to get out of the entertainment industry, then Zhong Qing wanted Dong Huaci to stay in it just as much. If the entertainment industry didn’t exist, even their accidental encounters at certain career events would cease to be. However, Zhong Qing also knew that the distance between the entertainment industry and high-end nightlife was not as far as outsiders imagined.

Not everyone is willing to be marked with a price tag, but some people force a price tag upon you. The thing that would crush Dong Huaci would never be Zhao Xuanxuan, nor would it be Zhong Qing; it would be certain terrifying, massive forces. Dong Huaci didn’t feel it was merely a hateful capitalist or the name of some local boss. If it wasn’t this one, it would be that one.

This was a type of malignant ideology that had existed for thousands of years.

On this land, within sexual-romantic relationships, how many women are truly “taking all the advantages” or “living comfortably”? Or rather, how many are lured by a downward path paved with superficial glory, mistakenly believing that their face, their movements, their posture, and their personality are a gift from heaven—a capital that through their own hard work can be exchanged for a shift in social class or the favor of destiny?

Zhong Qing asked, “The pain… what are you hurting for?”

Dong Huaci no longer avoided Zhong Qing’s gaze. Sometimes she felt dazed; sometimes Zhong Qing stood across from her, sometimes behind her, and sometimes she overlapped with her destiny. Zhong Qing held a unique position.

She said softly, weakly, “I loathe my own weakness.”

At the end of this sentence, she closed her eyes. The curtains were drawn, the lights were turned off and then on again, and old actors were replaced by new faces. An eighteen-year-old Dong Huaci was held by a nineteen-year-old Zhong Qing on a street by the Huangpu River in Shanghai. Her eyes were wide, staring at Zhong Qing as if she were a savior descended from heaven—forgetting that the reason she had come to the riverbank at eleven o’clock at night to clear her head was because the nineteen-year-old Zhong Qing had gone missing out of spite over dance practice and performance issues with everyone. Dong Huaci successfully defeated a child’s tantrum with a child’s method; her face, which was about to freeze into tears from the wind, broke into a smile: “You came.”

You. Came.

It was as if this was a long-planned date, rather than a mutually calculated bout of petulance. Zhong Qing gave a very cool “Mm,” and threw a clearly unfriendly glare at a few foreigners nearby. But Zhong Qing didn’t know that her cold face appeared exceptionally beautiful to Dong Huaci at that moment.

They huddled closely together, walking along the river.

Strangely, the bystanders had dispersed, and Dong Huaci and Zhong Qing fell into a mysterious deadlock where both were waiting for the other to speak.

The wind kissed two young faces, their long hair secretly intertwining behind their backs.

“Are you cold?” It was Zhong Qing who spoke first. The question was so serious it made her seem thirty-nine rather than nineteen.

Dong Huaci only giggled and then shook her head.

“What are you laughing at?” Zhong Qing was half-annoyed and half-ashamed, so she asked the question with a mix of righteous indignation and a guilty, probing tone.

“I can’t even laugh, Zhong Qing?” Dong Huaci laughed even more foolishly. “You control the heavens and the earth; you control too much.”

Zhong Qing couldn’t maintain her temper anymore. She laughed too, unable to explain why. Anyway, seeing Dong Huaci laugh made her want to laugh; all those messy troubles flew out of her mind. Positioning, salary, the future—which of those things was more important than Dong Huaci’s smile right now?

“Fine, I won’t control you anymore,” Zhong Qing feigned anger and pushed her hand away, only to be coaxed back by Dong Huaci’s nagging affection.

The fragrance in the wind became faint and flickering.

After fooling around like two children for a while—strictly speaking, eighteen-year-old Dong Huaci and nineteen-year-old Zhong Qing were children—Dong Huaci still asked the question she had intended to ask from the start: “So, Zhong Qing, why exactly were you angry today?”

The question flew out with the wind, but it did not immediately bring back a reply from Zhong Qing. They walked along the river for a long time, realizing that neither of them had a destination; they were just walking, each thinking the other was leading the way. Zhong Qing realized this first and pulled Dong Huaci down to sit.

The early autumn night wind was chilly.

Zhong Qing pulled Dong Huaci’s hand toward her. “I’m sorry, I won’t go missing again next time.” She was embarrassed; yes, the nineteen-year-old Zhong Qing would still put her embarrassment on clear display. “I made you sad today, didn’t I?”

Dong Huaci laughed again. “You already apologized to me on the phone, Zhong Qing. Why do you have to do it again?”

Zhong Qing lowered her head, then suddenly lifted Dong Huaci’s hand and kissed it.

Dong Huaci’s face turned bright red.

It took a long time before Dong Huaci asked, “I really want to know the whole story—of course, so do many others. It’s just that they made me the spokesperson.”

Zhong Qing kissed her again, smiling secretly, and asked knowingly, “Why did they choose you to be the spokesperson?”

When they said these things, no one could have imagined that later, one would become a “grassroots” breakout star and a trending actress, while the other would become an all-powerful idol from a survival show. Yet, during their youth, they actually shared such naive behaviors and dialogues. A thousand fanfictions could only portray Zhong Qing’s deep, repressed affection and Dong Huaci’s bright, broken nature; however, some details were buried deep within the memories of the only two people involved, waiting for a familiar wind to carry them back to that young Huangpu River.

When people are young, the Huangpu River is also very young.

The river water surged, full of vigorous life in the night.

Dong Huaci intentionally raised her eyebrows, saying very proudly, “What do you think?”

Zhong Qing smiled. “Because you are my wife. Right?”

“Exactly,” Dong Huaci drawled. “I am your wife, and you are my wife. So, I definitely have to know why.”

Zhong Qing said in a low voice, “It’s nothing, it’s just that sometimes I feel very powerless. If I don’t dance well, it’s naturally because I didn’t work hard enough. But after I feel like I’ve worked very hard, I still feel… I still feel very small.”

So, even Zhong Qing felt there were things she was too small and powerless to change? Dong Huaci had always felt she was strong—so strong that being with Zhong Qing felt like having a home, even if they were currently sharing a company dormitory and exhausting themselves for a few thousand yuan just to look their most glamorous.

Finally, Dong Huaci said, “Then, do you want to do it with me?”

She used the most innocent tone and the most pure face to say the most shocking words to Zhong Qing at that moment.

She locked fingers with Zhong Qing and repeated it: “Zhong Qing, let’s do it. I… I heard this can relieve stress.”