Riding the Long Wind – Chapter 11

Chapter 11

Liu Yuru stared at him.

Gu Jiusi was still happily planning out the future, absorbed in his own vision of it. He said earnestly: “I have thought it through. The reason women care so much about reputation is to marry into a good household. And the reason they want a good household is to live well. But if you can make yourself live well on your own terms, you do not need the good household, and if you do not need the good household, it does not matter what people say. Does that not follow?”

“A person only gets a few decades in this world. Nobody should spend them making themselves miserable for nothing. Miss Liu, picture it. You become a wealthy merchant woman, you find someone who truly loves you, and if he really loves you, he will marry you regardless. Spend your life with someone who wants you. That is what a life is. And if you never find him, you live on your own, and that is also fine.”

“As for me, I will eventually meet a girl I actually want to be with. If I do not, no matter. I can spend my whole life playing cricket fights by myself, that also works. But if I do find her, I want to be free to be with her properly. I care about her, so I cannot put her through something unfair. Which is why, sooner or later, you and I will have to go our separate ways. Because I am not that selfless, and I cannot give up my whole life for the sake of yours. I know you cannot accept this right now, but I am being honest with you. We have time. Think it over slowly. When you have had a chance to think, you will see that what I am proposing actually makes a great deal of sense.”

Liu Yuru was trembling.

She did not understand how she had ended up married to this person. Her jaw was shaking. A terror she could not name had closed over her. She managed to say, through clenched teeth: “If you do not want me, then why did you marry me?”

“That is exactly what I should be asking you,” he said, genuinely baffled. “If you did not want to marry me, why did you?”

“You agreed to the match. Now we are both trapped. I cannot leave you without you dying over it, but if I stay, I am throwing away my whole life. So I cannot just accept my fate. We have to find a solution.” He leaned forward, perfectly sincere. “I believe that someday you will come around to the idea of parting amicably and…”

The sentence did not finish.

Liu Yuru slapped him across the face.

Gu Jiusi went completely blank. Then he heard Liu Yuru break open.

“Get out. Get out of my sight.”

The author’s note here reads:

Gu Jiusi: “What do you think of the idea of parting ways?”

Liu Yuru: “No! I refuse!”

Many years later, Liu Yuru, now enormously wealthy:

Liu Yuru: “What do you think of the idea of parting ways?”

Gu Jiusi: “No! A thousand times no!”

Liu Yuru: “But I am rich enough to take ten husbands as handsome as you.”

Gu Jiusi: “You cannot.”

Liu Yuru: “Why not?”

Gu Jiusi: “You will not find anyone better-looking than me.”

Gu Jiusi: Trading on one’s looks. Proud of it. No regrets.

Gu Jiusi sat there dazed, hand pressed to his face, completely unable to process what had just happened. Liu Yuru threw herself face-down on the bed and wept with her whole body in a way she had not permitted herself all day.

How had she ended up married to this person.

How had she ended up married to this person.

A wastrel was one thing. A man with no sense of propriety was one thing. If he had even felt something for her, as Ye Yun had suggested, it might have been bearable. But he felt nothing. Less than nothing, in fact. He thought she had come scheming after his family’s money, and his entire proposal for their future was to give her some of that money and then eventually dissolve the marriage so he could be with someone he actually wanted.

Those fine-sounding ideas of his, about women becoming independent and living on their own terms, they were lovely in the abstract. In the actual world she lived in, the moment he cast her aside she would be buried in other people’s contempt.

She did not understand where he had gotten such ideas. After turning it over she could only conclude he was furious about being forced into the marriage and had decided to humiliate her. She had no energy left to argue the point. And even if Gu Jiusi did know she had been forced into it just as much as he had, what did it change? As he had said himself, who sacrifices their own happiness for the sake of someone else’s? If Gu Jiusi had genuinely decided to be rid of her, it would happen sooner or later. And even if he did not formally cast her out, a wife without a husband’s affection had a very limited life. She knew this. Her mother was the living proof of it.

The difference was that Su Wan had at least had a husband who did not actively want to leave her. Liu Yuru did not have even that. The Gu family would feel no obligation to keep a wife their son had no use for, not for the sake of a merchant household with no sons and no particular leverage.

The more she thought, the more hopeless it became, and the closer she felt she had come to Ye Shi’an before having it all taken away, the more it felt like there was nothing ahead worth looking toward. She dissolved completely, face in the pillow, crying the way she had not cried since she was a small child.

Gu Jiusi sat there being stupid at her for a long moment. Then, slowly, it came back to him. He pressed his face in his hands. “I am the one who got hit.”

The crying got louder.

Gu Jiusi felt the sound of it pushing against the inside of his skull. He said quickly: “Stop, stop, all right, I will not say any more. You are giving me a headache. Right, are you hungry?”

No answer. Just more crying. His stomach was growling. He had been beaten by his father since morning, dragged through the wedding, and then sat through hours of being made to drink at other people’s tables, barely eating anything. He got up, went to the side table, picked at the pastries there, poured some tea, and stood eating and watching Liu Yuru.

She kept crying. He genuinely could not understand how a person could sustain that.

He brought the pastry tray over and sighed. “Come on. Eat something. Food helps. It really does.”

“Get away from me.”

Gu Jiusi felt his own temper start to come back. He looked at her tears and felt a frustrated kind of exasperation. “What is actually wrong with you? I am trying to be kind and you treat me like the villain. I was just talking through future options. You like Ye Shi’an, don’t you? I am giving you a clear road back to that, and you are crying yourself sick over it. What am I missing?”

He said this while leaning against a pillar nearby, eating pastry, saying vaguely: “I told you to stop crying. Cry a little and that is enough. I have a very short temper.”

Liu Yuru did not stop. The sound went on and on. Gu Jiusi finally ran out of patience entirely. “What are you even crying about?”

He put the tray down. “All I said was that I might need to let you go someday. What is so terrible about that? I said I would make sure you were taken care of first. You like Ye Shi…” He stopped. Something crossed his face. He looked at Liu Yuru on the bed with sudden wide eyes. “You do not actually like me, do you?”

At those words, Liu Yuru lost the last of her composure and wept even harder.

Like him? How could she possibly like someone like this?

Gu Jiusi looked as though he had stumbled upon the explanation for everything. He was both alarmed and, to his own evident discomfort, somewhat flustered. This was the first time in his life anyone had liked him. He felt a small and unwanted sensation that might have been shyness.

It did not last long. He gathered himself and softened his voice considerably, clearing his throat. “Right. I hear you. I understand your feelings. But the thing is, I genuinely cannot return them. You are not really my type. If it is money you want, that is easy. Our family has plenty. But if you want my heart, that is much harder.”

He sighed, and there was real pity in his eyes.

He had been furious at the thought of Liu Yuru scheming her way into his family for the money. Now he knew she had done it for him, and all he felt was a somewhat genuine sorrow on her behalf.

She was not his type. The woman he wanted to love would have a brightness to her, something self-possessed and electric, completely unlike everyone else, the kind of person you noticed from across a room. Liu Yuru was ordinary. Too ordinary. Proper. Too proper.

He felt bad about an unrequited feeling he had not asked for, and he stopped using his loud voice and started using a quiet one. Trying to be gentle about it.

“Do not cry. The future is long. You have time. I know I do not feel that way about you, but you have come into this household now and my mother will treat you well. My parents are both good people. You do not need to worry.”

She was not marrying his parents.

Liu Yuru nearly choked. She ignored him and kept going, pouring out the grief and fury and helplessness of the past weeks until she simply had nothing left.

Gu Jiusi crouched beside the bed, no longer even trying to reason with her, just talking quietly. “Stop crying, stop. Let me tell you something funny. Here, eat something, being hungry makes everything worse. Miss Liu, love is bad for the health, you should stop thinking about me. Think about money instead. Real gold and real silver, that is the important thing. You are so clever. How do you not see this?”

“Come on. Rest for a bit. When you have rested, tomorrow I will take you out and we will spend money. When you are throwing silver around with both hands, you will understand that if any suffering in this world cannot be fixed, it is only because you have not spent enough.”

He reached into his robe and pulled out a banknote. It was his last resort. In his experience, a banknote produced smiles from practically anyone, but he was not entirely sure it would work here. He laid it on the bed beside her and said, with complete sincerity: “You must be tired of crying. Hold on to this and sleep.”

Liu Yuru said nothing. She was, in fact, exhausted. She let Gu Jiusi help her lie down. He lifted the phoenix crown off her head, removed her shoes, and drew the blanket over her with more care than she had expected. She curled up on her side, clutching the banknote, still hiccupping quietly.

Gu Jiusi sat on the floor with his back against the bed. He listened until the sounds of crying became the sounds of sleep. Then he let out a long breath.

He was so tired. Something inside him felt wrung out in a way that had nothing to do with the gambling house or the wedding banquet.

He was a wastrel. A man with simple tastes and uncomplicated wants. Why had he been handed this?

He sat there quietly for a while. Then, out of habit, he checked his pockets, and felt oddly reassured. A man should always carry enough cash. When one banknote was not enough, you needed a second one to fall back on.