Our Fake Engagement Went Viral

Chapter 1

The year Adrian Frost was stuck in Riverton, he often looked up. The sky here felt like a gray maze laid over the rooftops, and you hardly ever saw birds.

Later he understood why. The birds fell into the city’s dark net, and once they hit ground, they never got back out.

A woman in this city was a caged bird.

As the plane dropped toward Riverton, Adrian kept his eyes on the lights outside the window and didn’t come back to himself for a long while.

A jolt sent his briefcase sliding off the seat. It hit the floor and popped open, exposing the letter he had read over and over.

It was from Riverton, an address he had nearly forgotten, from someone who didn’t have long to live.

He couldn’t put off the request to meet again.

Late spring had tipped into summer. The Riverton night was thick and airless, a net cast over the streets so that anyone who came felt trapped like a fly in a web.

At the open-air market, the crowd roared. Behind the stalls the pans spat and flared, and the heat rising off the food slowed passersby to a halt.

The person he was waiting for hadn’t shown. The smell had his stomach growling. He followed the note: order their usual, and the house would send a dessert. Back then the three of them ate like kings.

By the time the dishes lined the table, it was close to nine, and Riverton was only getting started. This city didn’t sleep; it burned brighter at night.

Where was Shannon?

His shirt stuck to his back, the heat pushing the breath out of him.

Adrian pressed his lips together, scanning face after face.

He was always early. Years at work had carved the habit into his bones.

Still, a sharp black suit didn’t belong here, and it was suffocating.

He shrugged off the jacket and hooked it over the chair, loosened two buttons, then rolled up his sleeves.

A low, familiar laugh rose behind him. “You still hate the heat.”

The sound ran through him. Good memories and bad ones, all the clutter he had buried, sprouted in his chest like weeds and took root.

Brushfire never really dies. The first warm wind brings it back. So did love and hate in this world.

He was yanked back to that reckless, green summer when a woman in a towel, water beading on her skin, pushed open a white wooden door.

Back then he had been blind to everything, her name, the life she couldn’t talk about, the complicated look in her eyes when she faced him.

Fifteen years might as well be another lifetime.

Thinking of her on a noisy street still hurt and still confused him. He didn’t understand how she could be so cruel to him, and just as kind.

He couldn’t let it go.

Chapter 2

The woman across from him still dressed the way she used to, heavy makeup and a red lip.
She didn’t look like someone at death’s door, only whittled down to nothing, a husk wrung dry.

Sickness bled through the foundation, yet something kept her wired.
Her eyes were even brighter than before.

She never cared who was watching.
She crunched through a paper tray of crispy wings, the sound sharp, sweat beading on her hollowed cheeks.

Adrian said nothing, cool and contained.
He ladled a bowl of soup and set it in front of her.

She lifted a brow at the bowl, didn’t take it, and the reunion turned awkward.

“You’re not well, have some soup,” Adrian said.

He said it to her, and a picture rose anyway, the three of them at one table, someone always topping off drinks and passing the soup.

To Shannon, it landed wrong.
As if she should lie there quietly and wait for the end.

She took the bowl and, between swallows, rolled her eyes at him.
“I’m almost dead, you think I care if it’s bad for me?”

The temper in her voice cut both ways, at Adrian and at whatever passed for heaven.

Anyone could say she had it coming.
She had never played the saint, and plenty of wives had shown up yanking her hair and sobbing.

She always shot back.
“Listen, lady, cursing me won’t help. I take the money and do the job. You can’t keep your man from coming to me, that’s on you.”

Karma shouldn’t hit like this.

Then came the nights when she couldn’t sleep.
She sat by the window till dawn, pain chewing through her, watched the sky go light and then go dark again.

The day she took the lab report, she tore it up in front of the doctor and cursed him out.
He had told her she had late-stage liver cancer, told her to call family and eat whatever she wanted.

Family, where.
She had no one.

Back home she’d had two younger brothers.
Holidays meant no meat on her plate, fine.

The year she woke to a tearing pain in an old widower’s bed, he was mumbling, “Thought the vet said she’d be out cold, why’s she awake already.”

She remembered her parents whispering in the night, both brothers still needed money for weddings, remembered the cup of wine at dinner, and the rest clicked.

She clenched her teeth, forced a smile, coaxed the man until he melted.
When he passed out, she lit the place and walked away from the hills.

From then on she hated men to the bone.
She took that line of work and treated men as nothing but a way to get paid.

She had gone hungry too long as a kid and grew a greedy streak for food.
Once she had money she wanted meat and liquor, people mocked her for the way she ate, and only Jade never judged.

Now, who would feel for her.

She hustled all her life.
If there was money, she took the client.

People called her gutter trash from birth.
She grinned like she had no heart.

It was money, nothing else.

The money was soaked with sweat and blood.
After what happened fifteen years ago, she turned stingy with herself and saved every scrap, so the pile grew.

She wasn’t ready to go, but she was going.
What then, let the leeches take the cash.

In this world, aside from Jade, the only person more trustworthy might be the man in front of her

Chapter 3

As she ate, a fat tear dropped into the steaming soup.
Her chopsticks stirred and stirred, then stalled in her throat. She couldn’t swallow another bite.

Adrian had spent more than half a year in Riverton and had never seen her like this.
She used to smile through anything, lies rolling off her tongue, bold brows, sharp eyes, tough as nails and scared of nothing.

The day the three of them split, Jade had been blank as stone, and Shannon still managed a smile.
Thinking of that, Adrian set his fork down. “What are you sick with?”

She couldn’t stand the sympathy buried in his voice.
She wiped her face with a sleeve and flashed a prickly grin. “Please, mind your own business. It’s not an STD.”

She sounded both defiant and defeated.
Adrian pressed his fingers to his brow. Around her he turned back into the hotheaded kid from fifteen years ago and suddenly had no idea what to do.

Heat shimmered between them.
Sweat filmed his face and caught the light as he breathed.

Under the pulsing red neon, his pale profile looked almost blue, his deep-set eyes cutting and bright.
Jealousy pricked at her, envy too.

No wonder that silly girl had fallen for him back then.
But a woman like her shouldn’t have had a heart to give.

She thought of Jade, and pain ran through her.
“Let’s go,” she said. “If you don’t mind, we can sit upstairs.”

She stood there a long time before she finally heard his footsteps behind her.
She couldn’t tell if what rose in her chest was hurt or relief.

A hard wind hit the mouth of the alley.
A thin moon slid into view, its cold light catching on the caked makeup on her face.

A single tear line clung to her cheek like a skiff parting duckweed, then slipped into the dark where no one would see it.
Fifteen years had passed. The people from then were gone.

Shannon still lived in the same room as before.
The building had been grand once, now the stairwell was smeared with dark stains and grease. Even the flyers on the wall had stopped coming.

The iron rail from the nineties had rusted through.
It chilled the skin with a metallic tang, and the narrow hall carried nothing but their footsteps.

Almost no one lived here anymore.
The place felt like a tomb.

Years ago a woman had jumped from the roof.
People said it was haunted after that, clients avoided it, and the building emptied out.

Only Shannon stayed, too used to leave.
She kept on living there.

Adrian climbed the filthy steps and bit back the words that would have cut.
This had always been a place for secrets and stains.

Back then it was new and bright.
Pink neon leaked from windows and door seams and hooked men by the soul.

By midnight the pipes and walls hummed with the sounds of people coupling.
In those days he worked days at the Sichuan-Hunan place across the street. At night he was so tired he blacked out and didn’t see what was wrong right away.

When it finally hit him, it was like spotting a cockroach’s antenna at the bottom of your bowl.
The disgust was total.

“We’re here.”
She stopped, and he was still dazed enough to almost miss a step in the dark.

At the door he hesitated.
The white wooden door swung open, the only clean thing in the building. Maybe she just liked keeping up appearances, he thought, uncharitably.

Only that kind of pettiness could drown out the noise in his head.
There weren’t words for the mix of feelings that rose when he crossed the threshold.

“Sit,” she said. “I’ll get you some water. It’s small. Don’t mind the mess.”
She tossed her keys down and went to the kitchen to boil it.

“Thanks,” he said.

Paid Content

游客，Hello! To view the hidden content of this post, please purchase access from the author.100Coin

立即购买