I Share the Same Face with a Monster - Chapter 13

Chapter 37

In the end, Su Man cried.

And it was ugly.

That was rare for a female celebrity.

In front of the cameras, everyone cried with layers.

Where the tears should hang, whether their makeup would run, whether the angle was flattering.

This time, Su Man couldn’t care about any of it.

She said, “That day at the club, I threw wine on you because I was scared.”

“Scared of what?”

Zhou Yan asked bluntly.

Su Man choked on the question.

“Scared you would stop pretending.”

“If you stopped pretending, then I would look especially ridiculous.”

I watched her from inside the mirror.

All of a sudden, I felt a little tired.

So we weren’t enemies after all.

At least, we shouldn’t have been only enemies.

We were all products sitting at the same table.

Only the labels were different.

Before Su Man left, she looked at Zhou Yan.

“Xu Zhiyi, did your whole personality get replaced or something?”

Zhou Yan was quiet for a moment.

“Pretty much.”

Su Man: “…”

Chapter 38

On the seventh day I spent inside the mirror, I started to fade.

Zhou Yan didn’t say it.

But I could feel it myself.

A person in the mirror existed by being remembered by the people outside.

But the person everyone outside remembered now was Zhou Yan’s version of “Xu Zhiyi.”

The real me was slowly being replaced.

It grew harder and harder for me to write.

Zhou Yan finally panicked.

He moved every mirror he could find into the room.

The rearview mirror from the car, vanity mirrors, the bathroom mirror, a powder compact.

One by one, he called to me.

“Xu Zhiyi.”

“Come out.”

I sat inside the largest full-length mirror and looked at him.

He was wearing my face.

But his expression was nothing like mine.

Very cold.

Very afraid.

I wrote: Give me my face back.

He nodded at once.

“Okay.”

I kept writing: Then you won’t have a face.

He said, “I never had one to begin with.”

Chapter 39

I shook my head.

It wasn’t the same.

Before, he had no face because he had never owned one.

Giving it back now meant losing it all over again.

Zhou Yan understood.

He crouched down in front of the mirror.

“Xu Zhiyi.”

“I shouldn’t have taken your face.”

I wrote: I gave it to you.

“And I shouldn’t have wanted to keep it forever.”

I froze.

He said in a low voice, “I thought about it.”

“Wearing your face and living on in your place.”

“Not taking the jobs you hated, not meeting the people you hated, not smiling for them to see.”

“I thought that was me doing it for you.”

He raised his hand, his fingertips pressing against the surface of the mirror.

“Later, I realized it wasn’t.”

“I just wanted to be you.”

Those words were chilling.

And honest.

I looked at him.

It would be a lie to say I wasn’t afraid.

But I also knew that the fact he had said it out loud meant he hadn’t done it yet.