Only She Is Silent - Chapter 2

Chapter 2

I didn’t let Xu Shuheng in.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to; it was that I didn’t dare.

My desk was only five steps away from the door. In the bottom drawer, secured with an old brass lock, were my most shameful secrets, stacked neatly away from the light.

I was afraid that the moment he stepped inside, even my breathing would betray me.

But he looked terrible.

In the two seconds it took for the motion-sensor light to flicker out, the hallway was plunged into a sudden, damp darkness.

I heard his breathing hitch, as if someone had shoved a thousand screams into his ears at once.

He reached up and pressed his fingers against his temples, his knuckles white with tension. The veins on the back of his hand stood out in sharp relief.

“What’s wrong?” The question escaped before my reason could catch it.

He didn’t answer. He just stared at me. The uncontrollable red in his eyes slowly receded, as if he had finally found something that allowed him to breathe.

After a long silence, he spoke. “Let me stay here for ten minutes.”

It was a strange request, but his tone was almost a plea.

I watched him for a moment before stepping aside, leaving a narrow opening. “Only in the entryway.”

To my surprise, he was incredibly obedient. He didn’t even change his shoes, standing on the one-square-meter mat by the door like a powerful man serving a timeout.

My two cats had been hiding under the sofa. Sensing a stranger, they should have been bristling, but instead, they just poked their heads out and watched him cautiously.

Nian Gao, my shyest tuxedo cat, even padded over to sniff his shoes and didn’t run away.

The air was eerily quiet.

The soundproofing in my old apartment was terrible. Usually, the arguments between the couple next door, the crying of the child upstairs, and the clatter of the late-night food stalls closing down would seep through the cracks in the windows.

But that night was different. It was as if someone had turned the volume down on the entire world.

Standing by the door, less than two meters away from him, I felt for the first time that “silence” was something tangible.

When the ten minutes were up, he really did turn to leave.

Driven by some inexplicable impulse, I asked, “What did you mean earlier when you said you couldn’t read me?”

He stopped but didn’t look back. “It means that when I’m standing in front of you, the world finally shuts up.”

When the door closed, I leaned my entire weight against it, my heart hammering against my ribs so hard it felt like they would break.

The next day, I went to work with dark circles under my eyes. My colleague, Song Yuxi, tapped on my desk the moment she saw me. “Did you go out cattle rustling last night? The shadows under your eyes look like you just got dumped.”

I gave a vague response, not daring to tell the truth.

No one would believe it anyway. The fact that Xu Shuheng had appeared at my door in the middle of the night sounded like something straight out of my eighteenth diary.

But things got even more ridiculous.

At 12:40 PM, while I was crouching in the storage room re-indexing a batch of old periodicals, the Curator suddenly called me out. He said someone from the Municipal Archives Coordination Center had arrived to pull a set of municipal planning manuscripts from twenty years ago and wanted me to help verify them.

The library and the archives center collaborated often, so I didn’t think much of it. I grabbed my clipboard and headed over.

The moment the reading room door opened, I froze in my tracks.

The man had changed into a light gray shirt with sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He was standing by the window, flipping through the request list.

He wasn’t wearing that oppressive black trench coat, nor did he have any badges to prove his identity. He looked like an ordinary civil servant with an exceptionally cold temperament.

But I recognized him instantly.

He looked up, his gaze as calm as if he hadn’t been the one blocking my doorway the night before. “Ms. Xie, sorry for the trouble.”

The Curator smiled eagerly beside him. “This is Mr. Xu from the Municipal Archives Coordination Center. He’ll be coming here for the next week to pull records. Jinhe, you’re familiar with the archives, so please show him around.”

I: “…”

He had actually fabricated an identity just so he could show up in front of me every day.

I hugged my clipboard tighter, my voice dry. “Mr. Xu, this way, please.”

He followed behind me, but I didn’t dare look back the entire time.

I knew all too well that if I turned around, the heat in my face would give me away completely.

But more than the fluttering in my heart, something else made me uneasy.

Last night, he said the world finally shut up.

So, was he here today for work, or for the rare silence he found with me?