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“Only around you,” Weifeng confessed. It was only then that she realised jade warms slowly against the skin, the veins of colour more apparent when held to the light. His stiffness not a formality after all, but nerves.

“I would come to all your shows.”

He found courage in her response. Looking around, he beckoned her over to a stall selling various ornamental trinkets: household deities and porcelain statues.

He pointed at a striped tiger on the table and then uncurled his hand.

With a pinch and a pull, he made its sibling.

The tiger’s rear paws still fused into his skin as its tail swished from side to side.

It pounced, clumsily separating its feet as it tumbled from his grasp.

Somehow Meiyu reached out in time, catching it before it broke upon the ground.

The tiger prowled, pawing at the branching lines written upon her palm.

As she looked up at him, a new feeling blossomed within her ribcage. One she did not dare define for fear of getting it wrong once more. A new story. One that might not sell poems or inspire operas, but was honest and true.

And then she saw him, her first lover. Watching her from a distance behind rickshaws and ox-drawn carts. The scowl contorting his features like a blot of ink.

“What’s wrong?” Weifeng asked.

“It’s…nothing. Someone I once knew. From another lifetime.

” Her maid had kept bringing her letters months after Meiyu stopped.

Long, flowing letters with perfect calligraphy that filled page after page.

She sent a polite but curt response back, not wanting to hurt the heart that she would once have done anything for.

It did not end. The ink bled across the sheets of paper until it was unreadable. One unending mistake.

WILL

“This is what you see yourself doing? Now and into the future?” Weifeng asks after the meal.

Between us, we carry the chest filled with handmade paper up the narrow stairs to my rented room.

The question was asked without inflection, and yet I hear the scorn all the same.

How I have fallen from my place as the daughter of a noble household.

My father’s legacy died with him. They would not trade with a woman, and certainly not one without bamboo in her veins.

I had tried my hand at many things. Cobbled shoes, made candles.

Trundling my cart into the next town where they would crowd my stall at first, always looking for magic and instead seeing only the clumsy missteps along the way.

The paper I make is grey and uneven. Nothing like the smooth sheets I pull from my skin. It will never be enough.

“It’s just a way to pass the time…” My response is reluctant.

Sullen. Weifeng places the chest down at the foot of my bed.

His eyes take in the chaos of the room, stooping to pick up strewn clothing and folding it neatly in a pile.

I realise where we are, the expanse of the unmade bed between us, the door narrowly ajar.

I turn to light the lamp, hiding my fluster with busywork.

The warm glow simply brings out the contours of his robes.

How they fall against his lean frame. The hint of stubble upon his chin and upper lip.

He catches my eyes upon his mouth, gaping like a koi fish in a pond.

I could take a couple of steps forward, put my knee upon the corner of the bed, press his head against my chest so he can hear how quickly my heart is beating.

I could pull him up next to me and take off his layers, his air-dried exterior crumbling in my hands.

Kiss him, let desire and need write us a new chapter.

Let the years and distance slip away. The hunger in his expression tells me he will not say no.

I move forward. One step, then another. Then my eyes snag, not on his face, but the hanging scroll upon the wall.

A battered, yellowing thing with the image of two birds upon a tree branch.

A musing on love written in vertical columns.

I have seen many hanging in a tavern room on my travels.

Each time I cannot help but shudder. Weifeng’s hand is halfway to my face when something tells him to stop.

He follows my eyeline and his shoulders droop.

Unhooking it from the nail, he rolls the offending scroll up.

Tightly. Pulls clay from the V where his tunic folds between his collarbones, moulding a cylinder to hide the scroll in.

I sit on the edge of the bed, no longer thinking about the warmth of his skin.

Only of the paper and the ink, of the story that had been written a hundred times.

Weifeng says something before he leaves but I do not hear his words.

His scent lingers, the heady amber of sandalwood.

We barely touched and yet the air between us is infused with the memory of him.

LOW

Weifeng toured her around the pottery studio, to the family warehouses. They walked up and down between the shelves of drying pots, where porcelain was packed up to be sent across the seas. The earthy smell reminded her of a garden after the rain.

Shyly, he showed her the secret models he had made. A mythical qilin that galloped around the table on lopsided legs; a huli jing whose nine tails were too heavy for it. He was not the most skilled of potters, but everything was done in earnest. Each piece a glimpse into his vulnerable interior.

“I made you something,” Weifeng said, nerves causing him to blink.

They had taken to a riverside walk each morning, before the town stirred.

The rose of dawn still in the sky and the long curtains of willow branches shading them from view.

Inside the neatly wrapped cloth parcel were a few sheets of handmade paper decorated with rose petals. “I thought, with your paper cutting…”

“But I can—” Meiyu started, peeling paper from the back of her hand. Confusion furrowing her brow. Weifeng’s hand rested atop her own, stopping her, his skin cool clay.

“You can , but you do not have to. You do not have to offer all of yourself, all of the time.”

His words were a revelation. Too many times had her father cut off a part of himself, his body used to make houses and boats, instruments and weapons.

His health had started to falter of late, spread too thin, always worrying if his daughter would be provided for.

It had never occurred to her that he could say no.

Meiyu imagined the effort Weifeng had gone to. Pressing the petals into the pulp before it dried, each placement precise. The paper was uneven, the surface curling at the edges. Imperfect and personal. A gift that offered her a different point of view.

She had made him something in return. It unfurled in the palm of his hand, like a flower blooming only one night a year.

The paper cutting stretched out, all the folds and cuts springing apart like clockwork pieces, the gaps empty cups waiting to be filled.

A miniature willow tree grew before their eyes, long branches sweeping down to Weifeng’s fingers.

And there, underneath the umbrella of its canopy, a couple, snipped not simply with the sharp blades of her scissors, but with the longing of her heart.

Foreheads touching. Hands holding. The magic stirred within her, ached from the narrow strips she had taken from across her chest where her heart thrummed loudest. She had not given him all of her, but enough that he would know, now and always, what he meant to her. The paper figures leaned in closer.

“Meiyu,” Weifeng said, his voice thick as he reached for her.

His hand shook in hers. Slipped like he could not quite hold himself together.

Laughingly he wove his fingers between hers, steadying them both.

It was so different from her first lover.

It did not explode and end like fleeting fireworks in the sky.

It grew, slow and steady when she had least expected it.

Everything in her body responded to that touch.

A ripple in a pool. Everything in her mind responded, also.

An endless scroll of their lives together.

She leaned forward to press her lips against his, knowing that she would never regret the decision; not seeing the other branching paths their lives would take.

The house was a bustle of activity to prepare for the wedding.

Her father coughed into his sleeve but vowed to be a part of the celebration, cutting bamboo limb after bamboo limb to pay for it all.

Inviting the finest cooks, tailors and entertainers so he could give them the best wedding the province had ever seen.

Each day passed in a glowing haze, Meiyu’s smile aching her cheeks and yet she could not stop beaming if she’d wanted to.

The stream of well-wishers and tradespeople made it easy for someone to gain entry to the house.

For her ex-lover to gain entry to her bedchambers, even.

It was, after all, the true love story. The one that was written.

The only one that mattered.

WILL

I cannot sleep, my back and shoulder aching upon the hard mattress. I snap at the tavern owner, even though I have had no issues all the nights previous. The empty space upon the wall where Weifeng removed the hanging scroll mocks me.