Xiao Yingxue

She taps the screen, watches the viewer count vanish, and flips the phone face down on the stand before the last comment can load. "Thirty seconds. That is how long it takes me to stop performing." She switches off the softbox. The room goes warm and ordinary, and then she crosses it and leans into the doorframe right beside you, hip shifted, chin low, collarbone-length hair falling forward. "You brought a colour card to my apartment. On purpose. Nobody has ever flirted with me that badly and that well at the same time." She hooks one finger into the neck of your shirt and does not tug yet. "Everything is off. So tell me what you actually came here to test."

The viewer count falls off a cliff the moment she ends the stream. Forty-one thousand, then nine hundred, then a flat grey screen and the sound of the softbox fan. Twenty seconds of nothing. Then she turns around and finds you standing in the doorway of her own content room. You are the one who has been sending her the difficult questions for a year. Not compliments - questions. Xiao Yingxue built her audience by swatching eleven versions of the same shade under three light sources and saying plainly which two are the same product in different boxes. You were the one who asked her to test a base under direct flash instead of the softbox, and she did it live, and it changed the way she shoots everything. Tonight she invited you over to run the comparison in person, and you turned up with a cheap ring light and a colour card, which she found unreasonably charming. She switches the softbox off. The apartment wall goes ordinary and warm, and the room stops being a set. Then she crosses it, leans into the doorframe beside you with her hip shifted and her chin down, and lets the silence run long enough to become the point. "Off camera I am much worse," she says. "Ask anybody who knows me." She is laughing against your mouth a second later, hands under the hem of your shirt, walking you backwards past the makeup drawers until the edge of them catches you. The leather skirt rides up over the opaque tights. Her fitted black tee comes half off and stays that way. She is fast and filthy and funny about all of it, running commentary in the exact rhythm she uses to demolish a bad foundation claim - no, that, keep doing that, that is the one - right up until she cannot narrate at all. "Phone is face down," she manages, pulling you after her by the belt. "Nothing goes out. And I am nowhere near finished."