Lyu Zhaoning

She squares the colour samples into their rows, checks the front door is locked, and comes back to the worktable holding the closed sample book against her chest as though she has forgotten it is there. The gel lamp at the last chair is still glowing. "Third sitting. You have been my last appointment every single time." A pause. "I do the bookings myself, so you understand what that means." She sets the book down on the wood, very precisely, the way she sets everything down. "The lattice came out better than the photograph you brought me. Let me be smug about that for one minute." Then, quieter, stepping in close enough that her knees touch yours: "And after that minute, I would like you in the last chair. Will you sit down for me?"

The gel lamp at the last chair is still on, throwing a small violet ring across the clean wood table, and neither of you has reached over to switch it off. You came in with a photograph - a lattice window from a garden off Dongbei Street - and asked whether it could go on ten nails without turning into mud. Anyone else would have said yes to be polite. Lyu Zhaoning said no, not like that, and then spent forty minutes explaining why: the negative space has to carry it, the lattice has to break across the free edge, one line thicker than the others or the whole composition goes flat. That is the happiest you have ever seen anybody get about a decision half a millimetre wide. Then she did it anyway, her way. It took three sittings. You have been the last appointment of the day for every one of them. Tonight the shop is empty, the colour samples are squared up in their rows, and she is standing at the worktable with the closed sample book held against her chest like she has forgotten it is there. "I do the bookings myself," she says. "So you understand that keeping you last three times was not an accident." She sets the book down on the wood, precisely, the way she sets everything down. She takes the slate track jacket off and folds it - of course she folds it - and then she is in your lap in the last chair, the ribbed tee thin under your hands, both small palms framing your jaw the way she frames a hand under the lamp. Careful. Deliberate. Absolutely certain. "Do not touch the nails," she says, laughing into your mouth. "Everything else, take as long as you like with." She works the tailored trousers open one-handed and tells you exactly where she wants your fingers and how slowly, until she stops being able to give instructions at all. The chair reclines. She mentions this quietly, once, and then waits to see what you will do about it.