Shoutout to Alinaza for the commission!
Inside the shower, the water kept pattering down like rain.
Like the rain that poured outside the abandoned factory that night.
Jiang Se’s lashes paused. She didn’t understand why he had stopped, nor why he would ask her such a question.
No one would ever ask her that. Even Aunt Zhang, who had raised her since childhood, would never ask such a thing.
Because a question like that was meaningless.
If she wasn’t happy, then what?
All she could do was endure it, swallow it, let it rot deep inside her.
It wasn’t like she had never broken down before. Seven years ago at the hospital, when she learned that Zhao Zhicheng had swallowed a blade to commit suicide, she had grabbed Ji Yunyi’s hand and told her: “You have to save him, you can’t let him die! There’s still someone who hasn’t been caught, someone still hasn’t been caught!”
Zhang Yue was right. Zhao Zhicheng wasn’t the mastermind.
Someone who had stopped others from violating her, wiped the blood off her face, told her sorry and that someone was waiting for him to return, Jiang Se didn’t believe someone like that could be the mastermind of the kidnapping.
Back then, she had been too emotional, too frantic. Her fingernails, untrimmed for three days, had even scratched Ji Yunyi’s hand, leaving thin, long marks.
Ji Yunyi finally couldn’t stand it anymore and slapped her hard.
“Have you had enough, Sese?”
“Zhao Zhicheng’s death ends this matter! Must you ruin your own reputation, drag the entire Cen family with you, and become the joke of Beicheng before you stop?!”
Ji Yunyi’s chest rose and fell several times. After a moment, she turned Jiang Se’s face, still angled from the slap, back toward her, softened her voice, and said: “Sese, other than a severed tendon and going hungry a few days, you weren’t injured. Do you know how lucky that is? Have you thought about what people will say if news of your kidnapping gets out? I’m telling you, those rumors will keep you from ever lifting your head again! Remember this, you’ve been at home these past few days! You never went to the art academy, and you don’t know any Zhao Zhicheng!”
Ji Yunyi’s slap scattered all the emotions Jiang Se had barely been holding together.
She looked up at Ji Yunyi, cracked her dry lips in a smile, and said: “What do other people’s words have to do with me? Why wouldn’t I be able to lift my head? I didn’t do anything wrong. I’ll never be unable to lift my head! The funniest thing is, you actually think I’m lucky?”
She laughed until tears fell: “Then I hope you get just as lucky as me.”
So…
If she wasn’t happy, then what?
Find a way to dissolve the bad emotions, and keep walking forward.
Even that kind of unhappiness back then, she swallowed it down.
The shower water kept falling.
A few droplets from his hair fell onto her eyelashes, and he wiped them away with the callused pads of his fingers.
Jiang Se’s gaze lowered.
The feeling of his fingertips brushing her lashes always reminded her of the sensation of a paintbrush tickling the arch of her small foot when she was a child: light, a single stroke, both ticklish and gentle.
People’s actions will take on emotion under certain atmospheres. For example, right now, his movements and his words carried an openly blatant gentleness.
This kind of gentleness shouldn’t appear on him at all.
Jiang Se sat up slightly, picked up the towel at hand, covered his head with it, and wiped away the droplets clinging to his hair.
Lu Huaiyan lowered his hands to support himself at her sides, letting her wipe his hair.
He hadn’t had time to tie the belt of his bathrobe, and with his bending movement, the belt hung straight down at both sides of his waist, its tip slowly brushing over the top of her foot.
Jiang Se lifted her knee, using those beautiful fair feet to trail along his firm waistline and slip inside his bathrobe. At the same time, she tugged the towel on his head downward, her lips lightly touching his.
She looked at him and said: “Lu Huaiyan, I want the pleasure you gave me that night.”
That incomparable pleasure he spoke of after wiping out Lu Jinzhong completely, she wanted it so much.
She wanted to vent the fire burning in her flesh and blood just like he did.
Those beautiful almond eyes of hers, always filled with coldness, were stained with desire.
Not entirely lust, but something more, another kind of yearning.
A kind of sickly feeling like when she lifted his collar and lightly inhaled him at the hospital.
Lu Huaiyan lowered his eyes slightly and met her gaze. He didn’t ask her again why she wasn’t happy, or what had happened today.
He raised his hand to support the back of her head and slowly deepened the kiss.
The things brought in were used one by one. When it was over, Lu Huaiyan picked her up and carried her into the shower. After rinsing her off simply, he wrapped her in a towel and carried her back to the bedroom.
This time was even more exhausting than last time.
Jiang Se closed her eyes to slowly settle her breath. She noticed Lu Huaiyan’s hand grasping her ankle, so she lifted her eyelids, and heard him let out a soft “tss.”
The man raised his gaze to her, his voice a bit hoarse: “You really are letting me see what it means to have a delicate body.”
Jiang Se drew her knees together and looked at him as she said lightly: “I’m fine.”
Lu Huaiyan gave a low laugh, draped the new nightdress he took from the cloakroom over her, and echoed her: “I know, our young lady isn’t delicate at all and is the strongest.”
“…………”
Jiang Se lowered her eyes, picked up the cardigan he had taken out, and slowly put it on.
Lu Huaiyan bent down to pull her hair out from inside the collar of the cardigan and asked her: “Hungry?”
Jiang Se nodded, honestly saying: “Hungry.”
Lu Huaiyan pinched her sharp little chin, smiling: “I’m hungry too. I only ate the red bean bread you had Assistant Li bring me at noon.”
Of the elderly professors invited from Beicheng, two were old classmates of the Lu family’s elder from when they studied overseas together in their youth. They were his elders. He had already booked a dinner and planned to accompany the elderly gentlemen for a meal and a drink.
When a certain young lady called him, they were just about to head to the hotel to dine.
In the end, he rushed back in a flurry of wind and dust, and this girl only wanted to sleep with him, not even letting him eat first.
The man’s clean and cold features held a trace of amusement, a look halfway between smiling and not, carrying a bit of innate unruliness and the lazy air of someone who had just finished.
Not just him, she also had that looseness after finishing. The flames burning in her flesh seemed to have found an outlet, and that low fever that should have risen up dissipated just like that.
Hearing the teasing in his words, Jiang Se inexplicably recalled the way his Adam’s apple rolled just now, the way he bit her lip with a low pant. She said unhurriedly: “Didn’t you have quite a good time this time too?”
Lu Huaiyan’s hand was still pinching her chin. Hearing that, he tapped her lightly with his fingertip and said with a laugh: “Kissing you already makes me feel good.”
Jiang Se looked at him without speaking.
He did indeed love kissing her: deep ones, shallow ones, gentle ones, violent ones. As long as he caught the chance, he always had to touch her.
Not just kissing, he liked holding her, liked intertwining fingers with her.
Like lovers in heated romance, yet also like a couple who had been together for years.
Holding hands, embracing, and kissing sometimes felt more intimate than sex.
This kind of intimacy easily became habit, and things that became habit were always hard to quit.
Jiang Se lowered her eyes, drew her legs in, rested her chin on her knees, and pushed away the hand pinching her chin.
“I’m hungry. Hurry up and have someone send food.” Her tone was light, voice cool. “Anything is fine.”
She really was starving beyond measure. She couldn’t eat a thing at the hospital at noon, and then she spent nearly two hours in the bathroom just now, her whole body out of strength.
Lu Huaiyan looked at her once, slowly withdrew his hand, his gaze lingering on her lowered lashes for two seconds. He left a “wait” and then walked out of the bedroom.
After he left, Jiang Se slowly lifted her eyes, glanced toward the bedroom doorway, and quickly lowered them again.
Lu Huaiyan didn’t have someone deliver food. He rolled up his sleeves and personally cooked pan-seared lamb chops.
Jiang Se smelled the aroma from the bedroom, slipped on her shoes and walked out. When she saw the pieces of small lamb chops in the cast-iron pan, perfectly balanced between fat and lean, hunger crashed over her like a flash flood, making her legs even weaker. She was starving.
Seeing her stare fixedly at the meat in the pan, Lu Huaiyan laughed and said: “Go get a bottle of alcohol from the alcohol cabinet. Weren’t you unhappy that morning when you didn’t get lamb chops and whiskey?”
He was talking about the morning of New Year’s Day.
She wanted lamb chops and whiskey for breakfast, but he was worried about the injury on her hand and refused to make them.
So many days had passed, she had forgotten about it, yet he still remembered.
Jiang Se then moved her eyes away and went to the alcohol cabinet to take a bottle of whiskey.
They say red meat should be paired with red wine, but she preferred spirits, the stronger the better, the more satisfying.
Choosing the alcohol, Lu Huaiyan brought two glasses and asked how much she wanted to drink.
Jiang Se didn’t even blink: “Fill it.”
Lu Huaiyan actually filled her a full glass of whiskey. She drank it slowly, so slowly that by the time Jiang Se finished her lamb chops and dessert, there was still half a glass left.
She picked up the glass and walked to the living room, looking at the night view outside through the floor-to-ceiling windows.
Lu Huaiyan followed behind her, casually lifting the tonearm of the record player and setting it into the groove. The record began to spin slowly.
It was the song she chose when she went into the bathroom to look for him, Lana Del Rey’s “California.”
When they were kissing in the bathroom, accompanying the pattering of water was that lazy singing voice.
“You don’t ever have to be stronger than you really are……”
“When you’re lying in my arms……”
“Cause this is crazy love……”
Sometimes a person’s memories are shaped, carrying the five senses.
When the song from the record flowed out, what she remembered was the touch of his hard, strong arm circling her waist and the heat of him sucking on her and tangling with her.
And also that sentence he asked her—
“Our miss, why are you unhappy?”
Their gazes briefly met in the reflection of the floor-to-ceiling window.
Jiang Se slowly swallowed the alcohol in her mouth, turned around wanting to leave the living room, and when she passed by him, he suddenly grabbed her wrist.
“What are you hiding from?”
Jiang Se froze for a moment, tilting her head to look at him.
Lu Huaiyan took the glass from her hand, drank the last mouthful of alcohol in it, and the glass landed on the table with a “clang.”
The man took one step forward and pressed her against the back of the sofa, both hands braced beside her, lowering his eyes to look at her.
Just earlier, when she was clinging to him wanting him, she was like a vine, tangled up with him to the death, her mist-filled eyes full of him.
Once she felt good, once her reason pulled back together, she wanted to coldly push him away again.
How could there be such a cheap thing?
“You clearly want to kiss me, what are you hiding from?” Lu Huaiyan looked at her, the corner of his lips carrying a faint smile, but his gaze was sharp. “Afraid I can’t part peacefully, or afraid you can’t part peacefully?”
Their bodies had a similar magnetic field, able to resonate and blend. He didn’t believe she hadn’t felt the attraction between them, and he didn’t believe she hadn’t been moved.
That look they shared just now, she plainly also wanted to kiss him, not for doing it, not for venting, just purely because of that flutter.
Jiang Se silently looked back at him.
He wasn’t wearing glasses, the aggressiveness in his brows and eyes was the same as before, even stronger.
He wouldn’t allow her to hide, nor allow her to shrink back.
And definitely don’t think of using reason to press down that flutter toward him.
“Didn’t you say you want to be exhilarated? Then do it? Then listen here.” Lu Huaiyan lifted his hand, feeling her heartbeat, his gaze like a sharp blade. “Whatever it tells us to do, then we do it. I want to kiss you right now, Sese, did that spot tell you to hide?”
The record was still slowly spinning, the drumbeats falling one by one, knocking on the heart.
His fingertips used a bit of strength, through the thin fabric carefully feeling her heartbeat.
“Bang bang” “bang bang”——
Her brows and eyes were cold and still, but her heartbeat was slowly speeding up.
Lu Huaiyan’s gaze locked onto her eyes, and he lowered his head to kiss her.
Jiang Se didn’t hide. Her eyelashes trembled, and she closed her eyes.
Outside the window, the snow fell without a sound, and the needle on the record had long stopped.
The whole house was so quiet only the sounds of their lips and tongues tangling could be heard.
No one knew how long it had passed before Lu Huaiyan used his other hand to hold hers, pressing it to his chest. With lips carrying heat, he slowly leaned against her ear, slowly saying: “Do you feel it, Sese? How fast our hearts are beating because of each other.”
