Li Xun went to find Old Teacher Lin, and Zhu Yun spent the entire afternoon in a state of barely contained excitement. She got back to the dormitory early, showered, and changed into a fresh set of clothes.
She stood in front of the wardrobe mirror and looked at herself.
Ren Di was with her band. Fang Shumiao was busy with student council matters. The room was Zhu Yun’s alone, and she had all the time in the world to let her mind wander.
Maybe love really did have a kind of magic to it — the sort that got into you like a poison and kept you trapped. On the first day of this semester, Zhu Yun had slipped away without telling anyone and signed up for a membership at a beauty salon in the city center. She went twice a week whenever she could manage it, for skincare treatments.
The salon was far from campus — the round trip alone took an hour and a half — and yet she found it entirely effortless.
Zhu Yun thought of the story from the Bible: Adam and Eve, once living without a care, were tempted by the serpent to eat the forbidden fruit. With that, they came to understand the difference between good and evil, between beauty and ugliness, and developed desires of their own. God, in his anger, cast them out of Eden and condemned them to suffering for all their days.
Since meeting Li Xun, Zhu Yun had come to feel that eating the apple was worth it.
Zhu Yun found a hotel a considerable distance from campus, one of reasonable quality. Li Xun finished up his business at school, asked Zhu Yun for the address, and arrived just after eight.
He walked in complaining: “Why did you pick somewhere this far out of the way?”
“There are fewer people here.”
“Look at you, barely any nerve at all.” Li Xun went into the bathroom to shower.
He had left his T-shirt outside. Zhu Yun picked it up — it felt slightly damp. He had been sweating all day.
Did the shirt need washing?
She lifted it and gave it a sniff——
At precisely the moment her nose made contact with the fabric, the bathroom door opened. Li Xun emerged with his long, lean frame wrapped in nothing but a towel around his waist.
Zhu Yun: “!?”
Li Xun looked at Zhu Yun — who was standing there sniffing his shirt — with a completely flat expression. He toweled his hair with one hand, while more or less deliberately presenting himself with the other, and said: “No need to sniff it. Here’s the fresh version.”
You finished showering impossibly fast!
Li Xun gave a short, amused sound and sat down on the edge of the bed. Zhu Yun offered no explanation, and quietly made her way to the other side, settling in behind him to stare.
This hotel was different from the last one — the room was spacious, the furnishings comfortable. Li Xun’s skin under the warm amber lighting had an almost luminous quality, deeply appealing. As he toweled his hair, the lines of muscle across his back shifted with each movement, and Zhu Yun felt something in her chest pulling unbearably.
She couldn’t take it anymore. She’d already sniffed the man’s shirt — what was there left to be restrained about. She scrambled across the bed and wrapped her arms around him from behind. He hadn’t fully dried off yet; tiny drops of water clung to her arms, cool against the skin.
Li Xun abandoned the towel — tossed it aside — and turned around, pressing Zhu Yun down.
Perhaps owing to the higher quality of the hotel, Zhu Yun had the distinct impression that even Li Xun had somehow come into sharper resolution. She noticed, for the first time, a small faint mole on his chin, right where stubble tends to grow on men. She had never spotted it before.
Li Xun asked: “Did you miss me?”
Zhu Yun asked back: “Did you miss me?”
Not the most substantive of opening exchanges — but Zhu Yun knew Li Xun had no patience for drawn-out, circular conversations, which meant he would answer first.
“Yes.” Clean and direct. He lifted the hem of her sleep clothes, dipped his head to her stomach, and breathed in slowly.
Zhu Yun ran her fingers through his still-damp hair and felt his palm moving along her lower back, absently pressing into the skin.
It tickled. She shifted.
Li Xun propped himself up on one arm and, with the other, gave Zhu Yun a firm push — the mattress had good spring to it, and she bounced a little. When she looked up again, Li Xun had already untied the towel and dropped it.
Zhu Yun was distracted for a few seconds, then remembered something and quickly climbed out of bed to pull the curtains shut. When she turned back, the young master was lying on his side across the large bed, posing, completely unclothed and entirely unbothered about it — like a young model out of an art textbook.
Li Xun patted the bed. Zhu Yun climbed back over. He immediately pressed her down, and his hands went back to her waist and stomach — pressing, squeezing, kneading.
Zhu Yun truly couldn’t stand it. “What are you doing?” What kind of fixation was this.
Li Xun’s breathing had grown heavier. A low, rough sound.
“God, I’ve been going out of my mind missing the feel of this……”
Hearing that tone from him, she found the ticklish sensation from before had shifted into something else entirely — a different kind of sensitivity. Li Xun was running warmer now, and the way he looked at her had changed. He worked his way along her neck with his mouth, a combination of biting and pressing his lips to her skin, and got a little carried away — his own breathing coming uneven.
Zhu Yun was warm too, but catching the slightly roughened look in his eyes, she asked: “Were you exhausted from traveling today?”
Li Xun looked up at her. “Feeling sorry for me?”
Zhu Yun said: “If you’re tired, we can just rest.”
Li Xun leaned forward, one hand pressing into the sheets beside her, and said quietly near her ear: “After all that’s already happened to the sheets, and you’re still this considerate.”
“……”
Honestly, how did he just say things like that so effortlessly.
Li Xun pressed himself closer.
“If you don’t want to, we don’t have to.”
Zhu Yun thought to herself: I never said I didn’t want to — I’m just saying you look tired……
Li Xun read that silent internal dialogue with no difficulty at all, and gave her a light pinch.
“If you do want to, then let’s not waste the good moment.”
Zhu Yun registered that the arrangement this time was somehow different from before, and looked up to find Li Xun grinning down at her with thoroughly questionable intentions.
“Your Highness — tonight I’ll show you something new. Close your eyes.”
Zhu Yun closed them obediently.