Chen Baoxiang had also, by all rights, been thinking along those lines.
The Great Immortal had been with her for so long — they had shared joy and shared hardship, and by now had even weathered a near-death experience together. Her feeling for him was by this point something like the deep familiarity one had with family.
It was just one kind of voice becoming one living, breathing man — what was there to make such a fuss over?
——But when he stepped through the doorway, he brought a kind of light with him.
Chen Baoxiang looked up, dazed.
Within that luminous haze, Zhang Zhixu stood tall and upright, his broad shoulders and narrow waist bound tight by a jade belt. His ink-black hair was gathered high, his jaw was sharp and sculpted, the high bridge of his nose like a flawless length of white jade. But his eyes were cool and distant, and when he turned a sidelong glance toward her, the look was like ice still unmelted under the spring eaves.
She watched until she blinked slowly.
“Awake?” He came and sat beside the bed, quite naturally picking up the medicine bowl to feed her.
The pale joints of his fingers held the translucent jade porcelain — giving off the faintest hint of rose.
Chen Baoxiang was suddenly all at sea. She stumbled over herself, reaching out: “I — I’ll do it myself.”
Zhang Zhixu examined her, a trace of concern in his eyes: “You’re running a high fever again?”
“No, no.” She fanned her own face, forcing a dry laugh. “It’s just a little warm in here.”
Warm?
Zhang Zhixu turned his head: “Jiuquan — have someone chip another block of ice.”
One block of ice was worth several hundred coins — and he’d have it chipped just like that?
Chen Baoxiang immediately grabbed his sleeve: “Don’t — it’s not necessary. It’s only early spring — why spend that kind of money on such a rare luxury? I just need to rest a moment, just a moment and I’ll be fine.”
“And the topical medicine.” He turned to pick up a jade vial. “Has it been applied?”
“The wound dressings have already been changed.” Chen Baoxiang looked at the vial in his hands, puzzled. “What medicine is that?”
“For the scars.” Zhang Zhixu frowned and turned back her sleeve. “You’re a young woman. Always covered in injuries like this — how are you ever going to find a husband.”
As he spoke, he began to apply the medicine just as he always had.
The attendants nearby — Jiuquan and the serving boys — nearly inhaled their own breath in alarm. They quietly shuffled out, closing the door behind them.
Chen Baoxiang tried to be calm about it. After all, every previous injury had been tended by the Great Immortal — she ought to be used to it by now.
But now the Great Immortal had become a living, breathing man sitting at the edge of her bed. His slender fingers were dipped in the medicinal salve and moving across her scars, the warmth of his fingertips carrying the clean fragrance of the medicine to her all at once.
She raised her head in a daze, and found she was looking straight at his half-lowered brow — refined and distinguished, as though lit from within — close enough, at less than two cun’s distance, that she could catch the faint, clean scent rising from him.
Her composure gave an involuntary, uncontrolled lurch.
In the room, a thin curl of purple incense rose and drifted. In the stillness, something else seemed to be flowing.
Zhang Zhixu was midway through applying the medicine when he too felt that something was different.
He glanced up — and looked directly into the eyes of the person across from him.
Chen Baoxiang’s injuries had not healed, and she had not put on any makeup — her face was bare, without a trace of powder or rouge. It made her somehow easier to look at: a porcelain-pale face, the tip of her nose flushing faintly pink. It was the same face he had looked at in the mirror, and yet somehow felt different.
His throat worked involuntarily. He came to himself all at once, and shifted his gaze away quickly: “This side is done.”
Chen Baoxiang seemed to come back to herself too, glancing about, and said haltingly: “Then I’ll do the rest myself.”
“Can you reach your own back?”
“My back as well?”
Zhang Zhixu frowned: “Your back is a crisscross of scars, and many of them are old injuries from years past. Were you simply going to leave them alone?”
When had he seen them?
Her face reddened: “You — have you seen everything?”
Of course he had — she’d never kept herself covered during her baths.
——Zhang Zhixu was about to say exactly that, but suddenly caught himself.
He looked down at his own unmistakably masculine form, then back at the young woman across from him, disheveled and incompletely dressed. He went perfectly still. After a prolonged pause, he raised a hand to his brow: “I apologise.”
They were no longer sharing the same body. To carry on this way was to ruin her reputation entirely.
He started to withdraw — to put some proper distance between them — when the person in the bed suddenly let out an anguished wail: “But what’s the use of you seeing them, anyway! You can’t marry me and let me live in luxury and splendour — could you not just have Zhang Zhixu recover his full senses and open his eyes and look at me, too?”
Zhang Zhixu: “……”
Whatever tender feeling had just begun to stir vanished completely in an instant.
He said without warmth: “There isn’t a single proper thought in that head of yours.”
“There’s a sky-shaking fortune right within arm’s reach — am I not allowed to think about it?” She clutched her quilt and let her eyes shine with eager calculation. “If I can’t marry into the Pei family, the Zhang family is not a bad second choice, after all.”
His own family — a hundred times more illustrious than the Pei family — and in her mouth it was reduced to a backup option?
Zhang Zhixu’s jaw tightened. With a smile that was not a smile he said: “Don’t even think about it.”
“But didn’t you, Great Immortal, say you would help me rise to a place of honour?”
“You are too foolish and clumsy — I’m afraid if you flew that high you’d fall to your death.”
“Oh.”