Chapter 20: Even If You Were Just Joking

 

He dropped her at her door, said goodbye, and drove away.

Ruan Jing stood at the threshold for a moment. Then a small, bitter smile came to her mouth. From the careful exchanges on the drive to the polite farewell at the end — he had been entirely himself, genuine, approaching and receding with complete ease. No performance, no strain. Just Zhao Qiyan, doing what came naturally.

She had set the terms of this. She knew that. The person who'd established the distance should presumably feel some satisfaction at seeing it maintained. What she actually felt was a frustration she had no right to name — and the specific, clear understanding that she had suppressed something real and genuine, and that it could not be restored.

Did she lose Zhao Qiyan? She'd made her choices. This was what they'd cost. She deserved it.

The feeling stayed with her for two days.

---

She'd been back at the gallery maybe ten minutes when she noticed the white paper bag beside her computer.

Two bottles of scar-reducing ointment. A note: Recommended by my mother, safe to use. — Zhao.

She stood up so quickly she nearly knocked over her tea.

She stood there with the note in her hand. She had thought she was no longer on his radar. She had been certain that the careful withdrawal was mutual and final. This was — she didn't know what this was. A gesture of ordinary sympathy, the kind any decent person might make? Or something she wasn't permitted to read into?

She decided not to speculate. He wasn't a complicated person. It was probably exactly what it looked like.

That night, after showering, she applied the ointment to her knee and then picked up her phone and looked at his number for a while.

She called.

"Ruan Jing, you called me?" His voice was even, unhurried, as if this were a routine occurrence rather than the first call in weeks.

"I wanted to say thank you."

A pause, slightly longer than necessary. "It was a small thing. Don't worry about it."

Nothing more to say. "Goodnight, then."

"Goodnight."

She lay in the dark afterward and thought: this is what casual acquaintances are like.

---

The relationship continued in that key until Jiang Wei's birthday party.

She arrived late. The waiter led her to the private room and she stopped in the doorway.

Zhao Qiyan was by the window, talking to a woman with light brown hair. The woman was smiling and had her arm linked through his — easy, intimate, the posture of someone comfortable with where she stood.

From what Ruan Jing knew of him, he didn't typically telegraph closeness in public. She filed this away without deciding what to do with it.

"The birthday boy's girlfriend graces us at last," Xu Wei said.

Ruan Jing turned and smiled. "It's not like arriving early gets you anything."

Xu Wei found this logic baffling. Jiang Wei descended on her a moment later and pulled her into a brief hug, then murmured in her ear: "Maternal grandmother, center, the red robe. Difficulty level three times what my mother was. Okay?"

"If we fail, you're the one who suffers."

"My suffering won't benefit you — we're in this together."

"I'll do what I can. If it really doesn't work, I'll find another arrangement."

"Heartless. I'll go settle myself, come over and meet Grandma soon."

What looked to the room like a couple's quiet exchange was actually a battle briefing. They separated.

Ruan Jing looked up. Zhao Qiyan had already left the window and was walking toward her — composed, steady, as if nothing had moved in him at all.

"Long time no see, Ruan Jing."

She looked at him. Something in her chest had been accumulating for weeks, and it came out before she'd decided to let it.

"Zhao Qiyan, tell me honestly — have I done something to you? Because it seems like you've decided we're not even going to be friends anymore."

The words caught him completely off guard.

He closed his eyes.

All of it — the careful composure, the practiced distance, weeks of constraint — came apart in a single moment. He'd told himself this could hold. He'd believed that the firm withdrawal was at least manageable, at least stable. What Ruan Jing had just proven, without effort, was that he had no floor with her. The slightest thing she said reached all the way down.

He didn't want to end this. He had never wanted that. If she needed it, he would open himself entirely — lay out every complicated and ungainly thing in him, every thought he'd had since the first time he'd seen her. But she didn't need any of that. She wouldn't want to see the Zhao Qiyan who thought about her in ways he wasn't entitled to think, who had been fighting a very specific and very losing battle against wanting to possess someone who'd made it clear she didn't want to be possessed.

His eyes, when he opened them, were full — too full. Ruan Jing saw it and was startled. Hesitation, longing, something strained and painful all moving at once. His hand came up and rested on her shoulder for just a moment before he pulled it back. The gesture was unconscious and unfinished, and it closed something in her chest.

"Jing." His voice was even. "You haven't offended me. If you think I've done something wrong, I'll change."

She looked at him for a moment — this patient, kind man offering to adjust himself to whatever she required — and then turned and walked away.

He turned to face the window. Two meters away, the glass gave him back his own reflection, and it was unfamiliar. The composure was gone. What was left underneath was just obscurity.

I thought I could at least get through tonight.

---

He sat at the table and watched her across the round of it. She talked to Jiang Wei. She charmed the grandmother in the red robe. She smiled at the person beside her. The table between them felt like a demarcation he was not permitted to cross.

He knew what she was doing. He even understood it — she was showing him that she was fine, that his absence hadn't made anything less. And she was doing it very well. And it worked. Each deliberate gesture of ease produced in him something real and quite uncomfortable.

He raised his hand and pressed it lightly over his own eyes.

Xu Wei moved close. "Why are you doing this to yourself."

He didn't answer. He didn't have an answer. If he could have controlled it, he would have.

His phone vibrated in his pocket.

He opened it without looking.

I didn't drive here tonight. If it's not too much trouble, I was thinking I could take your car back later.

He looked at the sender's name. His hand was not steady. The phone went under the table.

---

After, in the emptied hotel corridor, Ruan Jing said her goodbyes and went out through the back.

The street was quiet. In the low light, Zhao Qiyan was leaning against the car, waiting.

She walked past him. He fell in behind her, unhurrying, matching her pace. She heard him and stopped.

He put his arms around her from behind — around her neck, slowly, drawing her back until her back was against his chest and there was no distance between them.

From the first moment she had caught his interest to every subsequent time she had tested it — the pleasure and the pain of it, the teetering — he had thought he was managing. He was not managing. He was past the point of caring whether he was managing. Even if what she wanted was to be precisely this much trouble to him, he still wanted this particular kind of trouble. He lowered his head and pressed it into the curve of her neck.

He had been carrying the faint smell of her since they'd sat across from each other all evening.

Ruan Jing closed her eyes.

The unease she'd been carrying for weeks — the accumulated frustration and guilt and something she hadn't named — softened in the warmth of it. She let herself be held and felt something she could only call dazed.

She had been tormenting him. She knew that. She had known it while she was doing it. Looking back at the whole arc of it — back and forth, neither resolved — she had thought she was past the kind of feeling that surprised her. But certain things had been working their way in slowly, without her permission, until she could no longer claim she hadn't noticed.

And she had not understood, until just now, that what he'd been doing wasn't withdrawing. He'd been suppressing. There was a difference. Knowing the difference made her feel something unexpected: she was sorry for him.

When his lips touched her earlobe she turned around.

What followed was nothing she had experienced quite like before — the specific quality of a kiss that had been held back for a long time and was no longer being held back. She kept her eyes closed. When he turned her, her back found the cold glass of the shop window, and she opened them. His face, this close, was — suppressed was still the right word, but barely. His hands moved up her arms, her waist—

She pushed him back.

The break was abrupt. He came back to himself in stages and looked at what he'd done — he'd actually— — and the panic moved through him visibly. He stood on the empty street staring at her, bewildered at his own capacity for losing himself.

When she turned away, he closed his eyes. Fine. He deserved that. Standing still and accepting it was the best available outcome.

He stood on the empty street for a little over two minutes. Then walked back to the car and got in and sat with his forehead on the steering wheel.

The passenger door opened.

Ruan Jing sat down.

He turned to look at her.

"I think—" she said. "We could give it a try."

"Try what." His voice was rougher than usual.

"Lovers."

She had been frightened. She had turned the corner and started walking and then found she had stopped. And then she had run back, and she couldn't have explained the feeling in that moment if she'd tried.

"Ruan Jing." His palm found her face. "If this is a joke—"

"No—" He kissed her before she could finish.

She heard it later, in the drowsiness of it: Even if you were just joking, I don't care.

---

He drove her home in silence. She sat beside him and felt, honestly, a little deflated. She hadn't expected enthusiasm, exactly. But she had expected something.

At her building he stopped. She waited. When she reached for the door, his hand came down over hers on the handle.

She turned.

He was looking at her — not the careful, managed look she'd grown accustomed to over these weeks, but something much less guarded. The kind that didn't perform. His eyes were dark and very still, and there was more in them than she could inventory quickly.

She was in a thin shirt, tired from the evening, no armor left to speak of. He looked at her like she was something he'd been waiting a long time to be allowed to look at this directly.

He leaned forward and pressed his lips to her forehead.

He stayed like that for a moment.

Then, simply: I just wanted to say goodnight.

She came back to herself. Thought she could go. His hand was still warm over hers. "Goodnight," she said.

He smiled — barely — and released her hand and opened the door.

She walked to her building without looking back. He watched her go, and when she was gone he found that his hands were shaking slightly.

Good, he thought, with something very close to relief. I held it together. If I'd actually lost it, she'd have been entirely right to put me back in the car.

He drove home.

He lay awake until morning for the first time in his life because he was looking forward to what came next.