Chapter 26: Zhao Qiyan's Desperate Kiss

Ruan Jing still wasn't entirely certain whether what had happened yesterday counted as a quarrel or a rekindling. If she was being honest with herself, Qi Yan's sudden frankness had caught her completely off guard. Love was such an abstract, weightless thing right up until the moment it was spoken aloud — and then it landed with the full, unexpected gravity of something real. It wasn't that she doubted Zhao Qi Yan's feelings. It was that she didn't know how long those feelings could hold their shape. She was twenty-six. If this came to nothing again, she found herself quietly calculating: how many years would it take to put herself back together this time? When she arrived at that question without a good answer, she knew what she already was. Still a coward. Always had been.

The following morning, Ruan's mother convened a family meeting with the particular efficiency of a woman who had already decided the outcome and was simply offering everyone else the courtesy of being informed. She requested — which in her mother's vocabulary meant required — that Ruan Jing report to the school for her internship. Ruan Jing listened and nodded without argument. She could be difficult on ordinary days, could dig her heels in over small things with exhausting stubbornness, but she had never been someone who lost sight of what actually mattered. Ruan Zheng had officially retired now. It was her turn. She was the one who owed something here.

Over the next two days, she went to the gallery to hand over her unfinished work and submitted her resignation formally. Chen Fan's disappointment was genuine, and he tried to talk her out of it with the quiet persistence of someone who means it — but in the end he understood the situation clearly enough to step back and let her go.

For two full days, she did not see Zhao Qiyan. She did not call him. She told herself this was fine — he didn't owe her a schedule, and she didn't need one from him. Then she ran out of patience and called three times in a row, and each time the line came back dead. Service unavailable. She laughed at herself, a small, tight sound with nothing warm in it. She had finally said something close to the truth, and now she couldn't reach him at all. Still — Zhao Qiyan didn't owe anyone an account of his whereabouts. She knew this. It didn't make the silence easier to sit with.

Lin Xuan pushed open the door and walked in looking like something the weather had been unkind to, already in the middle of her feelings about it. "Jing-jie, what am I supposed to do without you?"

The girl had been saying some version of this for two days. "Chen Fan will find someone new to mentor you."

"I'll definitely get bullied."

Ruan Jing shook her head, a small smile surfacing. "Trust me — you'll handle it better than you think."

Lin Xuan glared at her with the offended dignity of someone who resents being reassured, then promptly couldn't hold the expression. A laugh broke through. "You have an alarming amount of faith in me."

I'm only saying what's accurate, Ruan Jing thought. She didn't say it out loud.

"I'm really going to miss you, Sister Jing." Lin Xuan said this and meant it entirely — she crossed the room and wrapped both arms around Ruan Jing with the uncomplicated warmth of someone who has not yet learned to be guarded about what they feel.

Ruan Jing patted her shoulder. "All right. We'll miss each other." Then her phone rang. She pulled it from her pocket, saw the name on the screen, and went still for a moment. Then she pressed accept.

"Ah Jing — you called? Is something wrong?" His voice was low and slightly rough, with an urgency underneath it that he hadn't quite managed to conceal.

Lin Xuan read the room with the speed of someone considerably sharper than she sometimes appeared. She smiled, made a small silencing gesture, and slipped out without a word.

Ruan Jing settled back into her chair. When she spoke, her voice came out with a flatness she hadn't entirely planned. "Yes. Everything's fine now."

"Sorry — I had to go to Shenzhen, it came up suddenly. And my phone's been giving me trouble again—"

"Zhao—" She stopped herself. "Never mind, it doesn't matter." A dull weight had settled somewhere in her chest without announcement, and she found she had no interest in unpacking it over the phone. "You're busy." She ended the call without a goodbye.

That evening, a handful of gallery colleagues took her to a nearby bar to send her off properly. A glass of fruit beer and familiar faces around a table — by the second round, things felt marginally warmer.

Chen Fan slid into the seat beside her with the air of someone who has been holding onto a question for a while. "Ah Jing, I've been meaning to ask you something."

She waited.

"Don't hold it against me for prying — but are you and Qiyan actually together?"

"I've been hearing that question a great deal lately." Ruan Jing turned to look at him with complete sincerity. "What do you think?"

"I genuinely can't work it out — that's why I'm asking you. I asked Qi Yan directly, and he didn't confirm it. But then again — if it's nothing serious, why would he send breakfast every single day?" Chen Fan exhaled thoughtfully. "The problem is, you can never fully read Zhao Qi Yan. He's too accomplished at this. I can't tell if it's real or if he's just extraordinarily charming and it only looks real from the outside." He caught himself and added quickly: "Not that he's disreputable. He always treats people with genuine respect. That much is clear."

Ruan Jing smiled at the table. "Maybe. But I don't think anyone has ever seriously doubted Zhao Qiyan's character."

"Is that complete indifference to anything that doesn't directly concern you something you were born with, or is it something you developed?"

"Half and half."

Chen Fan laughed, leaning back. "I'm starting to question Zhao Qiyan's judgment. How on earth did he fall for you?"

"Who said he fell for me?" The smile stayed exactly where it was. "You told me that — he didn't confirm it. By that logic, what he said is the truth."

Around ten o'clock, Lin Meimei, settled on the sofa to Ruan Jing's left, tugged at her sleeve and leaned in. "Sister Jing — isn't that your boyfriend?"

Ruan Jing looked toward the entrance. Three people had just come through the door.

Her brow drew together before she could stop it.

"Jiang Wei! Qi Yan!" Chen Fan's voice carried across the room with unconstrained delight, and Ruan Jing heard the sound of him rising from his seat to wave. She turned to confirm what she already suspected: Young Master Chen on his feet, arm raised, waving at the new arrivals. Jiang Wei, Zhao Qi Yan, and — Xu Wei.

Oh, Ruan Jing thought with quiet resignation. This should be interesting.

She considered, briefly and with full honesty, the appeal of finding a reason to leave before any of this developed further. Then she decided against it. She had nothing to be reserved about. She adjusted her expression to something calm and stayed exactly where she was.

At Chen Fan's enthusiastic management, the two groups merged, introductions were made, and people settled around expanded seating with the social efficiency of people who have done this many times before.

Jiang Wei materialized in the seat directly beside Ruan Jing before she had fully processed his intention to be there, the particular smile on his face suggesting he found something about this situation privately satisfying. "Long time no see."

Ruan Jing looked at the empty seats around the table. "There are other chairs."

"Yes, and I've chosen this one. Catching up."

She thought back with reluctant clarity to their last encounter — the Starbucks ambush last week, the enormous red roses, his aunt watching from three feet away as Ruan Jing declined both the flowers and the entire premise with the minimum possible ceremony. She had perhaps not thought that one through entirely.

As if he had been reading her face, Jiang Wei angled slightly toward her and said, very quietly, through teeth that were almost fully closed: "What exactly were you thinking?"

"What do you mean?"

"You are going to get me killed. One of these days."

She acknowledged this with the fairness it deserved. She had been inconsiderate on that occasion. "I'm sorry. Would you like me to introduce you to someone?"

Jiang Wei looked at her as though she had proposed something genuinely absurd. "Do you have any idea how many people are already trying to introduce me to someone?"

"Then why don't you just pick one and get married?"

"Why don't you?"

Ruan Jing set her glass down, settled back in her chair, and let her gaze drift naturally — inevitably — toward Zhao Qiyan.

He was across the room, listening to Xu Wei talk beside him. His posture was composed, his expression quiet and unreadable, a faint smile appearing at intervals that gave nothing away about what he was actually thinking. He looked, from this distance, completely at ease.

As Jiang Wei eventually drifted away, Lin Meimei immediately filled the vacancy, pressing close with the urgency of someone who has been holding this in for several minutes. "Sister Jing — okay, what is happening? I thought Mr. Zhao was your boyfriend? Why is he sitting with another woman? And he didn't even come over when he came in. Please explain this to me."

Ruan Jing smiled and shook her head. "That is a very large number of questions."

Lin Xuan's feelings, characteristically, arrived fully formed and at full volume. "Sister Jing — he didn't break up with you, did he? I knew it! Men who are that good-looking are always—"

"Lin Xuan, could you get me a glass of water?"

Lin Xuan looked at her for a moment. Something in Ruan Jing's face made her stop. She got up quietly and went.

Across the room, Zhao Qiyan had not drunk much. He was quieter than usual, something slightly distracted about him that he was managing with surface-level composure. He declined several invitations to dance from women who approached him with what seemed like minimal internal conflict, which produced visible indignation among several of his male companions.

Jiang Wei was the first to voice the collective grievance. "Am I genuinely that unappealing? Why does no one ask me to dance?"

Chen Fan said pleasantly, "I don't recall you being able to dance."

"Whether it happens and whether someone tries are entirely separate questions. The principle is the point."

Men always come back to the same conversations, Ruan Jing thought. She checked her watch. Nearly eleven. She decided the evening had reached its natural conclusion for her — she would use the restroom and then go home.

She stepped out of the restroom into the corridor and felt, before she fully registered it as a specific sensation, a change in the quality of the air behind her. The presence of someone close. She turned.

Zhao Qiyan was standing there. And then he was walking toward her, one step and then another, steady and direct, closing the distance between them until there was almost none left.

When he was close enough that she would have had to take a deliberate step back to create space, Ruan Jing laughed — a short, genuine sound. "Why do men always end up waiting for people outside restrooms?"

Zhao Qiyan drew a slow breath. Something complex had been moving through him all evening, too many things at once, and somewhere in the breathing out it simplified itself — settled into something that came out as a quiet exhale and something that looked, for a moment, almost like relief at simply being able to look at her. "I thought you weren't going to speak to me again."

"What are you talking about?" Her voice was even.

His arms came around her without ceremony, and his breath, close against the curve of her neck, was warm and slightly unsteady — careful in the way of someone trying not to take too much and aware they are already close to it. "Were you unhappy? With what I said?"

Ruan Jing stood still. She didn't answer. After a moment, she placed her hands against his chest and pushed — not hard, but with enough intention to be clear.

Zhao Qiyan stepped back. The expression on his face in that moment was the kind people spend considerable effort learning to hide.

"Ah Jing—" The controlled composure he had been maintaining all day cracked open along a seam that had been there since the plane landed. In truth, he had been managing a low-grade panic since he touched down — something that had been building from the moment he'd replayed the hospital entrance in his mind for the hundredth time on the flight back, knowing she hadn't wanted it, knowing he had said it anyway, unable to identify the precise moment he had lost all self-restraint.

Ruan Jing exhaled. The tension in her chest released itself on the way out, like something that had been waiting for permission. "I'm not unhappy. I just—" She looked for the right words and found the ones that were true, if not quite complete. "I don't know how to be around you anymore. I don't know what this is supposed to look like."

"You want to give up." His voice went quiet in the particular way of someone bracing for an answer they cannot afford to hear. His face had gone pale.

Ruan Jing shook her head. Something in her expression shifted — an admission she had been circling around for days, finally arriving at its own weight. "I mean — I care about you, Qiyan. I love you. That feeling is real, I'm not uncertain about that part. It's just—"

He crossed the space between them and pulled her into him, both arms around her completely, his kiss urgent and unguarded and trembling slightly at the edges — as though the act of it was the only thing that had felt certain to him in days.

Ruan Jing thought, with something between resignation and clarity: Fine. Maybe this particular spell was never going to be broken. Because if it were breakable, she wouldn't have spent three days in quiet distress at a phone that wouldn't connect. She wouldn't have felt that low, specific pull of discomfort watching him sit across the room with someone else. She had never been confused about whether she loved him. She had only been trying to decide whether to let herself. In the end, he had simply made the waiting impossible — and she had fallen into the exact gap he had left open for her, the one she had been carefully stepping around for weeks.

He dug this, she thought with the last available fragment of her objectivity. He dug the whole thing and left it right in my path and waited.

Somewhere across the bar, a gallery colleague who had slipped away to use the restroom rounded the corner, stopped dead, and stood there for a long, stunned moment. Then he turned around and went back to report to the table that the gentle, composed, impeccably refined Mr. Zhao had just kissed A-Jing in the corridor — passionately and without apparent concern for the location.

The table erupted. Surprise from several directions. Silence from a few others. From one or two, something quieter and more complicated — the particular private feeling of someone watching a door close on a room they had always hoped to one day enter.