This was the first time Jiang Ran had taken service-oriented actions for Beijiao after an unknown period of time and a first attempt that ended in failure. To be honest, Beijiao was quite surprised and even dared not act rashly. He simply leaned back on the sofa, letting her explore on her own. She hid beneath the blanket, and when he wanted to lift it for a peek, she wouldn’t allow it, stubbornly gripping the edges of the blanket with a temper tantrum.
When vision is lost, the senses become infinitely heightened. At this very moment, Beijiao felt as though his entire being, even his hair, had vanished from this universe. He no longer existed, except for the small patch of skin that her soft lips were touching, which experienced an overwhelming and blood-rushing sense of presence.
Staring at the ornate ceiling, Beijiao thought blankly that he still had self-control— for example, right now he was only holding her shoulder with one hand, preventing her from leaving. In fact, if circumstances were different, or if it weren’t her doing this, he might have harmed her to quickly end everything. Yet now, he was displaying unprecedented patience, drawing on his lifetime’s endurance to approve of all her exploratory efforts… Although in Beijiao’s view, she was essentially using sweet methods to torture him.
Perhaps it was revenge for him obediently sticking to the household rules these days. Her every gentle and cautious move could almost kill him. Now Beijiao had also started to reflect honestly, questioning whether it was right to push her aside and keep his distance for several days. He never imagined she would actually miss his physical presence… He had always thought he was the only one eagerly pursuing a cold shoulder, especially since the most frequent words she spoke were, “No” and “Don’t mess around.”
…Indeed, a woman’s “no” meant “yes,” right? They were all annoying liars.
Thinking seriously managed to divert some of Beijiao’s tortured attention, even though he felt like he might explode at any moment. Until the blanket moved, and the woman’s flushed face appeared before him. Her lips glistened with moisture as she blinked and met his gaze. Her voice was somewhat hoarse, “Is there no condom downstairs?”
“…Hmm.” Beijiao responded weakly from his throat, “No.”
He lifted his head to look at the person lying on his lap for a few seconds before heavily flopping back down with a long sigh, “Should I go get one?”
Jiang Ran was just climbing off him when she burst into laughter—she actually laughed, raising her hand to press down on the blanket, “In this condition, do you think you can put on your jeans smoothly? You might break it, won’t you?”
Her tone was naturally conversational, reminding Beijiao of the solemnity and seriousness of a CCTV news report on the recovery of manned spacecraft capsules. Although her next sentence was far from serious: “Or should we just go upstairs like this?”
Beijiao was silent for a moment, thinking about that image, which indeed wasn’t very elegant.
Caught off guard by the woman’s mischievous and sparkling gaze, he rolled over, lying sideways on the sofa, completely withdrawing into himself: he felt like he was about to cry from frustration.
“I’m just telling the truth, are you really angry?”
Jiang Ran saw the young man with black hair turning his pretty face toward the sofa with a gloomy expression, and she really couldn’t help but laugh. Supporting herself with one hand on the edge of the sofa, she half-bent down close to him, her soft fingertips brushing over his ear.
It was like playing with a sensitive plant; the reaction was almost immediate. The originally pale ear quickly flushed red.
Jiang Ran found it adorable beyond measure. She grabbed his face, ignoring his resistance, and kissed his ear before heading upstairs to fetch the tools of the crime. She didn’t even really invite him to come along.
…
The fire crackled in the hearth in the living room, and the warmth from the source genuinely made the living room much cozier than the upstairs bedroom. Jiang Ran had taken off her fuzzy housecoat, revealing a pearl-white silk camisole underneath. It covered practically nothing.
She straddled Beijiao’s sides, wrapping her arms around his neck, her soft and delicate skin brushing against his nose. He lowered his head and left a moist kiss along her long neck.
Her gaze gradually became unfocused, as if falling from a great height and then sinking into the sea, filled with a sense of security that made her sigh. Only then did she realize how much she had missed the feeling of being completely embraced by him—this might not be a good thing.
Her body had completely gotten used to his presence, to the point where she couldn’t even verify whether it would forever be accustomed to only his presence.
His arms encircled her waist, supporting her so she wouldn’t slip off. He didn’t rush, almost gently, letting her slowly adjust. She lowered her head and supported herself with her hands on his solid chest, kissing him.
The sofa was this narrow, and quite old, even though it was a custom-made Italian craft that Jiang Huaimin had paid six figures for. Bearing the weight of two adults at once was genuinely a bit too much for it… It let out a creaking sound under the strain, as if it might fall apart at any moment.
Both of them heard it, and neither of them paid any attention.
Beijiao focused on prying open her lips with his tongue, maliciously drawing out and plundering the breath from her mouth, kissing her until her eyes turned red at the corners. His large hand gripped her chin to prevent her from closing her mouth, and some saliva that hadn’t been swallowed dripped from the corner of her lips onto his thumb…
Jiang Ran became even more excited because of this. Doing such things in the living room felt like stealing or engaging in a forbidden relationship in broad daylight. So she looked at this moment as if her eyes and nose were painted like a clown, red and disheveled, yet still smiling. She rubbed her nose against his and teased his lips with hers: “Your own taste, is it good?”
He hummed in response, having already regained some of his reason: “The key question is, are you used to it?”
There wasn’t really anything to get used to; he took a shower every day and habitually rinsed off in the morning, so he hardly had any unpleasant smells. It was just that the size wasn’t quite… ideal. To her, it felt like she had blown up a thousand balloons, leaving her mouth numb and her lips aching from being stretched.
They were very close, even managing to chat casually, with neither in a hurry.
The minute hand slowly made a full circle, and at one point Beijiao noticed this— At this time, Jiang Ran was lying on his chest, one hand holding the remote control flipping through channels. There was no game to watch for now; the 8 o’clock dramas were tearfully talking about family affection, one “Dad!!!” after another, which was really too jarring. She wanted to find a suitable background sound.
Actually, she hadn’t forgotten what she was doing. She just changed a couple of channels and moved a bit.
She made a sound of acknowledgment when her butt was patted, shifting her attention back to the person in her arms. His large hand was around her waist, gently rubbing, “An hour already.”
Jiang Ran was momentarily stunned, muttering, “That fast,” and then began to admire him again. He had lasted quite long, hadn’t he? If it was too long, wouldn’t it be a medical issue? Shouldn’t she take him to see a doctor?
She still had the mood for random thoughts.
Looking at her bewildered and innocent face, Beijiao expressionlessly said, “My brother is going to get pruny.”
When you soak in a bath for too long, your fingers do indeed wrinkle from absorbing too much water.
But at this moment, he was obviously just talking nonsense.
Jiang Ran caught on but, due to her lack of experience and this particular function, she somewhat believed him. She pushed herself up, wanting to check if he was really wrinkled, when she heard him groan.
In the next second, the world spun, and she was pressed into the sofa.
She fell into the soft cushions with a “plop,” his hands on her knees, pressing down on her head. “I guess I have to take over. You really can’t slack off at all.”
Dazedly, Jiang Ran thought, on the ski slopes she often heard dating couples say this kind of thing. Usually, after such a line, the guy would help the girl put on her shoes that she couldn’t manage herself or adjust the bindings she didn’t know how to set. How fresh and innocent.
They were getting older, becoming gradually more jaded, and now such lines were appearing in bed. How messy.
She raised her hand around his neck, watching that pretty face, so close and drawing nearer infinitely, and coquettishly demanded, “Kiss.”
He would kiss her even if she didn’t say anything.
Because in the next moment, as he lowered his head to kiss her, he smoothly swallowed all the instinctive scream she was about to let out into her throat.
…
Half an hour later, finally finishing up.
Jiang Ran, lying in the arms of her cheap younger brother, was yawning wildly, like a cat that had eaten its fill and refused to play along with anyone else anymore.
Her nightgown strap loosely hung off her shoulder, revealing her round, fair shoulder… Perhaps it was because the fire was burning too hot, or some other reason, but now she had finally stopped complaining about the cold.
Beijiao bent down and kissed her shoulder, feeling the coolness of the touch. He then reached out to pull the blanket over her.
Jiang Ran reached out and felt something wet, she screamed and pulled her hand back, and realizing what it was, she said in disbelief, “My Hermes blanket! It’s cashmere!”
Beijiao, wanting to laugh at her pitiful and heart-wrenching cry, said, “That’s your own fault, it’s all your stuff.”
His pants were soaked through, and she had such a unique constitution, as if she could accumulate things like this. After only a week, it was like a flood that couldn’t be stopped.
Jiang Ran climbed off him to examine her blanket, one of Beijiao’s hands still around her waist, “Send it to the dry cleaner?”
“This stuff can’t go to the dry cleaner, I don’t want to lose face, I still have some dignity!” Jiang Ran shot him a glare, picked up the blanket, and shook off his hand that was still around her waist, “My dad and mom are about to come back, you tidy up, I’m going upstairs to take a shower.”
Her tone was absolutely cold and heartless, completely different from the woman who had been clinging to him and asking for kisses just moments ago.
Beijiao felt a strong sense of being cast aside after being used, unfortunately, she didn’t give him the chance to voice his opinion.
He could only watch helplessly as she went upstairs. Beijiao opened the windows and the door of the living room to let the cold wind disperse the strong scent of intimacy lingering in the house.
This smell seemed even more intense and pungent in the warm air.
The cold wind blew in, making the black-haired young man sneeze. He rubbed his nose, put on his sweater, pulled up his pants, tucked his “brother” back where it belonged, and then dutifully went to find wet wipes to clean the sofa— It was a leather sofa, and any strange liquid would leave a noticeable mark. He cleaned it carefully, and didn’t forget to take all the cleaning tools back to his room on the second floor to throw them away.
…
Beijiao himself also took a shower. When he came out, the two parents had already returned.
They had gone to a big supermarket to buy some nuts for the New Year and snacks that Jiang Ran liked. It was about two hours until dinner time, and Jiang Huaimin said he wanted to take a nap, so he went upstairs to sleep. Zhang Lingling sat in the living room, watching TV expressionlessly.
The TV was broadcasting a melodramatic family soap opera again, with the family fighting over a shabby old house, chaos ensuing.
Beijiao went straight to the dining room, opened the fridge, and took out a bottle of mineral water. When he turned around, a pillow was thrown right in front of him.
He picked it up and turned it over, oh, an oversight from the cleanup.
He didn’t know how it had gotten here.
He casually stuffed the corner of the pillow soaked in white liquid into the sink to wash it. Zhang Lingling watched him the whole time, calm enough that he didn’t even bother to explain. She was probably about to say, “Thank you for reminding me,” and she couldn’t help but get angry.
“Do you have any shame? This is the living room!”
When Beijiao threw the wet pillow back on the sofa, she finally couldn’t hold back and asked.
The young man being questioned finally reacted, lifting his eyelids slightly and looking like he didn’t really want to deal with her. He just slowly said after a while, “I’ve already been very restrained. If it weren’t for you guys being here, I wouldn’t just be doing this in the living room—I’d dare do it in the dining room too.”
His voice had no inflection, just a statement.
Zhang Lingling was stunned, probably not expecting that when she accused him of having no shame, he really didn’t. She opened her mouth in shock for quite a while before she could recover— In her memory, although Bei Jiao was cold to her, he rarely spoke back.
At most, he would just ignore her, letting her go crazy and rave on, then walk away with a blank face…
Zhang Lingling couldn’t tell which treatment made her angrier.
Her eyes rolled around in their sockets a few times, her chin trembling slightly from shock, and she asked again, “You coaxed her… to play with you like this?”
The word “play” was used in a way Bei Jiao didn’t really like.
But he didn’t correct her because, in Zhang Lingling’s view, the idea that humans could supply other humans for play was deeply rooted and probably an unconscious product of her thinking. He didn’t feel like wasting the effort to straighten her out.
“Mom,” he simply curled his lips in sarcasm, “Isn’t it inappropriate for you to openly inquire about your son’s bedroom affairs?”
For a moment, Zhang Lingling thought she was hallucinating—
Unless his lips were continuously curled in mockery at this very moment, she would think she was hearing things.
Her face turned alternately pale and red, tightly gripping the hem of her cashmere dress, looking extremely helpless—
Today, she was dressed in light colors, making her appear even younger—almost like she was thirty. Her face, still charming without heavy makeup, had her eyes slightly lowered, enough to make any man’s heart ache, right?
But Bei Jiao wasn’t a man.
He was still young.
He didn’t fall for that stuff.
Bei Jiao coldly looked at her and said indifferently, “Stay out of things that have nothing to do with you.”
“Nothing to do with me?” she echoed, “You say it has nothing to do with me?!”
In an instant, she seemed to have her taboos touched and jumped up furiously, grabbing the pillow that had just been put back in place, and threw it at Bei Jiao’s face, “You dare to act shamelessly here! Remember where you are! This is Jiang Huaimin’s house!”
The pillow hit him on the jaw with a slap—not painful, but the zipper of the cushion was a bit stiff, leaving a faint red scratch on his chin. His face was slightly turned sideways from the impact, and he pushed his cheek with his tongue, but he said nothing.
“I know you hate me for leaving you behind during your senior year, but what else could I do? If I hadn’t left, Jiang Huaimin would have left instead! Where else could I find someone else to support us? Would you be happy if I couldn’t even give you five hundred yuan a month for food expenses?”
Zhang Lingling was almost breaking down. She always felt that everything changed the day she left for Canada—but she never stopped to think that maybe it wasn’t necessarily like that. Five hundred yuan a month couldn’t even cover basic expenses. It wouldn’t even cover the water and electricity bills. In their small southern hometown, even the summer electricity bill often exceeded two hundred yuan, and she had never asked or known where Beijiao got the money from.
Right now, she only felt her dignity stripped away by her own son’s few sharp words. She felt he hated her, and now he was deliberately trying to take everything stable and peaceful away from her life.
“You want revenge on me? Fine! But don’t drag others into it! Jiang Huaimin’s daughter hasn’t done anything wrong, so why should she suffer and be manipulated by you like this? You’ve never thought about respecting her, have you! You’re doing all this just for revenge! You’re waiting for her father to find out everything, get furious, and then throw me—throw us!” she hissed in a low, furious whisper, “out onto the streets!”
Beijiao looked down at her, watching her cry and choke on her words, too scared to raise her voice and wake Jiang Huaimin or alert Jiang Ran, his eyes flashing with disdain.
He turned his face away, staring blankly at a worn spot in a corner of the living room.
He was thinking how he occasionally complained about Jiang Ran making up all sorts of things in her head, getting angry at him for no reason, thinking she was too dramatic and always looking for trouble—
Now he realized he was wrong.
Although she sometimes had unrealistic fantasies, at least they still fell within the realm of normal thinking.
Zhang Lingling had opened his eyes. Her crying and broken lines of dialogue were so absurd that he didn’t even know whether he should bother refuting her anymore—it was just too exhausting.
It was like a director finally receiving the script outline from the screenwriter, expecting a romantic urban light comedy, only to open it and find that the screenwriter had started the story with the male and female leads getting divorced at the Civil Affairs Bureau today at age forty—
So ridiculous that he didn’t even know where to start pointing out the flaws.
So he decided not to say anything at all.
He bent down, picked up the pillow at his feet, and placed it back on the sofa. After a moment’s thought, he couldn’t help but ask, “You’re not still fantasizing that Jiang Huaimin will marry you, are you?”
Zhang Lingling was crying uncontrollably, her heart full of fear and confusion.
Beijiao pulled out a tissue and shoved it into her hand. “He’ll never marry you. Judging from the current situation, he might not even necessarily divorce you. Stop imagining so much, and you’ll last longer.”
His tone was gentle.
But Zhang Lingling’s tears only flowed even more intensely.
Beijiao said, “Stop crying.”
She kept crying, in broken sentences saying she didn’t want to either, that she had it hard too, that she didn’t want to live at the bottom of society and be looked down upon. She had dropped out at seventeen, following Beijiao’s biological father, a good-for-nothing drifter, traveling around trying to make a living. Later, that man had messed around until he ruined himself, leaving her all alone…
Some rambling words that Beijiao had heard many times before, so he remained completely unmoved.
He even thought cruelly that maybe only at moments like this did she truly seem old, repeating useless past grievances—
In front of someone who had long been numb to those past events and felt absolutely no empathy.
The tissue in her eyes was crushed into pieces. Beijiao handed her a few more. She wiped her tears, sobbing softly, yet instinctively understanding the basic rules of soothing men—her tone now softened, with a sob in her voice: “Don’t hate me…”
He glanced down at her eyelashes, still glistening with tears.
Beijiao simply repeated indifferently, “Stop crying.”
Zhang Lingling mistook this for her act working, and with teary eyes, she looked up at her son in front of her—
When she gazed into his calm, pitch-black pupils, her heart gave a jolt, as if she had suddenly stepped into empty space and fallen into an abyss. She sensed something was wrong.
Zhang Lingling saw her son curl his lips into a smile, clearly showing her.
In a tone full of regret, he said, “Except for Jiang Ran, no one else’s tears in the world will ever affect me again.”
“…”
“Don’t bother. I just find it annoying when I see it.”
…
After returning to the second floor, Beijiao noticed a shadow flickering around the corner of the hallway.
He approached, extended his hand, and his index finger, curved like a hook, somewhat forcefully scraped across the woman’s soft cheek. Then he wrapped his arm around her waist, pulling her back into his arms as she tried to turn and escape.
She had been leaning on the railing, watching the commotion for who knows how long. She had hidden well—if she hadn’t been too distracted while coming upstairs and failed to return to her room in time, he might not have noticed her at all.
“Enjoy the show?” he asked.
Her forehead pressed against his chest, her feet scuffing the floor as she turned slightly, her voice filled with embarrassment: “I didn’t really want to spy, but she was crying so hard that I felt awkward going downstairs.”
Avoiding the main issue.
Beijiao scoffed softly. The arm around her waist tightened silently. She gasped softly and stretched her arms around his waist. After a moment’s thought, she said, “I’m a bit scared.”
“Hmm?” He looked down at her.
“You’re so heartless toward your own mother,” she mumbled. “What if you don’t like me anymore in the future? Won’t you just open the door and kick me out?”
Actually, he wanted to say that he seriously doubted whether that day would ever come. Similar situations had occurred before, but the one being kicked out had been him.
Jiang Ran waited for a while but received no response. She widened her eyes and looked up at him, only to see the red scratch on his chin from the pillow’s zipper. She let out a soft “Ew,” and reached out to touch it.
At that moment, her wrist was caught. He looked down at her calmly and steadily, saying, “Oh, maybe. So, what would you do?”
The light, drifting voice entered her ears.
Under his half-smiling, half-serious counter-question, his slightly rough hand continued to caress her face—warm at first, gradually becoming scalding.
Jiang Ran’s wildly beating heart finally calmed down. For some reason, just a moment ago, she had actually been a little panicked—
The Beijiao she saw in front of Zhang Lingling was someone she had never seen before.
He seemed heartless.
But Jiang Ran wasn’t a savior, not to mention she was a selfish person. She suddenly realized—he treated others like this, what did that have to do with her?
He wouldn’t treat her like that.
Her eyes flickered, and her gentle fingertips rubbed his chin. “Forget it,” she exhaled, her voice becoming slightly more cheerful, “you won’t dare to kick me out.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“What do you mean ‘mm-hmm’? Isn’t that right?”
“Then behave yourself. I’ll see how you act.”
Tai Sui Yellow Amulet Paper FuLu Taoist Love Talisman Traditional Chinese Spiritual Charm Attracting Love Protecting Marriage