At this moment, anyone who could still say “no” was either possessed or about to become a modern-day Fan Jin who had just passed the imperial examination. Fortunately, Jiang Ran still had her wits about her, so she nodded vigorously, tearfully agreeing until her nose was about to run.
At the same time, every word and every character North Jiao had said ten seconds ago was deeply etched into her mind—
After all, in the five years she had known this dog, countless barks had come out of his mouth, but nothing had ever sounded this pleasant before.
She grabbed his hand randomly, using his sleeve to wipe away her tears and, at the same time, slipped the simple men’s matching ring onto his finger. The design was very straightforward—wide, plain band with a vertical line of small diamonds.
As Jiang Ran slid the diamond ring onto the middle finger of his right hand, her mind was in a haze, thinking to herself that he had actually splurged on a ring with diamonds, so he must really have decided this was going to be his only wedding ring in his lifetime.
The ring fit perfectly. Jiang Ran overlapped his hand with hers, admiring their hands together for a while.
Only then did she have the chance to examine the matching ring on her own finger closely. A row of small diamonds alternated with sapphires, not one of the many popular pure-diamond matching ring styles from the HW brand.
Jiang Ran spread her fingers toward the bright full moon hanging in the sky. Under the dim yellow moonlight, she was very satisfied with the sparkling ring on her finger, which also had a touch of decorative sapphires. Curiously, she asked Bei Jiao, “Why didn’t you choose the ordinary diamond style? It might have been cheaper.”
He looked at her with a half-smile, probably thinking that Jiang Ran thinking about saving money at a moment like this was just hypocritical pretense…
If he had really chosen based solely on price rather than design, she might have ripped his head off without hesitation.
He explained that when the smiling and sweet salesgirl had shown him all the popular wedding rings, saying, “These are our most popular and best-selling matching ring designs,” he had barely glanced at them before casually replying, “Take them all away. She doesn’t like to have the same style as others.”
—This was also the moment Jiang Ran had once caught by chance, when she turned around and saw him actually getting along cheerfully with a strange girl, all stemming from his sweet little act of describing how hard it was to please his future wife.
But it had to be said, his description was indeed spot-on.
After hearing his answer, Jiang Ran loved him even more.
There would never be a dog in the world who understood her better than him.
It had nothing to do with what he had said or done today. Honestly, if he had really taken out that diamond ring worth more than 300,000 yuan right now, she might not have been this happy. After all, she hadn’t liked that ring much after seeing it in person…
But everything he had done right now fit her rhythm so perfectly, it was just a natural outcome of years of observation. He had truly become the worm in her belly, knowing exactly what she wanted the moment she raised her eyelids.
How wonderful.
Marrying someone like this meant fewer wasted words during future arguments—you could just use eye contact for attacks.
After completing her self-summary, Jiang Ran immediately hugged his neck and bent down to kiss his lips, but then she thought about being outdoors with so many people watching and felt too shy to get too intimate, so she simply brushed her lips gently against his—
Completely without desire, yet full of deep affection, as if it would overflow the next second. She felt that her love for him had reached an unprecedented peak at this moment, five years after they had first met.
Bei Jiao obediently let her hold him and kiss him for a while. A few minutes later, when the elderly ladies looked over, one of them happily said, “Young people are so romantic,” she finally snapped back to reality…
Her face flushed red as she let go of him, only then realizing he was still on one knee.
She hurriedly pulled him up, even bending down to pat the dust off his knees with her own hands—
As she did, her eyes couldn’t help but follow the sparkle of the ring on her finger, as if her heart had been taken out and hung on one of the sapphires on this ring.
“Let’s go to the civil affairs bureau tomorrow morning!” she said. “I can get up early for you just this once!”
As another flock of white doves that hadn’t returned home yet circled back and landed on the branches of the church, Bei Jiao walked behind her, pushing her wheelchair and reminding her, “You have surgery the day after tomorrow. Let’s talk about this after the operation.”
“?”
After the surgery, she would have to stay in bed for at least a week without leaving the ward.
Jiang Ran turned around and glared at him, as if he were the biggest criminal preventing her from getting married.
Bei Jiao, under her glare, let out a soft chuckle: “Now you suddenly want to get married so badly? This afternoon when I carried you into the car, you looked like a piglet heading to the slaughterhouse.”
Mocked so openly, Jiang Ran twitched her lips but couldn’t come up with a rebuttal—
She admitted she was a bit twisted. The joy of getting money spent on her by a stingy man was ten times greater than the joy of using her own credit card…
So much so that she had now lost her senses and thought getting married wasn’t so scary anymore.
Her mood was actually quite good now. After glaring at him for a few seconds, she stopped, turned her head back, and said in a roundabout way, “I’m really excited right now. Maybe after a few days when I calm down, I’ll go back to that sulky face again.”
In a few days, those tens of thousands of yuan spent on the ring might just vanish into thin air!
“What? Are you threatening me?”
Bei Jiao’s voice still carried a smile, sounding completely unthreatened.
“No, what’s there to threaten you about.”
She refused to admit it.
After a two-second pause, she added, “Well, maybe it is a threat. What if I run away?”
“Where to?”
“The world is so big, I should see more of it—and besides marrying me, you don’t have any other Plan B, do you?” Jiang Ran kicked the wheelchair slightly with her good leg, paused, then asked, “Do you?”
Actually, he didn’t.
“What do you think?” he countered, “Is there anything I do that’s not under your watchful eye?”
Jiang Ran smirked slightly, still trying to argue, “What about when you were in Chongli—”
“Weren’t you secretly watching my short video account the whole time?”
Since he discovered she had been secretly stalking his page, his update frequency had even increased.
“What? I didn’t.”
“You accidentally liked one of my posts, my dear ancestor.”
“…”
Jiang Ran was silent for a few seconds, unable to believe she had been so foolish. She immediately took out her phone to check Bei Jiao’s videos and confirmed that on a certain day at noon a year ago, he had posted a video that she had indeed liked—
At that time, they were still in a state of no contact and no intention of ever reconciling.
She must have just woken up that day, opened the short video app, and the system automatically recommended Bei Jiao’s latest update. Drowsy and groggy, she thought the person danced well and casually gave a like.
…Actually, it could still be explained as pure appreciation; she hadn’t even looked clearly at who the person was when she liked the post.
But Bei Jiao didn’t give her any room to escape.
“I posted the video at 12:30 PM, and you liked it at 12:45 PM.”
If someone opens the short video app and within a few scrolls immediately sees the latest update from a certain UP (not followed) posted just ten minutes ago, there’s only one possible explanation: the recommendation algorithm believes you are a loyal fan who has visited the UP’s homepage multiple times daily.
The air grew silent, and for some reason, the person pushing her wheelchair now seemed oddly proud.
Jiang Ran felt humiliated: “I was just suspicious that you had stolen my tutorial and posted it yourself, so I checked your page—”
Bei Jiao “oh’d”: “I kept posting just to make you notice that. Didn’t you realize that whenever you posted a tutorial, I practiced exactly what you showed?”
…She had noticed.
And while secretly enjoying this follower-like behavior, she had scolded him at the same time.
“Why do you have so many antics?”
“Nothing much. Just consider it homework,” he said. “Isn’t your instructor’s tutorial video meant for me to watch?”
Jiang Ran wanted to scold him for having a face as big as a basin, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. If the first nollie 360° was posted for the general public, then her subsequent 540°, switch tricks, 180° followed by another 180°, and even the 720° were all posted only after she saw that he had mastered a particular move on his page—
Exactly like homework.
She fell into a gloomy silence.
“Push faster, I’m tired,” she said.
It was only 9:10 PM.
She was the kind of person who occasionally went to sleep at 9:10 AM.
“We’re almost there.”
He kindly refrained from exposing her.
…
By 9:30 PM, the hospital was mostly empty, with only one visitor allowed per bed. The doctors had already gone home, some of the corridor lights were turned off, and the nurses at the station were whispering to each other.
Considering she had surgery the next morning and needed to sleep early the next day, Jiang Ran requested a shower after returning to her room.
For the past few days, a nurse had been helping her wipe her body. Although she had been changing clothes and didn’t feel sticky or uncomfortable, she hadn’t been able to wash her hair, which made her feel like her head was heavy.
So they tried to be as quiet as possible, but still ended up being the most active room at the moment.
Sitting on the wheelchair, Jiang Ran directed him to wash her hair. That’s when she realized his attention to detail wasn’t all-encompassing. When it came to taking care of someone, he was practically clumsy—
At least a few times he pulled her hair, making her cry out in pain.
The last time, Jiang Ran was already annoyed and patted his hand: “If you keep this up, you might break my other leg while giving me a bath.”
She said it offhandedly, but the person standing behind her fell silent. A few seconds later, he asked, “You still want to take a bath?”
Jiang Ran looked confused and asked, “Can’t I? The doctor didn’t say I couldn’t. Just keep my left leg out of the water.”
Well, technically, it wasn’t impossible.
The private hospital room even had a bathroom with a heating lamp, enough for her to sit on a chair, slowly take off her clothes without touching any injured areas.
Jiang Ran unhooked her bra, sincerely contemplating how to take off her underwear while sitting without touching her wounds. She didn’t realize that under the bright light of the heating lamp, the skin exposed to the air had silently developed goosebumps—
And this small reaction seemed to make her skin, white as congealed fat, come alive.
The warmth from the heating lamp rose, and the disinfectant smell in the bathroom couldn’t mask her fragrance—
She was very particular. Every time after bathing or washing her hands, she used body lotion and hand cream. In the past few years, she had always used a specific scent—summer had one fragrance, and winter another—so her body had absorbed the scent quite deeply.
The high heat from the heating lamp accelerated the scent, and the entire bathroom was filled with her sweet aroma—
Probably already the middle and base notes of the fragrance. The initial bitter orange sweetness had burst out upon contact with the air and gradually dissipated.
What lingered in the air was the blooming of seductive water lilies, the aquatic notes gently drowning all the prey about to be hunted.
Finally, the heart-pounding, chest-tightening musk spread out.
“Go get me a pair of scissors,” Jiang Ran ordered Bei Jiao. “It’s hard to take it off while sitting. At least today’s underwear isn’t expensive.”
After she spoke, the person in front of her withdrew his gaze fixed on her neck and walked out.
When he came back, he indeed brought a pair of scissors, cutting off the last piece of cloth covering her modesty.
Jiang Ran lifted one side of her butt to let him move the fabric away, and was about to ask him to turn on the water, but she noticed he was staring silently at a certain spot—
Only then did she realize he hadn’t spoken for nearly ten minutes.
Following his gaze downward, she blushed belatedly and reached out to cover herself: “What are you staring at? It’s not like you haven’t seen it before.”
Most of the time, because Jiang Ran’s sense of shame was easily triggered, they usually did things under dim lighting… As for looking at her like this under bright lights up close, this was indeed one of the rare occasions.
The beauty of it was that Jiang Ran had always been a very self-centered person, so today’s focus was entirely on whether she could successfully take a bath, and for a moment, she had forgotten about her own sense of shame.
Now that she realized it, it was already too late. He turned to take down the showerhead, came back, and turned on the hot water to adjust the temperature. She sat on the fixed chair, unable to help glancing at his lower body.
He was testing the water temperature with his hand, now sideways to her, the ring on his hand flashing cold metallic luster under the heating lamp.
His voice, however, was even colder than the metal of the ring: “Look away. Don’t stare.”
As if he had eyes on the back of his head.
Jiang Ran nonchalantly shifted her gaze, pretending she hadn’t been looking at all.
After adjusting the water temperature, he turned off the water first, went out for a while, and somehow managed to get some plastic wrap, wrapping the wounds that couldn’t get wet.
She lifted her leg for him to wrap, and to her embarrassment, the wound was near her thigh, so his fingertips unavoidably brushed against the soft skin on the inside of her leg—
At first, Jiang Ran felt a little ticklish and hummed a bit.
As she hummed happily, she noticed his wrapping motion paused. She looked down curiously and found his breathing had become somewhat heavy.
Looking closer, she saw that under his gray sweatpants, a bulge was forming, and even the front of the light gray sweatpants had a dark gray wet spot.
At first, she sincerely thought it was water from testing the water temperature, but now she suddenly realized—if it had been water splashed there when testing the water temperature, he wouldn’t have walked out of the bathroom to get the plastic wrap…
Her heartbeat quickened.
As she realized what was happening to him, her gaze swept over his restrained, slightly furrowed eyelashes. Jiang Ran silently swallowed her saliva, and her body instinctively reacted in unison with his.
“Are you an animal?” Jiang Ran asked. “I’m still limping, and you still–“
Beijiao originally wanted to say nothing, but provoked like this, he couldn’t hold back anymore.
He made a soft “Oh,” and in the midst of her abrupt scream, his fingers swiftly brushed through.
“So what’s this?”
He raised his hand for her to see his fingertips. Under the bright bathroom light, they glistened with moisture.
Jiang Ran couldn’t bring herself to say it was because she had reacted instinctively after glancing at him for too long. She lightly kicked him, her ear tips flushed red, and turned her head away.
“Take a shower,” she said. “Don’t fool around.”
He stood up, took off his shirt, and turned the shower back on, his bare torso exposed.
…
Staring at the bathroom ceiling, Jiang Ran felt that if she had become as fierce as a tiger before thirty, she might have done so even earlier in her youth.
Beijiao didn’t touch her. Instead, with his own nearly unbearable arousal, he served her with unprecedented care and patience.
She experienced pleasure twice—
The first time, she transitioned from an initial, shame-fueled refusal to half-hearted resistance, finally only able to lean back helplessly against the chair back, nearly dying beneath his tongue.
The second time originated from the aftermath of the first. At that time, her head was spinning, her whole body covered in bubbles. Amidst the misty water vapor, she could only vaguely see droplets sliding down his clearly defined muscles—
She couldn’t tell whether it was water or his sweat.
He ended up pulling off his pants too and took a shower. Before showering, he bit her neck, taking care of his own needs.
Jiang Ran’s hands weren’t too well-behaved either, playing with his lips. When she pulled her fingers from his mouth, they felt like they were melting. Her eyes and nose were flushed red, her mind filled with his deep, close breathing. At that moment, surprisingly, without even touching her, she reached her second climax on her own.
Jiang Ran was completely drained of energy.
She lazily stared at her fingers, now freed, thinking how considerate he still was at not biting her—they bore no tooth marks at all…
Only the lingering sensation of his tongue swirling around her fingertips remained.
She spoke her thoughts aloud.
When Beijiao wrapped her in a towel and carried her to bed, she blocked his shoulders: “It must be because it’s your own thing that you don’t dare damage it. You used to bite me much harder before.”
Upon hearing this, Beijiao chuckled lowly, not even asking her specifically which instance she meant.
…
Beijiao had never been particularly curious, but Jiang Ran was different.
After the shower, she felt much more relaxed and was wide awake in bed. She hugged his waist and asked if he had started scheming for her back when he was still his master’s apprentice.
Since today marked a new stage in their relationship, she couldn’t help wanting to reminisce with him.
Beijiao thought for a moment. Just as she assumed he was choosing his words to deny or laugh at her fanciful imagination and overconfidence, he instead said, “A bit earlier than that.”
His voice was low and husky, filled with intense desire.
Clearly, the brief relief in the bathroom had only been a temporary solution.
Jiang Ran’s thoughts couldn’t keep up with his physical needs at this moment. Stunned by his words, she asked, “Earlier?”
“Do you remember that small, shabby congee restaurant where we first formally met?” He gently stroked her hair. “You probably don’t remember.”
“…No.”
She did remember.
An hour ago, she had even teared up recalling that day—don’t you think that’s why I suddenly started crying?
Jiang Ran was somewhat surprised he remembered that day too.
“I watched the daughter of my mother’s boyfriend walk in so brazenly, approaching me fearlessly with such innocent audacity, asking me to warm a bowl for her…”
Beijiao chuckled softly, burying his face into the crook of her neck. “At the time, I thought, this young lady must be out of her mind—naive and reckless.”
Tickled by his nuzzling, Jiang Ran felt embarrassed again at the mention of warming the bowl. She wanted him to stop but couldn’t resist the urge to keep listening.
“I warmed the bowl for her,” Beijiao continued slowly. “But then she wouldn’t let go, tugging at my pants, acting all sweet, asking me to not be so mean and giving her chili sauce.”
Scorpio’s memory always fixated on strange details. They held grudges and remembered odd little things, like chili sauce.
Jiang Ran began regretting bringing up the topic. She hesitated before asking, “At that time—”
“You smelled like pepper sprinkled on milk.”
Intense, pungent spices, beneath which surged pure sweetness and innocence.
Under the scorching summer sun, no male creature could resist such temptation. It stirred desires to overturn everything—
To smash the milk cup on the ground, watching the pure white milk spill and mix with the humble, dirty dust on the floor.
“That was the first time I had a physical reaction to you,” his voice was calm. “You probably didn’t know that when I told you to stay away from me, I was actually giving you a sincere and kind warning.”
Between men and women, it always comes down to that one thing.
No matter how much you refuse to admit it or find it vulgar, the attraction caused by hormonal surges always takes precedence… All those notions like sudden heartbeats or love at first sight are merely primitive, savage impulses later masked by romantic words.
In her complete silence, he chuckled softly.
“After you left that day, I went back to the dorm and changed pants.”
His fingers stroked her long hair, unashamed of his initial, dog-like thoughts—
Beneath jealousy and dislike, grew an unforgettable fixation.
Wanting to invade.
Wanting to possess.
Wanting to defile.
But later, things changed. The cup full of milk was no longer something he wanted to smash into pieces, only to gather the fragments later for possession…
Instead, he wanted to lift it up and place it on the safest, highest pedestal he could find.
He reined in all his dark and obsessive thoughts, even willing to arm himself fully, standing guard beside everything he wanted to protect.
He had once been a despicable stray dog wandering alleyways, but later, he completed his own domestication.
Tai Sui Yellow Amulet Paper FuLu Taoist Love Talisman Traditional Chinese Spiritual Charm Attracting Love Protecting Marriage