Ruan Yan dreamed throughout that sleep.
It was as though he lay not on the hard boards of his school dormitory bed but on the soft mattress at home. He rolled over and Jiang Tingnan gathered him into his arms, kisses falling thick and close from his forehead to the corner of his mouth, until Ruan Yan couldn’t take any more and pushed him off.
Jiang Tingnan seemed to have evolved sleep away entirely. Every day it was either doing Yan Yan or doing work, and many a time Ruan Yan woke to find Jiang Tingnan sitting there with his laptop answering emails.
Ruan Yan rested his head on Jiang Tingnan’s shoulder, nuzzling restlessly. “President Jiang, are other people’s CEOs as much of a workaholic as you?”
Jiang Tingnan frowned. “Other people’s, whose? What are you doing watching other people’s men? Is your own man not enough to look at?”
Ruan Yan, “……”
However charged the atmosphere had been, Jiang Tingnan had wrecked it. Ruan Yan suppressed the urge to kick him off the bed and turned over, sliding down into the covers.
Never mind. It really was better when Jiang Tingnan said nothing.
But Jiang Tingnan wasn’t having that, and hauled Ruan Yan back out, tipping his chin up to kiss him, mumbling between kisses, “Wife, who exactly were you talking about?”
Who?!!
He hadn’t said anything at all!!
Did Jiang Tingnan’s ears actually bend things around corners!!
The man was short on words. He lifted Ruan Yan out of the covers and set about kissing him, and though Ruan Yan fully intended to speak, Jiang Tingnan soon kissed him weak in the waist and legs, and then his trousers were being stripped off him, and before long he couldn’t manage a complete sentence at all.
Ruan Yan had no idea why he would dream a thing like that.
Opening his eyes to a gray white ceiling, he was still dazed, the rough kisses from the dream seeming to linger between his lips and teeth.
He drew a couple of breaths and turned his head, only to find Jiang Tingnan lying right there at the edge of the bed. The bed being too small, his body was half propped up, one hand supporting his forehead, apparently not deeply asleep.
Ruan Yan kicked him.
Jiang Tingnan, half asleep, was abruptly kicked onto the floor. He sat blinking for a few seconds before climbing up. “Baby?”
Ruan Yan sat on the bed with his arms folded, regarding Jiang Tingnan without any goodwill. “I’ve decided you’re a completely baffling person.”
Jiang Tingnan, “…… me?”
He was rather baffled himself, having no idea why he’d suddenly been kicked.
“I never mentioned any other man. If you want to do it, then do it, why do you always come up with so many excuses.”
Jiang Tingnan frowned. “What other man? You dreamed about another man?”
Ruan Yan furiously hurled the pillow at him.
Jiang Tingnan didn’t dodge, and the pillow caught him squarely on the head. Just then the dormitory door opened and a roommate came back with food, one foot already over the threshold. He froze at the scene, unsure whether he ought to come in.
Before he’d left, Ruan Yan had been smiling so gently, saying he’d make his husband’s bed, and the roommate had thought at the time that although Jiang Tingnan had got himself a male wife, the wife was surprisingly domestic.
Who could have guessed that in half an hour the gentle and sweet one would be violently remodeled into a little chili pepper.
Ruan Yan awkwardly withdrew his hand, greeted the roommate and squeezed out a smile. “Oh dear, husband, the pillow’s fallen. Go and pick it up, would you.”
Jiang Tingnan obediently picked the pillow up and held it out. “Do you want to hit me again, baby?”
The smile froze on Ruan Yan’s face.
He was doing it on purpose!
Jiang Tingnan was sabotaging him on purpose!!
Aaargh, he really did want to pull every hair off Jiang Tingnan’s head!!
He forced a few words out through his teeth. “Husband, what are you talking about. There’s dust on the pillow. I asked you to dust it off.”
The roommate withdrew the foot he’d got through the door after all, and smiled. “You two carry on. The canteen auntie’s getting married, I’m off to give a gift. Bye.”
The door shut with a bang.
The room fell quiet again.
Ruan Yan glared viciously at Jiang Tingnan.
To this moment Jiang Tingnan still had no idea where he’d gone wrong with his wife.
He said quietly, “Are you still angry, baby?”
Ruan Yan planted a foot high on Jiang Tingnan’s thigh and ordered imperiously, “Put my shoes on for me.”
Jiang Tingnan bent down, took Ruan Yan’s ankle in one hand and lowered his head to put his wife’s shoes on.
Ruan Yan was still muttering away. “Your roommate saw all of that. I finally manage to keep up a decent image and it’s ruined. Your roommate probably thinks I’m some kind of raging lunatic, the sort who beats his husband daily.”
Once the shoes were on, Jiang Tingnan lifted him up. Ruan Yan’s cheeks were flushed from sleep, and Jiang Tingnan couldn’t help leaning in for several kisses in a row, saying quietly, “Why care what anyone else thinks. It’s enough that I know you aren’t.”
“I know. Baby is so good and so obedient.”
“There’s nobody better than baby.”
Ruan Yan couldn’t quite bear to listen to any more. “Husband, I think your filter on me might be a little heavy. I hit you all the time, you know.”
Jiang Tingnan kissed his palm. “But you only hit me. You don’t hit anyone else.”
Ruan Yan, “……”
If he hit anyone else they’d call the police and have him hauled away.
He felt a twinge of guilt. Jiang Tingnan had love-brain to start with, and got KFC’d by him every day on top of that. Now it was hopeless, his head worked even less well than before.
Ruan Yan had Jiang Tingnan fetch his backpack and dug two shopping bags out of it. “Clothes I bought you at the mall. Try them on.”
Jiang Tingnan frowned. “What are you buying me things for, I don’t need any. Go and return them, buy something you like instead.”
“I cut the tags off. They can’t be returned.”
Ruan Yan held the clothes up against him, brooking no argument. “They fit you quite well. Put them on and let’s see. Don’t you have that business meeting this afternoon?”
“Deals aren’t judged on clothes.”
“Of course they are. If you’re badly dressed people will look down on you.” Ruan Yan knew exactly when to turn on the charm, wrapping his arms around Jiang Tingnan’s waist and whining at him. “Just wear them. Your wife buys you clothes and you won’t even put them on. President Jiang is very grand, isn’t he.”
Jiang Tingnan had no choice but to do as he was told and change. Ruan Yan propped his chin in his hand to look, and nodded, thoroughly satisfied. “I have quite the eye.”
Jiang Tingnan had a good build and a good face, a proper model’s frame. Ruan Yan poked his chest. “Why does this go soft and hard by turns.”
Jiang Tingnan coughed. “Don’t poke it like that. In its natural state it’s soft.”
Ruan Yan looked up at him. “Same as down below, then?”
Jiang Tingnan had nothing to say to that, and reached out to pinch his cheek.
Ruan Yan pressed closer and laid his cheek against Jiang Tingnan’s chest. “Husband, don’t you want to know what I dreamed about just now?”
Jiang Tingnan’s eyelid twitched, instinct telling him nothing decent was about to come out of Ruan Yan’s mouth.
Sure enough, Ruan Yan touched his own lips. “I dreamed you were kissing me, so fiercely, and while you kissed me you were tearing my clothes……”
Jiang Tingnan didn’t dare hear any more and quickly clapped a hand over his wife’s mouth.
He rasped, “Good baby, I have to go out shortly.”
He couldn’t withstand the slightest provocation now. Ruan Yan had only to squirm against him for Jiang Tingnan to feel he was about to go off.
“All right.”
Ruan Yan let him go, perfectly agreeable about it. “Will you be drinking tonight?”
Jiang Tingnan shook his head. “No.”
Ruan Yan spoke very considerately. “It’s fine if you do. It’s business, after all, a bit of drinking, a bit of smoking, it isn’t as though I don’t understand. Those clubs you all go to, with the pretty young men pouring your drinks, isn’t that right?”
Jiang Tingnan’s scalp prickled to hear it. “No. Wife, I never have. They know my temper, nobody would dare.”
And indeed nobody would dare.
Even before marrying Ruan Yan, Jiang Tingnan had kept himself scrupulously chaste, never having a male or female companion at his side.
After the marriage, even more so. But business made those venues unavoidable, and once a young man’s perfume was so strong that some of it clung to Jiang Tingnan. Having been drinking, he hadn’t noticed, and Ruan Yan smelled it when he came home.
To call that night an apocalypse would be no exaggeration.
Ordinarily Ruan Yan would squabble and bicker with Jiang Tingnan and often even hit him, but that night Jiang Tingnan learned that when Ruan Yan was truly hurt, he wouldn’t say another word, only quietly look at you, tears falling from his eyes.
His eyes were rimmed red, and the tears fell one after another.
What fell seemed not to be tears but boulders weighing ten million jin, and what they struck was not the floor but Jiang Tingnan’s heart.
He said only one thing. “Jiang Tingnan, if you don’t want this anymore, we can get divorced.”
Jiang Tingnan sat on the sofa making call after call, having the club owner pull the security footage, and every last young man who had set foot in that private room that night, every single one, was summoned.
“I never laid a finger on anyone.” Jiang Tingnan said it one word at a time. “The smell on my clothes was my own carelessness. Yan Yan, there won’t be a next time.”
Jiang Tingnan was as good as his word. From then on he never set foot in such a place for business again, and since his word was final, his partners simply had to accommodate President Jiang.
He had genuinely been frightened.
In the moment he heard the word divorce come out of Ruan Yan’s mouth.
Jiang Tingnan had felt himself shaking.
“Why so serious, I was joking.”
Ruan Yan grinned, rose onto his toes and kissed Jiang Tingnan’s chin.
Jiang Tingnan naturally wrapped an arm around Ruan Yan’s waist, lowered his head, and deepened the kiss by degrees.
Toward evening, Jiang Tingnan left by bus.
Ruan Yan had wanted him to take a taxi, but Jiang Tingnan wouldn’t have it, saying there was time enough.
In truth he was thinking that the money saved would buy Ruan Yan a bottle of soda.
And Ruan Yan, back at school, didn’t return to the dormitory either, but went to the logistics department and filled out a work-study form.
The teacher in the logistics department, seeing what a sweet face Ruan Yan had, spared him a few extra words. “The library post is the best one. The pay isn’t high but the work is easy. A position should open up next week, and I’ll get in touch with you then.”
Ruan Yan’s eyes curved and he said very obediently, “Thank you, teacher!”
Han Qiu had come along to register with him, and asked curiously, “Doesn’t that child bridegroom of yours give you money? Why are you taking a job as well?”
“To take a bit of the load off him.”
Ruan Yan said it as the most natural thing in the world. “When he had money, I spent his money. So now that he has hardship to endure, of course I’m going to endure it with him. He’s my husband.”
Han Qiu was taken aback.
The first time he’d laid eyes on Ruan Yan, he’d taken him for nothing more than a delicate boy spoiled rotten by his husband, and had never expected words like these out of him.
He said with genuine feeling, “You two really do have a good relationship.”
“Naturally.” Ruan Yan smiled brightly.
“My husband loves me very much.”