Ying Qiuman opened and closed his mouth for a long while. He didn’t know whether his guess was right, and he was afraid that if he’d guessed wrong he’d come off like a startled bird [1] jumping at the slightest thing jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2638893_1_1').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2638893_1_1', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], });, so he lied: “I… wanted to kiss you.”
The moment he said it, his ears went red. With nowhere to hide, Ying Qiuman simply shut his eyes in the end.
Xu Shuyuan watched him with a smile, tilting his head to kiss a path from his reddened earlobe to his tightly shut eyes.
“The people you asked me to look into yesterdayI found them,” Xu Shuyuan murmured softly. At that, Ying Qiuman immediately opened his eyes and looked up. “Didn’t you say—”
The moment he started speaking, Xu Shuyuan sealed his words off again.
Finally getting a chance to breathe, Ying Qiuman turned his face aside and asked, “Didn’t you say yesterday you couldn’t look into it?”
Xu Shuyuan straightened his clothes for him and answered with a slightly smug tone, “Sometimes I can still show off a little.”
“Am I impressive?” Xu Shuyuan fished for praise. Ying Qiuman nodded, then felt that wasn’t enough, so he turned back to face him directly and praised him properly: “Very impressive.”
Xu Shuyuan smiled and gave him a light bite, asking indistinctly, “Should I send it to your phone?”
“Don’t!” Ying Qiuman answered at once, his feelings showing on his face which Xu Shuyuan caught instantly. He drew back slightly, his gaze fixed on Ying Qiuman’s face without wavering for even a moment.
Everything Ying Qiuman had deliberately concealed was now laid bare. Yet Xu Shuyuan still pinched his chin, smiling warm as a spring breeze, quietly waiting for him to explain.
If his guess was right, then this matter, together with what Qiu Yuan had said, would become dangerous. And on Ye Li’s side, it looked all the more as though he was unwilling to talk to him.
Looked at this way, Xu Shuyuan really was the only person he could talk to.
“If you had a child, but you didn’t like him very much…”
Ying Qiuman paused, as if working out how to go on. Xu Shuyuan’s expression tightened. He wanted to promise that he would never do such a thing, but Ying Qiuman’s reaction seemed off, so the strength in his arms increased and he held him tighter.
“If you raised him somewhere far away from yourself, would you still send people to secretly watch him?” Ying Qiuman was trying to confirm the answer in his own heart.
Xu Shuyuan gazed into his eyes. As for the “child” Ying Qiuman spoke of, he knew it meant Ying Qiuman himself. But surveillance was a strange wordnormally no one would describe raising or caring for a child as keeping it under watch.
His expression turned somewhat grave as he told Ying Qiuman firmly, “Whether you like the child or not, surveillance is not something that should ever be done to a child.”
Ying Qiuman blinked, feeling he might not have made himself clear, and added, “What if… what if you found that he’d suddenly become useful? Would you arrange for people to track his movements?”
By now his meaning was already very plain. Xu Shuyuan’s gaze shifted slightly. He let go of him and pushed him a little farther away so he could stand properly on his own, then answered in an extremely serious, formal tone:
“That would be very contradictory, Manman. If I didn’t like the child, then no matter how useful he became, I wouldn’t bother with him.”
“Likewise, if I suddenly decided the child was useful, I’d only try every means to bring him to my side, rather than send people to watch him. That wastes both time and effort, not something a smart person would do.”
From Xu Shuyuan’s point of view, Ying Qiuman’s guess was far too strange, even impossible.
But the reason Ying Qiuman had asked him was that he saw Xu Shuyuan as a businessman too. Businessmen might think along similar lines, so he wanted to use Xu Shuyuan’s reasoning to guess at Ying Kangcheng’s true intentions.
Xu Shuyuan could see his doubts, yet Ying Qiuman still wouldn’t tell him the whole story. Xu Shuyuan gently cupped Ying Qiuman’s face and softly coaxed him, “Manman, can you try trusting me a little?”
Try trusting him. Tell him everything. Give him a chance to help.
From the moment Ying Qiuman asked the question, he had already begun to waver. He just hadn’t known how to voice his suspicions. After hearing Xu Shuyuan say that, it felt as though a stone in his heart finally dropped, cracking it open, and a spring called trust began steadily flowing toward Xu Shuyuan.
“I’ve never even met him, but yesterday when I went to Lihe to save Ye Li, his reaction was too fast. It felt wrong to me.”
This “him” meant Ying Kangcheng. From the moment Ye Li’s call for help came in to when Ying Qiuman rushed to the hotel and found him, no more than two hours or so had passed. Yet a floor supervisor at the entertainment hall, who was supposed to have seen him before, had suddenly recognized him all over again it was hard not to be suspicious.
At first Ying Qiuman had thought someone around him was watching him. But because he was sensitive to electronic devices, the timing of last night’s two phone calls also felt far too coincidental. That was why he’d wanted to ask Xu Shuyuan what he thought today.
If watching someone with people on the ground wasted time and manpower, then planting a bug or invisible monitoring software would be far easier. They’d only need to track keywords, and the moment he tripped one, the other side could react at once.
Ying Qiuman really was sensitive and insecure. On top of that, he already knew how his character’s story ended, so every unusual thing around him left him as jumpy as a startled bird.
Seeing Xu Shuyuan just looking at him like that nothing but concern, not the reaction he’d expected, the long silence made Ying Qiuman feel that the worried expression actually meant Xu Shuyuan thought he was overreacting.
“Am I being too sensitive?” Ying Qiuman unconsciously lowered his head to avoid Xu Shuyuan’s gaze.
He started to feel uncomfortable, even a little regretful that he’d suddenly blurted all this out that he thought he might be under someone else’s surveillance.
Anxiety began to spread, forcing the spring of trust back down.
Yet in the next second, Xu Shuyuan suddenly hugged him, his palm resting on the back of his head as he gently soothed him. “Being sensitive isn’t a bad thing. You don’t need to be afraid. Let’s solve it together, all right?”
The retreating spring abruptly halted. Then it felt as though heaven and earth had turned over, the center of gravity of the lake in his heart shifting, pouring downward with all its force and playing a world-shaking melody.
When Ying Qiuman lifted his eyes to Xu Shuyuan, there was an indescribable panic in them but this time it wasn’t because he found the turbulence and strange reactions in his heart hard to handle. It was the joy of a mermaid setting foot on land for the very first time.
“So, have you noticed any strange people around you?” Through the emotions in those eyes, Xu Shuyuan knew he had won Ying Qiuman’s trust.
Ying Qiuman shook his head, lit up by this sudden happiness. “Probably not a person. It’s… the phone.”
In the end, he suspected some kind of bug or monitoring software.
That phone had been sent over by Ying Kangcheng after the original owner degraded. A tablet and a computer had come with it too, but Ying Qiuman had found the latter two not much use during his senior-year review period, so they’d been left at the Li family home the whole time.
And because the phone still mysteriously kept Qiu Yuan’s account, he had gone on using it without switching. But now this was what he suspected most. In fact, he needed only the tiniest bit of proof to confirm that Ying Kangcheng was monitoring him.
For now, though, he couldn’t act rashly. He still didn’t know why Ying Kangcheng was watching him like this.
When Ying Qiuman finished speaking, Xu Shuyuan looked at him and smiled. His hand moved from the back of Ying Qiuman’s head to his cheek, thumb and forefinger pinching the soft flesh of his face, while his half-lidded eyes suddenly gave off a dangerous signal.
“So the reason you were being so proactive just now was that you wanted to use me to leave your clothes and your phone outside?”
Ying Qiuman didn’t catch the meaning behind Xu Shuyuan’s subtle expression. Having been guessed correctly, he admitted it honestly. “Mm. I’d originally wanted to leave it in the car…”
Oh so that was why he’d already been unusually proactive in the car.
Xu Shuyuan pressed his tongue against the inside of his cheek, his smile deepening. His hand slid downward, abruptly hauling the other man flush against himself.
“Next time, don’t tease me like this, all right? You can just tell me directly what you want to do,” Xu Shuyuan said in a low voice.
But Ying Qiuman didn’t agree with the word “tease.” He simply felt the method was natural. If he really was being monitored, then this way would rouse the least suspicion.
“I wasn’t— mmph.” Ying Qiuman’s lips were bitten, his voice breaking apart in his breathing.
After lunch, Ying Qiuman dragged Xu Shuyuan into rewatching Circle, and shared the whole process of how he’d cracked its puzzle along the way. But when he mentioned it was Qiu Yuan who had tipped him off, Xu Shuyuan still frowned almost imperceptibly, though he kept up a calm front and merely answered with an “Oh.”
Ying Qiuman decided Ling Yi had really had him pegged he got angry especially easily.
He was grateful his own temper was good. Everyone praised him for being emotionally steady, like a capybara.
Earlier, when Xu Shuyuan had teased him into getting angry, he’d received only a light smack, and it had landed merely on his fingertips. Now, though, using the cover of the movie, he studied the especially focused look on Ying Qiuman’s face during the tense, thrilling scenes.
A little devil’s trumpet sounded in his heart.
On the screen was a tense moment of chasing down the killer a pursuit that wound through narrow, twisting alleyways.
Ying Qiuman watched intently. Although he already knew this part of the plot by heart, the moment the killer was caught and his mask torn off was a scene he could never look away from, no matter how many times he watched it. And the subtle micro-expressions of the detective played by Ling Yi at this instant were also worth savoring carefully.
Yet even during such a famous scene, Ying Qiuman could clearly feel the small movements of the person beside him. The hand around his arm quietly slid backward, tracing down one side of his spine, and then, at the very instant the gunshot rang out, Xu Shuyuan buried his head in the crook of his neck and shoulder.
If Xu Shuyuan had merely been startled, Ying Qiuman wouldn’t have reacted much. He’d long since grown used to all kinds of intimate moves from Xu Shuyuan, and would even clumsily guide him during his skin-hunger episodes in order to ask for more.
But this time Xu Shuyuan wasn’t actually frightened. He was simply seizing the chance to kiss his gland.
When the warm, wet tip of his tongue swept over it, Ying Qiuman felt as though a current had run through his whole body, and his shoulders tensed upward without his meaning them to.
Xu Shuyuan pressed on his shoulders, easing them back down. For a moment, Ying Qiuman’s embarrassment overwhelmed his reason, and he raised a hand to shove him away.
The force of his reflexive movement was actually quite strong but he missed. Xu Shuyuan suddenly drew back and steadied himself. By the time Ying Qiuman looked over, he was already sitting there upright and proper, the picture of composure.
“…”
Was he being a little too clingy? That had just been the movie’s iconic scene!
Ying Qiuman was the type who could only sulk in silence. Seeing that Xu Shuyuan didn’t seem to react much, he turned his face back to the movie. The detective’s face on the screen only sharpened the embarrassment and guilt inside him.
Speechless.
After the movie ended, Ying Qiuman had meant to go over those clues with Xu Shuyuan again, but he was no longer in the mood. He gathered up his things and, without a word, slipped into the bedroom, shutting Xu Shuyuan out.
He was angry, but apart from working through it himself on the inside, he had no way to get back at him.
Ying Qiuman looked at the smart cabinet beside the bed and lifted his foot to kick it. In the very next second, however, the cabinet intelligently popped out an item, making the heat on his face all the more obvious.
Hearing the noise from beyond the door, Xu Shuyuan couldn’t help laughing, but he didn’t go open the door and call him out. Instead he went off to play the virtuous husband and father, picking up the clothes scattered on the floor and tossing them into the washing machine.
Ying Qiuman had worn that overcoat back home, and his phone was in the pocket. Xu Shuyuan took out the phone and stared at it for a while when, all at once, a wicked idea came to him.
Since they already suspected the phone was being monitored, what if he pretended not to notice and threw it into the washing machine?
It looked like a model from several years ago anyway. He could just go out afterward and buy Manman a new one outright.
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