I woke up facing the wall.
The other side of the bed was untouched. The pillow still held its neat shape. The blanket lay smooth and cold. Wen Xiao had not come in at all.
It did not surprise me. After the way the previous night ended, the empty space felt almost expected. I sat up slowly. My cheek no longer hurt, but the memory of the slap remained. The mark on my neck had darkened overnight. I covered it with my collar before I left the bedroom.
The living room was quiet. I stepped into the kitchen and stopped.
Breakfast sat on the table. A covered plate, a glass of water, a pair of chopsticks placed neatly beside them. No note. No sign of the person who had prepared it. The apartment felt hollow without her presence.
I sat down anyway.
The food had gone cold. I ate it in silence, chewing without tasting much. When I finished I washed the plate and left it to dry. The ordinary action felt strange in the empty space.
I left for university alone.
The entire day passed without a single glimpse of her. I told myself I was glad. Between classes I found myself scanning the paths between buildings. During lunch I glanced toward the tables where basketball players sometimes sat. After my last lecture I walked all the way to the courts and stood at the edge of the fence. The court was empty. The bleachers held only a few scattered students who had nothing to do with her.
By late afternoon the realization settled in with uncomfortable clarity.
I had been looking for her since morning.
Every corridor, every open space, every familiar route had been checked with the same quiet hope that she might appear. The hope itself irritated me. I did not want to need the sight of her. I did not want the absence to feel so noticeable. Yet the day had stretched long and thin without a single moment of her presence, and I had noticed every hour of it. The source of this chapter is novelping dot com.
When I finally returned to the apartment the lights were off.
I switched them on one by one. The kitchen was clean. The living room held no discarded training bag or half-finished drink. The bedroom looked exactly as I had left it. Her shoes were not by the door.
Wen Xiao was not home.
I stood in the middle of the quiet space and listened to the ordinary sounds of the building around us. No key turned in the lock. No footsteps approached down the hallway. The silence continued.
I set my bag down, sat on the edge of the sofa, and waited without knowing what I was waiting for. The cold breakfast from that morning still sat in my memory. The empty court. The long day of not seeing her.
The apartment felt larger than it ever had before.
Hours passed. I tried to practice guitar on the terrace but the notes sounded flat and wrong. I abandoned the instrument and returned inside. I made tea and let it go cold. I opened a textbook and read the same page three times without absorbing a single sentence. Every small sound from the hallway outside made my head lift. Every time it was only a neighbor or the elevator doors closing again.
By ten o’clock the silence had become heavy. By half past ten I had stopped pretending I was not listening for her key. At eleven I was still sitting on the sofa with my phone in my hand, the screen dark, the time staring back at me.
The lock finally turned.
I stood up too quickly.
Wen Xiao stepped inside. Her face was flushed, a deep uneven red across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose. Her usually steady posture looked off, as if she needed the wall for balance. She closed the door behind her with more care than usual and leaned against it for a second before straightening. The source of this chapter is novelping.com.
“Where have you been?” I asked.
Her reply came slowly. The words sounded thicker than normal, dragged out between breaths.
“Tournament today.”
She took a few steps forward. Her bag slipped from her shoulder and hit the floor with a dull thud. She did not seem to notice. Another step. Then her knees simply gave out.
I watched her collapse onto the living room floor.
For a moment I could not move. The flushed skin, the weak voice, the way her body had simply stopped cooperating, all of it lined up at once. The heavy scent that had begun to fill the entryway reached me a second later, stronger than I had ever caught from her before.
Rut.
Wen Xiao was in rut.
I remained standing near the sofa, heart beating too hard, staring at the Alpha who had spent the entire day avoiding me only to fall unconscious at my feet.