The master bathroom of Ran Fan’s home had a double sink, spacious enough for two people to wash up side by side yet for Li Yang, it still felt a little cramped.
Here, he welcomed a new dawn.
Just as he was about to finish washing up, Ran Fan came in.
The two of them tacitly avoided mentioning anything about the night before. Ran Fan kept his head lowered, looking at the floor and said in a low, slightly awkward voice, “It’s a bit late. I have to go to work.”
Li Yang said, “I thought you were on holiday.”
“I am on holiday but something came up at the clinic. They need me to go over.”
“I’ll take you.”
They switched places, Ran Fan going in to wash up.
As soon as the sound of running water started, Ran Fan’s voice came again, a little hurried, as if explaining himself. “I’m not making excuses.”
Li Yang smiled faintly and did not respond.
Seeing how rigidly straight Ran Fan’s back was, Li Yang turned away and walked farther off.
After going several meters, he turned back again. Ran Fan was wearing a white shirt, already dressed in long trousers. His legs were slender and long, his waist bent slightly, his back facing Li Yang.
His skin was wrapped up completely, not a trace of its pearly pallor exposed. Though the color of his skin could not be seen, the lines of his body were still there, smooth and flowing like a string of soft musical notes.
During last night’s drunken tears and murmured confessions, whenever Ran Fan spoke of Jiang Wenyu, he could never avoid one word: young.
As though Jiang Wenyu was young, while Ran Fan himself had already been cast aside by time, worn down and faded.
Yet in Li Yang’s eyes, Ran Fan was also young. So young.
A supple body, brimming with vitality.
There were no other staff members at the pet hospital during the holiday. Ran Fan arrived just in time to open up and take duty.
Before the holiday, a batch of hospitalized animals had recovered and gone home. At the moment, there were no patients that required care. Ran Fan went straight into the treatment room, opened a pet cage and let out a sleek, glossy tabby cat.
The cat was as big as a medium sized dog. After stretching lazily on the floor, it flopped down at Ran Fan’s feet, rolling around and acting spoiled.
Ran Fan stroked it with one hand while cleaning its litter box with the other, then added fresh cat food.
“A stray?” Li Yang asked, noticing the clipped tip of the cat’s ear.
“Yes. I rescued it a few years ago. After it was neutered, it stayed here. Since I wanted to keep it, I’ve been the one taking care of it most of the time.”
“Didn’t you try to find someone to adopt it?”
“I did but when it came down to it, I couldn’t bear to part with it, so I didn’t send it away.”
Li Yang could see how much he liked the cat. “Why not just take it home and raise it yourself?”
Ran Fan finished changing the cat’s water. Hearing this, the motion of rubbing the cat’s belly paused slightly. “Wenyu is allergic to cat hair.”
Besides that, Jiang Wenyu had liked bright, glamorous, beautiful décor since he was young. Cats, by nature, would inevitably scratch and damage furniture. Either of these points was unacceptable to Jiang Wenyu.
“Then now you can take it home.”
Keeping a cat was a long term responsibility. Once you picked it up, you couldn’t abandon it halfway. Someone with Ran Fan’s personality was even more so, once he took it home, he would never send it away again.
The implication carried by those words contradicted what Li Yang had said before about Jiang Wenyu eventually regretting things and Ran Fan needing to give him time.
Li Yang did not know whether Ran Fan caught that contradiction. He bent down and squatted beside Ran Fan.
Ran Fan thought Li Yang was going to take over with the cat. He withdrew his hand, yielding the entire soft expanse of the cat’s belly. Unexpectedly, the hand Li Yang raised did not touch the cat’s fur at all but instead passed through Ran Fan’s hair, lightly lifting a strand that had fallen down.
Human hair has no nerves, just clusters of keratinized dead cells.
Yet Ran Fan felt as though his scalp had been licked by hot coals, a shiver flashing through him.
Only then did Li Yang turn his attention to the cat. Ran Fan saw Li Yang’s fingers move back and forth over its body, his palm broad and solid. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of Li Yang’s physique as well, broader than his own.
When the two of them were together like this, Ran Fan felt as though he were being invisibly compressed by Li Yang’s presence.
Jiang Wenyu had a similar build yet rarely gave him this kind of invasive pressure.
Ran Fan thought of the driver he had seen downstairs earlier, the one who belonged to Li Yang. Because he did not know when Li Yang would need the car, the driver had not left all night. When facing Li Yang, the man’s head was always bowed, his forehead angled downward.
“Thank you for sending me home yesterday.”
His thoughts drifted again to last night, a tangled mess of emotions.
After speaking, Ran Fan paused.
Li Yang looked at him, waiting for what would come next. As expected, there was more. “I’ve already taken up a lot of your time. You must be very busy.”
Li Yang neither confirmed nor denied it. He stood up. “Your phone.”
Ran Fan took it out as instructed. In a matter of seconds, Li Yang scanned the code and sent him a friend request.
Ran Fan looked up at Li Yang and nodded to indicate that he had seen it. Li Yang did not move, waiting until he personally saw Ran Fan accept the request before speaking.
“My private number,” the man said. “If anything comes up, you can contact me.”
He was not surprised.
In the month after they added each other as contacts, Li Yang did not receive a single message from Ran Fan.
Instead, his once quiet household descended into nonstop chaos, wave after wave, something he had not quite anticipated.
Ever since Li Yang took control, the old man would stir up trouble every so often. Li Yang was used to it and never took it to heart.
This time, however, after making a scene, the old man fell ill, heart disease. Specialists from all over the world were flown in one after another and he underwent surgery.
Physiologically, he was fine afterward. Emotionally, he was not. Day after day, he vented his temper by picking on anyone he could find.
The root of the trouble lay squarely with Jiang Wenyu, who had only recently been acknowledged and brought back into the family.
Jiang Wenyu returned home halfway through life and was not close to either his father or his grandfather. The old man demanded that he change his surname to Li. Jiang Wenyu refused. When the three generations sat down to eat together, ten sentences among the three of them would already feel excessive and even then, whatever was said inevitably grated.
All of that was trivial.
The real problem lay in Jiang Wenyu’s relationships.
The old man looked down on Jiang Wenyu’s biological mother, uneducated, dull witted, addicted to alcohol and gambling. To be blunt, he acknowledged Jiang Wenyu’s existence for one reason only: to have an heir.
Yet when he had people investigate Jiang Wenyu, he focused solely on blood ties and capability, never bothering to look into the young man’s hidden romantic life.
It was only when gossip news began surfacing nonstop, stories of Jiang Wenyu seemingly compensating for his deprived youth by indulging in extravagant spending with a lover, that the old man, who despised nothing more than defiance of his will, belatedly realized Jiang Wenyu’s sexual orientation.
Jiang Wenyu liked men as well.
In fact, unlike Li Yang in his youth, who had not distinguished between genders, Jiang Wenyu liked only men.
The only son was gay. The only grandson was also gay.
After going around in a full circle, the Li family was still destined to die out.
To Li Yang, it was nothing more than a farce. After the old man’s surgery, he did not visit him many times.
Old friends who heard the news came by to see him, bringing the matter up with expressions caught somewhere between laughter and tears.
“I told you years ago, while you were still young, to just find someone and have a child. Technology is so advanced now, women willing to have your child are more numerous than stones on the ground. So what if it satisfies him?”
“You’re not short of money to raise a child. Do you really want to anger him to death?”
Li Yang’s answer back then was, “I don’t want to have a child without love.” More than ten years later, his answer was still the same. “If the parents don’t love each other, I don’t want to bring a child into the world.”
His friend stared at him in disbelief. “Of all the people I know, your family is the most immersed in material desire yet you’re the one obsessing over spiritual love?”
Then came a sigh. “So that’s really it? At your age, it’s not too late to have a child even now. I heard that your bargain bin son isn’t close to you. If the family business ends up in his hands and you retire, what will you do then?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Who could possibly control you? Your father ending up like this, isn’t that all your handiwork?”
After seeing his friend off, Li Yang got into the car and went out.
The driver did not ask where he was going. He automatically keyed in a destination he had grown familiar with over the past few weeks.
Outside the car window, traffic flowed endlessly, crowds surging back and forth.
Li Yang mulled over his friend’s remark about him pursuing spiritual love and suddenly propped his arm up, smiling to himself.
He thought that yes, he did pursue spiritual love. After realizing how difficult it was for him to develop feelings for anyone, he had even given up on so called companionship, sealing off both body and heart. More than ten years had passed like that.
Over those ten years, he never thought about it, never felt that he lacked anything, believing himself completely removed from base desires.
And yet.
Once a crack opened, he was still just a base man. A whole month had passed and when he thought of Ran Fan, it was always a cycle of day and night, endlessly repeating.
The car stopped. Li Yang looked up and saw a subway entrance clearly marked with signage.
At this hour, Ran Fan would usually emerge from here after getting off work, then walk home.
Over the past few weeks, Li Yang had not once taken the initiative to message Ran Fan. Every few days, he simply came here to take a look, just to look.
Today was the same.
He waited for a long time but Ran Fan never appeared.
Li Yang gestured to his assistant. “Call and ask if Ran Fan has gotten off work.”
The assistant made the call immediately. When he hung up, his expression was hesitant. “President Li, they said Doctor Ran got off work an hour ago.”
Li Yang frowned slightly. The pressure inside the car instantly grew heavy, making it hard to breathe.
In the silence, the phone in his hand rang. Li Yang lowered his head and saw that the call was from Ran Fan.
He answered at once.
The voice on the other end was light and slow. “Sir, this is Ran Fan.”
Li Yang said, “I know.”
There was no sound from Ran Fan for a moment. After a long few seconds, he said, “Sorry to bother you. Do you have time right now? If possible, could I trouble you to come to S City XX Affiliated Hospital?”
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[Translator]
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← PreviousNext →
ChaptersChapter 1 · Let’s break upChapter 2 · A hand landed on Ran Fan’s backChapter 3 · Jiang Wenyu’s biological fatherChapter 4 · Li Yang kissed him againChapter 5 · Could you come to the hospital?Chapter 6 · I hope you can give birthChapter 7 · Are you bothered by the fact that I am Jiang Wenyu’s biological father?Chapter 8 · Don’t you think I’m ordinary?Chapter 9 · Don’t consider it me going back on my wordChapter 10 · You are a truly remarkable personChapter 11 · Would you say you’re cold-hearted towards Ran Fan?Chapter 12 · Dr. Ran resigned several months ago.Chapter 13 · Can we meet up?Chapter 14 · You also know the child’s fatherChapter 15 · You are the most important to meChapter 16 · Extra 1Chapter 17 · Extra 2Chapter 18 · Extra 3