The night rain had begun at some point without anyone noticing.
At first, it was only a faint sound, falling onto the roof tiles so lightly that it was almost impossible to hear.
By the time Xia Lanshi lifted his head from the documents, water was already dripping from the eaves. The sound of rain had merged into a dense layer of white noise, drawing the distance between the East Courtyard and the outside world even farther away.
The paper on the window billowed slightly in the wind before shrinking back, and the candle flame flickered with it, casting a fleeting shadow across the desk.
When Xiao pushed the door open and entered, his ink-black hair and shoulders were speckled with fine raindrops. In his hand was a bowl of medicinal broth that still gave off a bitter heat.
He said nothing, merely setting the bowl gently at the corner of the table.
Then he poured a cup of tea and placed it beside the medicine.
Everything was as it always was.
Xia Lanshi remained bent over the desk, the furrows between his brows looking as though they had been carved there by official documents. Not even the sound of rain could loosen them in the slightest.
The vermilion brush in his hand moved among the densely packed documents, making annotations as though he had not noticed how deep the night had become.
Xiao did not interrupt him.
His eyes lowered, settling on Xia Lanshi’s left wrist.
The red cord bracelet, worn for years upon years, had faded into a dull, dark ochre-red, its edges beginning to fray.
It was still there, but it was old.
Xiao reached out, his warm fingertips gently wrapping around that slender wrist.
Xia Lanshi’s movements paused slightly. The vermilion brush stopped on the paper for a moment, but he did not pull away, allowing Xiao to take his hand.
Xiao produced a small pair of scissors and, with a decisive snip, cut through the old red cord.
When the old cord fell away, it made the faintest sound.
Xiao carefully slipped the warm, smooth white jade peace charm free, holding it in his palm and gently rubbing the surface of the jade with his fingertip.
Then he took a bundle of brightly colored new red cord from inside his robes. Sitting down in the empty space beside Xia Lanshi, he lowered his eyes and quietly began weaving a new bracelet.
Xia Lanshi continued with his work.
He was already accustomed to Xiao bringing him medicine every day, sometimes helping him look over official documents, and sometimes simply sitting quietly beside him.
When he was tired or exhausted, he would simply curl up and sleep on Xia Lanshi’s couch.
The only sounds in the room were the rain, the soft crackle of the candle flame, the friction of brush against paper, and the faint rustling of the cord passing through each knot.
After a while, Xia Lanshi finally finished reviewing the most urgent stack of documents in front of him.
He set down the vermilion brush and rubbed his slightly aching brow. Then he picked up the medicinal broth, which had cooled to exactly the right temperature, and tipped his head back, drinking it all in one go.
Afterward, he picked up the teacup and washed away the medicinal taste in his mouth.
The herbal bitterness still lingered on his tongue.
His gaze, however, fell upon Xiao’s hands beside him.
He studied them for a moment.
Those hands, which usually either wielded a blade or plotted and strategized, were now holding a slender red cord, long fingers deftly weaving the threads and jade together into an intricate, perfectly even knot.
The movements flowed like water, possessing an indescribable elegance.
He could not help curving his lips into a smile, propping his chin up with one hand as he teased lazily, “I didn’t know you were so nimble with your hands. You even know how to weave bracelets.”
Xiao did not look up. His long fingers continued threading and tightening the cord with unhurried precision, his voice calm as though stating an obvious fact.
“Mm. Live long enough, and you learn a little bit of everything. I’m very good at tying knots.”
His movements paused briefly before he raised his eyes.
Those eyes, usually as unfathomable as a cold pool, now held a meaningful glimmer of amusement as they looked straight into Xia Lanshi’s.
“My hands are pretty nimble, too.”
He spoke slowly and leisurely, and paired with that deep gaze, his words somehow filled the air with a hint of ambiguity.
Xia Lanshi naturally caught the implication. The tips of his ears grew slightly warm.
Yet he did not avert his gaze. Instead, he let out a soft laugh, a hint of unwillingness to be outdone and slyness shining in his eyes.
“That… sounds a little strange when you put it that way.”
The curve of Xiao’s lips deepened, but he did not explain.
He tightened the final knot, picked up the scissors, and neatly snipped away the excess thread. Then he leaned toward the desk, holding the end of the cord over the dancing candle flame and lightly singeing it. He carefully rolled the melted end flat between his fingertips, making sure it was smooth and would not scratch the skin, before taking Xia Lanshi’s hand again.
The red cord slipped around his fair wrist, the white jade resting flush against his skin as though it had always belonged there.
The tension was adjusted with remarkable precision—not tight enough to leave a mark, nor loose enough to slip off easily. It fit as though Xiao had measured it countless times until he knew the exact size.
Xia Lanshi slowly turned his wrist, his gaze settling on that vivid red. He stared at it for a long time.
It was exactly the same color as when he had first put on this jade peace charm.
It was as though time had been reconnected by this cord, threading through all the days he remembered and those he did not, stirring up a vague, indescribable nostalgia.
He was just about to say something when the shadow beside him had already fallen over him.
Xiao placed one hand against the back of his head. Without any unnecessary preamble, his slightly cool lips accurately covered Xia Lanshi’s.
The kiss was infinitely gentle, yet left no room for refusal.
It carried a faint herbal fragrance.
The cold, sharp scent surrounding Xiao came together with his scorching warmth, flooding Xia Lanshi’s senses and claiming every one of them.
Outside the window, the fine rain continued pattering softly, while inside, the air grew warmer by the moment.
Xia Lanshi had gradually grown accustomed to what it felt like to kiss this man.
Accustomed to the scent of cold plum and burning wood spreading around him, accustomed to the weight of those hands upon his body, accustomed to slowly shedding all his restraint in front of this person.
Accustomed to the way this man looked when he was proud, and the way he looked when he was vulnerable.
He naturally lifted both arms and wrapped them around the back of Xiao’s neck, tilting his head back slightly as he felt the other’s somewhat hurried breathing.
It was like a confession he did not want anyone to see clearly, hidden within his actions, more honest than words could ever be.
He was not entirely passive.
When the kiss deepened and his emotions stirred, he would also explore that unfamiliar territory in return, making Xiao’s breathing falter for a beat and watching the other man lose himself in him.
Amid their entanglement, Xiao’s kiss slipped downward along the curve of his body, carrying scorching heat. His slightly rough tongue lingered from Xia Lanshi’s earlobe all the way to the side of his neck, slowly gliding over the most delicate and sensitive skin.
Xia Lanshi instinctively bit his lower lip, trying to suppress the uncontrollable tremor in his voice, only making it softer and huskier as it seeped faintly from his throat.
His entire body, all the way to his fingertips, had gone weak.
“Mm…”
That involuntary sound made Xiao breathe out a soft gasp as well. Unable to control himself, he gently nipped at the fair skin of Xia Lanshi’s neck, as though venting something he could not contain.
Xia Lanshi’s hands weakly pressed against Xiao’s solid shoulders. He managed to glance at the mountain of documents piled on the desk, his voice carrying a huskiness utterly unlike his usual tone as he tried to summon the last remnants of his reason.
“Work… isn’t finished yet…”
But his eyes were clearly shimmering with moisture, while his snow-white cheeks were flushed with an enticing pink, like a begonia just beginning to bloom in spring, so beautiful that it was impossible to look away.
Xiao’s lips brushed almost imperceptibly over the pulse at his neck, feeling the rhythm of its beating.
His low voice sounded against Xia Lanshi’s ear, carrying an irresistible allure, closer and more intoxicating than the rain outside.
“…I’ll help you with it later.”
There was a faint spark of heat in his half-lidded eyes, yet they also seemed to hold nothing at all, merely resting lazily upon Xia Lanshi’s face, a trace of amusement hidden in his voice.
“Your injury… is almost healed.”
Xia Lanshi froze for a moment, then nearly laughed at this man in exasperation.
So he really had remembered every word.
Back then, he had said, “Some things will have to wait until your injuries have healed before we can do them.”
Now Xiao was returning those exact words to him, fulfilling them without missing a single detail.
Before the words had even fully fallen, Xiao had already bent down, lifted him from the chair, and carried him past the cold-plum screen. His steps were unhurried, as though he were performing something solemn and important.
He gently laid Xia Lanshi down on the couch.
Then he reached out and slowly removed the jade hairpin from his hair. Strands of jade-dark hair cascaded down with it, catching tiny glints of light in the candlelight as they scattered across the couch, like freshly fallen snow settling upon some delicate place.
“Don’t be afraid,” Xiao murmured, leaning down and breathing warm against Xia Lanshi’s ear. “I’ll be very gentle.”
Xia Lanshi laughed inwardly. This man really was vindictive, returning every word Xia Lanshi had ever said to him one by one.
He had merely changed the tone, changed the circumstances, and transformed them into something impossible to fault him for.
Yet before Xia Lanshi could finish thinking about it, Xiao had already deftly removed his heavy outer cloak and undone his belt.
As his robes loosened, the snow-white skin beneath, almost never exposed to sunlight, was bared to the coolness of the spring night, making him shrink slightly and instinctively curl inward.
His inner garment still hung from his body, half-open, making the sight all the more suggestive.
Xiao did not rush to do anything else. He merely lowered his head and looked at him.
His gaze fell beneath Xia Lanshi’s collarbone, upon several marks of varying shades, some already faded while others remained distinct.
They were all the “marks” he had left behind.
His eyes narrowed slightly, revealing an expression of greed and restraint that appeared only at moments like this.
He pressed Xia Lanshi down onto the soft couch and lowered his head, burying his face into the hollow of his neck, greedily drawing in his scent.
“Huaiyu…”
Xia Lanshi laughed softly, tickled and heated by his breath and hair.
“If you like this scent,” he said quietly, “I’ll make you a sachet next time.”
Xiao raised himself slightly and looked at him.
He looked into those eyes he loved so much, now slightly reddened by the heat, like a sheet of thin ice steeped in spring colors, translucent with light and carrying a gentle warmth.
A smile touched his lips, warm and deep.
“All right,” he said. “Take your time making it.”
The moment the words fell, a kiss far more hurried and heated than before descended upon him.
This time there was none of the initial hesitation or restraint, only the weight finally released after being suppressed for too long, like a sudden downpour after a prolonged drought, pouring forth with an immense and unmistakable depth of feeling.
The two of them were no longer content with merely tasting the moment.
They could no longer suppress the wildfire of desire spreading between them.
Xia Lanshi could no longer feel the cold. His entire body had been heated by the kisses.
That warmth seeped beneath his skin, burning from his fingertips all the way to his chest. His breathing became disordered and feverish, and his reason gradually drifted away, as though something were slowly covering it layer by layer.
All that remained was the sound of rain and the person before him.
When their lips and tongues parted, a glistening thread briefly stretched between them, catching the candlelight before vanishing.
Xiao’s gaze darkened in that instant, deep as a bottomless well, yet burning with fire.
He lowered his head and let all the things that could not be expressed in words fall, little by little, upon Xia Lanshi’s neck, collarbones, and chest, as though in a place belonging only to the two of them, quietly leaving behind traces of his presence.
Xia Lanshi’s body was kissed over and touched all over by him, each touch igniting waves of burning sensation he had never imagined within himself. Heat surged through his lower abdomen.
He opened his mouth and breathed softly, fragmented sounds spilling out intermittently, only for him to bite them back beneath his lips.
In the rainy night, there was nothing but the interwoven sound of their breathing, filling the room with an intoxicating intimacy.
When Xiao took Xia Lanshi’s chest into his mouth, his wet, heated tongue teasing and circling him, Xia Lanshi could not help arching slightly, his neck falling back as his breaths came one after another.
He could no longer say exactly when he had lost his defenses.
Perhaps it was when Xiao’s hand settled at his waist, or perhaps even earlier, when the rhythm of that first kiss had changed.
All he knew was that, at this moment, all the things that normally occupied his mind—
calculations, restraint, self-control—
had all been quietly pulled away, leaving only sensations beneath his skin that he normally kept buried so deeply he had almost forgotten they existed, now being drawn out bit by bit.
Xiao seemed to know exactly where they were.
It was not tentative exploration, but an accuracy that was impossible to tell whether it came from familiarity or instinct. Every point of contact seemed to have been measured in advance, the pressure and gentleness precisely controlled in a way that left Xia Lanshi no chance to prepare and nowhere to hide.
He did not hide.
At one point, he even unconsciously leaned toward that touch.
That tiny movement made Xiao’s breathing deepen beside his ear, as though someone had lightly plucked a tightly stretched string.
He reached out and pulled Xiao’s clothes down, revealing the lean yet powerful expanse of his chest beneath the open robes.
Xia Lanshi’s cool fingers rested against the exposed skin, his palm feeling the warmth beneath it and the subtle tightening of muscle with each breath.
He traced the contours of those muscles, slowly following the lines, feeling the faint tremors beneath his fingertips.
Xiao raised his head and looked at him.
His eyes were especially deep at a time like this, so deep they seemed to have swallowed all the light, leaving only a heavy, focused intensity that made Xia Lanshi’s scalp tingle.
“Do you like it?”
His voice was hoarse, so low it was almost nothing more than breath.
Xia Lanshi raised his reddened eyes. He did not avoid Xiao’s gaze. Those eyes, usually filled with calculations, now openly held another kind of profound feeling, one even he himself had not realized was there.
“I like it.”
His answer was crisp and utterly undefended.
Xiao had originally only meant to tease him, yet instead, Xia Lanshi had turned the teasing back on him.
Something in his eyes sank completely, like a stone dropping into deep water, never to rise again.
Tonight, he was not going to let Xia Lanshi go.
The candlelight in the room flickered faintly.
He removed Xia Lanshi’s undergarments, then pinned Xia Lanshi’s restless hands above his head while his other hand moved lower, grasping his arousal.
“Ah…!!”
A shudder ran through Xia Lanshi. He could not help crying out, breathing hard.
He instinctively struggled for a moment, but Xiao held both his hands firmly.
The very hands that had just been weaving a bracelet for him were now wrapped around his most sensitive, heated flesh, moving with practiced dexterity.
Xia Lanshi’s consciousness began drifting repeatedly around some invisible threshold.
When he was lucid, he could feel every detail; when everything blurred, there was only a scorching white haze, before something pulled him back, bringing him to awareness again, making him feel everything once more.
Again and again, like waves surging endlessly with the tide.
At the moment when he was almost completely sinking beneath it, unable to suppress the wanton sounds escaping him, Xiao unexpectedly reminded him teasingly at his ear:
“Shh… Chief Administrator, you’re being too loud. If the guards stationed at the courtyard entrance misunderstand something… and you disturb them, that wouldn’t be good.”
Xia Lanshi instantly recovered half his senses and shot the detestable man a sideways glare.
There was irritation in that look, embarrassment, helplessness, and even a trace of coyness hidden so deeply that Xia Lanshi himself had not noticed it.
But Xiao’s hand did not stop.
If anything, it seemed deliberate, as though he wanted to watch Xia Lanshi struggle between restraint and surrender in exactly this way.
Xia Lanshi was suffering from having to hold himself back. Tears involuntarily welled up and rolled down with the slight trembling of his pale lashes.
They were not tears of pain or grievance, but simply the overflow of something he could no longer contain.
Xiao lowered his head and gently brushed his lips over the wet trail, tasting that faint trace of salt.
Then he lifted his eyes and looked at the person before him.
That normally dignified and elegant face had now lost its composure. His eye sockets were faintly red, his lashes damp, even his breathing disordered, yet he was still stubbornly clinging to the last remnants of his restraint.
Like a pear blossom in the spring rain, delicate and achingly vulnerable.
Xiao’s heartbeat sank deeply in his chest at that moment.
“When you were little, you didn’t cry. How did you grow up to become such a crybaby?” he teased.
“It’s all because… you do this to me…” Xia Lanshi replied, a trace of helplessness in his voice.
He was not usually like this.
It was only in front of this man that he could not control himself.
Xiao smiled faintly.
He wanted so badly to pull this person into his arms and comfort him properly; yet part of him also wanted to keep watching him like this, even to make him cry harder.
The two desires existed simultaneously, leaving his chest swollen with a feeling he could not tell whether was pain or joy.
Seeing that Xia Lanshi had bitten his lower lip until it was red and swollen, Xiao sealed away those fragmented sounds with a kiss.
He wanted Xia Lanshi to no longer have to struggle to suppress himself, nor worry about anything else—only to surrender, in this night that belonged solely to the two of them, those parts of himself he normally never allowed to show, little by little, into Xiao’s hands.
Xia Lanshi felt his entire body grow soft, tingling and weak, so overwhelmed with pleasure that his reason was about to fly away, yet he suddenly remembered that there were still people guarding the area nearby.
Desire and reason battled endlessly inside his mind, and his tears fell even harder.
But in the end, because of his lack of experience, he quickly could not withstand Xiao’s advances any longer and climaxed in Xiao’s hand.
Xiao finally released his grip on Xia Lanshi’s hands and lifted his own hand, looking at it covered in thick fluid.
While Xia Lanshi was still immersed in the afterglow of pleasure, his mind a blank haze, his unfocused eyes still followed Xiao as he licked his hand, as though savoring some exquisite nectar.
Those intensely predatory eyes remained fixed upon him like a hunter watching its prey, carrying a hint of danger.
The sight made his scalp tingle faintly, and instinctively, his body developed an even deeper desire for this man.
Why was this man so alluring, so sexy, whenever he did things like this?
Like a pot of intoxicating wine—no matter how much he drank, he remained thirsty, never able to get enough.
He unconsciously raised his foot and gently pressed it against the throbbing desire beneath Xiao’s clothes.
Through the fabric, he traced its shape and hardness with his toes, almost as though teasing him.
When he saw Xiao’s gaze grow even more dangerous, a faint thrill rose within him.
He loved seeing this man infatuated with him, driven mad by him.
Xiao reached out and caught that restless foot, then took advantage of the movement to press his heated body down, grinding firmly against him through the fabric.
When that low, rough breath escaped beside Xia Lanshi’s ear, Xia Lanshi involuntarily let out a soft moan as well, his voice soft and trembling with pleasure.
He did not know whether it was because of that movement or because of that sexy breath.
Xiao’s self-control had always been meaningless in front of Xia Lanshi.
This person was always teasing him, whether with the movement of his eyes, his provocative words, or even a soft breath like the one just now.
Every single one of them was enough to make his reason snap.
He almost lost control completely, wanting to immediately and fiercely ravage this cunning snow fox.
But soon, he managed to recover a sliver of reason.
The night was still very long.