That night, Li Xun slept at Zhu Yun’s place.

After that opening salvo, they were both too exhausted to say much. Zhu Yun recovered somewhat, but Li Xun was genuinely spent — drenched in sweat, breathing hard, taking a long time to come back to himself.

The occupational hazard of an IT engineer.

Zhu Yun gathered her clothes from the floor. Li Xun lay on the bed, his arm draped across his forehead, resting with his eyes closed.

“Is your back all right?” Zhu Yun asked, concerned.

Li Xun opened one eye and gave her a look of mild displeasure.

She helpfully explained: “I just worry you’re overexerting yourself. You’ve been busy nonstop these past few days and haven’t been getting any exercise.”

Li Xun said with complete calm: “You and I doing this is exercise.”

There was simply no engaging with this man.

“Want to go for a walk?” Zhu Yun offered.

“No.”

He turned over and found a more comfortable position lying face down.

Zhu Yun narrowed her eyes at him. Thoroughly cooked — stubborn to the last breath.

She finished tidying, came back to the edge of the bed, and pressed her hand down on his deltoid. It was as hard as stone.

He gave a small, involuntary flinch of his shoulder. Zhu Yun asked, “Ticklish?”

No reply.

After a man has his fill, only laziness remains.

She pressed down again. He flinched again. Zhu Yun smacked him. “Tell me — is it a tickle or a pain? One word!”

Li Xun’s face was buried in her soft, fluffy duvet. “Pain,” he said.

Something tender and furious moved through Zhu Yun simultaneously. She seized the back of his neck, teeth clenched. “I told you to exercise, I told you to exercise! I spent five thousand yuan getting you a gym membership — how many times have you actually gone?”

Li Xun let her shake him for a moment, then reached up without looking and closed his hand around her throat, pulling her down onto the bed.

He was on top; she was flat beneath him. He held every advantage.

“Go ahead,” Li Xun said quietly. “Give me another reason to show you.”

Zhu Yun lay very still with his large hand at her throat. He gave a slow, deliberate press. She caught the scent of him again — heightened now by the sweat, his warm, deep, physical presence all the more distinct.

He looked down at her with unhurried indifference. “If you’ve got the energy to nag, you could be doing something more useful.”

Zhu Yun managed to wriggle free from his grip for a moment and said, with some difficulty: “Like what?”

His Lordship replied: “Such as giving me a massage.”

Zhu Yun considered this for a moment, then slowly climbed back off the bed and set about providing this “more useful” service. Li Xun’s back was rigid, especially around the shoulders — the slightest pressure caused his muscles to seize up in pain. She could only work gradually, in slow increments.

She had been at it for a while when Li Xun said, “All right, that’s enough. Rest.”

“I’m fine,” Zhu Yun said. “Just lie there.”

The massage was lulling him into drowsiness. “You’re not tired?” he asked.

“Not at all.” Unlike some people, who were barely past thirty and already falling apart.

Li Xun’s voice was becoming heavier, with a note of injured pride. “Why are you not tired… Right, it’s because you were lying flat the whole time. Next time you should be on top…” He trailed off mid-sentence and fell asleep.

Zhu Yun turned out the light and quietly lay down beside him.

They slept a beautiful, long sleep.

Zhu Yun had forgotten to close the curtains. When she woke, the five o’clock dawn was spread across Li Xun’s back, and in that moment, she felt a sudden, fleeting thought — that it would not be so terrible if life were to end right here.

She sat up, knees pulled to her chest, back against the headboard, like a small child.

One turn of her head and she could see his face.

In all her life, Zhu Yun had never committed anyone’s sleeping face to memory — not a single friend, not a single family member. Only Li Xun. Only that slightly tired, peacefully sleeping face of his had left a mark on her life that could never be erased.

So much of his presence felt like something the universe had arranged on purpose. Sending such a person into her life to fill all the gaps she had missed, and complete all the parts of herself that were missing.

He felt her gaze on him and slowly opened his eyes. For the first moment, he didn’t see her — his gaze lifted automatically.

Zhu Yun was already waiting. She said to him: “Li Xun, let’s get married.”

He had just woken, his eyes still heavy, not yet fully open.

“I will make you happy,” she said.

He closed his eyes again, his face settling back into the blanket. A long time passed. Then, she finally heard a single, unsteady word: “Okay.”

That afternoon, Zhu Yun drove home.

The atmosphere in the house was like a frozen cellar again. Her mother had been steeling herself since Zhu Yun’s arrival and launched in without a moment’s pause from the second she stepped through the door.

Her mother categorically forbade her from returning to work at Feiyang and handed her a thick stack of company brochures to look through.

Zhu Yun looked through them without a word.

Her mother asked: “Have you been in contact with the painter?”

“He’s already back in France. What would be the point of reaching out?”

Her mother considered this. “From what I could tell, he was serious about you — he even came to the house to meet us. You’ve known each other for a long time. Give it another try. Give you both a fair chance.”

Zhu Yun smiled. “You can’t treat someone like a product you can pick up and put back at will. He’s a well-known artist — he has no shortage of admirers. I can’t very well beg someone to come back when they’ve already moved on. Even you know your own daughter has too much pride for that.”

Her mother’s brow furrowed. “And yet you have no trouble shamelessly throwing yourself at that awful man?”

Zhu Yun said calmly, “He’s the exception. He’s the only person in the world with whom I have absolutely no pride.”

“Zhu Yun!”

Her mother hurled her teacup onto the floor. Zhu Yun sank deeper into the sofa and quietly began reciting something calming to herself while her mother’s fury washed over her.

At that moment, Zhu Guangyi, sitting in the living room, spoke. He said, in a grave tone: “Zhu Yun, even if you can’t bring yourself to pursue the painter, and even if I gave you permission to go a few more years without a boyfriend — Li Xun is completely and absolutely out of the question.”

“Why?”

“You’re asking me why?” Zhu Guangyi said sternly. “You don’t understand people who’ve been in prison. He wasn’t a good person to begin with, and after six years inside, there’s no telling how much worse he’s become. Your mother and I are standing in your way now because we’re afraid you’re about to step into a fire pit and regret it when it’s too late!”

Zhu Yun said nothing.

Her parents bombarded her for over an hour. By the end of it, Zhu Yun’s eyes felt like they were spinning. Her mother, seeing that she wasn’t absorbing a word of it, pulled out her phone, pressed a few things, and handed it to Zhu Yun.

“Even if you won’t go back to the painter, there’s someone your Aunt Wang has introduced — I was thinking tomorrow would be a good time to meet. Just go and have a look.”

Zhu Yun took the phone, startled. On the screen was a photograph — a neat, presentable man in a white lab coat, smiling at the camera.

Her mother said, “He’s a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Institute of Physics. Surname Wu, same age as you. Look at him — not bad at all, is he?”

Zhu Yun studied the photo and said, “He’s quite fair.”

“Well, of course. His father I know as well — and going back to his great-grandfather’s generation, the whole family has been in scientific research. I don’t just pick people off the street the way some people do.”

Zhu Yun dearly wanted to retort: who on earth did she think Li Xun was — someone you could just pick off the street on a whim? She’d like to see her try. But to avoid making things worse, she held her tongue.

She looked at this Researcher Wu in the photograph. His features were somewhat familiar — and after a moment’s thought, she realized he bore a passing resemblance to Tian Xiuzhu.

Her mother truly did have a type.

“That’s settled — you’ll meet him tomorrow,” her mother decided for her.

“I don’t want to go.”

“You must go!”

Zhu Yun thought for a moment and began to negotiate. “I’ll go once, but only if you promise not to interfere with my work.”

“Absolutely not!”

Zhu Yun adopted the attitude of someone with nothing left to lose. “Then I’m not going.”

Her mother was so angry she grew dizzy. “How can you be so disobedient?” She pressed a hand to her own chest. “My blood pressure — Zhu Yun, are you trying to be the death of me? You were so sensible for a few years, and the moment that awful man shows up again, you’re back to this?!”

Seeing that her mother was genuinely enraged, Zhu Yun stood and poured her a cup of hot water — which her mother knocked away.

The standoff reached a complete deadlock. Zhu Guangyi told Zhu Yun to go upstairs first, and said in a heavy voice: “Think carefully about all of this. You’re not young anymore — you need to learn to take responsibility for yourself.”

Zhu Yun lay on her bed and looked up at the ceiling.

In the blink of an eye they had been fighting for over two hours. Outside, it had gone dark. During the argument itself she hadn’t felt the toll it was taking, but now that the noise had stopped, she became aware that her eardrums were ringing.

At least now that she was this old, her mother had stopped resorting to petty tactics like confiscating her phone. Zhu Yun locked her door and called Li Xun.

He picked up quickly.

She asked what he was doing. Li Xun said he was organizing her electronic medical records.

“You work fast,” she said.

“Keep dawdling,” Li Xun said lazily, “and I’ll finish that web system of yours before you’ve even had a chance to come back.”

What did he mean, “keep dawdling” — she had only returned home that very day. She had only proposed to him that very morning.

The thought of the proposal made her face grow warm without her meaning it to.

“Zhu Yun,” he said softly, saying her name.

She said quietly: “What is it?”

Li Xun kept typing. “Don’t let things get too ugly with your family,” he said evenly.

“I know.”

“It’s normal that your parents don’t approve. We’ll take it slowly.”

She didn’t want him spending too much energy on these kinds of worries. She changed the subject. “How are you getting on with my electronic records?”

Li Xun gave a small, amused sound. “Passable.”

Zhu Yun pursed her lips.

“You built the whole thing only as a web system — no groundwork laid at all for a mobile port,” he said.

“I was just starting out when I built it…”

He said a few complimentary things. “On the whole it’s decent enough — doctor, pharmacy, lab, insurance payments… everything that should be there is there. Given where you were when you first went abroad, this is a fairly impressive effort.”

“Somehow I feel like you’re insulting me,” Zhu Yun said.

He laughed softly.

Zhu Yun lay on her bed and kept talking with Li Xun. Her room had barely changed in all those years — the quiet night and the locked door brought back memories of a different night, long ago.

She had stood in her dress waiting for the New Year’s Eve firecrackers to ring out, then crept out barefoot into the bitter cold to go and find the person her heart belonged to.

Compared to that girl, she felt much calmer now. They were both calmer now. Even when they talked about the future, there was none of the feverish urgency that had once driven them.

Everything proceeded steadily and in its own time — work, and love alike. Like a river flowing quietly through the dark, slow and deep and impossible to contain.