The little girl threw open the car door in a hurry and shoved him inside.

Like an impatient little lion, hair already coming loose, one hand pressed against his chest, the other reaching back to pull the door shut.

In the narrow, dark interior of the car, with only the pale wash of moonlight filtering through the windows vaguely enclosing them both, Lin Luxiao reclined slightly, hands braced against the seat. She was kneeling above him, the light behind her, framing the pale skin of her neck — the fine strap of her evening dress had slipped off one shoulder and hung precariously at her upper arm.

Nan Chu fixed her gaze on him. That look was deep enough to draw him in — bold, unguarded.

Lin Luxiao couldn’t help but laugh. He pinched her cheek, voice dropping very low. “What do you think you’re doing?”

Asking when he already knew perfectly well.

Nan Chu leaned in and kissed him on the mouth. “Guess.”

Then she stopped looking at him, lowered her head, and pressed her lips to his neck. The soft warmth of her mouth against his skin was cool and slightly chilled, like a piece of springy fruit jelly. Lin Luxiao’s whole body gave a sharp, involuntary shiver; something lodged in his throat, as though catching on a breath. In the next moment, Nan Chu’s hands had moved to his belt — and despite how smoothly she worked the buckle, when she drew it free there was still a trace of inexperience in the gesture.

Lin Luxiao remained in the same half-reclined position as before.

Nan Chu pushed the windbreaker off his shoulders to reveal the military-green undershirt beneath. Her gaze lingered there for just a moment, deepening. It had been so long since they’d seen each other, and the longing had built in both of them — they looked into each other’s eyes, far inside the sealed quiet of the car, the only sounds the faint, occasional press of lips.

She had the shirt unbuttoned to the second button when Lin Luxiao drew back the hand that had been braced behind him and held her still, somewhere between exasperated and amused. “Stop fooling around.”

Nan Chu ignored him, reaching instead for his trousers. “Stop pretending.”

Lin Luxiao pressed her back against the seat. His back was screaming. He shifted away and said, brows tight: “Don’t push it. Be good — move back a little. Let me breathe.”

Nan Chu refused to let go. When she saw him keep retreating, she frowned with sudden suspicion: “You’re not actually — are you saying you actually can’t?”

“Please!” Lin Luxiao laughed and muttered: “I’m just not used to doing this in Shen Mu’s car.”

Nan Chu gave him a level look. “Five minutes and you fold. Good going.”

Oh for the love of—

Lin Luxiao glanced sideways, but in the end — she was his own girl, and he decided not to make a thing of it. There would be plenty of chances to reassert himself later, and she’d have nothing to say about it then.

The dress strap was still hanging off her shoulder.

Lin Luxiao straightened it, then looked her over from head to toe, faintly reproachful. “Do you have to dress this scantily? Showing off that figure of yours?”

Nan Chu looked at him without enthusiasm. “And I suppose you’d prefer I wrap myself up like some old granny?”

Lin Luxiao’s deeply ingrained traditionalism resurfaced. “What’s wrong with that? The old woman at the gate near my childhood home dressed very nicely — all those bright floral padded jackets, very cheerful. And besides, I haven’t seen anyone else dressed the way you are.”

Nan Chu caught it immediately, eyes sharpening. “Anyone else? Who exactly?”

Lin Luxiao cleared his throat. “Someone whose name I’ve forgotten. A singer. Xu Zhi-something.”

“Xu Zhiyi?”

“Oh, right.”

Nan Chu stared at him with cool dispassion. “She’s a pretty girl.”

Lin Luxiao couldn’t have picked her out of a crowd if he tried — he couldn’t even recall what she looked like. Seeing the look on the little girl’s face, he began to put things together, and reached over to ruffle her hair carelessly, laughing low. “What are you thinking? Stop jumping to conclusions.”

……

Jiang Ge had searched the entire hall without finding Nan Chu, and was on the verge of losing his temper, when he turned and saw Shen Mu coming his way. He raised a hand in greeting.

“You made it. Find yourself somewhere to sit — I have something urgent to deal with.”

Shen Mu had one hand in his jacket pocket; with the other he stopped him. “Hold on.”

Jiang Ge paused and looked at him. “What is it? I really am quite busy right now.”

“Looking for Nan Chu? Don’t bother.”

Jiang Ge had been in a state of restless agitation — hearing that, he stopped completely and stared with a slightly stunned expression.

Second floor.

Jiang Ge sat on the sofa. Shen Mu had pulled a chair over and sat across from him, arms folded, watching him.

Jiang Ge was seething inside, and a strange unease was rising alongside the anger. His mouth, however, was all bravado: “Say what you’ve come to say!”

This sort of scene — two men, one woman in the middle — almost always played out in much the same way.

Lin Luxiao had thought it through long ago. Getting Jiang Ge to back down wasn’t going to be simple. Tonight was mainly about letting Shen Mu stake the claim on his behalf. If he truly wanted to fight for it, then let him come — if he so much as touched a single hair on Nan Chu’s head, Lin Luxiao would consider it a personal loss.

Hearing that, even Shen Mu shook his head: “You really are asking for someone to hit you.”

But he was used to it. That was Lin Luxiao — always had been. He’d never prop up someone else’s position at his own expense. Confident, never arrogant.

Ten years of friendship, after all. Shen Mu said a word on Jiang Ge’s behalf: “Jiang Ge isn’t without his merits either. He just doesn’t always use his head. You don’t have to be quite so cutting about it.”

Lin Luxiao smiled and said: “When did I cut him? That’s just my faith in my own woman.”

Shen Mu made a sound of contempt: “Shameless. Has she even agreed to be your woman?”

“She will be. Sooner or later.”

The certainty in his voice was the kind that made you want to find a brick and use it.

Shen Mu let out a string of exclamations: “That’s brutal. You are absolutely brutal about this.”

When he actually delivered the message to Jiang Ge, he was more tactful — after all, he and Jiang Ge had practically grown up together.

The second young master of the Jiang family looked as though he’d stepped on a hidden explosive and been blown clean off his feet. He lay back on the sofa with a cigarette dangling from his lip, incredulous, going over it again and again.

“Nan Chu’s boyfriend?”

Shen Mu’s expression was entirely composed. He nodded.

“Lin Luxiao?”

Shen Mu nodded again.

“Your childhood friend?”

Another nod.

“Special Operations Unit One, firefighting. Company commander?”

Another nod.

“Hold on—”

Shen Mu: “What?”

Jiang Ge had the cigarette at the corner of his mouth, fell back against the sofa. “Let me work through this.”

He thought for a long moment. Then, apparently, he accepted it. He sprang up from the sofa, crushed the cigarette out against the table, and said to Shen Mu: “You know that program that was shot at your friend’s fire station a while back — you know about that, right?”

Shen Mu seemed to recall Lin Luxiao mentioning something. “That fire safety education one?”

Jiang Ge gave a nod. “Don’t tell me those two got together because of that program.”

“How would I know.”

Jiang Ge had a fairly good idea of what had happened. It had to be the program — otherwise, a firefighter and a celebrity, what would have put them in each other’s orbit?

He could have bitten his own intestines out of regret.

Then something seemed to occur to him. He looked up sharply, his gaze sweeping toward the two assistants standing poker-straight nearby. He waved a hand at them, calmly: “Come here, both of you.”

The two assistants exchanged a glance, and for once, they were genuinely a little afraid.

They hadn’t even reached him when Jiang Ge had already sent the wastebasket flying with one kick, then gave the coffee table a brutal two-kick follow-through — the banging reverberated through the room: “It was you two and your brilliant idea — entering her in that wretched program! And now someone’s stolen her right out from under me! You can repay this debt with your lives!!”

The two assistants, widely known for their unflappable composure, looked at their raging young master with a profound, quiet sympathy. Honestly, if you thought about it — rather pitiable — not only had he been cut off at the pass, he’d practically built the very road the other man walked down to get there. Such was fate.

Shen Mu clapped him on the shoulder in commiseration, then offered one parting thought: “Jiang Ge, my man, I’m telling you — come join me in practicing Buddhism. Leave all this business of men and women behind.”

Jiang Ge shoved him off. “You try meeting a woman like this and tell me if you can still say that.”

Shen Mu went downstairs to find something to eat.

Jiang Ge didn’t appear for the rest of the birthday party. He’d shut himself in his room alone — no lights on, pitch dark, sprawled on the sofa with one hand over his face, curtains fully drawn.

The music in the room was playing at full volume, loud enough to rattle your bones.

On repeat. Just one song. A Cantonese song — the only CD in his car.

“This bed is my bed, but your heat upon it sends waves crashing through my world…”

The first two lines were enough to make a person flush red.

“Love that burns too bright makes you afraid; then I must carry the weight of this charge — even sitting still becomes unbearable, if desire’s flame were brought to light…”

By the end, the old grandfather had come over from the next room, tapping at the door with his walking stick: tap tap tap — “Have you no shame! What filth are you listening to!”

Jiang Ge was fed up with all of it. He grabbed a throw pillow and buried his face in it like an ostrich.

He raged inwardly — this is karma. This is absolutely karma.

In the past, he’d beckoned to women as he pleased and discarded them just as easily. In his reckless youth he’d done plenty of things he shouldn’t have. And now, the one time he’d genuinely developed feelings for a woman, he’d been beaten to it by someone else.

On top of that — with a lifestyle as carefree as his had been, and the contempt he’d shown women along the way, now that he was actually heartbroken, nobody would believe he was suffering.

This was why you shouldn’t be too full of yourself when things were going well.

Life was long. You never knew which ditch was going to flip your boat.

He was genuinely in pain.

……

Inside the car, Nan Chu had talked herself around in circles and then thrown herself at Lin Luxiao and started kissing him again.

Lin Luxiao leaned back against the seat and let her, now and then dipping his head to press his lips to her earlobe, her neck, her collarbone. The two of them were exactly like a pair of infatuated young lovers — sweet and sticky and unable to get enough of each other.

Nan Chu kept kissing him, and her hand moved to cover him — which Lin Luxiao caught and held.

Nan Chu lowered herself and murmured against him: “Let me. You stay still.”

Nan Chu had a slight contrary streak — the more she was told not to do something, the more she wanted to do it, and to do it in a way that left him in agony. Lin Luxiao’s unusual resistance made her uneasy. The pressure of her hand increased; her voice turned cool and clipped: “I’ll take care of it.”

Lin Luxiao reclined against the seat. The dark depths of his eyes already held an unspoken emotion, and in the end he didn’t refuse — he let his hand go slack in a slow, unhurried gesture.

In the darkness, the soft sound of a zipper.

……

Nan Chu’s dark eyes stayed fixed on him, her hands moving with intent.

The car was quiet. There was only the two of them. Heartbeats drawn close. Even the moonlight seemed to have taken on something intimate.

……

A current ran through Lin Luxiao, pleasure arriving all at once, like a jolt of electricity.

He looked at Nan Chu — the girl leaning over him, the soft white expanse of her back, a narrow opening down the center of the little red dress that only made her skin appear more luminous; it seemed almost to glow, turned the colour of fine porcelain, delicate and precise.

Lin Luxiao traced a finger along that opening, following the line of her spine all the way down to the small of her back. The rough pad of his thumb moved slowly back and forth across the graceful contours of her back — the sensation was felt by both of them.

Nan Chu felt the light touch on her back. She lifted her eyes to look at him, her gaze soft and liquid, as if encouraging him. Then she drew on a sudden surge of effort, looked up at him once, her brows and eyes heavy with allure.

Lin Luxiao kept watching her, finding, to his discovery, that this girl knew exactly what she was doing — the way she looked up from under her lashes, every gesture a pull. He closed his eyes. But his mind was full of nothing but that bewitching look.

He had never encountered a more alluring woman in his life.

He suddenly understood — that line about dying under the peony blossoms and it being worth it.

Lin Luxiao had exceptional self-control; even at his most extreme he seldom made a sound. Yet tonight, as the peak arrived, he lost his grip on it for just a moment — and let out a low, involuntary sound.

That voice.

Something in it he never revealed in ordinary life — a low, rough, intoxicating quality.

Nan Chu had known it would sound like this.

That day they’d reunited, in the hospital corridor, she’d heard him talking with Xia Wan. That voice — so cold at its edges — she’d known then exactly how it would sound.

……

Afterward, when the two of them had sorted themselves out.

Nan Chu picked up the windbreaker that had been wedged into the crease of the seat. At first glance she noticed something on the back — a dark reddish patch. She thought it was just a stain from something and reached out to wipe at it, then brought her hand in front of her face and pressed her fingers together, brought it to her nose.

It was blood.