Yu Hao was pressed into the sofa, her thoughts scattered. He had her chin in his hand and her head tipped back — no choice but to receive the full force of his kiss.

A week apart, and all that longing poured directly into his mouth. Lu Huaizheng was nothing if not thorough in this particular area — and had only gotten more skilled with time. He pressed her down into the cushions, half-kneeling on the sofa above her, and bent to kiss his way along the pale line of her throat. His hands moved slowly upward from the bottom of his uniform shirt, undoing each button one at a time.

The collar fell open, and the line of his chest came into view. The room was dark — only the scattered light through the window cast a dim glow across the two of them.

Yu Hao’s eyes followed his hands as he worked down the buttons. The shirt opened along a narrow gap, and beneath it, the hard planes of a body built like a slab — abdominals carved and defined. He looked lean and spare in his uniform shirt; without it, he was something else entirely — broad across the chest, solid through the shoulders.

Beneath the open shirt: his belt. His long fingers settled on the buckle, pressed lightly against it. With one smooth motion — *click* — the belt came loose.

Yu Hao had, in fact, prepared for this.

She had even bought a box of condoms and stashed it in the apartment. The day she’d gone grocery shopping with Zhao Dailin, at the checkout, she’d been six or seven hundred short of the discount threshold. She’d been staring at the condoms on the display rack for a few minutes by then, and when the cashier scanned everything and announced the total, she reached over without thinking and added a box to the basket, then turned away and began examining something very carefully in the opposite direction.

On the way home, Zhao Dailin had looked at her with extremely poorly concealed interest. “I had no idea things were moving so fast between you and Lu Huaizheng. I figured the two of you were the type to wait until after the wedding…”

Then she sighed with theatrical disappointment. “Truly, this day and age — a platonic love is nowhere to be found.”

Yu Hao had put on a pained, troubled expression. “I keep thinking Lu Huaizheng is going to propose soon, so I figured I’d be prepared. Besides — what if I turn out to have no interest in that sort of thing? I should know before I drag him into a marriage where that’s off the table. That wouldn’t be fair to him.”

“You really haven’t?”

“Not yet.” Yu Hao said. “I thought I’d wait for when he comes back next time and see. If I genuinely can’t respond, I need to tell him in advance — he shouldn’t go into it without knowing.”

Zhao Dailin didn’t know all the details of what Yu Hao had been through. She only knew about the condition. She found it difficult to believe. “…You really mean that?”

Yu Hao said nothing, and walked on ahead with her bags, lost in thought.

Her state, actually, was quite good at this point. Even Professor Han had said she seemed indistinguishable from any ordinary person — more optimistic and quick to laugh than most, even given to the occasional joke.

The institute director had noticed the change too.

One day when Yu Hao came by to submit a report, the director happened to be in Professor Han’s office issuing some instructions. After the meeting, the director looked at her with mild surprise, studying her from head to toe, and said with a smile, “You seem to be doing well lately, little Yu. You’ve got some color to you.”

Professor Han, still flipping through a stack of documents, shook his head with a soft exhale. “She’s in a relationship.”

“Oh?” The director perked up. “How’d that happen?”

Professor Han put on his reading glasses and looked at Yu Hao with a meaningful expression. “You might as well just tell him yourself. And when the wedding comes — don’t forget the director’s invitation, and maybe ask him to put in a good word in your annual recommendation while you’re at it.”

The director expected her to be reticent. Instead, the girl broke into a grin, her cheeks curving into shallow dimples. “Sure.”

Yu Hao told the director her boyfriend was a soldier — a man with a serious and responsible nature.

The director sat there quietly and listened to this young woman describe her boyfriend as though no one in the world could compare to him.

Professor Han gave him several confirming looks throughout, as if to say: I know, the praise is earned.

Which only deepened the director’s curiosity. Did men like that actually exist — men with that kind of dedication, that kind of devotion to what mattered?

“Bring him in sometime. I want to meet him.”

Professor Han had watched the whole road they’d traveled — it hadn’t been an easy one, and he felt genuinely glad for the two of them. He couldn’t help adding his own thought: “I wasn’t sure at first either. But meeting him changed my mind. You learn something about what a real man looks like.”

The director was displeased. “What does that imply about the rest of us?”

Professor Han smiled. “Different things. Our generation came up through hardship — the fields, the countryside, labor we didn’t choose. That shaped us. Their generation largely didn’t have that. What they know of life’s harder lessons, and how much of it they’ve actually absorbed — well, think of your own son.”

The director groaned at the mention of his son. “Don’t remind me.”

“And yet some of them — you see it in small moments, how they’ve made sense of things,” Professor Han said. “Young people who still carry themselves with that kind of backbone — it’s rare.”

Yu Hao’s journey back to herself had owed no small debt to Lu Huaizheng’s patience.

Perhaps without even realizing it, the way she spoke and moved through the world had been quietly shaped by him. The lightness and wit that occasionally broke through her — the easy, dry humor — that was entirely in his register.

Yu Hao felt herself reaching a degree of love for him from which there was no returning. So she was trying to give something back in kind.

Like now — she was willing to try, with him. Her pale legs eased up around his waist.

That single, inviting movement hit the already unsteady Lu Huaizheng like a detonation, flooding his entire body — and then, sudden as a thunderclap, one clear thought cut through everything:

*There’s nothing here.*

He’d bought nothing.

Under normal circumstances, the first time without — arguably preferable — but his situation was particular, and precautions were necessary.

Going back downstairs now, on the other hand, would absolutely destroy the moment.

While he was still weighing this—

“Do you need a condom?” Yu Hao lay there on the sofa, looking up at him with perfect guilelessness. “I bought some. Bedside drawer.”

They went to the bedroom.

Lu Huaizheng actually found an unopened box in the bedside drawer.

He looked at it and looked at her, amusement breaking easily across his face. Yu Hao dropped her head, heart thudding against her ribs. “Don’t look at me like that. I bought it at the supermarket with Senior Zhao to make up the discount threshold.”

He hadn’t done up his shirt. Chest still bare, broad, looking down at her with a low laugh. “Very distressing purchase? Grabbed one at random without looking at the box?”

“What?”

He tossed it over to her, expression somewhere between pained and amused. “Or do you have a particular misconception about me?”

Extra small.

Small alone would have been bad enough, but apparently extra small existed as a category, which had to be the most grievous insult possible to the male ego.

“These come in different sizes?” Yu Hao was genuinely startled.

Lu Huaizheng let out a helpless laugh. “Women’s tops come in different sizes, don’t they?” He let his gaze rest on the relevant region of Yu Hao’s chest for two measured seconds, expression extremely grave. “Please tell me you didn’t accidentally pick the one that matches your own measurements.”

Yu Hao moved to hit him.

He caught her wrists with a laughing ease, and kissed her with thorough conviction.

A hand settled over a certain softness, and squeezed, entirely unrepentant.

“I’m not teasing anymore. I’ll go buy some.”

…

Lu Huaizheng didn’t go back up immediately. He crouched in the building’s entryway and smoked two cigarettes.

A neighbor came down to throw out the garbage and, surprised to find him there, called over warmly, “Huaizheng! What are you doing out here?”

Lu Huaizheng had changed into an ordinary t-shirt, military trousers still on, pressed lines running down his long legs. He was crouched in the doorway, cigarette dangling from his mouth. He looked up at the voice and took the cigarette out, brushed the ash away, and smiled. “Reflecting.”

“On what?”

“Life.”

The neighbor cuffed him firmly on the head.

“Nonsense!”

Lu Huaizheng didn’t protest — let his head drop once under the impact, and smiled with the easy unconcern of someone who didn’t especially mind. When the footsteps behind him had faded, the smile at the corner of his mouth faded with them. He brought the cigarette back to his lips, let his eyes drift half-shut, drew a slow, careful breath. The pale smoke filled his chest, rose, and spread into the dark.

He smoked half of it down.

Then his hand dropped naturally, and the tapped ash drifted in small flakes to the ground.

The old man always used to say.

*When things go wrong, you push through. When things go right, you take stock. Before every choice, you think it through three times.*

*A man doesn’t count the cost too closely. If you love someone, give her everything you have — but don’t hold on to small acts of kindness and wait for them to be returned.*

He had never forgotten.

What Yu Hao had done tonight left him quietly moved.

Before he’d come back, he had already made peace with the possibility of something entirely without that dimension. If Yu Hao was simply never able to go there, he would stay with her anyway.

If she hadn’t pulled him close and kissed him the way she did — hadn’t leaned into him with all of that — he had only planned to come back, say what needed to be said, and go.

All these years he had wanted her, had replayed it in his mind more times than he could count — and still, he would not have touched her.

When he came back upstairs, Yu Hao was waiting for him at the door — clinging, kissing, arms around him — and thoroughly undid every last thing he’d managed to hold together. He picked her up and carried her directly to the bed.

He yanked his t-shirt over his head, went to her bare-chested, kissed a trail slowly downward.

Then his fingers found her shirt buttons — each one freed with careful patience, the way you peel a peanut — and in an instant, everything underneath came into view. He pressed down toward her ear and murmured, low, “Are you afraid?”

Yu Hao nodded.

Something like a smile crossed his face. “Don’t be. I’ll try to be gentle.”

“You haven’t done this either?”

“No.”

…

He stripped her down with deliberate patience, stopping at the last layer. He lowered his head, looked at what remained, and spent a moment simply breathed through it. He wanted to start slowly — let her grow accustomed to the closeness of their bodies. She was genuinely pale, white as anything; he ran his hand along the line of her waist and the contrast between them was stark and absolute.

To call it intimacy would have been accurate. But it felt more like a careful, attentive lesson.

Lu Huaizheng led her through it — quietly, step by step.

Yu Hao trembled, deep in her chest, and he was equally unsteady — their warmth filling the room around them. He had switched on the bedside lamp deliberately, and the amber light spread through the bedroom, soft and golden, casting two silhouettes in long, tender relief against the white of the wall.

Low, muted sounds wound through the room.

At last, everything shed, every layer gone — Yu Hao lay with her eyes shut. Lu Huaizheng moved close to her, one knee on the mattress, the other foot on the floor, and gently pressed her legs apart.

He held her face in both hands, arms braced on either side of her, and looked down at her with a softness that had nothing guarded in it.

Then he noticed: Yu Hao’s hands were clasped tightly together on her chest, her eyes sealed shut.

He was barely there — just at the threshold.

Yu Hao said, out of nowhere, “Are you sure you don’t want to watch a video first? For reference?”

“…No. I’ve done extensive reference research already.”

“…”

Lu Huaizheng was patient. He coaxed her, slow and steady. “Relax. Yes?”

*What does relax mean.*

Yu Hao went entirely rigid.

“Not tighter — relax.”

Several attempts, and she still couldn’t quite manage. Looking at the sweat gathering on Lu Huaizheng’s face, she felt genuinely guilty.

But the man above her was patient without limit, kissing her again and again, drawing her back into it, murmuring things into her ear that were outrageously effective and should not have been — she genuinely did not know he had that in him, given that he was otherwise a person who swore almost never and rarely said anything crude at all. And yet here he was.

“Stop talking,” she managed.

“You don’t like it?” He was smiling — outrageously — and took that exact moment to sink home in one definitive motion.

At the same time, he sealed her mouth with his.

It hit without warning. Yu Hao felt as if something had split her entirely in two.

He moved.

Each movement dragged through her like a blade, and she could barely breathe — she was gasping, short and shallow, like a small fish trying to surface. Which seemed only to have the opposite effect on Lu Huaizheng — his eyes had gone dark, and he pressed against her waist and moved again, harder.

Yu Hao’s eyes burned. She bit down on her own lip and held.

Lu Huaizheng scrambled to comfort her — until he saw blood at the corner of her mouth, where she’d been biting too hard. Something in him broke. He withdrew.

“Alright — I’m out. I’m done.”

Yu Hao, eyes still wet, looked down.

He really had.

In total: fewer than ten.

“You were so fast,” Yu Hao said admiringly.

“…”