◎ “Don’t be afraid, your husband is here.” ◎

On the matter of pregnancy.

Actually, Yunque had seriously imagined it quite early on.

Back then, the two of them had just registered their marriage. They were newlyweds in the first flush of love, and Lu Rangchen always had absolutely no restraint. It just so happened that shortly afterward, Yunque’s period was late.

Honestly, she had been genuinely frightened at the time.

Her menstrual cycle had always been very regular — from childhood to adulthood, she had barely experienced a handful of delays. And for this to happen right after she had just started living with Lu Rangchen, she couldn’t help but let her thoughts drift in that direction.

But she wasn’t the type to keep things hidden without showing a trace of it.

Even though a faint anxiety had already begun smoldering inside her, on the surface she still went through the motions and finished the day’s classes one by one.

Lu Rangchen was away on a business trip abroad at the time.

After returning home, Yunque had thought about bringing it up with him, but after carefully turning it over in her mind, she felt that pregnancy was, for her, a rather private matter.

On top of that, there was a time difference between where they each were. After going back and forth in her head, Yunque simply decided to keep the whole thing to herself for the time being.

She wanted to figure out what to do on her own.

Of course, no amount of figuring was going to help.

What she needed to do was just go buy a pregnancy test.

However, for Yunque, going downstairs to buy something like that was an absolutely mortifying prospect. Her sense of feminine liberation hadn’t reached that point yet, so she could only order it through a delivery app instead.

Unfortunately, the delivery rider was extremely slow, and Yunque endured nearly a full hour of agony waiting at home.

During that hour, she was on pins and needles. She had even begun thinking through what she would do if she really was pregnant — whether it would affect her future career, whether it would affect her relationship with Lu Rangchen.

After all, the two of them had only just gotten their marriage certificate.

Nothing had settled down yet.

Neither of them had developed the awareness needed to be good parents.

But if she were to end the pregnancy, she didn’t dare — and couldn’t bring herself to do it either. That would be a living little life, after all. One that was hers and Lu Rangchen’s.

She even found herself wondering — would it be a boy or a girl?

If it was a boy, she hoped he would take after Lu Rangchen. If it was a girl… it seemed like taking after him would still turn out very beautiful.

Going around and around like this, Yunque eventually arrived at the conclusion: if she really was pregnant, she didn’t seem to have any reason at all to refuse the child’s arrival.

They would have to have children sooner or later anyway.

The difference between sooner and later wasn’t that great.

But thinking it was one thing, and reality was another.

When Yunque got the pregnancy test and worked up the courage to use it, she discovered that she wasn’t pregnant at all.

Not at all. Not even a little!!!

Yunque stared at the test and was immediately rendered speechless, letting out a sharp inhale.

Even the cold sweat clinging to her body seemed to lighten somewhat.

A couple of days later, her period finally made its belated appearance, and she finally told Lu Rangchen about the whole false alarm.

As it turned out, her prediction had been correct.

Lu Rangchen was very displeased that she had secretly been “pregnant” without telling him.

It was late at night. Both of them had been getting ready for bed, but this man directly let out a laugh of exasperation, sat up, and pulled open the floor lamp. He looked at her with questioning eyes and said, “Zhu Yunque, you’re getting more and more brazen, aren’t you — something like this you can just handle on your own without discussing it with me?”

Yunque: “……”

Weak, helpless, and in the wrong.

She carefully burrowed into the blankets and argued feebly, “But I wasn’t even pregnant…”

Lu Rangchen let out a light scoff. “And what if you had been?”

“Then I would have told you…”

The more she spoke, the quieter her voice got. She looked at Lu Rangchen with a deliberately pitiful expression and said, “I’m so sleepy, hurry up and turn off the light. I need to sleep.”

With that, she tried to pull the covers over her face and hide.

The result was that Lu Rangchen gave a derisive laugh, yanked her blanket away, and pressed down on top of her.

He pinned both her slender wrists above her head, and those deep, hawk-like eyes bore straight into her as he deliberately tried to frighten her. “Sleep? We’re nowhere near sleeping. If you don’t give me a proper explanation right now, I’ll make that pregnancy of yours a reality tonight.”

This man was someone who truly meant what he said.

The words had barely left his mouth before his hand was already tugging at the lace drawstring of her undergarment below.

Yunque was genuinely scared. She let out an involuntary cry and quickly drew up her knees to resist.

But the disparity of strength between a man and a woman was far too great. Within a few seconds, Lu Rangchen had kissed her into silence.

Yet that kiss didn’t linger for long. Lu Rangchen pulled back, and this time he was considerably more serious. His voice softened as he said, “Zhu Yunque, can you just be a little more reasonable and stop making me angry?”

She couldn’t explain why.

Even though this man occasionally smoked a cigarette, every time they kissed, his lips tasted clean and sweet.

That taste was something Yunque found herself craving in a way she couldn’t quite control.

So much so that, without realizing it, she found herself bewitched by the handsome face in front of her, and she answered honestly, “Then what do you want me to say?”

“Tell me the truth, of course.”

Lu Rangchen’s tone was low and meaningful, his gaze dark and intent as he looked at her. “If you really were pregnant, shouldn’t I be the first to know? Or are you saying that if you really were pregnant, you’d want to get rid of it without telling me at all?”

“Who do you think I am to you — am I still your husband or not?”

Yunque: “……”

She had to admit it.

When a cold and aloof man put on a wounded and aggrieved expression, the damage it inflicted was far greater than that of the average person.

Looking at that beautiful face.

For one brief moment, Yunque actually felt as though Lu Rangchen was acting coquettish with her.

Of course her scalp was genuinely going numb too, because this man had seen straight through her. At the time, she had indeed harbored, just for a fleeting second, the faintest thought of quietly ending it.

Of course it had only been for a moment.

But regardless, not having come clean was not having come clean.

Yunque pressed her lips together and, in a rare display of coquettishness, looked at him and said, “…You’re obviously still my husband. You’re the only husband I’ll ever have in this lifetime. I’ve never even held hands with another man.”

She knew how to please Lu Rangchen.

Lu Rangchen let out a muffled laugh at that, and the corners of his eyes and brows carried a faint, barely concealed pleasure.

Yunque pressed her advantage while she had it. “Can you let go of my hands? They’re really aching. I have to write on the blackboard tomorrow.”

She had to say, capitulating was simply the most effective strategy.

Upon hearing this, Lu Rangchen raised an eyebrow and actually let go of her hands, gathering them into his broad palms and gently kneading her wrists.

But he didn’t let her steer the conversation away with a few light words.

Lu Rangchen looked at her with a grave air and continued, “So tell me — what are you going to do if something like this ever comes up again?”

“In the future?”

“Yes. If you ever really get pregnant in the future, are you still going to hide it from me and try to take care of it quietly on your own?”

“……”

Yunque looked at him in speechless silence. “Do I seem like someone that cold-hearted?”

“Is that so?”

Lu Rangchen drew out his tone deliberately and said, “So what you’re saying is, if it happens in the future, you’d want to keep it?”

Yunque hesitated slightly and said, “Well, if it really came to that, it’s not as though I could stop it.”

She paused, then looked at Lu Rangchen seriously. “What about you — have you thought about being a father?”

“Of course I haven’t.”

Lu Rangchen answered with particular candor. “I haven’t had enough time alone in this world with just the two of us.”

As he spoke, he truly couldn’t restrain himself. He pinched her chin and dipped his head down to kiss her for a few seconds.

Yunque couldn’t explain why, but she felt a little like laughing. She teased him and said, “Then what were you just making such a fuss about?”

“One has to prepare in advance.”

Lu Rangchen spoke plainly. “Let’s settle it now — if even with precautions taken, the child still comes, then we keep it.”

Yunque pressed her lips together and couldn’t help dampening the mood. “What about the other way around?”

Lu Rangchen: “What other way around?”

“Meaning —”

Yunque bit the inside of her lip and said, “What if when the time comes and we’re at the right age and we want one, but no matter what we do, it just doesn’t happen?”

“……”

Lu Rangchen was genuinely in awe of her imagination.

He let out a helpless laugh. “What, am I giving you that little confidence?”

As though determined to show her something, that hand of his started getting up to mischief again.

Yunque gritted her teeth as he kneaded and teased her, and said, “Stop fooling around. We’re having a serious conversation.”

“The serious point is that my fertility is excellent.”

Lu Rangchen murmured dismissively against her ear and, in the same breath, switched off the floor lamp.

So that night, the two of them unsurprisingly ended up engaging in several more rounds of passionate activity, serving as Lu Rangchen’s proof of his own capabilities.

But no matter how many rounds of proof, the two of them consistently maintained their precautions.

After all, when it came to a matter of “someone’s life,” these things couldn’t be taken lightly.

Still, she was genuinely tired.

Yunque’s deepest memory of that night was how terribly her waist ached, and how uncomfortable she felt the entire next day at work.

Of course, the two of them had also reached a mutual understanding.

That was: in the future, no matter what happened, Yunque was not allowed to make unilateral decisions on her own. She absolutely had to tell him at the very first opportunity and discuss it with him.

Perhaps having witnessed firsthand just how “not to be trifled with” this man was —

From that point on, Yunque became considerably more well-behaved. At the very least, she never lied to him again.

As for the matter of having children —

The two of them had also reached an agreement: they had no plans to have any in the short term.

Though they weren’t terribly young anymore, there was still some time before either of them was mature enough to be a parent.

But ideals were ideals, and reality was reality.

Fate had a way of playing jokes on you — sometimes the very things you were most afraid of were the things it handed you.

For instance: despite the two of them conscientiously taking precautions every time, because of one particularly intense occasion, Yunque still found herself caught.

The following day, in the month of April —

Yunque, completely unaware, became pregnant.

This time it wasn’t that she was deliberately keeping it from Lu Rangchen — she herself hadn’t paid any attention to it.

That year, the classes she was teaching had moved up to their third year of senior high school. The coursework was demanding. It wasn’t just the students who were under pressure; she was under no small amount of pressure too, and she frequently had to supervise evening self-study sessions as well.

And because of the stress, her period had previously gone missing before.

So this time, Yunque dismissed it without a second thought.

By the time she truly noticed something was wrong, she already had fairly obvious symptoms.

Fatigue, loss of appetite, mild nausea.

At first, Lu Rangchen assumed she simply hadn’t been well lately. He went from picking her up after work every evening to picking her up and dropping her off regardless of the time of day, no matter how busy he was.

And whenever she had evening self-study to supervise —

Lu Rangchen would personally cook dinner for her.

It had to be said that Lu Rangchen’s cooking skills had improved more and more impressively since their marriage. For a stretch of time, even Deng Jiao couldn’t resist going over to cadge meals.

And yet, even so.

During that period, Yunque’s appetite still hadn’t improved.

One evening when Lu Rangchen was having dinner with her, she caught sight of the braised pork with preserved vegetables — a bit on the greasy side — and rushed straight to the bathroom to retch.

It was that day that Lu Rangchen finally noticed something was off.

He set down the meal container, and without caring in the least whether it was inconvenient for him near the women’s restroom, he waited directly outside the door. When Yunque came out, her face completely drained of color, he immediately pulled her into his arms. His thick brows knitted together as he pressed the back of his hand to her forehead to check her temperature.

Once he confirmed her temperature was normal, he looked at her with a grave expression and said, “Yunque, are you pregnant?”

She wasn’t exaggerating.

The color drained from Yunque’s face even further when she heard those words.

She parted her lips lightly. “…That can’t be, can it?”

Lu Rangchen furrowed his brows with some worry and said, “Let’s buy a pregnancy test and check.”

“……”

Yunque suddenly felt her steps go light beneath her.

Afterward, the two of them really did go to the pharmacy outside the school. Lu Rangchen bought the test and took her to the restroom inside the shop.

The result was exactly as expected.

Two lines.

A particularly distinct set of two lines.

For some reason, Yunque’s eyes suddenly turned red.

Lu Rangchen’s heart ached terribly at the sight of her.

He let out a sigh, drew her into his arms in a secluded corner away from everyone, and bent down to press a restrained kiss against her ear. In a coaxing, murmuring voice, he said, “It’s all right. Don’t be afraid. Your husband is here.”

Author’s Note: A young couple experiencing their first pregnancy with no idea what they’re doing~ Don’t worry, you get used to it after having a few. (Just kidding.)