Admittedly, Lu Rangchen, for all his roguishness, always knew exactly how to calibrate things between men and women — never crossing the line, but never falling short of it either.

Just like right now.

Those words of his — say one phrase more and he’d come across as crude and disrespectful; say one phrase less and he’d lose that particular edge of his, that dangerous, taunting quality.

Yunque felt the tips of her ears flush. She turned and went straight back to the bathroom, tracking down the undergarment she’d left behind.

The pale pink bra hung perfectly undisturbed on the rack — completely at odds with this decidedly masculine bathroom — visible the moment you walked in.

She snatched it down, spun around, and walked straight into Lu Rangchen.

The man was tall and lean with broad shoulders and long legs, blocking her way entirely. The scent of him hung in the air like a dormant volcano — deceptively calm, yet churning with undercurrents.

Yunque was completely hemmed in. She looked up to find Lu Rangchen standing with his hands in his pockets, half-lidded eyes regarding her with a cool, unhurried gaze.

He said it deliberately, making trouble: “Found everything?”

“……”

Yunque pressed her lips together and said nothing. She simply shoved Lu Rangchen aside and walked out.

Such a slender little frame — and yet that shove actually made his shoulder shift.

Lu Rangchen smiled without a sound, his gaze trailing after her as she left, until she slammed the bedroom door shut behind her with a definitive click.

Quite the temper she had.

He called for her again later — after his shower — when the third floor was in the thick of a hotpot gathering, and the group kept sending messages urging him to come down with her since he hadn’t shown up yet.

It was only then that Lu Rangchen knocked on the bedroom door and called out in a lazy drawl for Yunque to come out.

Having learned her lesson earlier, Yunque threw on a top before opening the door. Her bare face wore an expression of clear displeasure — not that Lu Rangchen showed any sign of minding. He’d changed into a fresh white T-shirt and long trousers, and seemed to be in a genuinely good mood.

He leaned against the doorframe with idle ease, tilting his head toward her. “Hotpot on the third floor?”

Yunque was still nursing that earlier grievance and was about to say she’d pass — but before the words could leave her mouth, her stomach betrayed her with a loud, undignified rumble.

Lu Rangchen half-narrowed his eyes. “Haven’t eaten?”

Yunque pressed her lips together and said, “I ate. At the night market.”

Lu Rangchen asked, quite naturally, “With who.”

“With Xu Linda.”

A perfectly clean, perfectly ordinary exchange — nothing remarkable about it at all. And yet between the two of them, something about it felt distinctly off.

Lu Rangchen made a sound of acknowledgment and gave her no time to waver. He tossed out a quick “change your clothes and hurry up,” but then paused before he could turn to leave, glancing back at her with an expressionless face, and said, “There’ll be men out there. Don’t wear what you had on just now.”

With that, he finally turned and walked out the door.

“……”

Yunque stood rooted to the spot.

She didn’t quite know why, but she’d caught a faint thread of displeasure in his tone.

Overbearing as it was, he wasn’t wrong.

So Yunque ended up changing into the outfit she’d set aside for work tomorrow, and when she stepped into the corridor she found Lu Rangchen already waiting there.

He was exactly the same as before — languid, casual, wild in a way that was entirely his own. The boyish quality was gone; in its place, a fully matured tension radiated from every inch of him.

Seeing her emerge, he barely lifted his eyes, said nothing, and simply turned to head toward the staircase. His pace was steady and unhurried throughout — as if he were indulging her without quite meaning to.

By the time they reached the lower floor and drew near the recreation room, the rich, fragrant smell of hotpot was already in the air. Inside, things were lively and boisterous — a cluster of young men gathered around the pot.

No one had expected the boss to come down with a woman. When they spotted Yunque, the group went visibly still for a beat, and then someone muttered under his breath, “Boss brought the boss’s lady.”

The moment those words landed, the whole room broke into laughter.

Yunque had always been the type to blush easily — but strangely, their teasing didn’t make her particularly uncomfortable. She even glanced over at Lu Rangchen.

Lu Rangchen, for his part, was genuinely provoked into laughing against his will.

He let out a low, magnetic reprimand: “Are you done? Anyone who doesn’t want to eat can get out.”

That shut them up, and they all grinned and fell quiet.

Someone quick on their feet immediately cleared two seats for the two of them.

No sooner had Yunque settled in next to Lu Rangchen than a dipping bowl and chopsticks were set in front of her. The table looked chaotic at a glance, but the spread of ingredients, she had to admit, was actually quite generous.

Lu Rangchen casually wiped her bowl and chopsticks for her, and said, “Just eat whatever. Better than starving.”

He might have meant it as nothing much — but Yunque didn’t see it that way.

Thin-sliced lamb, beef tenderloin, shrimp paste, tripe, yellow throat — the group of young men fished them out as soon as they were done cooking and piled them in front of Yunque, bumbling over one another with earnest eagerness.

Worried she might be put off, they even went to fetch a fresh ladle.

Each time they set a bowl in front of her, Lu Rangchen’s gaze would follow — cold as a supervisor overseeing drills.

By the third bowl, he clicked his tongue. “That’s enough. When are you planning to stop.”

Chastened, the lot of them laughed sheepishly and withdrew.

Yunque had just finished her first bowl. She looked up at Lu Rangchen.

Lu Rangchen looked back at her. “You don’t have to be so polite. If you don’t want it, don’t eat it. No one’s going to say anything.”

Several of those dishes were ones she didn’t particularly like — but because the others had given them to her, she ate them all anyway.

She pulled out a tissue to wipe her mouth and said, “Can’t very well refuse someone’s good intentions.”

Lu Rangchen let out a short, amused hum. “You’ve got a principled streak.”

As he spoke, he pulled the bowl with the shrimp paste closer to himself, picked out all the shrimp paste and transferred it to his own bowl, then fished out a freshly cooked portion of round cabbage and glass noodles and set them in front of her instead.

Yunque didn’t like shrimp paste. She liked round cabbage.

Such a small, forgettable habit — and yet Lu Rangchen had carried the knowledge of it, clear and intact, all this time.

Staring at the two bowls in front of her, Yunque tightened her grip on her chopsticks. Something rose up inside her, and suddenly she couldn’t say a word.

Lu Rangchen hadn’t expected her to say anything anyway.

He reached idly into his pocket, wanting to pull out a cigarette — then remembered she was sitting right beside him. He pressed his tongue briefly against the corner of his mouth and ultimately left the pack untouched.

Just then, his phone rang.

Lu Rangchen glanced down at the screen. It seemed to be someone important — he furrowed his brow slightly, stood, and went outside to take the call.

Yunque ate a few bites of her food and looked up at him.

Lu Rangchen stood with his phone pressed to his ear, listening intently — and yet, even so, his gaze could still find Yunque’s with unerring precision whenever she glanced his way.

The two of them held each other’s gaze across the room in silent quiet, until Lu Rangchen pulled open the recreation room door and finally that deep, dark look broke away from hers.

Coming back to herself, Yunque felt her heartbeat quicken in a way she couldn’t quite name.

With the boss apparently gone and the air open again, the young men’s conversation inevitably drifted toward Yunque. The one among them who was closest to Lu Rangchen — the one called Jiang Sui — worked up his nerve and asked her, “Beautiful, can I ask you something? What exactly is your relationship with our boss?”

A rather abrupt question. No one had dared to ask it outright until now.

But not asking was genuinely driving them all mad.

It was Lu Rangchen they were talking about — a man who, throughout all these years, had never let a woman anywhere near him. Whether it was someone set up for him or someone who threw herself at him, not a single one had caught his eye.

And then out of nowhere, like a bolt from the blue — Yunque.

What made it most pressing for Jiang Sui specifically was that his older cousin had been taken with Lu Rangchen for some time and was hell-bent on pursuing him. If Yunque really had something going on with Lu Rangchen, Jiang Sui wanted to tell his cousin to give it up already.

As it turned out, the question was more than worth asking.

Yunque didn’t know what had come over her in that moment. Without a second thought, she opened her mouth and answered: “Ex.”

The moment those words fell.

The clamor of the recreation room snuffed out all at once, like a flame blown dead. The young men looked at each other, then back at her, blank-faced and thoroughly stunned, each more completely thrown off than the last.

Yunque regarded them the way she regarded Ye Tian.

She found it quietly amusing — though her expression gave nothing away.

It was Jiang Sui who came back to himself first. “Holy — so you’re the ex who dumped our boss?”

His tone held no accusation — more like genuine, unabashed admiration.

Deng Jiao had said something similar once, which had given Yunque a certain immunity, so she gave a fairly composed nod.

Someone else chimed in: “But why? Why did you break up with our boss? Was he bad to you?”

He seemed to reconsider his own question the moment it was out of his mouth.

After all — the way Lu Rangchen had fussed over her just now was completely indulgent, hardly the behavior of a man who’d treated someone poorly.

Sure enough, Yunque shook her head. “He was wonderful. He treated me very well. It was me who wasn’t good enough.”

Her voice was quiet when she said it — but Lu Rangchen, who had just finished his call and was back at the doorway, heard it nonetheless.

His footsteps stilled.

Lu Rangchen swallowed quietly and didn’t go back in.

The voices inside came to him clearly.

It was Jiang Sui asking her, “So what actually happened? Why did you two break up? Are you planning to get back together now?”

Yunque said nothing.

It was another young man who stepped in, saying, “What kind of question is that — are you a war correspondent? Asking everything. You want the boss to walk in and smack you upside the head?”

The Tianjin-flavored phrasing made the whole room burst out laughing, and the unspoken tension dissolved with it.

Jiang Sui scratched his head, looking genuinely embarrassed. He smiled at Yunque and said, “Sorry — that was out of line.”

Yunque gave a careless tug of one corner of her mouth.

Then yet another bold soul spoke up: “Miss, can I ask — when you two were together, who chased who? Was it him who came after you?”

Honestly, as questions go, it was fairly harmless.

Mostly just curiosity.

Yunque didn’t hedge. She said, “It wasn’t exactly him chasing me.”

A deliberately vague answer.

At the doorway, Lu Rangchen let one eyelid drop, then made a quiet sound of derision.

He thought: how remarkably shameless of her — unaware that her very next sentence would be:

“Actually, I liked him from a very long time ago.”

Her tone when she said it was completely different.

Gone was the flatness and detachment of before; in its place was something calm and settled, something that spoke of quiet certainty.

“……”

No one had expected her to say that. At the doorway, something shifted in Lu Rangchen’s eyes — a sudden, unguarded darkening.

The young men, by contrast, were hardly surprised.

Lu Rangchen was the kind of person who stood out wherever he went, and that someone had harbored a secret love for him seemed, if anything, perfectly unremarkable — nothing remotely new about it.

Yunque herself hadn’t expected that it would be this particular group of people — of all people — who would draw these words out of her.

She couldn’t explain it.

In that moment, in front of all of them, she simply wanted to be reckless just this once — to open every door she’d kept sealed shut.

She said, “Back in high school. I’d been silently in love with him for a long time by then. There was a time at the bus stop — I’d dozed off without meaning to, and he woke me up. Because of him, I made it home.”

“Later, by chance, he came to my class looking for help. I used that as an excuse to borrow a hundred yuan from him.”

“But I never spent that hundred yuan. Not a single note of it. Because it was from him — I just wanted to keep it hidden away.”

Yunque’s eyes shimmered faintly. “And he never knew — but on the day I was supposed to return the money, I actually went to the pavilion on purpose to make a phone call there.”

“I’d known for a long time that he and his friends often went to smoke by that pavilion.”

“Whenever I had a chance, I would go there — pretending to recite lessons, pretending to memorize vocabulary. Every single time I went, I’d take off my glasses and try to look as pretty as I could.”

“And from start to finish, I ran into him exactly once.”

“Just that one time,” Yunque said with a small smile. “I deliberately made the first move and added him on WeChat, saying I needed to return the money.”

She stopped there.

Yunque didn’t say another word. Instead, she lifted her head and looked — calmly, steadily — toward Lu Rangchen, who was standing in the doorway.

The man stood with one hand in his pocket, the other holding a bottle of peach-flavored fizzy drink — her favorite kind, picked up from the convenience store downstairs. His gaze was direct and unguarded, his dark, deep-set eyes trained on her with fierce and unblinking intensity.

Their eyes met.

Yunque’s voice trembled slightly when she finally spoke again.

“That crush,” she said, “started when I was seventeen. It never stopped. Not for a single moment.”

“……”

“And I never once told him.”

“How much I loved him.”