Chapter Nine: Coast of the Man-Eating Sharks (1)
Because the conflict in Maguindanao Province was still ongoing, they took a detour around that road.
Cheng Muyang and she were arranged to stay on an unaffected island, one of the bases. Although the two of them were free to move about, during the Philippine civil unrest, even if they could escape the island, it would be difficult to avoid the armies engaged in large-scale fighting.
It was very peaceful here.
If they did not say they were in wartime, it would be impossible to imagine that the Philippines was in the midst of widespread bloody conflict.
Their room was small, but had everything they needed. There was a tiny living room and bathroom, as well as a bedroom. One night, Cheng Muyang was gone for a long time. The young girl responsible for cooking for them, who looked about fourteen or fifteen, seemed to know that Cheng Muyang would not be there that night and had deliberately come to keep her company, bringing her dinner as well.
Normally, when Cheng Muyang was there, the girl never spoke.
Tonight, though, she was a little more talkative.
At first, Nan Bei simply chatted with her in English. It was only when she heard the girl mention her husband that Nan Bei was surprised to learn that she was already married.
“Does the law here allow you to marry this young?”
“Sixteen. The law allows sixteen,” the girl said with a smile. “But for many people, if a girl isn’t married by thirteen or fourteen, it will bring shame on the family.”
She gave a quiet “Oh.”
Thinking about it, when she was thirteen or fourteen, she was still at the Shen family’s home.
No matter how close she had been with Shen Jiaming then, she would never have thought of the two words “get married.” At thirteen or fourteen, she was still suffering under the torment of her private tutor, living in an environment where she could not even skip school, tormented by all the emotions of girlhood.
After the girl left, she grew bored. There was nothing for entertainment, so she simply made up for all the sleep she had missed over the past few days, lying on the bed and sinking into a deep sleep. Late at night, she felt as though she could not catch her breath. Slowly waking, she discovered Cheng Muyang gently kissing her.
“Awake?”
Nan Bei hummed softly and wrapped her arms around his neck. “Where did you go to have some fun?”
“To meet someone.”
“Oh?”
Cheng Muyang said softly, “The custom here is that a man can marry four women. When they saw that I only had you, they thought they could arrange for their good brother here to marry another beautiful, gentle Filipina wife.”
Nan Bei hummed again. “Actually, you should have told them you still had four spots left.”
He seemed to smile.
Moonlight filtered through the wooden blinds, spilling inside and casting mottled shadows across his face.
“And besides, some ethnic groups here are more open-minded. They believe the greatest purpose of marriage is to have children.” His hand slipped beneath her waist and lifted her from the bed. “Before officially getting married, they can even try living as husband and wife.”
“Sounds pretty good.”
Still immersed in the hazy emotions of sleep, she let him do as he pleased with her.
Ever since he had come here, he had been more mindful, trying his best to respect the local customs and avoid drinking. So sometimes, he would use his unfulfilled desire for alcohol as an excuse and turn to her instead.
Sometimes she would sit by the shore watching the coral, and he could have the people accompanying them move farther away, then easily enter her on the rocks made scorching hot by the sun. His recklessness went beyond anything she could have imagined, yet she had to admit that she found it difficult to refuse him.
“It is,” Cheng Muyang said, pressing her against the blinds and kissing her gently. “But I would have to treat all my wives equally to marry them. I can’t do that. When I see you, there’s no one else.”
“Really?” She tried to escape from beneath him.
“Really.” But he caught her by the ankle, pulled her back, and pressed her beneath him.
Perhaps because she was not accustomed to the food, she was thinner than when she had arrived.
Yet it made her beautiful collarbones, as well as her wrists and ankles, stand out even more.
He lowered his head and caught her collarbone between his teeth.
Nan Bei tilted her head back and heard him say in a very teasing voice, “Spread your legs.”
“Rascal.”
Cheng Muyang smiled faintly, his fingers caressing her skin as they slid down from her waist, until he once again caught her ankle and bent one of her legs, pressing it between them.
Her frame, slim and alluring. Her curves, distinct.
She bit her lip, her head tilted back as far as it could go, bearing all of his strength.
Through their repeated encounters, he had practically watched her go from awkwardness and pain to now accepting him with almost no reservations. Cheng Muyang knew that he loved her deeply, far more than she loved him, yet even so, he was still astonished by his own insatiability.
With everything else, he always knew when to advance and when to retreat. He had never been like this, never satisfied.
Afterward, Nan Bei slept deeply in the crook of his arm.
Just as she had when he returned.
Cheng Muyang looked at every subtle detail of her face. He even noticed the slight bump on her forehead. Was it an allergic reaction, or perhaps she had too much internal heat? His thoughts stopped there, and he could not help laughing to himself.
He could not sleep at night because he was watching this woman, and he was even thinking about the pimple on her forehead.
Was that taking things too far?
When she slept, her mouth was never completely relaxed. Sometimes her lips were pursed, sometimes they were slightly pouted, always making people wonder what kind of dream she was having, or what she was seeing in it.
Cheng Muyang bent down and gently pried open her mouth with the tip of his tongue.
He closed his eyes, feeling her little tongue unconsciously responding to him.
The woman she was now was not the same as the woman in Belgium who had fallen asleep holding a book. She had gone to the Shen family when she was ten; he had gone to Moscow when he was fourteen. Her girlhood had been filled with sunlight, while before that, she had been constantly uprooted and displaced. His adolescence, meanwhile, had been filled with the gentle words of his elders and the benevolent teachings of Buddhism and incense, but after he went to Moscow, it was filled with killing.
Her path had been chosen for her because she had no other choice. He, on the other hand, had stood between good and evil and, without the slightest hesitation, chosen a bloody road. A person may live a hundred years, but it is no more than a fleeting dream of yellow millet. If the dream is so short, why crave more?
Yet if he had not craved more, she could never have known him.
Cheng Muyang realized that he was jealous, jealous that the purest feelings of her teenage years had not been for him. He caught her chin and kissed her almost as if in retaliation.
Nan Bei finally felt suffocated and could not help twisting her body, wanting to push him away.
But he caught her hands.
He opened his eyes, ending the kiss. Through the mottled moonlight filtering through the blinds, he silently looked at her body, trying to calm the fire in his heart. Unexpectedly, with the pressure on her breathing gone, Nan Bei instinctively wrapped her arms around him again and clung to him.
Nestled in his arms, she continued the dream she had been having.
He smiled helplessly. When her skin pressed tightly against his, he simply rolled over and pressed himself on top of her again, taking her once more. Nan Bei was practically exhausted, her mouth protesting nonstop, unable even to open her eyes, yet her body responded to him obediently, accommodating this man whose demands knew no bounds.
The next morning, when she got up early and came out of the bedroom, the young girl had already begun busily preparing breakfast for the two of them. Seeing the flush on Nan Bei’s face and her weary, somewhat unsteady steps, she could not help smiling at her.
Nan Bei smiled back, inexplicably embarrassed by the feeling that she had been seen through.
For some reason, these past few days, the young local leader had remained dutifully at Cheng Muyang’s side as they walked through the island’s plantations. Today, they were going to the moringa and rubber plantations.
She remembered that this organization, which had broken away from the Liberation Front and established itself independently, had officially been said to have no more than nearly a thousand members. But judging from their itinerary over the past dozen days, it was obvious that their sphere of influence was far greater than that.
“Has their conflict with the government ended?” Nan Bei asked Cheng Muyang.
He placed the sun hat on her head. “More or less. One side wants independence, the other wants to prevent independence, but neither wants to affect the civilians too much. The conflict won’t last too long. After all, this island of Mindanao is where those organizations have lived for generations. They aren’t like many organizations that are constantly on the move, so they simply won’t disregard the impact of armed conflict on civilians.”
“You really know everything, Professor,” Nan Bei mocked him. “Do you have every organization in every country memorized by heart?”
Cheng Muyang smiled. “More or less. They’re all clients, of course I have to know them well.”
Nan Bei could not help laughing and reached out to take his hand.
Not far away, more than twenty heavily armed men could be seen concealed in the surrounding jungle. The leader continued introducing the rubber production here. Nan Bei listened attentively, then suddenly said in French, “In Yunnan, China, there is a group of hidden millionaires who all made their fortunes growing rubber.”
The leader was quite interested. “I only know that China has a lot of coal mines.”
She laughed. “That’s why I said that people who do business in rubber in Yunnan are all hidden millionaires. At the airports in Shangri-La, Lijiang, and Kunming, you can see a lot of private planes. They basically all belong to rubber-industry bosses.”
“Your wife seems to know Yunnan, China, very well,” the leader said to Cheng Muyang with a sigh of admiration.
Cheng Muyang smiled but said nothing.
Nan Bei had only felt a sense of familiarity at the sight of the rubber, which was why she had casually said a few things. But clearly, she had brought up far too much about “Yunnan, China.” She pretended not to care and said, “I’m Burmese. It’s very close to Yunnan.”
Fortunately, Cheng Muyang had told them from the beginning that his woman was an ethnic Chinese from Myanmar.
On their way back, the leader received a message.
“There are candidates who don’t want this civil unrest to stop.” The leader laughed. “Cheng, if your weapons don’t arrive soon, I’m afraid we’ll have to go to the Liberation Front and take some weapons.”
Cheng Muyang laughed. “Soon.”
In this country, violence always followed politics like a shadow, especially on Mindanao. Those political families that had been locked in long-standing struggles were even willing to hire these organizations to strike at their opponents, carrying out kidnappings and murders, targeting not only locals but also foreign media journalists. At times like this, these organizations were nothing more than tools.
It was said that over the past thirty years, this organization and its splinter groups had caused the deaths of more than a hundred thousand people. But who could calculate how many of those deaths had actually been caused by struggles for power?
When they got out of the car, a gust of wind blew past and messed up her hair.
Through the fragmented gaps in her line of sight, she saw a familiar figure, a blond European.
He reached out and smoothed her hair back into place. “What are you looking at?”
She leaned against him. “I suddenly saw a European. It seemed a little strange.”
No comments:
Post a Comment