Chapter Thirteen
Love Without a Trace of Another Color (1)
She wanted to be close to him. She couldn't even hold herself back...
It wasn't Shen Ce who wanted her. She was the one who wanted him.
Zhaozhao lifted her lips away and lightly brushed the tip of her nose against his Adam's apple. The warmth of her own breath enveloped her, drawing her further in. Just as she was about to bite, his Adam's apple suddenly moved, much more noticeably than before.
Reflections of light played across the mirror and entered Shen Ce's eyes.
Shen Ce's hand slid down from beside her face. He wanted to move it lower, wanted to hold her, but he didn't want to disturb the atmosphere. He could see everything in the mirror. He could see her hair brushing against his shoulder, could see her looking at him.
The man's breath fell across the bridge of her nose. He really wanted to kiss her now.
Zhaozhao could no longer hold out and closed her eyes.
There was a very faint scent on Shen Ce, one that belonged uniquely to him. The smell of aftershave mingled with a fragrance rarely encountered on ordinary people. It was the scent of incense after it had burned out, decadent and rich.
It carried the sense of exhaustion from struggling through a long night with no end in sight, yet also the finality of everything turning to ash...
She was suddenly suffocated by the scent. Her lips trembled slightly, and she felt terribly sad. But the feeling soon vanished without a trace, leaving only the dull thudding of her heart.
"Ge," she called him involuntarily.
"Mm." To her surprise, he answered.
"I feel like... I can't breathe. I feel a little unwell."
Outside the door, the tailors suddenly began speaking in low voices.
His arm wrapped around her waist from behind, and she couldn't help leaning toward him. This was the first time she had ever held Shen Ce like this. As though she were truly hugging her older brother, Zhaozhao slipped her arms around his waist. Shen Ce had a very narrow waist.
Shen Ce abandoned the thought of being intimate with her and began feeling for the pulse beneath her neck.
It tickled, so she pushed his hand away.
Although she knew he was trying to check her heartbeat, she still didn't want him to move. Holding him like this felt very comfortable.
Zhaozhao's thoughts drifted outward, spreading endlessly like curling wisps of smoke. She thought of the tea room in the basement, then of the home theater in Hong Kong, and then found herself thinking that there didn't seem to be any calligraphy hanging there.
"Do you have a courtesy name?" she asked. "When I have time, I'll write you a piece of calligraphy and give it to you."
Shen Ce remained silent for a long while.
A knock at the door broke the stillness.
The tailors outside, having seen no one come out, asked whether something was wrong with the clothes.
Zhaozhao wanted to leave, but the hand at her waist held her in place. She couldn't move an inch. Shen Ce told the people outside to go have some tea and rest first. They acknowledged him, and the conversation outside promptly ceased.
"Muye," he finally said, lowering his head again.
"Muye? As in the Battle of Muye?" She considered his courtesy name carefully. "Does Uncle Shen admire King Wu of Zhou?"
The plains of Muye stretched vast, the sandalwood chariots gleamed brilliantly. It described the scene of a commander leading his armies into battle, and also referred to King Wu of Zhou's Battle of Muye.
To her surprise, he corrected her. "It's the ye from 'Success is due to Xiao He.'"
She thought about it, then laughed. "Wouldn't it be simpler to say the ye in yexu, 'perhaps'?"
It would be simpler, but he preferred that particular saying.
Because back then, everyone under heaven had said of him, Shen Ce: His success was due to Zhaozhao, and his downfall was due to Zhaozhao.
For Zhaozhao, he had endured pain no one else could endure, suffered humiliation no one else could bear, and survived countless brushes with death. King of the Rivers, undefeated through a hundred battles. In the end, all of it had become nothing more than passing clouds. Once Zhaozhao died, everything was empty.
He knew his own ending had not been a good one. A prince of one dynasty, reduced to dust. Yet the scene before him was blank, and he could not see the whole picture.
At present, he could only taste a morsel and guess at the whole feast, glimpse a single spot and imagine the entire leopard. Heaven had set a puzzle before him. The past was in disarray, and what tomorrow would bring, whether good or bad, painful or joyful, was impossible to predict. He could only make conjectures out of thin air.
It was as though he had returned to the days when he faced his enemies across the battlefield, when rival warlords contended for supremacy and the realm was divided into five. Who was friend and who was foe today, who would send troops to invade, who would form a temporary alliance, and who would stab him in the back tomorrow? None of it could be foreseen.
"Why use that particular ye?" It was unusual. Normally, the name would be written as Muye, after the place.
"I have a... distant younger cousin. She started learning to write when she was three, and she always complained that the character for 'wilderness' was too troublesome to write, so I changed it."
Another younger sister. And a distant relative, at that.
Zhaozhao felt a little uncomfortable. Pretending to ask casually, she said, "How old is she?"
Shen Ce observed her expression in the mirror. It seemed she was no longer feeling unwell, so he asked, "Feeling better? Let's go outside for a walk. It's easy to feel stifled shut up in here."
She could tell he was avoiding the question. In her mind, she had already conjured up an image of a delicate, spoiled little girl clinging to him. She pulled out some tissues and began wiping away the numerous marks on the mirror.
Shen Ce opened both doors. When he saw that she hadn't followed him, he understood.
"Ten years younger than me," he said from the doorway.
Ten years younger meant she was only a little girl in her early teens. That was all right, then.
Still, he really did dote on his younger sisters. Zhaozhao thought of how all the children in the family liked gathering around him, never minding his fierce manner. She supposed he was like that with all children, so she didn't give it any more thought.
The two of them could be considered reconciled, and they didn't separate for the rest of the day.
Someone came to ask them to join the elders for lunch, but Shen Ce had someone reply that they weren't home. Instead, he took her on a day trip to Taiwan. They had lunch there and, while they were at it, visited another Fisherman's Wharf.
The sun was blazing, and she hadn't brought a sun hat. Shen Ce bought her a straw hat from a roadside vendor beneath a bridge and insisted that she go up onto the bridge to have a look.
Zhaozhao didn't understand. What was so special about a bridge spanning the water?
Behind them, a tour guide was saying, "This is Lovers' Bridge. Everyone, take a walk across it and may it lead you to a happy marriage."
All at once, Zhaozhao thought even the sound of the waves was lovely. The little marina enclosed by iron railings in the distance seemed more romantic, and even the scorching sunlight that slipped past the brim of her hat and fell on the tip of her nose and her lips felt just the right degree of warm, making her skin tingle pleasantly.
Unfortunately, the brim of her hat restricted her view, and she couldn't see what expression Shen Ce was wearing beside her.
Until, from an angle where no one else could see, the pad of his finger gently brushed beneath her chin.
They returned to Macau that night, and he still stayed close by her side. Zhaozhao was too young to enter Macau's actual casinos.
Shen Ce hired two of the best dealers and opened a private suite to entertain Shen Jiaheng and the others, just as he had once done in the waterside pavilion at the Shen residence.
The Macau branch of the Shen family was meticulous about etiquette. However they had been entertained, they would return the hospitality in precisely the same manner.
But people who observed every courtesy and kept their accounts so carefully were usually the least inclined to show personal consideration, because every debt of goodwill had already been repaid.
The dealer removed the cardboard packaging from a fresh deck of cards and inserted it into the card shuffler.
Amid the mechanical swishing sounds, Zhaozhao sat in the farthest corner, resting her chin on her hand as she watched the dealer.
Shen Ce's legs were very long, stretched out beneath the card table. At first, their legs rested side by side, touching. Later, when she grew tired, she draped her legs over his right leg.
Shen Ce's expression remained unchanged. He bent his fingers and tapped the table twice.
"Change the deck."
It was almost as though he had tapped directly against her.
At his request, the dealer opened another new deck of cards and placed it into the card shuffler.
During this brief interval, Shen Ce reached beneath the table, lifted her legs, and settled them more comfortably across his own.
Shen Yan, seated at the same table, couldn't see it, nor could Shen Jiaheng. But the attendants standing behind them, serving tea and pouring water, and the other dealer resting off to one side could all see it clearly.
Shen Yan picked up his two cards and looked at them, one overlapping the other. "Little Aunt, do you have a boyfriend? My brother-in-law told me."
She didn't understand. "Who's your brother-in-law?"
"The one who boxed with Little Uncle in the ring that day," Shen Yan explained. "Liang Jinhua. He's my wife's older brother."
"By seniority, he should address you as Little Aunt," Shen Ce added calmly.
So it was that man.
Zhaozhao found it even stranger. "He said I have a boyfriend? I don't even know him."
"It wasn't exactly him who said it." Shen Yan shook his head and explained to Zhaozhao with a gentle, refined smile. "Little Uncle was the one who let it slip to him."
Zhaozhao looked at Shen Ce in surprise.
"When did this happen?" Shen Jiaheng, seated at the far left of the table, also looked at Zhaozhao in surprise.
Shen Ce was asking someone behind him for a hot towel and some water.
"Before... I came here," Zhaozhao answered, unable to guess why Shen Ce would have told someone such a thing.
She saw Shen Ce take the hot towel without a change in expression and wipe his hands clean. He picked up a blister pack of white tablets, pushed halfway through the foil, and, holding the thin strip of tablets, slipped two pills into his mouth...
Distracted, she answered perfunctorily, "Just recently, I guess. Only a few days ago."
He was taking medicine. Was he feeling unwell somewhere?
His fingers covered the writing on the blister pack. Zhaozhao wanted to look, but he gave her no chance.
"What's Little Aunt's boyfriend like?" Shen Yan asked with a smile.
How had he already become her uncle-in-law?
Zhaozhao hesitated, looking as though there were some great secret behind it, when in truth she simply hadn't figured out what to say. Especially since, apart from Shen Yan and Shen Jiaheng, everyone in the room had seen how intimately she had been resting her legs on Shen Ce's. Those few silent outsiders were listening, too.
Shen Ce accepted a glass that caught the light and swallowed his medicine with water.
"He's..." Zhaozhao began slowly. "He's quite tall, and he's... good-looking. He looks fierce, but he's actually all bark and no bite. He likes to coax me."
Shen Ce put the glass back on the tray.
"Have I met him?" Shen Jiaheng asked.
"Of course you haven't," Zhaozhao said at once. Then she cautioned Shen Yan, "Don't talk about it so formally, especially not in front of the elders."
If they made it sound too serious, her mother would certainly start asking questions.
"That's the right attitude," Shen Jiaheng said, misunderstanding her meaning and joining in with his own advice. "Who says that just because you're dating someone, you have to decide right away that you'll spend your life with him? You're only seeing whether you get along."
Zhaozhao really couldn't keep talking about it. Quietly, she withdrew her legs.
Shen Ce gave Shen Yan a look, signaling him to take Shen Jiaheng downstairs to the main gaming floor. Shen Yan thought nothing of it, assuming that Little Aunt was tired and that he was being asked to entertain this distant relative on his own. With a few words, he persuaded Shen Jiaheng to leave.
Shen Ce nodded to the dealer in thanks.
The dealer nodded in return and left with everyone else.
Once everyone had gone, Zhaozhao pressed a finger against a playing card and spun it on the felt tabletop. One of Shen Ce's hands rested there. Against the green felt, his fingers looked remarkably long and slender. Just the lines of his knuckles alone had an air of effortless charm.
He leaned toward her, watching her spin the card. Just as he was about to kiss her, Zhaozhao turned her head aside.
"You sent everyone away just so you could do this."
He laughed.
"Don't tell me you don't want to?" Zhaozhao cut in.
"Yes, I do." He didn't deny it.
But back when she had slept in his arms, she had been the one to slip her hand inside his clothes. And a few days ago in Hong Kong, she had been the one to repeat the trick and reach out to touch him again. If it came down to who wanted it more, she was still the more eager of the two.
Shen Ce reached out and touched her knee.
Zhaozhao didn't move.
But he pushed back his chair and left the card table. Behind her came the sound of a door opening and closing. She turned around in puzzlement. Why had he gone out?
Before long, Shen Ce returned with a grayish-white cashmere blanket.
He took her by the wrist and pulled her toward him.
Shen Ce lifted her onto his lap, wrapped the soft, fluffy blanket around her, and only then gathered her into his arms. He had just touched her knee and found it cold. The air-conditioning in here was turned up too high.
"Tuck your legs in," he said.
Zhaozhao had been feeling cold for some time, but it hadn't occurred to her to get a blanket. She drew her legs up and sat curled on his lap while he tucked the blanket securely around her on all sides. With his arms around her waist and legs, she couldn't help leaning toward him, just as she had that morning.
"The way I feel about you is different from what you think," he murmured close to her eyelids. "Even if you stayed with me day and night, if you wanted me to go my entire life without touching you, I could do that."
He couldn't tell her: We're different. The way I feel about you isn't the way an ordinary man feels.
Holding her like this reminded him of their childhood, of how she would part her lips beside his neck and yawn sleepily. Of how he had carried her on his back, walking all the way from Linhai to Chaisang. Of how she had wound a quilt around their feet, making a circle that enclosed them both to ward off the ghosts she feared. Of how, no matter how many times she drifted off and woke again, she would still sit leaning against the doorway, waiting for him to set his sword down on the floor and stretch out his arms to gather her into his embrace and coax her to sleep.
Of how she would sit before the mirror, combing her hair and dressing, while he would often pretend to watch the swallows flying beneath the eaves so he could look at her.
When he saw Zhaozhao's beauty, unlike ordinary men, his first thought was not to embrace her and make her his own, but to protect her and keep her hidden, afraid that she might attract the improper intentions of others.
Yet the way she gazed at his features, his brows and eyes, was quite direct. She would often become absorbed in looking at him, only to seem rather displeased when she came back to herself, saying, "Ge, you're so good-looking. Your future sister-in-law is going to get quite a bargain."
As for him, she really did... often have designs on him.
That was what made them different from other people.
He thought of how that night in the home theater had ended.
She had insisted on taking off his shirt completely, determined to sleep with him in her arms. Even after he turned off the air-conditioning, it was still cold, so he had no choice but to rummage around for a blanket and wrap them both up together, making do on the sofa for the night.
She truly was the only person he couldn't handle, in either his previous life or this one.
You want to kiss me? I'll go drink some tea first to moisten my mouth. You have designs on my body? I'll willingly loosen my clothes and undo my belt, lest anything hinder you...
But to say that his affection was entirely free of other desires would not be quite true, either.
Shen Ce held her around the waist. Against his neck was the warmth of her real, living breath, light and lingering, concealing within it the most unspeakable restlessness between a man and a woman.
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