Deep in the night, with everything still, dark cloud gathered until a black press of it had shut out every trace of light.
At last a bolt of lightning cut the night open, and with it came scattered raindrops… and in no great while it was coming down in sheets.
The hands pointed to twelve exactly: the midnight of midnight. The rush of the rain and the steadily louder voice of the thunder wiped out the quiet of that midnight altogether.
Guoguo, woken by the thunder, lay against the window with her small face pressed flat to the glass, both eyes flashing with bright light, watching in excitement as the lightning flared and flared again outside.
“Whoa! So pretty.”
Flashing lightning and crashing thunder of a kind that would easily reduce any child her apparent age to tears were, in Guoguo’s case, a trigger for delight.
Ye Tianxie had his head wrapped tightly in a thin blanket, trying to shut out the sound of the rain and the thunder that was wrecking his sleep. Nerves as sensitive as his were, a great deal of the time, not a good thing at all. The slightest movement could wake him outright, let alone lightning and thunder like this.
“Master, is this lightning…”
“Yes.” Ye Tianxie answered without any strength in it.
“Master, why does lightning fall down out of the sky? It’s so strange.”
“…No idea.”
“Master, I want to go outside and look…”
“Mm…” Ye Tianxie made an unconscious noise.
Whoosh…
The window was pushed open by Guoguo, and a swift cold wind carrying raindrops came rushing in. Ye Tianxie’s bed was against the window; every drop the gust carried in landed on his head and his body, and the cold shock woke him most of the way in one go.
Bang — he shut the window, then pinched Guoguo around her small waist, hoisted her up, tossed her onto the bed and said sternly, “Guoguo. Sleep!”
“But, but I want to look.” Guoguo scrambled back up onto the bed, eyes swimming.
“It’s only thunder. There’ll be plenty more of it.” Ye Tianxie draped Guoguo’s own small thin quilt over her, lay back down, and wrapped his head up again.
Knock knock. Knock knock knock…
The sound of someone rapping at his door started up, and the rapping was distinctly urgent. At the same moment another bright bolt of lightning sprawled jagged across the night sky, and behind it the deafening thunder arrived with a crash.
The knocking faltered noticeably when the thunder broke, then grew more urgent still. “Tianxie, Tianxie… open the door, quickly, Tianxie!”
“Huh? Is that Sister Feifei’s voice?” Guoguo, who had not been able to sleep anyway, sat straight up, then floated lightly into the air and drifted over to the door. It being bedtime, she had nothing on; she had never made any effort to avoid such things in front of Ye Tianxie.
Ye Tianxie got up, resigned, and opened the door. Outside stood Su Feifei in thin nightwear with both arms guarding her chest. He was about to speak when an enormous peal of thunder split the air; Su Feifei cried out and flung herself bodily against him, all four limbs wound tight around him, her whole body faintly shaking.
A summer night of rain was hot all the same, and Ye Tianxie had nothing on above the waist, while Su Feifei, having run out in a rush, was wearing only silk nightwear about as thin as nightwear can be, with no time whatsoever to have put on anything underneath. Ye Tianxie could feel the softness of the pressure very clearly indeed.
Most girls are afraid of thunder, and Su Feifei was one of them. Moreover, because of her mother’s death and no end of shadows left behind by it, the degree of her fear of lightning ran well past an ordinary girl’s. She had woken at the first clap of thunder, and in her panic the first person she had thought of was Ye Tianxie, and had come running over in a hurry.
“Young Mistress Su, coiling yourself around a man like this… is very dangerous.” Ye Tianxie held both hands out and away to avoid touching Su Feifei’s body — because with what Su Feifei currently had on, touching anywhere at all was hardly different from touching skin. And the pressure at his chest had his mind wandering; he worked desperately to shift his attention elsewhere.
At that moment Su Feifei had both arms clamped around Ye Tianxie’s neck and her long white legs locked firmly about him… and having finally come back to her senses out of that sudden fright, she registered at last how improper her posture was, and scrambled down off him in a flurry, her pale neck and pretty face flooding cherry-blossom red.
“I… I’m afraid of thunder.” Su Feifei said it in a small voice with her head slightly lowered. One hand went unconsciously to grab at Ye Tianxie’s clothes — and touched instead the bare skin of his chest. Her hand snapped back as though from a shock, and she stammered, “You… why aren’t you wearing anything?”
“It’s this hot. You can’t have been expecting me to sleep in my clothes.” Ye Tianxie said it helplessly. In the dark he could make out only the outline of Su Feifei’s shape — and into his mind, unbidden, came the picture of Su Feifei bared in front of him that afternoon.
Su Feifei bit her lip lightly and said in a low, small voice, “Tianxie, I… would you sleep beside me tonight?”
“My self-control is very poor. If you’re not afraid of something happening.” Ye Tianxie raised an eyebrow and said it with great helplessness.
Su Feifei lifted both arms and folded them across her chest, was silent for two seconds, and then said with mild reproach, “Hmph. I don’t care. I’m sleeping with you tonight… but you’re not allowed to touch me. If you dare touch me… I… I won’t cook for you anymore! Hmph!”
That said, she hurried around Ye Tianxie’s body and over to his bed, seized the blanket off it, and wrapped her rather magnificent self up in it completely. Then she lay down on the bed, curled up inside it, and watched Ye Tianxie’s outline in the quiet, on the sly.
Ye Tianxie pressed at the tip of his own nose, went back to the bed without a word, lay down beside Su Feifei, closed his eyes, and did not move again.
A bolt of lightning flashed past, and Su Feifei’s body visibly shrank in on itself. By the light of it, Su Feifei made out the bare chest of the man beside her, and her heartbeat quickened.
Rrrrumble…
The thunder came half a beat behind and set the strings of her heart shaking. Su Feifei closed her eyes, and into her mind came, once again, that night of thunder and rain… the night she lost her mother. Nights of thunder and rain had always been when she was most afraid; the shadow of that terror always kept her from sleeping through them, curled up alone under her covers… and even on the rare occasions when exhaustion put her under, it was one nightmare after another.
Tonight was the first rainy night since that day on which anyone had kept her company. And it was also the first time she had ever shared a bed with a man. But… Ye Tianxie’s absolute stillness was making it impossible for her to hold down the nervousness inside her. She put one arm out of the tightly wrapped blanket and pushed at him gently. “Tianxie, are you asleep?”
“Mm…” Ye Tianxie answered with a soft noise. With a woman lying beside him, how could he possibly be as calm inside as he looked? He was every bit as far from sleep as she was.
“…Hmph! Liar. How can you talk if you’re asleep?”
“Sleep-talking.”
“You… you great lecher, so unsatisfied you go out on the street to molest young women, and now there’s a beautiful girl lying right beside you and you start putting on this act of being proper. Hmph!” Su Feifei curved her lips, and thinking of that first chance encounter, laughed in spite of herself — a laugh like a silver vase cracking open, and a face in that instant as lovely as the moon breaking cloud and the flowers stirring their shadows.
Ye Tianxie’s eyes opened and turned toward her, and in the dark they glimmered faintly with a strange, sinister light. “Are you by any chance reminding me… that there is something I ought to be doing?”
“You… you wouldn’t dare!” Su Feifei hurriedly pulled her body back into the blanket. She had already realized that the nightwear she had worn when she came rushing into this room was nowhere near enough to cover her… and that underneath it there was nothing at all. Only, with the deep shadow of her fear of thunder over her, she had entirely lost the courage even to run back and change.
Ye Tianxie moved a little closer and said, half seriously, half not, with a wicked grin, “Young Mistress Su, it isn’t as though I haven’t seen your body, or touched it. There’s no need to—”
“You, you, you, you’re not allowed to say it!!”
Amid Su Feifei’s panicked protest, the blanket was flung open and a pair of soft hands folded one over the other and clapped down over Ye Tianxie’s mouth, shutting off the rest of it. In her shame and haste Su Feifei had all but thrown herself on top of him. Su Feifei was lively on the surface and would occasionally dress rather provocatively, but at the bone she was a very traditional girl who had trouble fending off even the most basic verbal provocation.
The two of them were very close together now, and Ye Tianxie’s nose was full of the faint sandalwood-and-orchid scent that came off her; the glare of the lightning came down and lit Su Feifei up, throwing the flawless line of her into relief, temptation itself in a way past saying.
Skin against skin, a strange charged atmosphere grew up between them, and Su Feifei’s hands finally retreated. She lay back into her own blanket and said in a very small voice, “Great lecher… hmph. Would you dare take responsibility for me?”
Ye Tianxie said nothing.
Because of that sentence, the two of them fell silent together. Two people living under one roof, and now lying in one bed — their development ought to have followed as water follows its channel… but in fact a gulf that could not be crossed lay between them. To put it accurately, it lay across Ye Tianxie’s heart.
With a girl he had never met he could behave with utter shamelessness… whereas with Su Feifei, sharing a bed with him, he forced down every thought he shouldn’t be having. Su Feifei’s figure had begun to appear in his heart more and more often… and because he cared, he could not violate her, could not do her harm.
He was waiting for her to come back… his Xian’er.
And she had said she would wait alongside him, until she came back…
The lightning flared no less often for the passing of time, lighting the two shapes on the bed again and again. The thunder went on and on without ending. After a long while, Su Feifei edged quietly a little nearer to Ye Tianxie. “Tianxie, would you talk to me for a while? I’m still a little frightened.”
What she really wanted to say was… could you hold me while I sleep?
If she could close her eyes inside his arms, then surely all the fear would stay away. Even with thunder filling her ears, she would surely be able to sleep soundly.
Only, she did not dare. She was afraid of hearing him refuse.
“Wuu… wuu wuu… poor Guoguo, Guoguo’s place to sleep is gone, it’s gone… wuu wuu…”
Guoguo, with nothing on, drifted back and forth overhead, distressed and aggrieved. Ye Tianxie’s bed was not particularly large, and the spot Su Feifei’s arrival had occupied was precisely where Guoguo usually slept. Guoguo liked Feifei very much (because the things she made were delicious), so she was too embarrassed to fight Su Feifei for the sleeping spot and could only keep up a running account of her grievances in Ye Tianxie’s ear.
Ye Tianxie put out a hand, plucked Guoguo down from above, set her on his own pillow, and let her sleep against his shoulder.
Knock.
Knock.
Knock.
A sound that should not have been there suddenly started up. Under the interference of the falling rain and the flashing lightning that sound was already very faint, and yet it still carried clearly to the ears of the two of them, lying there occupied with their own thoughts, unable to sleep.
Ye Tianxie’s brows drew together.
(End of Chapter 194)