Shi Linchuang had never been short of people propositioning him.

Before crossing into this fictional world, he had been what most people would call a born winner — jokingly nicknamed “the guy who maxed out his reincarnation stats.” His family name carried enough public recognition that the gossip surrounding its members alone kept a small fleet of entertainment tabloids in business.

Marrying into the Shi family was widely regarded as one of the fastest routes to a different social class. And Shi Linchuang was the fastest route of all.

So from the moment he entered adolescence, before he’d even turned eighteen, he had encountered people throwing themselves at him in any number of settings — men and women alike, bold and shameless, coolly elegant, softly clinging.

In one sense, Shi Linchuang had seen quite a range of humanity.

None of them had left so much as a mark on him. He forgot most faces the moment they were out of sight. A handful, though, had made an impression precisely because they were exceptional cases.

At nineteen, a young woman he was supposed to call “sister-in-law” had once taken advantage of a moment when she believed him to be drunk to express her feelings for him with considerable enthusiasm.

Shi Linchuang had simply been grateful, on that occasion, for one of his better personal habits.

He never let himself actually get drunk.

---

Midday. Bright afternoon light.

In this office, which was large enough to feel slightly empty, Shi Linchuang sat with his eyes half-lowered, watching Xie Jinghe perched on his lap, head bent, fumbling in an unsteady way with the buckle of his belt.

He found himself thinking, not for the first time, that this was genuinely the most inept seduction he had ever been subjected to.

This was a man who had won a Best Actor award at his debut, and had collected prizes steadily ever since. And yet here he was, struggling even to get the words out, the few that emerged sounding awkward and juvenile. Any trace of appeal the situation might have carried had dissolved entirely.

What Xie Jinghe seemed to want, more than anything physical, was to prove something through the act itself.

Something along the lines of disproving what Shi Linchuang had said just now — that offhand remark about being tired of him.

In Shi Linchuang’s assessment, Xie Jinghe was someone who had always been starved of affection.

He had been left at the doors of a welfare institution before he was old enough to form memories. That kind of place could meet a child’s most basic physical needs, but it couldn’t fill the other kind of hunger. Then, in the most unformed years of his adolescence, Xie Jinghe had stepped straight into the entertainment industry, a world that ate people whole. Simply keeping himself intact in an environment like that was no small thing, let alone finding anything resembling genuine feeling.

There was an old saying that rang true: the more a person lacks something, the more desperately they want it.

Xie Jinghe had spent years building up an enormous weight of longing around the ideas of family, marriage, and love. And he had placed every bit of that longing onto Shi Linchuang alone.

Put another way: Shi Linchuang was, to him, the embodiment of all three.

For three years of shared life, Shi Linchuang had lived up to that. He had been everything Xie Jinghe had imagined love to be. So when he had abruptly dropped the act and begun deliberately saying things designed to wound, Xie Jinghe had only pushed back once — on that first night, acting purely on instinct.

He had been furious enough to raise a hand. He had cried, and come back to apologize.

He had said he wanted to leave. Had declared with complete conviction that he would have the name tattooed on his inner thigh removed.

And yet here he was, sitting quite openly in the lap of the husband who had treated him so badly, using that very tattoo — that mark that had been pressed onto him without his consent — as some kind of signal, as though proving that desire still existed would equally prove that the love he had once been given had not ceased to exist either.

Everything about it pointed to one thing.

He did not want to let go of Shi Linchuang’s hand.

At this thought, Shi Linchuang felt a faint twitch at his temple.

He was thinking that there might genuinely be something wrong with Xie Jinghe.

Was this man’s ancestral homeland Stockholm?

He was also thinking about something else entirely: wherever had Pei Yue bought those cheap coffee beans? The coffee they produced was undrinkable — nothing but bitterness and a sour edge that sat badly in both the stomach and the chest.

He really wanted to spit it out.

It was at this moment that Shi Linchuang heard a sound — a soft rasp of fabric.

The person in his lap had finally managed the belt. Because of the way he was sitting astride, his already loose-cut trousers had pulled taut, pressing against his thighs, tracing shapes through the fabric.

Rounded, not without strength. The lines were distracting.

Xie Jinghe curled his fingers and yanked the zip of his trousers all the way down in one motion, revealing a narrow strip of lean waist and abdomen. Below that, the edge of his underwear.

Black.

He had kept his head down the entire time. His fingers hesitated for two seconds, then reached for Shi Linchuang again.

Before Xie Jinghe could take the next step, Shi Linchuang caught his wrist. When he spoke, his voice was entirely composed.

“That’s enough. Didn’t you come here today to discuss something? Something that actually mattered?”

Xie Jinghe kept his head down. “You were responding.”

His tone had a stubborn quality to it.

Shi Linchuang simply guided his wrist, letting his palm make brief contact, then said, “It’s gone now.”

The words were barely out before he pulled Xie Jinghe’s hand away.

“Watch where you’re putting that. Let go.”

The tableau the two of them made was, objectively speaking, slightly ridiculous.

Shi Linchuang sat in his chair with complete composure. Xie Jinghe sat on top of him, head hanging, both wrists caught and held, his long fingers still restlessly pawing at the belt.

Even when told no.

Shi Linchuang bounced his leg with some force, rattling the person on top of him, then issued a stern warning. “Xie Jinghe. You’re a public figure. You’re behaving indecently in someone else’s office. Does that seem appropriate to you?”

Xie Jinghe was clearly not interested in being reasonable. His hands were restrained, so he shifted his approach entirely, pressing his mouth forward in a rush, lips and tongue working at Shi Linchuang’s lower lip, his jaw, his throat, his earlobe in quick succession.

His neck was tilted back, eyes shut tight, and at the outer corners of those eyes there was the faintest trace of wetness. Not obvious. But they were much too close for anything to stay hidden.

The long lashes trembling with suppressed unease: hidden nowhere.

The breathing, disordered and unsteady: hidden nowhere.

The small almost-soundless sniff: nowhere near hidden.

For the sake of moving things forward — both the conversation he still needed to have and the contract sitting ready in his desk drawer — Shi Linchuang decided it would be useful to get this person to calm down and stay still. It would be a waste of preparation if things spiraled out of hand before he’d had a chance to say any of what needed to be said.

He considered his options briefly and arrived at the most efficient solution.

He drew both of Xie Jinghe’s hands upward. The natural result was that Xie Jinghe’s arms looped around his neck. Then Shi Linchuang stood in one smooth motion, supporting him with one hand, and used the other to move both coffee cups to the edge of the desk.

The desk was unusually large. One adult, spread out across it, would fit with room to spare.

The moment Xie Jinghe registered that he was being responded to, something in him ignited. His limbs tightened their hold immediately. His warm forehead pressed against the side of Shi Linchuang’s neck, his mouth finding the skin just around his throat and working at it steadily, producing a series of small wet sounds.

Shi Linchuang tried to set him down on the desk. The problem was that Xie Jinghe had the adhesive qualities of glutinous rice cake — impossible to peel off cleanly.

Deeply annoying.

Nothing for it.

Shi Linchuang angled his head, located the man’s ear after some effort, and pressed a brief kiss there.

It functioned, apparently, as a signal.

Xie Jinghe responded as if he had a receiver built directly into his skull. He turned his face around immediately, and parted his lips by the smallest fraction.

The tip of his tongue rested against his lower lip, uncertain. He looked, somehow, almost shy.

His eyes were still closed.

Shi Linchuang looked down at him for less than a second. Then he changed his mind about what he’d been intending to do.

The glutinous rice cake’s adhesive force was genuinely impressive. Both hands were clearly unnecessary.

He reached out with his now-free hand, unhurriedly picked up the coffee cup sitting at the edge of the desk — his own, the black coffee, down to its last thin layer at the bottom, enough for one small swallow — and held it.

“Open a little wider.”

His lips were near Xie Jinghe’s ear as he said it, voice quiet.

And then, with admirable speed and precision, Shi Linchuang tipped what remained in the cup directly into those half-parted lips.

Xie Jinghe couldn’t handle coffee. When forced to drink it at all, he needed an unreasonable quantity of sugar to make it go down.

Hit without warning by a mouthful of undiluted bitterness, he opened his eyes by pure reflex — and found himself looking directly into the man’s sidelong gaze, and at those lips he had made rather a mess of.

One moment of disorientation.

Shi Linchuang used it. He detached the glutinous rice cake cleanly and, in the same movement, reached down and pulled the open zip closed.

A crisp rasp of the zipper. Clean and final.

Xie Jinghe sat on the edge of the desk. He looked down at his trousers, now restored to order. He looked up at the man’s cool, sharp expression.

His feelings were complicated in a way that was difficult to articulate.

A little sad, but not exactly sad.

A little deflated, but not exactly deflated.

A little happy — which was strange, given that nothing he’d wanted had happened, but the feeling was there regardless. It was like taking a sip of lemon soda: sour and sweet at once, with a fizzing pressure somewhere in his chest.

Then the man held out a document.

The “a little happy” feeling that had been taking root somewhere in Xie Jinghe seemed to receive an injection of something. It shot up past the ceiling, past any ceiling, becoming something more like “extremely happy.”

The reason was simple.

This was a management contract with remarkably generous terms. The artist retained a high degree of autonomy. The company’s control over them was minimal. Resources and profit share were visibly weighted toward the artist’s benefit.

Five years. Not too short, not too long.

After what his previous agency had done to him, Xie Jinghe had spent a furious stretch of time reading through every piece of entertainment law he could find. He had come away with a decent working knowledge of how contracts in this industry were typically structured.

He read through it once. Then he flipped back to the first page and went through it again, word by word.

After a long moment, Xie Jinghe closed the document.

He glanced back over his shoulder at the man standing by the window, looking out at whatever lay beyond the glass.

Noon, now. Sunlight coming down without restraint.

Shi Linchuang’s posture had a quality to it that Xie Jinghe couldn’t put a name to. He only knew it looked good.

He felt slightly embarrassed about himself.

Because he had turned the word over in his mind several times, and the only thing he had arrived at was those two plain, impoverished characters: good-looking.

And yet no more precise description presented itself for what the man looked like to him.

Shi Linchuang stood in that generous midday light, the small chain attached to his glasses shifting faintly, catching the brightness and scattering it. His features were cool and sharp, like ice that refused to melt.

Something that made you want to press your lips against it.

The rustling of turning pages had gone quiet.

The next instant, Shi Linchuang became aware of a familiar gaze — one he knew well by now, and which ran distinctly hotter than the sunlight currently hitting his back. It prickled against his skin, simultaneously sharp and itching, and irritated him beyond measure.

He truly disliked this feeling.

He endured it briefly. Then, not managing to continue enduring it, he turned his head. His eyes met those of the man now seated in his desk chair.

“What are you staring at?” The words came out with an edge.

Xie Jinghe looked away, a little sheepish. He pressed a finger against the corner of the document’s pages. After a long pause, he answered.

“You’re so good to me,” he said.