Chapter 74: N. Settling Every Score

Ning Yixiao liked to plan, and he tended to be confident about the things he set out to do. So he had thought early on about how to tell the people around him once he and Su Hui got back together. When Carl walked in on them, he wasn’t particularly embarrassed, just mildly annoyed that it didn’t match the plan.

What was strange was Carl’s behavior afterward. First, he made oblique remarks suggesting their current PR team might not have the strongest risk management capacity, then he started sliding Ning Yixiao a list of alternatives.

“How long do we have left on the contract with the current firm?” Ning Yixiao asked.

“A year and a half.” Carl answered plainly.

“A year and a half.” Ning Yixiao looked up, one eyebrow rising slightly. “So you’re suggesting we switch teams, and you think we have enough budget to cover the early termination fee?”

Carl put on an expression of noble self-sacrifice and said nothing.

Ning Yixiao dropped his gaze back to his work. “Time is valuable. Go do something useful.”

The next day, Carl tried again with a different angle. “Shaw, the privacy on your current residence is excellent, but one of the neighbors is a celebrity, and they’re not far from you. I’m a little worried about paparazzi following them and accidentally catching you in the frame. Should I arrange for someone to keep an eye out?”

Ning Yixiao found this puzzling.

Surely Carl couldn’t know about him and Su Hui near the floor-to-ceiling window…

Impossible.

“All the glass in this building is one-way privacy glass, isn’t it?”

Carl nearly lost his composure internally.

Yes, but you’re not inside the building twenty-four hours a day!

“If you have something to say, say it.” Ning Yixiao had no patience for circling.

Carl weighed it, still worried that being direct might irritate his employer and cost him his job, which would be counterproductive.

Ning Yixiao was too difficult to approach directly. Better to go through Su Hui.

“Never mind.” Carl produced his professional smile. “Just being cautious.”

He redirected his efforts.

Su Hui was warm and easy to talk to, and Carl always found conversation with him much more relaxed. Since Su Hui couldn’t drive, Ning Yixiao arranged for Carl to take him out when he was away from home. On one such occasion, accompanying Su Hui to a nearby art museum, Carl found an opening and broached the subject carefully during the drive.

“Eddy, you two… how long have you been together?”

Su Hui had been staring at an enormous Alaskan Malamute on the side of the road and wasn’t quite present. Carl repeated himself, and Su Hui turned his head. “Oh, you mean me and Shaw?”

“Right. You two are, that kind of… relationship now, right?” Carl felt as though something was stuck in his throat.

But Su Hui was completely unfazed. “Yes, we’re a couple. As for how long, it depends on how you count it. If you include before, it’s been quite a while. If you only count from this time, we’ve just started.”

“Before?” Carl was confused. “You were together before?”

Su Hui nodded, keeping it brief. “Our families didn’t approve, so we separated.”

They disapproved?

This only reinforced Carl’s theory.

Su Hui noticed Carl go quiet and looked over. “What’s wrong?”

Carl shook his head, wrestled with himself for a moment, then decided he couldn’t keep it in. “It’s just… doesn’t it feel a bit… I mean, going from brothers to partners seems kind of…”

Su Hui was a beat slow on the uptake. “What? Brothers? Who are brothers with who?”

Carl almost missed the red light and braked hard. Both of them lurched forward.

“You and Shaw. Aren’t you?”

“Us?” Su Hui looked genuinely incredulous. “Brothers?”

“I assumed…” Carl couldn’t believe his own judgment had been this wrong. “But you two really do look alike. I thought so the moment I saw you both…”

Su Hui burst out laughing. He couldn’t stop, bending sideways in the passenger seat with one hand over his stomach, and every time he tried to compose himself it got worse.

Carl had never seen him laugh this freely, and felt thoroughly humiliated.

Su Hui was in a hypomanic period and prone to getting unreasonably happy over small things. Carl’s spectacular misreading of the situation was, to Su Hui, the funniest thing that had happened to him in recent memory.

“You really can’t tell Asian faces apart, can you,” Su Hui wheezed. “Ha!”

From that day on, it became a strange reflex. Every time Carl appeared, even with Ning Yixiao present, Su Hui would inevitably start laughing.

After a few rounds of this, Ning Yixiao grew puzzled.

“What’s so funny?”

Su Hui had promised Carl he wouldn’t tell, so he kept it to himself with great effort.

“I’m not telling you.”

Ning Yixiao noticed that when Su Hui said this, he glanced at Carl. Remembering Su Hui calling Carl adorable, Ning Yixiao felt a quiet and irrational irritation, though he said nothing in front of them.

The moment Su Hui left, he told Carl directly: “You don’t need to drive Eddy anymore. Arrange a dedicated driver for him.”

Carl kept his expression neutral. Internally, he was opening champagne.

Finally. No longer the permanent punchline of my boss’s relationship.

The Carl situation was not the only thing Ning Yixiao was dealing with.

He had many people around him to assist with various things, and Carl handled the broadest range, but Carl’s scope was mainly business and personal logistics. Certain messier or less presentable matters required different handling.

Ning Yixiao had moved through several phases in how he presented himself: all through high school and college he had smiled constantly, cultivated warmth, kept everyone around him on good terms, useful for building the connections he needed. In graduate school, devastated by the breakup, he had gone very dark. Since starting the company, his outward manner had become increasingly light and easy, giving the impression that nothing troubled him, that he could watch the ceiling fall and not raise an eyebrow.

In practice, he was still someone who kept score.

Among the legal teams he had worked with over the years was a man named Charles, introduced by Ning Yixiao’s mentor. They had maintained a good working relationship. Charles happened to be a Canadian who had built his career in the States and had an extensive network. When Ning Yixiao had needed help investigating Xu Zhi’s situation, Charles had assisted.

Through Charles, Ning Yixiao found the restaurant Su Hui had mentioned.

Su Hui tended to take things as they came, and let most things go. Ning Yixiao did not. Every time he thought about the fact that Su Hui had ended up unable to sleep in a normal bed, he wanted to break every bone in that old bastard’s hands.

Close to ten in the evening, Charles called.

“Sent you the file. Nothing too dramatic in it, honestly. The man has a history. Multiple incidents involving local teenagers, parents filed reports a few times, but it all got settled out of court. Classic pay-to-make-it-go-away pattern.”

“He’s good at using his own ethnicity as cover. Most of his targets have also been Asian, leveraging that sense of cultural familiarity. And he has some connections in the right places. Not much jail time to speak of.”

Ning Yixiao looked at the photo of the middle-aged man and felt his stomach turn. “Is there any realistic way to put him away for a few years?”

Charles sighed on the other end. “Difficult. The criminal record isn’t clean enough for a solid charge. What he does is mostly groping, technically. This type tends to have problems in that department, psychological deviancy, and if you try the legal route I’d actually advise against it. It’s slow, it’s messy, and even if you get him a few years, what does that really accomplish?”

Ning Yixiao understood exactly what Charles was not saying. “You mean handle it privately.”

“I said no such thing.” Charles laughed, very deliberately washing his hands of it. “I’m a lawyer. Professionally, I’m here to give you legal counsel. But speaking as a friend, there are obviously other ways to deal with something like this.”

They were both intelligent people. No need to spell it out further.

“I know.” Ning Yixiao’s voice was a little cold. His fingers tapped the desk. A memory surfaced, not a pleasant one. “When I was young, my mother was beaten. But because the man hitting her was legally her husband, what he was doing was classified as domestic violence, and every agency you went to treated it like it was too complicated to touch.”

He knew from experience which methods worked and which were a waste of time.

Charles knew something of Ning Yixiao’s past. He exhaled and left it there.

Ning Yixiao had no intention of simply moving on. The man hadn’t technically committed a crime in the legal sense, but what he had done to Su Hui’s mind was something that couldn’t be undone.

The smile at the corner of his mouth was cold. His voice was entirely even, the kind of tone that, if you weren’t listening to the content, could pass for someone reading from a research paper.

“Charles. Find a few people who aren’t worried about their records. I’ll cover it. Have them bring the restaurant owner out and give him a lesson. Pay particular attention to the hands he likes to use on people. Record the whole thing and send it to me.”

He leaned back in his chair and thought for a moment. “Afterward, tie him up and leave him under the bed in the attic of his own restaurant. Don’t bother checking on him. He likes hiding under beds. Let him stay there as long as he likes.”

Before he finished, there was a knock at the door. He turned his chair. Su Hui was standing in the doorway.

His hair was damp and hanging over his shoulders. He was in soft white pajamas, the legs a little short, pale ankles showing.

“Do you have a pencil?” Su Hui stayed in the doorway, leaning against the frame.

“What do you need a pencil for?” Ning Yixiao held out his hand and switched to Mandarin.

On the other end of the call, Charles noticed something remarkable: one second earlier, Ning Yixiao’s voice had been cold, carrying a barely contained edge. One second later, it had become completely gentle.

He refused to believe it was just the language.

“I had an idea just now and want to sketch it before I forget.”

Su Hui walked in then and simply climbed onto his lap, settling across it.

He smelled faintly of something light, the kind of scent that made you think of a garden in full bloom.

Charles, listening through the earpiece, heard an unfamiliar voice and took the opportunity to tease. Who’s that? Shaw, is someone else there?

Ning Yixiao was surprised by Su Hui’s easy spontaneity, and hearing Charles’s question, the corner of his mouth curved.

Su Hui, now seated, noticed the smile and hesitated. “Am I too heavy? I can get up.”

“You’re not.” Ning Yixiao circled both arms around his waist. “Very light.”

I should have taken a Mandarin elective! came the voice from the earpiece.

Su Hui, reassured, settled comfortably against him and immediately forgot about the pencil. He rested his hands on Ning Yixiao’s shoulders and asked, with a slight nasal tilt to his voice: “I’m going back in a few days. Will you miss me?”

“Of course.” Ning Yixiao tilted his face up to kiss him, but Su Hui leaned deliberately back, and the kiss met air.

“Why are you dodging?” Ning Yixiao reached up, cupped the back of his head, and kissed him properly.

He intended to keep it brief, just a moment, given that the call was still technically open, even if it wasn’t exactly work.

“Mm…”

Su Hui, of course, had no idea about the call, so he went with it and deepened the kiss, his tongue piercing clicking softly against Ning Yixiao’s teeth and finding its way past without much difficulty, curling around his tongue.

Ning Yixiao noticed for the first time that Su Hui’s breathing during a kiss was this audible.

WOW.

The moment he heard the reaction through the earpiece, he reached up and tapped the device to end the call.

Su Hui was unaware, but he sensed Ning Yixiao was distracted. So he pulled back deliberately, kissed the mole at the corner of his eye, then moved lower without warning.

The cool, wet tongue piercing dragged across his throat, right over his Adam’s apple.

Entirely retaliatory, entirely against the rules.

Ning Yixiao’s arm went tight around him instantly, but too late. Su Hui had already slipped free and was standing on the other side of the desk, looking perfectly innocent.

“I’ll just borrow this pen. Thanks.”

He evacuated the scene at speed, helpfully pulling the study door closed behind him.

Ning Yixiao’s throat felt dry. He reached for his glass, took a long drink of water, and managed with some effort to press the restlessness back down. His phone buzzed.

[Charles: I should have made this a video call!]

They were close enough that Charles knew about the fake engagement, knew Ning Yixiao’s private life was essentially nonexistent, and knew it well.

He wasn’t particularly shocked that Ning Yixiao was living with a man. What shocked him was discovering that this particular person apparently had wants and needs like a normal human being.

He’s not a robot after all.

[Charles: That explains it. I was wondering why you suddenly had a personal vendetta against some random old creep you have no obvious connection to. This is about him, isn’t it.]

Charles sent it as a joke, not really expecting a reply. Ning Yixiao almost never engaged with commentary on his personal life, always pivoting back to business.

So when the reply came, Charles genuinely did a double take.

[Shaw: Yes.]

[Shaw: My boyfriend. You’ll probably hear from me again on his behalf. Thank him in advance for me.]

Now Charles was thoroughly curious.

What kind of person could reduce someone as single-mindedly ambitious as Ning Yixiao to this?

[Charles: Good lord. Impressive. (I mean your boyfriend.)]

[Shaw: That I’ll agree with.]

Ning Yixiao came out of the study and from the top of the stairs spotted Su Hui in the kitchen downstairs, cracking eggs. He went down to see what he was making.

Su Hui turned and startled. “You scared me.”

“Are you hungry?” Ning Yixiao asked.

“A little.” Su Hui was trying to add water to the egg mixture and looking uncertain. “How much water is the right amount? I tried this once on my own before and no matter how long I steamed it, it never set properly.”

Ning Yixiao walked over and took the bowl. “I’ll do it.”

“About one and a half times the volume.”

Su Hui had already lost confidence in his own estimation and was close to giving up. “This kind of thing is better left to you. Lower failure rate.”

“A very wise decision.” Ning Yixiao slid the steamer open and put the egg mixture in.

Su Hui went to stand in front of it and watch. “The shrimp aren’t in yet.”

“In a moment.” Ning Yixiao moved to stand behind him at the kitchen island, leaning down. “We weren’t finished with something earlier.”

Su Hui played innocent. “What something?” he asked, smiling.

“You know what.” Ning Yixiao lowered his head and let his lips graze the side of Su Hui’s neck.

Su Hui flinched and tried to back away, and in the next second was lifted onto the counter with nowhere left to go.

“Professor Su. Don’t play dumb.”

Ning Yixiao pressed a hand to his back and kissed him, and it was impossible to say who started it, only that the kiss went much deeper than anticipated. A faint current moved from the back of his skull downward, all the way to the base of his spine, and Su Hui’s whole body softened into something warm and slow.

Somewhere in the middle of it, Su Hui noticed that Ning Yixiao was breathing harder than usual, and pushed at him.

“Did you forget how to breathe or something…”

Ning Yixiao gave a light laugh, easy and bright as a summer cloud.

“Learning from you.”

Su Hui felt he was being too smug about it, and that he himself was too reliably pliant in these situations, always ending up on the losing side. He was looking for a way to reclaim some ground when the steamer made a soft chime.

Exactly what he needed.

“Done.” Su Hui patted Ning Yixiao’s shoulder several times. “Go put the shrimp in for me.”

Ning Yixiao sighed and did it.

Su Hui hopped down from the counter and produced a cigarette from somewhere, lit it, and bit down on the flavored bead in the filter. A cool burst of mint spread through him like ocean water.

These days staying with Ning Yixiao had felt like the beginning of something new, all warmth and closeness. The thought of going back to distance made Su Hui quietly reluctant, though he was unwilling to show it and seem clingy.

He was lovely and soft-looking, eating nothing heavier than steamed egg for a late-night snack, in his childish pajamas, elbow on the counter, chin in hand, drifting slightly, a slim women’s cigarette between his fingers. A walking contradiction, entirely natural about it.

The trailing smoke half-hid his smile as he lay his head on his folded arm and tapped a small dish into service as an ashtray.

“Eat.” Ning Yixiao sat across from him and reached over to take the cigarette out of his hand.

Su Hui made a small sound of agreement and took a bite, nearly burning himself.

“Should we play truth or dare?”

The thought arrived from nowhere, as his thoughts often did. He had decided not to waste any good evening.

Ning Yixiao drew on the borrowed cigarette and smiled. “With two people? How does that work?”

Su Hui smiled back. “Two people have their own way of playing.”

He thought it over. “Okay: rock-paper-scissors. Whoever loses has to answer any question the other asks, truthfully. That’s truth.”

Ning Yixiao looked at him with lazy eyes, exhaling a ring of smoke. “And dare? Can you ask for anything?”

“You can pick dare instead.” Su Hui’s voice carried a trace of the past few days’ aftermath, a slight roughness that softened his usual lightness. He rested his cheek on his hand and smiled up at Ning Yixiao.

“But you can only look. No touching.”