Blossom through the Cloud - Chapter 69

Chapter 69

As the clock hand pointed to seven, the last shred of light at the edge of the sky was swallowed up. Rows of streetlights flickered on uniformly in a single, sudden motion, and even filtered through the curtains from hundreds of feet away, Ruan Suxian still found the glare piercing.

She shielded her eyes and turned to switch on the lamp.

Before her hand even touched the toggle switch, she heard the voice of the person behind her. "If it were you, how would you choose?"

Ruan Suxian's hand froze mid-air. The light remained off, leaving the living room plunged in gloom.

Dong Xian stood two meters away from her, speaking in a hollow tone. "The last chance of a lifetime to take the pilot exam, versus staying at home to continue serving a husband and raising children—how would you choose?"

An extended silence filled the room, making even the air feel as though it had stagnated and ceased to flow.

The surrounding atmosphere clamped tightly around her throat and her brain. She could not think; her nerves throbbed wildly, as though they were about to burst at any second.

"I wouldn't make her choose between the two."

Suddenly, a hand covered the back of Ruan Suxian's hand and pressed the switch, casting a bright illumination across the entire living room.

Holding Ruan Suxian's hand, he stepped sideways in front of her, blocking Dong Xian's direct gaze.

"Aunty, asking a question like that is meaningless. This kind of hypothesis does not apply to me."

Hearing his resolute voice, Ruan Suxian looked up, gazing at him in a daze while her throat felt itchy.

The wind outside was howling fiercely. Having just returned, his clothes still radiated a chill, yet his palm was warm.

When Dong Xian had asked that, Ruan Suxian's temples had suddenly tightened, feeling as though she were standing on a tightrope over a cliff where the slightest movement could send her plunging.

His voice acted like a sturdy rope, hauling her safely ashore.

Fu Mingyu's sudden arrival shattered the delicate, deadlocked atmosphere between Dong Xian and Ruan Suxian.

He glanced toward the dining room; the dishes on the table were virtually untouched.

"Has Aunty eaten yet? Would you like to sit down and join us for dinner?"

His "invitation" sounded far more like an eviction notice.

Without needing further thought, Dong Xian weighed the relative weight of her status versus Fu Mingyu's within this apartment; the answer was glaringly obvious.

She felt with absolute clarity Ruan Suxian's reliance on Fu Mingyu.

The two of them stood opposite her, with a barrier seemingly erected between them that signaled they stood on entirely different sides.

Ultimately, things were bound to end in discord.

She sighed silently, walked over to the dining table, and tested the temperature of that bowl of soup with the back of her hand.

"It's still warm," she said. "The pigeon is very fresh, and the medicinal herbs inside were carefully selected. It helps calm the nerves and soothe the mind. Drink it while it's hot."--

The moment the door clicked shut, Fu Mingyu turned to look at Ruan Suxian.

He raised his hand, intending to stroke her cheek.

Yet before his fingers touched her skin, she suddenly lunged forward, collapsing onto the sofa and burying herself in a throw pillow.

"I'm exhausted to death."

Taking advantage of the fact that Fu Mingyu wasn't paying attention, she rubbed her eyes. "Why did you come over?"

"Afraid my precious might get bullied by someone." Fu Mingyu picked up the dishes from the table and headed toward the kitchen. "Besides, didn't someone want me to keep her company for dinner?"

Ruan Suxian rolled her eyes at the ceiling from the sofa, hugged a pillow, and flipped over to turn her back to him. A smile curved the corners of her mouth as she stood up, picked up the remaining dishes, and hurried into the kitchen.

Fu Mingyu placed the dishes into the microwave. "Why did Aunty come over today?"

"To bring me some food." Ruan Suxian pointed toward the table outside. "Did you see it? Fresh pigeon soup."

Once the first batch of food was warmed, he carried it out while asking, "She only came to drop off food?"

Ruan Suxian let out an "oh." "And to conduct a minor exchange of hearts and minds."

An exchange of hearts and minds that generated that kind of atmosphere?

If he hadn't known Dong Xian was coming and felt a lingering sense of unease that prompted him to rush back immediately, knowing Ruan Suxian's temper, she might have gotten into a screaming match with her right here in the apartment.

Fu Mingyu turned around and leaned sideways against the cabinet, his back slightly arched so that he was perfectly at eye level with Ruan Suxian.

A faint smile lingered at the corner of his lips. "Fought with your mom?"

"Mhm-hn." Ruan Suxian turned to dish out the rice, her tone laced with a feigned nonchalance. "Didn't you hear it?"

Fu Mingyu wrapped an arm around her neck, hooked his wrist, and cupped her chin. "Then tell your older brother, what did you and your mom fight about?"

His tone was light and breezy, making him sound genuinely like an older brother coaxing a young child.

Yet Ruan Suxian had always known that for the longest time, Fu Mingyu had held a vague suspicion regarding her family background.

However, since she hadn't brought it up, he had never asked.

Lowering her head, Ruan Suxian remained silent.

The microwave beeped. Fu Mingyu released her and reached out to open the door.

"It's fine. You don't have to talk about it if you don't want to. Let's eat first."--

Unless she had something major going on, Ruan Suxian always stopped at seven-tenths full for dinner.

Eating too much made one prone to drowsiness and fogged the mind.

Yet that hour with Dong Xian's visit seemed to have drained every ounce of her energy. Her stomach felt hollow, and before she knew it, she had refilled her rice bowl.

The clay pot of pigeon soup sat off to the side, having cooled down at some point and begun emitting a gamey scent.

Sitting across from her, Fu Mingyu ladled out a bowl of winter melon soup.

Just as Ruan Suxian reached out to take it, he redirected it to his own mouth.

"..."

Fu Mingyu paused mid-motion. "You can still eat?"

Ruan Suxian pulled back her hand and nodded with resigned acceptance.

"Fine, I can't eat anymore."

Fu Mingyu chuckled softly, took a sip, and finding the temperature of the soup just right, handed it over to Ruan Suxian.

Ruan Suxian turned her head away. "I refuse to accept charity food."

The man across from her looked up, his eyes half-closed. "Are you waiting for me to feed you?"

Normally, Ruan Suxian would have rolled her eyes and retorted, "I'm not disabled."

Yet recalling what Zheng You'an had said at noon, she lowered her head and picked at her fingernails. "Well, I heard that some girls dating a boyfriend never have to wash their own fruit, never have to tie their own shoelaces, and never even have to unscrew a bottle of mineral water by themselves."

"That's other people." Fu Mingyu drank his soup and nodded. "You're different. You're a woman who can pop open bottle caps with one hand."

"..."

"Let me tell you," Ruan Suxian kicked Fu Mingyu's shin lightly across the table, "I'm a big deal online right now. You'd better treat me well, or my 63,108 Weibo followers will tear you apart one comment at a time."

Not only that, but starting from the early hours of yesterday morning alone, numerous media outlets had been scrambling to interview her.

Lacking the energy and time for all that, Ruan Suxian had rejected the vast majority, accepting only invitations from a select few highly reputable mainstream media outlets. If she had agreed to all of them, she really would have had to hire a personal agent.

Fu Mingyu let out a soft chuckle.

Ruan Suxian detected a hint of disdain in his laughter.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

Fu Mingyu raised his gaze, arched an eyebrow, and stood up to walk over to her side.

"Open your mouth."

Ruan Suxian seemed to have developed post-traumatic stress disorder from those two words; hearing them brought back a flash flood of memories from this morning. Instead of opening her mouth, she clenched her teeth shut.

Watching her reaction, Fu Mingyu stirred the soup in the bowl with a spoon and said with casual nonchalance, "Didn't you want me to feed you?"

"You said that this morning too—" As the spoon neared her lips, her brain short-circuited, and her earlobes gradually turned crimson.

"Hm?" Fu Mingyu tapped her lower lip with the spoon. "What did I say this morning?"

Snatching the bowl from his hands, Ruan Suxian used hands and feet to shove him away. "Scram. I'm not disabled."

While drinking her soup, Fu Mingyu sat beside her, leaning against the back of his chair with his head lowered in thought.

He felt his trouser pocket, which held a hard cigarette case.

Just as he thought about pulling it out, he reconsidered and dropped the idea.

"If you want to smoke, go ahead."

Ruan Suxian set her bowl down and said, "It's not like I've never breathed secondhand smoke before."

"Just one." Fu Mingyu pulled out the cigarette case. "No time for sleep, I'm exhausted."

Ruan Suxian sneered.

"No time for sleep, yet you lay in bed with your eyes wide open doing this and that."

"Doing what?"

"..."

Ruan Suxian snatched the lighter from his hand, flicked it on, and stared at him with a vicious glare. "Missing incense sticks for your grave?"

This gesture failed to intimidate Fu Mingyu in the least. Instead, he tilted his head and lit his cigarette using the flame cupped in her hand.

Holding the cigarette between his lips with his head lowered, the contours of his brow bone and the bridge of his nose caught the light, casting a shadow that gave him a depth bordering on the unreal.

Yet this very unreality made it impossible for her to tear her gaze away, gluing her eyes to the cinematic tableau.

Before long, a wisp of white smoke drifted up beside them.

With the soup in her bowl now finished, Ruan Suxian set down the lighter. Her spoon clinked crisply against the ceramic rim of the bowl.

"The last time I drank this soup was during the summer break of my third year in junior high."

"Hm?"

Dropping this seemingly random comment out of nowhere, Fu Mingyu paused slightly, shaking a few grains of ash from his fingertip.

"Back then, that restaurant had just opened, and my mom came to school to pick me up for dinner. That was the place."

She had brewed this sentence throughout the entire meal before finally finding an opening to drop it.

Just now, when Fu Mingyu had asked her about family matters, she hadn't spoken up—not because she was unwilling to share, but because she didn't know where to begin.

Dong Xian was no stranger; she was her mother, and moreover, the wife of the owner of Fu Mingyu's affiliated company. Both logically and sentimentally, he deserved to know.

He was different from everyone else.

If she couldn't even talk to him, Ruan Suxian had no idea who else she could confide in.

Thus, even if he hadn't asked, Ruan Suxian would have found a chance to tell him.

Yet no matter how much time had passed, ancient history remained a scar that would ache if touched even lightly.

Recounting it all required a tremendous amount of courage.

"When I was fourteen, my mom and dad divorced. After that, she seemed terribly busy, only coming to see me once or twice a year. The first time she came back was when she took me out to eat at Xixiang Banquet. In the past, our family could never afford a restaurant like that."

Starting from the beginning of the story, Ruan Suxian spoke in an even, measured tone, as though narrating someone else's tale.

When she reached the part about the misunderstanding, she even chuckled at herself.

The high school years had been tedious; she breezed through them in two sentences.

"During senior year, airlines came to recruit pilots, but they didn't accept female candidates. Did you know that?"

Fu Mingyu nodded. "I knew."

This wasn't unique to World Airlines; back then, virtually all airlines operated under that restriction.

"Later on, during my junior year in college, airlines came to the school for campus recruitment tours again." Ruan Suxian lifted her chin. "I was extremely confident back then, feeling certain I'd get selected because the interviewers loved me, and the captain who gave the presentation even left me his contact information. So I packed my bags the moment I got back to the dorm."

Fu Mingyu raised his eyes. "Left you his contact information?"

"Yeah, he was very handsome. Do you want to see?"

As she spoke, Ruan Suxian pulled out her phone to flip through it for him.

Ignoring the phone, Fu Mingyu only noticed her crafty smile. He let out a cold huff and said, "You really have a wide network of connections."

"If my network were that wide, I wouldn't have ended up in that wretched state." Ruan Suxian slammed her phone down onto the table with a heavy thud, a trace of disdain flashing in her eyes at the memory. "And what happened? I thought I had scored a VIP pass, but it turned out to be just a cheap promotional flyer. I didn't even know my slot had been snatched away by someone with connections until I heard about it through the grapevine from someone else."

The cigarette between his fingers had burned down past the halfway mark, a half-finger length of ash trembling precariously.

He let out a quiet sigh, flicked the ash away, and snuffed out the cigarette.

Under the warm yellow lighting of the dining room, Fu Mingyu's gaze looked murky and unreadable.

Cupping her face in her hands, Ruan Suxian stared back at him, suddenly struck by a bizarre thought.

If her spot hadn't been squeezed out back then, she probably would have crossed paths with Fu Mingyu much sooner.

"If you had met me back then," she wondered aloud, inspired by the thought, "would you have liked me?"

Only a wisp of lingering smoke lingered on life support inside the trash can, curling upward between Ruan Suxian and Fu Mingyu to slow the passage of time.

"If I had met you back then," Fu Mingyu stared straight into her eyes, "then you'd already be Mrs. Fu by now."

Mrs. Fu.

Ruan Suxian froze. A strange sensation crept slowly into her heart, tickling and itching like a cat's paw scratching at her.

The three words "Mrs. Fu" had a rather pleasing ring to them.

Mostly because it instantly made one think of wealth—since "Fu" sounded like wealth, after all.

Ruan Suxian splayed her fingers to cover half her face, refusing to meet his eyes while her heart hammered wildly in her chest. Eager to change the subject, she blurted out, "My dad didn't buy commercial life insurance, so the money he left behind after passing away wasn't much. I still had to earn my own living expenses in college through part-time jobs. While other people went out on dates and traveled, I spent all my time working."

Fu Mingyu frowned.

He found it difficult to imagine how Ruan Suxian had gotten through that period of time entirely on her own.

If he really could have met her sooner.

He certainly would never have let her live through days like that.

At that moment, Ruan Suxian abruptly raised her head and smiled triumphantly. "But during college, I was one of the wealthiest students in my class."

"..."

Fu Mingyu's train of thought came to an abrupt halt.

"Well, what choice did I have? Who told me to be so pretty?" Ruan Suxian straightened her hair to enlighten Fu Mingyu. "Taobao stores were constantly hiring me as a model. A day's shoot could earn me a thousand yuan. There was even one store that publicly sponsored my trip to the beach for a shoot, paying twenty-five hundred for the day. Across four years, my little savings fund grew to tens of thousands."

"..."

Fu Mingyu reined in his overflowing pity and arched an eyebrow. "The beach?"

"Yeah."

"What were you wearing?"

"Is that important?" Ruan Suxian closed her eyes and inhaled sharply, ready to be driven mad by him. "The point is twenty-five hundred a day."

"Are there photos?"

Ruan Suxian froze for a second.

She actually did have them.

Moreover, perhaps because the shop owner was extremely satisfied with her photos, they had been featured prominently on the store's homepage back then. Clicking into the site brought up full-screen images, and she had saved the raw files herself.

Since the shots turned out so well anyway, there was no harm in letting him look.

Ruan Suxian unlocked her phone and dug those photos out of the cloud storage.

Though taken several years ago, the photographer's aesthetic eye had been solid, and even viewed today, they didn't look outdated.

Besides, although it was an online store, the brand positioned itself in the mid-range swimwear market—sexy without being vulgar. Stripping away the watermark, nobody would have batted an eye if someone called them professional artistic portraits.

Against azure sea and golden sand, a twenty-year-old girl dressed in a vibrant, fresh-toned swimsuit sat perched upon a rock, one leg extended downward with her toes lightly brushing the sand, blindingly fair.

Fu Mingyu held Ruan Suxian's phone, studying the images for a few moments with an unreadable expression.

"Not pretty?"

Ruan Suxian stared him down.

If you dare say "yes," you're dead.

Without answering, Fu Mingyu closed the phone and flipped it facedown on the table.

"If I say they are, will you wear one for me tonight?"

"No, get lost!"

Glancing at her, Fu Mingyu stood up and strode toward her bedroom.

"I really don't have any!" Ruan Suxian immediately stood up and rushed over to block his path. "I haven't stepped foot in the water in ages!"

"You don't? That's fine."

Fu Mingyu leaned in close to her ear and murmured, "I'll buy you some next time. Whichever style has the most cutouts is fine."

He paused before dropping his voice even lower. "Preferably the tie-string kind—easy to take off."

Ruan Suxian pressed her lips together and nodded. "You strip me of one piece of clothing, I'll strip you of a layer of skin, how about that?"

"..."

Reaching a stalemate with her, Fu Mingyu nodded. "Alright, as you wish."

Pulling on his jacket, he reached out to stroke her ear. "After the interview tomorrow afternoon, my parents would like to invite you over for dinner."

"Mhm, okay—wait."

Ruan Suxian suddenly grabbed his arm. "Why are they inviting me to dinner?"

Fu Mingyu found it amusing. "Isn't that only natural?"

Lowering his head to catch her hesitation, Fu Mingyu soothed her with a gentle voice. "You don't need to feel pressured. I'm not forcing you into anything; inviting you to dinner is because of what happened yesterday."--

Although Fu Mingyu claimed she wouldn't feel pressured, actually going to her boyfriend's parents' house for dinner for the very first time was far more nerve-wracking than interviewing for her first job out of college.

Determined to maintain a stellar condition, Ruan Suxian promptly chased Fu Mingyu out of her apartment, then immediately threw herself into taking a shower, applying a sheet mask, and doing a hair mask... After executing this full routine, she collapsed into bed and fell sound asleep.

Meanwhile, stepping out of Ruan Suxian's apartment and into the elevator, Fu Mingyu suddenly remembered something and pulled out his phone to make a call home.

Doudou, I'm sorry, you're going to have to suffer a bit tomorrow.