Dawn and Dusk
Too much!
Way too much!!
She was going on strike!!!
Rong Ci slumped over the desk and began pretending to sleep.
Xie Xunzhao glanced sideways at her, his gaze coming to rest on her.
Her cheek was pressed against her arm, making that strikingly beautiful face of hers look unusually childish. Her inky-black hair fell past her waist, slightly disheveled across her back, making her look slender and fragile, like an epiphyllum growing on the edge of a cliff.
Rong Ci knew he was looking at her, so she quietly curled herself into an even smaller ball. She would look a little more pitiful that way.
Sure enough.
After several minutes of silence, Xie Xunzhao slowly said, “I heard from my colleagues that the dessert shop that just opened in the commercial district next door is pretty good. I had Secretary Su buy you one.”
“It’s a raspberry lychee tart.”
“Want some?”
“No.” Rong Ci didn’t lift her head. She said angrily, “Don’t think I’m that easy to coax.”
That was exactly what cats looked like when they were acting pitiful and sulking, too.
Xie Xunzhao admired the sight for a while longer before dialing the internal line.
Secretary Su knocked, came in, set the food down, closed the door, and left. The entire sequence of movements was like a program preinstalled in a robot. Absolutely no disturbance.
Xie Xunzhao stood up and unhurriedly untied the ribbon on the dessert box. “Really don’t want it? Then I’ll feed it to a stray cat.”
Rong Ci’s ears perked up. She peeked through the gap at the dessert. “……”
She could vaguely see a layer of translucent, pearly-white lychee flesh covering the top. Her mind automatically recalled the sweet, abundant juice of lychees, the sweet-tart flavor of raspberries, and the delicate black-tea cream that balanced everything perfectly.
She pressed her lips together.
At lunch, she hadn’t dared ask Xie Xunzhao to help her look over the menu. She had only ordered a few safe dishes of plain boiled vegetables. Now, she happened to be hungry. But if she gave in this easily, wouldn’t it make her look like she had been pretending to be angry all along?
Taking advantage of his height, Xie Xunzhao took in every one of the girl’s reactions.
The corner of his lips twitched, and he smiled soundlessly. His usually cold, distant eyes were suddenly like a summer-night breeze brushing over a quiet lake, sending ripples of light shimmering across the surface.
Only the raspberry and lychee tart on the desk witnessed everything.
A few seconds later, Xie Xunzhao murmured as if to himself, “So hard to coax. I’m not doing it anymore.” As he spoke, he picked up the internal phone again. “Secretary Su, come take it away.”
Fine, she admitted it; she was absolutely pretending.
Rong Ci suddenly raised her head. “I’m easy to coax!”
She met Xie Xunzhao’s smiling eyes. He hadn’t even made the call.
He had tricked her!
Rong Ci felt that her dignity had suffered a severe blow. If she ever got the chance, she was definitely going to get her revenge.
“Finish eating, then continue writing your self-criticism.”
Xie Xunzhao’s tone was as calm as if he had merely said, “Have a little more.”
Rong Ci pretended not to hear him and leisurely bit into a piece of lychee coated with cream and raspberry jam.
Just let you gloat for a few more days.
Once she finished drawing up her revenge plan, she would take back everything that belonged to her.
Xie Xunzhao returned to work, and the office fell quiet again.
Only the occasional scratch of his pen across a contract and the faint sounds of her eating broke the silence, quietly, like tender shoots awakened by the rain, growing rapidly in some unnoticed corner.
Rong Ci had eaten half of the dessert when the corner of her eye caught sight of the white paper beside her, the one meant for her self-criticism. Suddenly, she found herself unable to eat another bite. “Xie Xunzhao, you’re really so mean.”
Xie Xunzhao remained unmoved. “You used to say I was the best Big Brother in the whole world.”
“……”
Rong Ci immediately remembered where that line had come from—
Her gaze dropped. She reached out and poked the prayer beads wrapped around the bone of his left wrist with her fingertip, feeling the fine, faintly golden patterns carved into them.
The meaning behind Xie Xunzhao carrying those prayer beads with him was no secret among the well-connected families who were close to the Xie family. So much so that his peers would occasionally joke.
“Who can even tell the difference between Xie Xunzhao and a Buddhist shrine anymore?”
“Has Brother Xie really made himself into Little Princess Rong’s shrine?”
Later, Rong Ci heard those remarks when she came home for winter break. She immediately got into a fight with them on the basketball court.
Xie Xunzhao had personally taught Rong Ci self-defense. Because Xie Xunzhao had told her, “Getting sick is normal. Your body can be weak, but you can’t let your spirit be weak.”
And so, the Rong Ci he taught—despite being frail and sickly, liable to collapse at the slightest gust of wind – somehow became incredibly good at fighting, growing into someone bright, vivid, and full of life.
In short, Rong Ci had talent. She just never used her self-defense skills for self-defense. She used them for picking fights. If she wasn’t hitting this one, she was hitting that one, and once she finished fighting, she would faint, never giving the other side a chance to hit her back.
That time, when Rong Ci woke up, she still wanted to go settle scores. “You’re the best Big Brother in the whole world. Why do they have the right to make fun of you?”
Xie Xunzhao was applying medicine to her wounds, his tone faintly cool. “You have so many good Big Brothers. Isn’t the best one Rong Qingtiao? Do you have enough fights to go around?”
It left a deep psychological scar on little Rong Ci. She figured Xie Xunzhao was going to fail his exams. His ability to grasp the main point was dead last.
Her thoughts returned to the present.
Rong Ci took another bite of dessert and tilted her head to look at the adult Xie Xunzhao, asking curiously, “So, when they called you my Buddhist shrine, why didn’t you ever get angry?”
No one liked being called a “Buddhist shrine,” especially not when it was meant as a joke at their expense and even less so for someone like Xie Xunzhao, a young man born into a prestigious family and accustomed to standing above others.
That was why, back then, Rong Ci couldn’t stand hearing that label attached to Xie Xunzhao. She thought it was humiliating him. By all rights, that kind of “joke” should have been stopped from the very beginning. How had it spread wider and wider instead?
“Why should I be angry?” Xie Xunzhao set down his pen and turned to meet her eyes.
The man stood tall, his shadow almost twice her size. When he suddenly leaned down, his silky collar fell open, revealing a small expanse of collarbone smooth as jade.
His beauty hit her eyes with an audible thud. Rong Ci froze on the spot and only after a long moment did she blink. “They were objectifying you!”
Xie Xunzhao reached out and wiped the cream from the corner of her lips. “But that’s exactly what I am.”
Rong Ci: ???
Wait, who objectifies himself?!
Rong Ci hadn’t understood the Xie Xunzhao of his youth and understood the present one even less.
~~
Night fell over the city. The moon was half-hidden behind dark clouds, the other half straining to cast a hazy glow.
The dishes she hadn’t been able to eat at Amber Glow for lunch were no longer a problem at dinner, with Xie Xunzhao there to serve as her “memo.” Rong Ci ate without a hitch.
By the time they were preparing to return to Mirror Lake Manor, it was already eight in the evening.
“Big Brother, are we sleeping together again tonight?” Rong Ci tilted her head as she asked Xie Xunzhao, who was fastening her seat belt.
“Cough, cough, cough!” Secretary Su, who had just gotten into the passenger seat, choked and immediately covered his mouth before swiftly raising the partition between the front and back seats.
Good heavens. Madam really didn’t treat them like outsiders at all.
She didn’t even treat them like people.
Was this something they were supposed to hear?!
The back seat instantly became an extremely private space, falling quiet all at once. A faint gardenia fragrance mingled in the air with the cool, restrained scent of Xie Xunzhao’s cologne.
Click.
The seat belt fastened gently.
Xie Xunzhao didn’t immediately pull away, his palm braced beside her. They were very close. Their breaths mingled and intertwined. The car remained parked by the roadside, unmoving for a long while.
Xie Xunzhao raised a hand and tucked the strands of hair that had fallen across her cheek behind her ear; his meaning was difficult to discern. “Mumu, this is a car, not a bed.”
The light was dim and quiet. Rong Ci’s skin was so fair it seemed translucent and luminous. Although she had a pair of proud, alluring almond-shaped eyes, her gaze was perfectly clear and innocent.
The next second, the ear hidden beneath her hair turned red. She finally realized how ambiguous her words had sounded. But wasn’t Xie Xunzhao’s answer ambiguous too?
Rong Ci instinctively wanted to cover her face and hide, but Xie Xunzhao’s face was right in front of her. So instead, she wanted to cover his face, to keep him from looking at her.
Only for Xie Xunzhao to catch her wrist effortlessly, his gaze settling clearly on her face.
Rong Ci had never thought his eyes could look so aggressive, as though… he wanted to eat her?
For once, a trace of helplessness surfaced in her expression. “Big Brother, you’re kind of scary like this.”
Xie Xunzhao laughed softly. “Such a small courage.”
He released her and sat back down. “I wasn’t being fierce with you.”
Rong Ci curled her fingers. “Oh.”
She couldn’t help feeling that the place on her wrist where Xie Xunzhao had held her was still burning, as though a flame had brushed over it, leaving behind a deep imprint.
The car started moving.
Rong Ci stayed quiet for no more than two seconds before remembering that Xie Xunzhao hadn’t answered her directly. “So, are we sleeping together?”
Please don’t. Please don’t. Please don’t.
The higher the virtue, the higher the devil.
She had downloaded a whole bunch of videos at home that morning, all ready to secretly watch before bed tonight!
Xie Xunzhao turned his head and met her expectant eyes, and his thin lips curved slightly. “Rong Mumu.”
“Do you know who I am?”
“Xie Xunzhao?”
“Big Brother?”
Seeing him remain silent, titles from financial news began surfacing in Rong Ci’s mind—
“New head of the Xie Group?”
“The Xie family’s sole heir?”
“This year’s most influential rising star in the business world?”
“Beicheng’s number one young master?”
Xie Xunzhao: “……”
“Stop.”
“There aren’t that many people in the car.”
……
There was a small safe inside the car compartment. Xie Xunzhao opened it, took out a thin red booklet, and handed it to Rong Ci. “See this? What do you think?”
Rong Ci took it and looked at the photograph on the marriage certificate. She looked beautiful in a white shirt.
Oh, no. That wasn’t the point.
Her gaze shifted to the person beside her. A handsome young man in a matching white shirt.
Rong Ci opened her mouth. “I see it. You’re very… handsome?”
Of course, she was the prettier one.
Xie Xunzhao lightly tapped the embossed seal on the photograph with his finger. “Look here.”
“I’m your lawful husband.”
He announced it without so much as a change in expression. “So, it’s perfectly natural for us to sleep together.”
~~
“Heaven knows how naturally Xie Xunzhao has taken to controlling me.”
“My parents handed my guardianship over to him. Now I can cry out to Heaven, and Heaven won’t answer; cry out to Earth and Earth won’t respond.”
In the study, Rong Ci had her eyelashes lowered as she earnestly worked on her architecture assignment. A video call was open in front of her, allowing her to work with one hand while chatting with her best friend, Pei Yitong, who was abroad.
Pei Yitong’s almond-shaped eyes curved into a smile. “No wonder your schedule has been so regular lately.”
As one of Beicheng’s prominent wealthy families, the Pei family naturally knew the true relationship between Xie Xunzhao and Rong Ci.
On the small phone screen, a fresh bouquet of white grape-wine lilies stood in a black vase that flowed like satin ribbons, reflecting the girl’s delicate, focused features.
Pei Yitong quietly admired the sight for a while before feeling deeply comforted. “Little President Xie really knows how to take care of his wife. Your complexion is so much rosier.”
Rong Ci thought to herself: These past few days, going to bed at nine-thirty sharp every night, drinking a bowl of tonic every other day—whose complexion wouldn’t be good?
Sometimes she even felt feverishly warm in the middle of the night. She had even wondered whether Xie Xunzhao had slipped some kind of love potion into her food. Otherwise, why did she wake up every morning curled against his chest?
Rong Ci rubbed her brow and said with a troubled expression, “But my soul is withering.”
“Your drawing looks pretty smooth to me. Where’s the withering?” Pei Yitong suddenly remembered something. “Oh, right. With Little President Xie controlling you so strictly, can you still intern over the summer?”
An architecture internship was no child’s play.
Of course, Rong Ci wanted to intern, and she had already sent out her résumé.
Architecture was a five-year program. With the new school year, she would be a fourth-year student. Her coursework would only get heavier, and she didn’t have many summers left in which she could intern!
But…
“Xie Xunzhao definitely won’t agree.”
“He says I can’t go outside if the temperature is above thirty degrees. Beicheng is going to be hot all day for the next few months!”
The moment Rong Ci thought of this, she lost all motivation to draw. She tossed down her pen, picked up Zeus, who was lying asleep on the desk, and began rubbing him all over.
Zeus lightly patted her with one paw. “Meow.”
His emerald-green eyes looked almost human as he looked at Rong Ci, as though comforting her.
Just then, Pei Yitong shoved her tablet toward the camera. “Ci-bao, look at this.”
“Your idol, Ms. Shen Yu, is going to collaborate with the Xie Group on a huge art museum project. The investment is said to be in the tens of billions, and apparently they’re going to turn it into a landmark building for Beicheng’s new district.”
Shen Yu was a renowned architect in China. She had won countless architectural awards, and the Galaxy Century Tower she had designed in Lingcheng remained one of the country’s most influential and representative architectural works, having set numerous records.
This was the first time in thirty years that she had taken on a project of this scale as the lead architect again.
“Just go ask Little President Xie for an internship position. That way you’d be right under his eye, you’d get your internship, and you’d get to learn up close from your idol…”
Pei Yitong deliberately drew out her words. “And it’ll satisfy Little President Xie’s need for control, hehe.”
“Three birds with one stone!”
!!!
Rong Ci stared at the news, her pupils slowly widening. Shen Yu was the architect she admired most.
In fact, she had chosen to study architecture because, as a child, she had gone with her parents to visit the “Galaxy Century Tower,” and from that had come her dream of having her own name, together with her architectural works, live on through the ages.
Pei Yitong’s suggestion was undoubtedly an enormous temptation.
—
Rong Ci finally found her marriage certificate in the innermost compartment of the dressing room. She placed it reverently on the coffee table with both hands.
Then she took a photo and sent it to Xie Xunzhao. [Marriage certificate.jpg]
[If you’re the president of the Xie Group, then that makes me the president’s wife of the Xie Group, right?]
helios: [Do you have a fever?]
[How high is it?]