Chapter 174: You Told Him First

*Runze’s POV*

Bael’s still standing behind my chair, his hands rest on my shoulders, warm through my knit cardigan.

Then he comes around it and crouches down in front of me, and I have nowhere to look except his face.

For a moment neither of us speaks. His eyes are steady on mine, the way they get when he’s decided something and is figuring out where to begin.

My fingers tighten around the diamond of the pendant at my throat, the sharp edge digging into my skin.

"Xue Lian and I were together," he says. His voice is flat and even. "Before the marriage. For a long time. When my father’s will changed the inheritance conditions, I asked him to come back from abroad, to marry me." Something in his jaw tightens. "He said he wasn’t ready, and asked me to wait a little longer."

I say nothing, I don’t even nod. I just listen to the sound of his voice filling the quiet room, trying to match the words to the history I’ve been guessing at for months.

"Then Grandmother arranged the merger with the Li family, to marry Feifei" he continues, his gaze never wavering from mine. "I thought hearing about it would change his mind." He pauses. "It didn’t. He told me to go ahead, secure the inheritance, and divorce in five years when he was ready to come back. He wasn’t threatened by the arrangement at all. He thought it was just business."

I look at his face. I look at the particular, unblinking stillness of his expression.

"But then you got pregnant and I married you instead," he says, and his voice drops a fraction lower, rougher around the edges. "That was when Xue Lian came back. When he saw that the person I’d married wasn’t just a convenient placeholder he could wait out."

My throat feels dry. I swallow once, my fingers slowly letting go of the pendant until they’re resting flat against the blanket over my knees.

"...Did you love him?" I ask.

The question is small. It sounds thin in the room, but it’s the only one that matters.

Bael looks at me.

He doesn’t blink, he actually thinks about it, which I wasn’t expecting, and somehow that... the fact that he doesn’t reach for the easy answer, makes what’s coming mean more before he’s even said it.

"What I felt for him was comfortable," he says slowly. "Familiar. We understood each other without needing to explain much, and neither of us wanted things the other couldn’t give." A pause. "But what I feel for you..." He pauses, his eyes tracking across my face. "I have never felt anything like it before in my life, Runze. I didn’t even know what it was until it was already too late to pretend it was something else."

Something sharp and sudden moves through my chest, a sudden ache that feels less like pain and more like something shifting back into its proper socket.

I keep my face very still, flexing the muscles in my jaw so nothing shows.

"The night I came home smelling like him," Bael continues, and this time, he looks down at his own hands for a brief second before looking back up. "I had gone to his apartment. He kissed me, and I..." He stops.

Something crosses his face, a dark shadow of regret that pulls at the corners of his mouth.

"I stopped it and left. Because the whole time I was there, I kept thinking about you. I wanted to come back to you."

I look down at my lap, focusing on the blanket. My chest feels tight, the image of that night playing out in my head with entirely different colors now.

"And then," he says, his voice shifting into something harder, darker, "on the day of your presentation..."

I look up instantly at that.

"I had been with Shen Rui, going through some things that needed handling." Something shifts in his expression, his eyes turning cold as flint. "When it was done, I left Shen Rui to finish up and I was on my way back to you. But Xue Lian was waiting by my car in the parking garage."

I go very still, my hands curling into small fists against my thighs.

"I didn’t want to know why he was there." Bael’s eyes don’t move from mine. "I told him that I love you,I made it very clear to him that you’re my wife, and that I’m never going back to him." His fingers tighten slightly on his own knees. "But then my phone rang. It was the hospital. They told me that you—"

He stops.

He doesn’t finish the sentence, he doesn’t have to. The memory of that call is right there in the sudden, tight squeeze of his jaw and the way his breath hitches in his throat.

He reaches out quickly and takes both my hands in his, wrapping his warm fingers around mine until they are completely covered, completely contained. He looks at me with an expression I don’t have a name for, something raw and fierce and completely exposed.

"I never loved him, Runze," he says, the words quiet but carrying the weight of an absolute truth. "You’re the one who made me realize what love even is."

My face goes warm.

Very warm.

I can feel the heat climbing up my neck like a physical wave, reaching my ears, making them prickle.

The intensity of his gaze is too much, too heavy to hold while my skin is reacting like this. I turn my face away from him, looking back out toward the window, trying to focus on anything else. I also attempt to pull my hands back out of his grip, tugging slightly.

"...Leave my hand," I tell him, my voice sounding a little tighter than I meant it to.

His grip doesn’t loosen even a millimeter. In fact, his fingers tighten around mine, holding me firmly in place. "....What’s wrong? Are you still angry?"

Before I can answer, his free hand comes up, his fingers settling gently against the side of my face. He turns my chin back toward him, his thumb resting right against the line of my jaw, forcing me to look at him.

"Runze."

I keep my eyes slightly averted, focusing on his collarbone instead of his eyes. My face is on fire now, the heat radiating off my cheeks.

"...You told him first," I say, the words coming out in a small, muttered rush.

Silence.

"What?" Bael says, his brow furrowing slightly.

"That you love me." I can feel my own pulse drumming loudly in my ears, fast and frantic. "You told *him* first."

Another silence settles over the room.

This one is longer. Much longer.

The pressure of his thumb on my jaw relaxes slightly, but he doesn’t take his hand away. After a few seconds of hearing nothing but my own breathing, I chance a look up at his face.

He looks genuinely speechless. His mouth is slightly open, his eyes wide, an expression of total, blank surprise that I have never once seen on him in all the months we’ve lived together.

He looks completely thrown off balance. Then, something dawns on him—I can actually watch the realization arrive in his eyes, clearing out the confusion—and he lets go of my face, dropping his head back with a sharp exhale. He puts his own hand over his eyes, his shoulders starting to shake.

Then he smiles.

It isn’t the small, private almost-smile I’ve spent months cataloguing and saving in my memory.

It’s a real smile, sudden, big, and bright. I barely have a second to realize I’ve never seen him look like this before he moves.

He leans forward, rising from his crouch. Both of his arms wrap around me, holding me tight through my cardigan. I make a small gasp and try to pull back, but with my stomach and the deep chair, there is nowhere to go. He knows it, too. He holds me gently against the backrest, burying his face right into my neck.

"I thought I did something wrong," he says into my hair, and he sounds... relieved. Properly, deeply relieved, his voice losing the strained quality it’s been carrying since I asked him that question. His arms tighten around my back, pulling me against his chest.

"You scared me, Runze."

"You made me wonder for so long!" I mutter, my voice muffled against him. My hands are trapped between our bodies, my fingers bunching into the fabric of his clothes because I don’t know what else to do with them.

"I know." His mouth finds the sensitive skin at the side of my neck, his lips pressing there, warm and lingering. "I know. I’m sorry."

"You are the worst—"

"You’ll hear it from now on," he says against my skin, his breath hot and uneven. Then his teeth slide up to find the shell of my ear, giving it the gentlest, sharpest little bite, and I make a high, strange sound that I will absolutely be taking to my grave. "Whenever you want. For the rest of our lives." His lips move back down to my neck, his voice turning into a rough whisper. "I love you. I love you. I love you, Runze. I love—"

I kiss him.

It is the only reasonable option available to me. He is too close and my face is completely unsalvageable and somewhere behind us at least one of the maids is making a sound she is trying very hard to disguise as something other than giggling, and I need him to stop before he says it another eight times.

He kisses me back like he has nowhere else to be, warm and unhurried and slightly devastating, and when I pull back I press my fingers over his mouth.

"I heard you," I whisper, my eyes fixed on his. "The first time."

He blinks up at me, his eyes dark and heavy with something else now, and exhales against my fingers. It’s a short, resigned sound of defeat.

"Aaagh." He drops his forehead heavily onto my shoulder, letting his weight rest against me for a long moment.

"Get better quickly, Runze."

I look down at the dark hair near my cheek, my fingers still resting against the side of his neck.

"...What for?"

He lifts his head slowly. His eyes meet mine, the bright amusement from before completely gone, replaced by a dark focus that makes my stomach do a strange, nervous flip. He leans in closer, his mouth brushing the edge of my ear, and says, very quietly, very plainly—

"I want to fuck you so badly."

My face, somehow, finds a brand new level of heat it hadn’t previously achieved in its entire existence. My ears feel like they’re going to melt.

Behind us, someone drops something.

I choose to believe it was an accident.