His response hit me like a storm. It lifted me high into the air, spun me around, and shook me to my core. Each word left me dizzy, struggling against the pull of gravity, only to find myself plummeting. Just as I thought I’d found solid ground, it felt like I was teetering on the edge of a cliff.
In that moment, I realized it wasn’t Chu Ke Huan who was destroying the peace I once knew—it was my own greed, corroding his life bit by bit.
If even Chu Ke Huan had lost control, maybe we shouldn’t meet again at all.
“I’m scared,” I whispered, my throat dry.
“So am I,” he admitted. He leaned back slightly, pulling me with him until we were lying on the couch. My cheek rested against his chest as his heartbeat thrummed beneath my ear. “Tonight was the perfect opportunity, with Brexit giving me the perfect excuse. I should’ve made you mine.”
“Yes, you should’ve,” I murmured, my gaze fixed on Hao Yi’s personal belongings scattered around the room. I knew, with painful clarity, that it wasn’t those objects stopping me from being intimate with Chu Ke Huan.
“I messed up again,” he said with a hint of frustration, though his tone betrayed a trace of relief.
“You did,” I replied with a bitter smile. “You should’ve taken me home that first night and convinced me to let you in. Maybe things would’ve been simpler then.”
“I know.” He kissed my cheek. “That’s on me.”
At that moment, his phone buzzed on the table, vibrating like the chime of a church bell—a relentless duty that, much like me, he despised.
“You should go,” I said, wrapping my arms around him, both giving and taking the excuse he might need. “It’s late. Gao Zi Yuan will worry if you don’t go back.”
“I don’t want to leave,” he confessed, ignoring the escape I had offered.
“You know as well as I do—we’re not making love tonight.”
“And you know that’s not the reason I want to stay.”
His words sent a tremor through me. “Then... what do you want to do next?”
“I don’t know,” he said, his gaze distant, tinged with confusion. “Everything that’s happened tonight has thrown me off course. I can predict what the financial market will do after Brexit, but us? I don’t know. The only thing I can tell you is that a year, two years, or three years from now, I don’t want to sit across from you, drunk and miserable, talking about the predictable lives we’ve settled into through marriage, only to lean in and say, ‘It’s a good thing you got married.’ If that happens, I know I’ll hate the version of myself I am now. I’ll figure out what to do. You should think about it too.”
His unexpected conviction sent a chill through me. “Chu Ke Huan... Are you drunk?”
The irony was that neither of us had had a single drop to drink tonight.
The deeper tragedy, though, was that the future he feared most was one I hated just as much.
We stopped speaking and simply clung to each other, as if waiting for the end of an air-raid siren. The faint hum of his phone’s vibrations echoed through the silence, like a distant bombardment. It finally fell silent, leaving the night undisturbed once more.
And yet, I realized with chilling clarity that neither those missed calls nor Hao Yi’s belongings had ever been the real reason stopping me and Chu Ke Huan from being together.
What would happen from now on? Perhaps tomorrow’s dawn would bring an answer.
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