The place was extremely crude. The “ring” was just a rectangle painted on the ground in the center, with traffic cones placed at its four corners.
Two groups of people stood around it, separated by a narrow gap.
Someone in the group closer to Sheng Renxing followed Xing Ye’s gaze toward the door and quietly asked his companion, “Who’s that?”
The companion shook his head.
“You lost.” A man in a jacket from the group near Sheng Renxing called loudly to the other side.
The people on the opposite side had already helped the huge man off the ground. At the words, one of them gave a cold snort. “The money will be sent to Juhuatai tomorrow.”
The man in the jacket smiled and raised one finger at him. “And the one-year ban.”
The speaker drew a deep breath. His face went scarlet. The curses had obviously reached the edge of his lips, but he forced every emotion down with masculine dignity and did not answer a word. “We’re leaving.”
They might have lost, but they could not lose their presence.
Several men supported the injured giant and marched out with heads held high.
Sheng Renxing was the first to break eye contact with Xing Ye. He stepped aside and happened to witness the huge man in the middle, who had lifted his head too high, smack straight into the doorframe.
“…”
Unable to see his own expression, Sheng Renxing lowered his head and gathered his earphone cord. At the same time, he adjusted his hair to cover his bright-red ears.
“Good fight. Congratulations.” Watching the group leave, the man in the jacket turned and applauded Xing Ye. The people behind him gradually quieted.
Xing Ye nodded.
The man was used to Xing Ye’s silence after a fight. There was not even a trace of joy in him after winning.
He simply gave a few reminders, exchanged some polite words, and took his people away too.
When he passed Sheng Renxing, the man in the jacket even turned and smiled at him.
Sheng Renxing did not smile back. His hands remained in his pockets as he watched them leave.
Then he turned and strode toward the ring.
Neither of them spoke.
Sheng Renxing did not know what to say. After all, this was only their second meeting, and in a scene like this.
What he had just witnessed seemed to have stirred a windstorm through his mind.
Now that he was close, he could clearly see a fine layer of sweat on Xing Ye. It had dampened his hair and mixed with the blood on his face as it ran down.
The scent of hormones hit him head-on.
Without showing it, Sheng Renxing took one step backward.
He selected among several possible opening lines and settled on, “Are you okay?”
After saying it, he saw Xing Ye roughly wipe away blood running toward his eye and frowned slightly. “You’ll pull the wound open like that.”
That was why it still had not stopped bleeding.
Xing Ye dropped his shirt. The wrinkled hem clung to his waist. He lifted his eyes toward Sheng Renxing. “Why did you come?”
His tone was ordinary, like casual small talk between friends.
His voice still carried a trace of breathlessness and weakness. In the haze of it, he almost sounded softly gentle.
“To return the umbrella.” Sheng Renxing worked to keep his face calm and skipped the polite response.
Inside, he furiously cursed the deer in his chest: Stop fucking jumping around.
“We were meeting at the noodle stall.” Xing Ye started unfastening his fingerless fighting gloves. Once one was loose, he tucked it beneath his arm.
Sheng Renxing folded his arms and looked at him with complete righteousness. “I waited for you at the stall for an hour.”
He had only come looking because he could not wait any longer.
“We agreed on nine-thirty.” Xing Ye paused, then looked up at him. “It’s forty-five now.”
Sheng Renxing froze and looked down at his phone.
9:46.
He blurted, “How do you know?”
Xing Ye looked behind him.
Sheng Renxing turned around.
A huge clock hung above the door.
“…”
“You were still late.” He turned back and glared slightly.
Usually other people waited for him. No one had ever made him wait.
“Sorry.”
Xing Ye apologized so crisply that Sheng Renxing suddenly had nothing to say.
“…” He pulled his backpack around, took the umbrella out, and held it forward. “Here.”
Xing Ye looked down and silently accepted it.
Even after returning the umbrella, Sheng Renxing did not leave. He watched Xing Ye remove the glove from his other hand. His fingers were stained with half-dried blood and his knuckles were scraped. Sheng Renxing could not tell whose blood it was.
After watching for a while, he asked, “Need help?”
Xing Ye looked up at him.
A moment later, as though the tension had drained from his bones, he slowly sat on the floor.
“You should go to the hospital.” Sheng Renxing held a cotton swab and carefully poked around Xing Ye’s wound, trying to clean away the dirty blood.
Xing Ye still sat where he had been. Sheng Renxing half knelt beside him to treat the injury.
But Young Master Sheng had never treated someone else’s wounds before. At first he had no sense of how much force to use and kept poking directly into the cut.
The important part was that every time Sheng Renxing poked him, Xing Ye had not even reacted before Sheng Renxing hissed through his own teeth as though he had been stabbed instead.
After enough of Sheng Renxing’s hissing, Xing Ye almost started thinking that the wound on his brow did not just require a hospital—it needed the ICU.
He had originally meant to say he could do it himself. But when he lifted his eyes and saw Sheng Renxing’s intensely serious expression, he lost the desire to speak.
Sheng Renxing was a little nervous.
When he got nervous, he could not stop talking. The questions he had decided not to ask came tumbling out anyway.
“When you said ‘the rules’ back then, you meant a fight in the ring?”
Xing Ye nodded.
The movement touched the wound. Sheng Renxing reacted as though burned. “Don’t move!”
“…Mm.”
“Are you a boxer?” Sheng Renxing asked curiously.
He had not seen the fight itself, but he had seen the gloves on Xing Ye’s hands.
Xing Ye was silent for a moment. “No.”
Sheng Renxing glanced at him in confusion.
Because they were so close—with Xing Ye sitting on the floor and Sheng Renxing kneeling beside him, barely an arm’s length apart—Sheng Renxing had a strange feeling of seeing him both too clearly and not clearly enough.
Xing Ye’s eyes were lowered now, so Sheng Renxing could not make out his expression.
“Did you win just now?”
“Mm.”
“Damn, that’s impressive.” Sheng Renxing clicked his tongue in amazement. “He looked huge. Twice your size.”
The scene felt like a movie dragged into reality. Frame by slow-motion frame, Xing Ye’s appearance in that moment seemed carved into his memory.
There was a bizarre unreality to it and far too much hot-blooded excitement. Even remembering it now made his heart pound abnormally and his fingers begin to tingle.
He quickly shook out his hand.
“That was all useless bulk. His technique was bad,” Xing Ye analyzed rationally, contradicting him. “And he wasn’t twice my size.”
He was not that skinny.
“He was,” Sheng Renxing said firmly.
Xing Ye: “…My build is about the same as yours.”
“Oh. Then no, he wasn’t.” Sheng Renxing reversed himself instantly.
After a moment of silence, he said, “You’re thinner than me.”
A boy’s inexplicable stubbornness.
Sheng Renxing held a cotton pad in place with one hand and extended the other in front of Xing Ye.
Xing Ye extended his arm too, and the two compared forearm muscles.
Sheng Renxing examined them carefully. “Your frame is bigger than mine, but I have more muscle.”
Xing Ye did not pull his arm back. “That’s not muscle.”
Unconvinced, Sheng Renxing flexed hard, forcing the muscle lines to stand out.
Xing Ye said nothing and flexed too.
“…”
Sheng Renxing withdrew his arm.
After a while, he said, “But you’re paler than me.”
He glanced at Xing Ye. Under the light, his skin was so white it nearly glowed.
Pretty boy.
Sheng Renxing released the cotton pad to check whether the bleeding had stopped.
He replaced it with a fresh one and pressed again.
Xing Ye looked at him speechlessly for a while, then for some inexplicable reason said, “…You’re shorter than me.”
Sheng Renxing whipped his head toward him in disbelief. “I’m 175.”
“I’m 177.”
“I don’t believe you!”
“I slouch a little.”
Sheng Renxing was half skeptical. After a long moment, he scoffed at Xing Ye’s competitive behavior. “Childish.”
“?”
They chatted while treating the wound.
When Sheng Renxing picked up another cotton pad, he found that the bleeding had slowed. He asked, “What next?”
Xing Ye handed him the red antiseptic solution. “Put a little on with a cotton swab.”
“Oh.”
Sheng Renxing tried it, then handed Xing Ye a cotton pad. “Cover your eye.”
He was afraid the solution would run into it.
When he finished applying it, Sheng Renxing asked, “Then do we put a Band-Aid on?”
“No.” Xing Ye lowered the hand covering his eye. “This is enough.”
Sheng Renxing withdrew his hand and helped gather the rubbish from the floor.
Once everything was cleaned up, he stood and dusted off his trouser legs.
Looking at Xing Ye, who remained seated, he asked, “Anything else you need help with?”
The way Xing Ye had stood motionless in the ring, and the difficulty with which he had sat down, did not look like a single cut on the brow was his only injury.
But Xing Ye shook his head.
“All right. I’m leaving.”
Sheng Renxing nodded and bent to pick up his backpack.
He did not press further, assuming Xing Ye wanted to deal with the rest himself.
“It’s raining outside,” Xing Ye said.
“?” Sheng Renxing listened.
Sure enough, he could hear raindrops striking the sheet-metal roof.
“Take the umbrella.” Xing Ye held it out again.
When Sheng Renxing had taken the umbrella from his bag earlier, Xing Ye had noticed there was no other one inside.
“What about you?” Sheng Renxing accepted it.
Xing Ye shook his head.
Sheng Renxing thought about the first-aid kit Xing Ye had told him to fetch from this building.
He stared in shock. “You’re not planning to sleep here tonight, are you?”
Xing Ye nodded.
For some reason, his mother had been coming home unexpectedly in the middle of the night these past few days. If she saw him like this, he was finished.
“…” Sheng Renxing looked around.
Compared with a park bench, this place had exactly one extra feature: walls.
Bare walls.
Xing Ye sat there, silently treating the scrapes on his hand.
There was something lonely and dispirited about him.
Sheng Renxing felt his heart miss a beat. Acting on impulse, he said, “Why don’t you come stay at my place?”
“…” Xing Ye looked up in surprise and instinctively refused. “No need.”
Half an hour later, Sheng Renxing brought Xing Ye back to the hotel.
A huge pile of the clothes Sheng Renxing had bought yesterday was still stacked on the sofa. He had thought the wardrobe was dirty and thrown everything here instead.
There was not even enough empty space for someone to sit.
“Pick something?” Sheng Renxing asked when he saw Xing Ye looking at the sofa. “I haven’t worn any of it.”
“No.” Xing Ye shook his head. “I brought clothes.”
“Want to shower first?”
Sheng Renxing had not noticed when they first came in, but now he looked around and realized the blanket was unmade, his pajamas lay on the bed, one pillow was at the head and the other at the foot, and a bath towel had been thrown on the floor.
He had thought nothing of it before, but now that Xing Ye seriously looked around, Sheng Renxing suddenly felt his ears warm.
And his motives had not been entirely pure. He had been momentarily seduced by beauty earlier. Now that the overheated CPU in his head had cooled down, embarrassment came rushing in.
He did not even know how to make polite conversation, so he could only pretend he had noticed nothing.
“Okay.” Xing Ye placed his backpack on the floor and crouched to take out clothes.
His movements were natural. He did not look awkward at all.
“Put them on the table.” As Sheng Renxing spoke, he shoved the clothes on the sofa farther to one side, creating a small patch of space.
“Dirty.” Xing Ye shook his head. “Where am I sleeping later?”
“Huh?” Sheng Renxing froze.
He had not considered that at all!
He looked around the room… There was nowhere to sleep except the bed.
The sofa was too small. There was plenty of floor, but had he invited someone back just to make him sleep on the ground?
Sheng Renxing licked his lips. His CPU stubbornly kept working. Putting on the air of a perfectly straight man who was not overthinking anything, he said, “Can you sleep with me? The bed’s pretty big.”
Xing Ye nodded as expected. He had slept on large communal platforms before.
His main surprise was that Sheng Renxing did not look like the kind of person who could sleep beside someone else.
Sheng Renxing also nodded with elaborate casualness and unnecessarily declared, “I’m fine with it too. I used to sleep with one of my brothers all the time.”
Xing Ye looked at him once, then took his clothes into the bathroom.
Sheng Renxing pondered what that look had meant. He could not figure it out.
Seeing how messy the room was, he tidied a little.
Then he straightened the bed.
Looking at the scattered bedding, he struggled internally for a while…
In the end, he called room service and ordered a fresh quilt and pillow.
Then he sat on the floor and played with his phone.
A short while later, Xing Ye came out of the bathroom wrapped in steam.
A towel covered his hair.
It was not one of the hotel towels. It was black-and-white checked.
As he dried his hair, he asked, “You going to shower?”
“…” Sheng Renxing stared at the towel. His mind went blank for several seconds.
Then heat rushed from his ears all the way across his face.
That was the fucking towel he had used to shower last night.
After Sheng Renxing finished his own shower,
he held his phone, thinking and hesitating for ages before finally messaging Big-Head Qiu:
[Someone used a towel I’ve used before. I don’t know how to tell him.]
Big-Head Qiu was silent for a moment, then replied:
[I remember once I used your towel and you threw it away right in front of me and said it was dirty…]
