It was already noon when Cixi woke up. The room was still dark. The curtains were still drawn.
She turned, and she felt the pain in her neck. Was it because of the sex, she pondered. Her whole body still pained her. She wished she did not have to go to work. She groaned softly in pain. She turned carefully to take a look at the ti on her phone, only to find that Cassian was sleeping next to her, his hand on her, wrapped around her.
Had her body been in so much pain that she had not recognised there was a man sleeping next to her?
Cixi looked at the sleeping Cassian, and a soft smile appeared on her lips. A few strands of his hair sat across his forehead, and even while sleeping, he looked handso. Now she understood why no woman ever wanted to end the contract with him, or why won fell in love with him. Who wouldn’t? Even her own heart started to beat abnormally again, looking at his handso face.
She leaned forward and pressed her lips against his, and when she pulled away, Cassian was looking at her.
"You wanna have another round?" Cassian asked in a husky voice.
"No!" Cixi almost recoiled.
"Then why did you kiss ?" he asked her, genuinely confused, while Cixi was confused about why a simple kiss was considered a sign for having sex.
"Can I not simply kiss you because I found you cute?" Cixi said, unsure.
"You think I am cute?" Cassian laughed, and he sat, placing his back against the headboard. His bare torso was now visible, and the blanket had covered his lower bare part.
Cixi sat too, holding the blanket against her chest. "It is not funny."
He said nothing. He simply looked at her.
"I thought you would have been gone." Cixi was not expecting Cassian to be found next to her.
"You thought wrong." And Cassian left the bed and walked to the living room bare. When he ca inside, he had new clothing in his hand, and he started wearing it. For the first ti, Cixi saw him wearing blue jeans and a black shirt.
She had only ever seen him in a suit. And yesterday without anything.
Cixi decided to dress herself, and then she rembered she had slept in the tub itself.
"I had slept off in the tub," she said aloud.
"I bathed you," Cassian said proudly.
When Cixi got up from the bed, and the blanket was aside, she saw the red stain on the bed. She kept the blanket on top to keep it hidden, which Cassian noticed but said nothing.
Cixi took a fresh pair of clothes and went into the bathroom. She changed into a sumr dress, and when she looked at the mirror, she saw glowing skin. She combed her hair and started to make a bun when her eyes fell on her neck, where a tattoo had ford.
It was a dark rose.
Leaving her hair, she rubbed it. It did not go away. She opened the tap of the basin, took water, and started rubbing it on her neck. She rubbed and rubbed. It would not go away. She applied soap. Still, the rose would not go away.
A horrified thought arose — if it was done by Cassian. While she slept, he drew a tattoo on her neck. Why? Why would he do that?
She left the washroom looking for Cassian, who was sitting in the living room waiting for her.
"Did you do this?" she asked as she entered the living room.
Cassian gestured for her towards the opposite sofa to take a seat.
"No. First, tell — did you draw a tattoo on my neck?"
"I will answer you, first sit."
"No, you never answer. So answer first."
Leaning back, Cassian kept his keen eyes on Cixi. "Yes, it was ."
"Why? Why would you draw a tattoo on ? Should you not have asked whether I wanted it or not?"
To which Cassian smiled. "You wanted it. That is why the tattoo is there on your neck."
"If I say yes when I am asleep, that does not count as my permission."
"Cixi, sit. Or else I will think you want to sit on my lap. And then I do not know — after that, we will be talking, or you will be moaning, calling my na." Cassian gave her a perfect smile, nonchalant, certain.
Cixi sat down.
She sat carefully. She had decided, in the small private corner of her chest that handled the assessnt of threats, that the threat Cassian had just delivered was a threat he was capable of carrying out. She did not, at this hour of the morning, in this room, with his rose on her neck and his shirt on his back and his amused face watching her from across the low table, want to test it. Her body, by every honest asure of its remaining strength, would not have survived the testing.
She lowered herself onto the long low couch across from him.
She crossed her legs at the ankle. She drew the hem of the sumr dress down over her knees. She placed her hands in her lap. She had been raised in a small bare apartnt, and she had read enough books to know how, in a room that did not belong to her, a woman of her age and her circumstance was ant to sit.
She did not look at Cassian.
She looked at the cup on the low table at his side.
She looked at the long quiet glass of the window across the living area, behind which the noon light of the city was held back by the heavy drapes.
She looked at her own hands in her own lap.
She looked, in the careful second she had given herself to compose the next sentence, at every object in the room except the man who had drawn a flower on her neck while she was sleeping.
"Now," she said. "Answer ."
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