My Chongxi Husband Is Faking His Coma novel · Chapter 16 of 24
Chapter 16: Walking
Xie Zhaoran learned to walk again on a gravel path, between two rows of tea bushes, in a pair of Pei Wen's borrowed slippers.
Lin Zhi had marked the path in chalk every few yards.
"Twenty," he said, on the first morning.
"Eighteen," said Zhaoran, through his teeth.
"You stopped to complain. I'm counting the complaint."
By the third day it was forty.
By the fifth, he could reach the moon gate without a hand.
Lin Zhi stood there with his arms folded, trying not to look proud and failing.
Madam Xie had put them in separate rooms, on opposite sides of the corridor, for propriety.
Lin Zhi crossed it every night when the house was dark, with his shoes in his hand, walking on the sides of his feet.
The first time, Zhaoran had been lying awake and listening to him do it, and had counted the boards.
"She knows," he whispered.
"She knows nothing."
"She has the floor boards counted."
"Then she'll pretend," said Lin Zhi, and slid under the quilt, and put his cold feet against Zhaoran's shins.
Each evening he worked the stiffness out of Zhaoran's thighs with the heel of his hand.
He did it in the lamplight, in a hurry and then not in a hurry.
It was therapy.
The hands went from the thighs to the hips, and from the hips to the small of the back, and every night they went a little farther before somebody said a stern word.
It was also the best part of the day, and neither of them pretended otherwise.
Zhaoran's body was coming back.
He could feel the muscles fill in under his skin, one by one.
He could feel other things too.
Lin Zhi cooked dinner on the fifth night.
The stove at the villa had not been lit in fifteen years and did not wish to be.
Lin Zhi stood over it in an apron, swearing in a low voice at the heat.
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