Chapter 17: The Rain Behind the Stall

"Chengzhi," I said.

I said it low and plain, with my hand still against his temple.

It was the way I had said it when he was afraid of the thunder.

He shut his eyes.

His breath went out of him in a long shaky line, and the muscles in his shoulders came down under my other hand.

"Again," he said.

"Chengzhi."

"Lanxi, is that the shears?" Madam Lu called through the wall. "It is very late for shears."

I snatched my hand back.

"Almost done!" I called.

"Tomorrow," Chengzhi said under his breath, with his eyes still closed.

I finished the haircut with my face on fire and my fingers not quite steady.

He did not move once.

It rained all the next day.

It was a cold winter rain, not heavy, the kind that gets inside a collar and stays.

I closed the stall early because the line had thinned.

I was stacking the benches in the narrow space between the oilcloth and the Lu wall.

Chengzhi came out of the gate with a paper umbrella.

He held it over my head, which was foolish, because I was already wet.

"I can carry a bench," I said.

"I know. I have seen you carry two."

"Then what do you want?"

"I wanted to stand here," he said.

He stood there.

The rain drummed on the umbrella and ran off in a ring around us.

I looked at the new cut of his hair, short at the nape, and the clean line of his jaw.

I had been looking at this man through an academy wall for three years.

"You said Ask me when the register has my name," he said. "It has my name."

Keep reading free with an account. Start They Jilted the Broken Scholar, So I Married Him from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.