After A Secret Marriage Agreement With A Rival Omega - Chapter 91

Chapter 91

◎ “You are my wife; is anyone else?” ◎

The door had been locked.

Both Sheng Ruxi and Jian Jixing were back inside the hotel suite, but their confrontation hadn’t closed the distance between them by even an inch. Jian Jixing felt the hand she was holding; it was ice cold.

She gently rubbed her thumb over Sheng Ruxi’s palm, her voice softening as she allowed her helplessness to show through. “Sheng Ruxi?”

“I didn’t come here to do… these things with you.” Sheng Ruxi turned her head away, avoiding Jian Jixing’s proximity. “I didn’t know you were coming tonight.”

Jian Jixing’s gaze and movements froze simultaneously. As the implication of Sheng Ruxi’s words sank in, her entire body went rigid.

Because they had remained motionless, the sensor lights in the room flickered on and off—now shrouding them in darkness, now illuminating them, like shadows rising and receding. Jian Jixing’s thoughts became complex and difficult to voice. “What did you think I was going to do to you?”

Did her hurried return, her tone, and her movements really lead Sheng Ruxi to believe that she only had the goal of physical possession?

Sheng Ruxi didn’t reply, maintaining her turned-away posture. Her voice was very soft. “Don’t overthink it. It’s just that lately, every time we meet, it ends up like this. I…”

“Sheng Ruxi, I thought… I thought this was our emotional connection reaching a certain point. Spontaneous intimacy. I never approached it with a singular, calculated purpose. I never did it because…” Jian Jixing looked back on their recent encounters, her brow furrowing deeper. “It was never just because I was attracted to your body.”

Sheng Ruxi: “I understand.”

Jian Jixing still didn’t let her go.

As if trying to prove something, she stood there in a standoff with Sheng Ruxi. Sheng Ruxi didn’t dodge as Jian Jixing leaned down. But this kiss only landed gently on Sheng Ruxi’s cheek. It was a mere touch, and then she immediately pulled away.

Sheng Ruxi thought Jian Jixing would release her then. Instead, Jian Jixing pulled her over to the sofa, sat down, and silently pulled Sheng Ruxi onto her lap.

She had used action to close the physical gap, but aside from a small sense of relief from holding her, Jian Jixing felt awful. That feeling of Sheng Ruxi being miles away still lingered.

She buried her head in Sheng Ruxi’s neck, recklessly freeing one hand to interlace her fingers tightly with Sheng Ruxi’s. “During the livestream, they said two days of no contact meant a default breakup. Do you agree with that?”

“No.”

“I don’t agree either. But just now, when I called you, you didn’t give me the chance to say it.” Without waiting for Sheng Ruxi to speak, Jian Jixing’s tone turned bitter. “Are you really going to give up on me just like that?”

Sheng Ruxi looked up, stunned for a moment. She felt Jian Jixing was a bit too good at applying what she learned—those were the exact words Sheng Ruxi had said over the phone earlier. “I never thought that.”

“Sheng Ruxi, what I said before was true.” Jian Jixing lowered her head slightly, her forehead resting against Sheng Ruxi’s. “So, even if you don’t want to be with me right now, I won’t agree. I simply won’t agree.”

As she said this, her face held an unusually calm resolve, as if she had long since thought this through.

Sheng Ruxi’s heart felt as though it were being squeezed by a heavy hand. An immense wave of sorrow flowed from her core to her limbs, making her tremble uncontrollably.

“Jian Jixing.” Sheng Ruxi looked directly at the person in front of her, a smile of unreadable emotion appearing on her face. “You’re making it very easy for me to ‘misunderstand’ that this is true love.”

“No matter how angry you are, you shouldn’t say such spiteful things.” Jian Jixing’s voice deepened. When the words “misunderstand” and “true love” were used together like that, it created a subtle mockery. For a moment, it made Jian Jixing feel that her frantic rush back to catch Sheng Ruxi was like a clownish joke.

Sheng Ruxi’s heart was pounding. She struggled to keep her eyes from welling up. She didn’t scream or shout; the suffocating atmosphere was simply making her want to burst into tears. Even though they were holding each other, Jian Jixing hadn’t made any other inappropriate physical contact, as if she were following a set of rules. Sheng Ruxi bit her lip, enduring.

Jian Jixing, however, was observing her.

She knew she couldn’t rush things with Sheng Ruxi, but both of them were prone to impatience. When they weren’t in a hurry, they could stabilize and communicate in a few sentences. But when Sheng Ruxi got angry, she couldn’t listen or be reached—that was the real trouble.

“I apologize. That day, I shouldn’t have been petty with you after you said that.” Jian Jixing spoke first. “I’ve thought about it for many days afterward.”

“That night, we were both in a bad state. We really shouldn’t have just stopped talking like that.” Jian Jixing sighed. “I intended to come back that night to invite you, but I ended up making things worse.”

Sheng Ruxi’s voice was low: “Stop talking.”

“The more you tell me not to speak, the more I know I should.” Jian Jixing didn’t follow her lead. “I understand now. Sometimes I have to listen to the opposite of what you say.”

“Jian Jixing!”

“Mm, I’m here.” Jian Jixing continued watching Sheng Ruxi’s expression, feeling a bit more confident. “Besides our last disagreement, is there something else you’re unhappy about that you haven’t told me?”

Sheng Ruxi instinctively looked away, avoiding eye contact. Jian Jixing didn’t say another word, adopting a look of infinite patience. Her gaze carried a warmth that Sheng Ruxi couldn’t withstand. She reached out to push her away. “I said there’s nothing.”

As expected, she couldn’t move her. Instead, Jian Jixing pinned her hand down. “Sometimes, it’s because I truly feel I have no other way to deal with you that I want to kiss you. This…”

Jian Jixing curled her lips in a self-deprecating smile. “This is a drawback left over from our previous way of interacting. Back then, our arguments only went quiet when we were kissing. Now that our relationship has changed, you don’t scold me anymore, and I find myself temporarily lost on how to be with you.”

Sheng Ruxi pursed her lips. “I don’t think that’s a ‘drawback.'”

“Your reaction is telling me otherwise. I can’t keep using that method to force an answer out of you. Where else do I need to do better?” Jian Jixing’s voice became progressively steady, approaching absolute calm.

Sheng Ruxi was speechless, feeling that the current Jian Jixing had become very detached.

Jian Jixing sighed and finally moved, just rubbing her forehead against Sheng Ruxi’s. “Sorry. I’m looking at what happened between us from a different perspective now, so I can be rational. If I followed my own heart, I’d probably end up arguing with you again within a few sentences.”

So she detached herself to calmly review the situation. Jian Jixing didn’t know when she had learned this method; she only remembered it had helped her get through many nights she thought would be heartbreaking.

She closed her eyes, letting her emotions drift through her body. After a long while, she spoke. “Blindly apologizing is also a mistake. If you want me to correct my errors and coax you, you should tell me all the mistakes, rather than making me search for them in this vast ocean.”

She had been in this state for a long time—feeling that something was wrong but unable to find the source. From her mother’s departure in her childhood to the physical discomfort of her differentiation, to the aimless swaying of her adulthood, she had asked herself countless times: Where did it go wrong?

She would find many tiny mistakes, pull them out, and try to blame the mess of her life on those small grains of sand. Perhaps it was because she didn’t like the princess doll her mother bought that summer, which sparked the fight between her mother and Yan Yaojin. Or perhaps it was because she hadn’t calculated her differentiation period in time, causing everything to fall into chaos.

Such things were as numerous as ox hairs. Jian Jixing had spent night after night diving into the ocean to search. But when she swam to the bottom, she found nothing but countless grains of sand on the seabed; she could never finish searching through them in her lifetime.

Sheng Ruxi was startled. “Jian Jixing, I didn’t mean that. I’m just as confused as you are…”

She felt something was off. Some subtle thread had wound its way out and hidden itself in the depths of Jian Jixing’s eyes. Sheng Ruxi said, “I don’t want you to talk about yourself like that in front of me!” What “ocean of mistakes”? It was all nonsense.

She felt Jian Jixing’s tone becoming increasingly strange. Forgetting about the argument, she lifted Jian Jixing’s face.

Jian Jixing gave a light smile. “I’m fine. I just feel that after all this time, I’m still as foolish as I was when I was a child.”

After she started making movies, probably because she was exhausted, she stopped having those absurd dreams of searching for mistakes on the seabed. The cleaner she stripped herself of her old identity, the more she felt she was slowly coming back to life. But she hadn’t expected that inviting the female lead she most wanted to film would lead to such a mess.

“You are foolish, but not in the way you mean.” Sheng Ruxi suddenly pulled away from Jian Jixing’s embrace, a hint of persistence in her voice. “Do you still want to… find me to film?”

“I do,” Jian Jixing said truthfully.

Sheng Ruxi frowned slightly and asked, “Then why did you change the script?”

Jian Jixing was surprised. “You know? Wait—” She suddenly realized Sheng Ruxi must have misunderstood something. Instantly, the tangled knot of threads loosened by half. “You thought I didn’t want to collaborate with you? No! I gave the notice to change the script later because I wanted it to fit the character better.”

And that character had always been written with Sheng Ruxi as the first and only choice. That had never changed.

Sheng Ruxi suddenly asked, “Was there influence from the investment company?”

Suddenly, the remaining half of the knot unraveled instantly. Sheng Ruxi’s information was good enough to know she changed the script, but not good enough to know what she was thinking. She actually thought there was pressure or involvement from Xie Jinheng.

Xie Jinheng, female lead, predecessors planting trees and successors enjoying the shade… several fragmented pieces clicked together in an instant, forming a continuous strip of movie film. Jian Jixing steadied herself. In those fragments, she caught a whiff of a familiar scent.

Sheng Ruxi’s insecurity was exactly like her own.

Although her expression was truly inappropriate for the moment, she couldn’t help it. She suddenly laughed. Her own insecurity stemmed from how fast her feelings grew; the more intense the love, the more she feared it would vanish. Just as she loved Sheng Ruxi, she found affirmation in the other woman’s insecurity.

“You’re still thinking about what Xie Jinheng told you. You’re afraid that if we collaborate this time, you’ll fall in too deep,” Jian Jixing said, peeling back the layers word by word. “And that I’ll film other actresses, have other female leads, and even have other… feelings.”

Sheng Ruxi’s expression froze. Jian Jixing was being too blunt for her to handle, but she kept her voice stiff. “See? You’re not foolish at all, Great Director Jian.”

Jian Jixing blinked and reached out to wipe the corner of Sheng Ruxi’s eye. Then, she pulled Sheng Ruxi into a tight embrace.

“So that was it. Forgive me. At this moment, I’m relieved that this was the only reason.” Jian Jixing breathed a sigh of relief, holding Sheng Ruxi so tightly she almost couldn’t breathe. Only now did she feel she truly had her in her arms. “But the movies and the ‘techniques’ I give you will never belong to another person. As for the ‘training’ I mentioned last time, please don’t misunderstand.”

“Think of that as just some playful language I used with you, understand? If it were another actress, it would just be ‘instruction.’ A director instructing an actor is part of my job. But with you… well, call it favoritism? I just want to use work as an excuse to spend more time with you.”

Sheng Ruxi’s eyes widened in shock, her entire body going soft.

“You are my wife; is anyone else?” Jian Jixing suddenly let her go, turning her head. Her breath brushed against Sheng Ruxi’s earlobe, making her tremble uncontrollably.

The warmth suddenly pulled away—she was a master of “playing hard to get.” Unable to resist, Sheng Ruxi turned her head toward her.

“…”

Before a word could be spoken, the second she moved, Jian Jixing caught the back of her neck, pulled her close, and kissed her, abandoning all logic and reason.