Sweet Gardenia - Chapter 23.2

She was genuinely starting to wonder if they ever attended class.

Just as Lu Zhi was about to speak, the boy seemed to finally realize the voice behind him was unfamiliar. He suddenly turned around, and a curse word slipped out.

The group buzzed with noise, taking a while to settle down. All Lu Zhi wanted now was to solve this problem. She repeated, “Find the midpoint. Measure with the ruler, divide the number by two, that’s where the midpoint is.”

If she could lift her arm, she would have demonstrated. Suddenly, a pair of hands appeared in her line of sight, tracing the path she had envisioned. A voice followed: “Connect here, here, and here. Calculate the perpendicular, it’s 2 and √5/7.”

The boy didn’t hesitate, immediately writing down the answer. Only after a long pause did it dawn on him. He looked up, dazed, and asked, “Can I trust you?”

“You already wrote it down.”

“…”

Lu Zhi watched as he stepped closer, equally bewildered. “Didn’t you promise to come after work?”

Fu Yanshang: “I left early.”

Lu Zhi: ?

She tried to process how such absurd logic could be delivered so matter-of-factly, then she snapped back to reality upon hearing him ask, “What happened?”

Lu Zhi thought for a moment, keeping it brief. “Just arrived at my destination, and a cat fell from above. I reached out to catch it. The cat’s fine. I broke my arm.”

“…”

She thought she might be hallucinating.  Otherwise, why did it sound like he sighed?

“Still hurts?”

She shook her head. “Not anymore.”

The boy holding the pen instantly chimed in. “She’s lying! How can a fracture not hurt? Bro, I broke my arm too, and it hurts like hell. I’m dying over here.”

“Varies from person to person,” Lu Zhi said. “Did you also catch a cat?”

“Oh, no,” he replied with an embarrassed smile. “I got into a fight.”

Fu Yanshang didn’t say anything. Just as Lu Zhi was about to see what he was doing behind her, she felt the sling around her neck loosen. He had lifted the cast’s strap slightly, relieving the pressure on her neck. Instantly, she felt much better.

Fu Yanshang: “Let’s go. Upstairs.”

“Hey! Wait, wait, wait! We haven’t finished the problem! Sis, can you stay a bit longer?”

Lu Zhi tilted her head. “Try it yourself first. If you still don’t get it, ask me later.”

On the way upstairs, she remembered something and asked Fu Yanshang, “How did you calculate it so quickly?”

His tone remained unperturbed. “Made it up.”

Lu Zhi: ?

Back in the room, Aunt Chen still hadn’t arrived, but the medication she had picked up was sitting untouched on the table. Lu Zhi asked Fu Yanshang, “Where’s Auntie?”

He was examining the doctor’s notes on the medicine box and replied without looking up, “I told her to go home first.”

“I was planning to stay here tonight, and we’ll see about tomorrow,” she paused for a moment, “But if she leaves, who’s going to take care of me?”

“Can’t I take care of you?”

“No… but…” Lu Zhi instinctively wanted to tug at her earlobe, but both her hands were in casts, so she gave up. “You… don’t have to. You can go attend to your own matters. With so many projects at the company and your busy schedule, why would you go out of your way to add more work?”

He poured half a glass of warm water from the dispenser, flipped open the aluminum foil, and shook two pills into his palm.

“I’m your husband. It’s only natural that I take care of you when you’re sick.”

“As for my work, how busy it is or what it entails, has nothing to do with whether I should take care of you,” he said. “Open your mouth.”

She let out a soft “ah,” reflexively asking, “Here? Now?”

“I meant for your medicine.”

Lu Zhi: “…”

“I was talking about the medicine,” she tried to cover up her embarrassment. “Opening your mouth for medicine… it just sounded a bit ambiguous.”

“…”

The glass straw in the cup clinked against the rim. She had no idea where the straw had come from. After she took the medicine, he spoke again, “A lot of people see me as distant, and I don’t mind that. But I hope you’ll just see me as your husband.  Nothing to do with my status. Whatever other husbands can do, I can do too.”

“And,” he added, “why didn’t you tell me?”

She stammered, her voice growing quieter, “I did tell you…”

“You know what I’m asking,” he said. “Is it because you think I’m not doing well enough that you didn’t tell me right away?”

“No!” she exclaimed. “I just don’t want to seem too dependent on you. I can handle a lot of things on my own. If I really can’t, my friends or the housekeeper can help. If my first instinct for every little thing is to turn to you, once that dependency forms, it’ll be hard to break. And if there are times when you’re not around, I might not even know how to handle things myself… Do you understand?”

He sat in the chair by the bed.

The gauzy curtains swayed gently. From somewhere far away, a faint shout echoed, as if muffled by a layer of transparent fog.

“Barring any accidents, I probably won’t die in the next thirty years.”

“Coincidentally, I have some authority over my work, and there aren’t many people who can control me,” he said. “So if you need me, I’ll most likely be available.”

Her instincts urged her to retreat to safety, to stay within familiar boundaries because the path ahead was unknown and daunting. But he calmly dismantled each of her reservations, building a new kind of intimacy.

He said, “Lu Zhi, you can try relying on me.”

“I’m willing to be relied on, so it’s not a bad thing.”

She had always believed that love was a difficult subject, and marriage felt unfamiliar to her. How to interact, how to find the right balance within boundaries.  She wasn’t very good at it, so she could only adapt slowly.

So it was possible after all. She nodded, giving him a heads-up, “Well, I can be quite demanding. If you’re serious about this, you’d better be prepared.”

“…”

“Alright,” he raised an eyebrow indifferently, “I’ll give it a try.”

That evening, at her insistence, the cast-covered parts were carefully wrapped. A nurse helped her take a shower and change into her pajamas.

Much of his work had shifted online, and his meetings hadn’t stopped since she started her bath. A movie was playing on the projector screen, and she leaned quietly against the headboard watching for a while before feeling a bit sleepy.

She asked, “Aren’t you going back to sleep?”

“I’ll sleep right here.”

The VIP ward was spacious, complete with a living area and a refrigerator. The bedroom also had two beds. Lu Zhi nodded and prepared to lie down.

“Going to sleep?” He picked up the remote nearby. “Should I flatten the bed or raise it a bit?”

“Just flatten it.”

Not being able to use her hands was truly inconvenient.  She had almost no ability to take care of herself. As the backrest of the bed slowly lowered, she suddenly remembered something. “Oh, and could you press the call button for the nurse?”

Before he could speak, she quickly clarified, “It’s not that I don’t rely on you. It’s just that you don’t know how to do this. You can’t handle it.”

It was rare to hear those words in his life. He pushed the computer monitor back slightly and asked, “What is it?”

She closed her eyes and spoke with difficulty, “I… because they still need to do rounds and all, after my bath, I put on… um, nipple covers.”

“But I can’t sleep with them on. I need to take them off now.” The more Lu Zhi spoke, the more she felt her back burning with embarrassment. “You really don’t know how. Just call someone for me. You’ve never even dealt with something like this.  How would you manage?”

“I know how to do this.” He disliked hearing those two words. Taking off his still-swaying glasses, he set them on the table with a soft click. “Do you need the lights off?”