…They truly had no way of dealing with Xu Yinian.
Though neither said it aloud, “sharing” was clearly unavoidable. Otherwise, how long would they keep fighting?
Shen Ruoshuang stared at the medicine Ji Yan had snatched up first. “If you want her to suffer more, you can keep hogging it.”
Being told what to do in such a high-handed manner made Ji Yan unhappy, of course, but for Xu Yinian’s sake, she forced herself to endure it.
Ji Yan set the medicine open on the table and took out a few cotton swabs, swirling them inside.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw another hand reaching for cotton swabs. No matter how she looked at it, she couldn’t swallow this resentment.
Given her lifelong germaphobia and possessiveness, once she decided something was hers, she wouldn’t yield even half a fraction of it. When had she ever shared anything with anyone?
Moreover, this was the first person she had ever liked in eighteen years!
Her gaze drifted down, only to collide with Xu Yinian’s watery, timid eyes peeking over at her, looking nervous and pitiful.
Is she in a lot of pain…?
Ji Yan’s heart tightened, and she forgot everything else.
As she leaned down, she looked into those instinctively narrowed, light-colored watery eyes. For some reason, it felt as if the girl was bracing herself for an impending kiss.
That slight resemblance to intimacy caused Ji Yan to instantly sink into a fantasy of drinking poison to quench her thirst—unaware that this was a far more lethal toxin.
A ridiculous thought of self-comfort flashed through her mind.
…At least she chose me for the front.
Those stunningly beautiful, mixed-race features suddenly enlarged before Xu Yinian’s eyes.
Held by the gaze of those jet-black, moist, and eerie eyes, how could Xu Yinian not see the sinking obsession within them?
She still remembered when they were on the infirmary bed during Military Training, when Ji Yan had maliciously leaned in to fake-kiss her right in front of Shen Ruoshuang.
Back then, when she had easily succumbed to those eyes that held no love, she realized too late that the focus in that mocking, teasing gaze was nothing but a facade.
The shame and embarrassment had nearly drowned her.
But now, why was it the other person who had fallen into the depths?
…She hadn’t even done anything.
“Ji… Ji Yan.”
Xu Yinian turned her head away in an act of avoidance, softly calling her name as a reminder.
But all the refusals she couldn’t voice out of kindness and cowardice were hidden within the way she spoke that name.
In reality, Ji Yan was more sober than anyone, which only made her conscious descent all the more tragic.
“I’m just looking at you,” Ji Yan said, word by word, helpless yet persistent.
The final madness of a losing dog was probably all that remained.
As she spoke, her slender fingers holding the cotton swab reached out. Even the focus she had shown while holding a pen countless times couldn’t match half of what she displayed now.
Her skin was white to the point of being nearly translucent, making the veins over her knuckles appear daunting, yet her movements were visibly gentle.
Her innate nobility was completely at odds with her current cautiousness.
This wasn’t the first time the arrogant and willful eldest Miss of the Ji Family had served her.
But in this moment, the intermingling of their breaths and the endless itchiness triggered by the gentle contact on her skin only served to catalyze her senses.
The pink medicine slowly covered the rash that was as eye-catching as a hickey, but it couldn’t cover the rolling desire in her eyes.
One was an itch on the neck that made her shiver and shrink, unable to escape.
The other was an itch in the heart, gnawing and spreading wantonly.
It made the perfectly normal application of medicine feel unbearable.
Shen Ruoshuang was right beside them. No matter how wrong things felt, Xu Yinian could only pretend as if nothing was happening. She had to grit her teeth to suppress even the slightest whimper in her throat.
Ji Yan’s hand, which had been steady for so many years of painting, finally faltered for the first time. The medicine accidentally smeared onto the collarbone.
She originally intended to grab a tissue to wipe it away, but she thought of something. Her fingertip lightly touched the skin, using the accident as an excuse to wipe it away bit by bit.
One couldn’t tell if she was truly wiping it, or if she was trying to delay the agony of her desperate craving for contact…
Xu Yinian immediately felt the touch was wrong, but she didn’t dare draw Shen Ruoshuang’s attention to it.
Little did she know that while one of them was sitting and the other was leaning down, Shen Ruoshuang was standing behind Xu Yinian, looking down.
The hand lingering on the collarbone, hiding its true intentions, was fully within her view.
The darkness in her Peach-blossom eyes deepened, brewing something dangerous.
At that moment, another ice-cold hand reached out and silently brushed away the stray hairs at the nape of Xu Yinian’s neck in an invasive gesture.
The bone-chilling temperature instantly diverted Xu Yinian’s attention.
Through her misty gaze, she instinctively looked into the mirror in front of her.
There, she saw the Inaccessible Flower behind her leaning down. Her gaze was also fixed eerily on the mirror’s surface, locking eyes with her.
She seemed to be imprinting every detail of Xu Yinian’s disheveled state—the furrowed brows, the squinted eyes, the lips bitten pale—into her mind.
In the reflection, Shen Ruoshuang curled her lips. Her philtrum and the bridge of her elegant nose brushed past Xu Yinian’s hair in sequence.
It looked like a gentle sniff, yet also like a lingering kiss.
She continued downward until the overlapping perspective in the mirror made it look as if she were pressing a kiss against the center of Xu Yinian’s neck.
Her lips seemed to be sealed… right upon that hickey-like flush.
Xu Yinian could no longer restrain herself.
Her neck tightened and arched back.
The movement caused Ji Yan’s hand to freeze.
Ji Yan finally straightened her leaning body, and she finally witnessed the violation that had been taking place right in front of her for god knows how long.
Shen Ruoshuang lifted her head from its tilted position, her teeth releasing the final strand of hair she had been nipping.
Yet, those silken black threads seemed to linger, sticking to her cold lips like a lingering, inseparable thread of silk.
Shen Ruoshuang’s snowy-white fingertip lightly hooked the hair away, winding the striking black strands around her finger. Her calm statement only made the provocation more aggressive:
“My apologies.”
“It seems my technique is better.”
