The Road Home

Chapter 21

Gui Xiao silently deliberated over everything a few times, but ultimately she still decided to speak plainly. Ever since they were young, the way she and Lu Yanchen interacted was very direct, and whatever needed to be said would be said. "What did my dad say to you?"

Lu Yanchen had the cigarette clamped between his teeth, and it was a long while before two words came forth from him. "Forgot already."

"I'm asking you seriously."

By the moonlight, he looked at her neatly-trimmed, oval fingernails, a smile at the edge of his lips as he pulled back down his foot that had been resting on the fence railing. Unable to see his face, Gui Xiao felt a slight sense of panic in her heart, and with her hands, she turned his face towards her.

Her action was too abrupt. The plume of cigarette smoke that Lu Yanchen had not had a chance to blow out all landed on her face now.

For a moment, Gui Xiao choked on the pungent smoke and was unable to produce a word. Lu Yanchen watched her with lifted brows, a languid smile on his face. Tossing onto the snow-covered ground the half a cigarette he had been holding, he pressed her against his chest with one hand.

In this pitch-dark place that had not even the slightest speck of lighting but still could roughly be made out to be a horse shed, the two of them silently embraced, nestling together for quite some time.

Gui Xiao also slid her arms around him. The warmth she exhaled all poured in through the gap at his neckline, gentle and also carrying a moist heat.

Bringing his head down against her ear, Lu Yanchen gave a sigh before remarking, "There's a stench of goat."

Embarrassment rushed up in Gui Xiao, and she gave him a shove.

Far away, that good, kind comrade-in-arms, who had waited long and fruitlessly for these two people's return and hence had braved an all-new round of wind and snow to come out to find them, just happened to catch this never-before-seen scene of Lu Yanchen teasing his wife. Truly, it was like seeing the ninth wonder of the world. He gave a "whoa-oa-oa," utterly gleeful. " 'Even a hero cannot resist the charms of a beauty', eh. Commander Lu, I can say my eyes have been opened today. But, Commander Lu, you're here joking around and playing with Sister-In-Law right by my family's heaps of frozen cow dung. You're sure not scared of not treating Sister-In-Law well enough."

Gui Xiao snuck a glimpse. Ah, so those hastily covered-up piles and piles of stuff on the inside of the fence beside them were cow manure.

At night, when they were back inside the little ger that they slept in, Lu Yanchen specially added a lot of coal into the metal stove so that the fire burned quite a bit more intensely than the previous night. After he had turned off the lights, he grazed against Gui Xiao's half-bare arm beneath the covers. Gui Xiao's breathing was extremely light, but it teased at him until he felt as if he had plunged into a dense fog. He closed his eyes and, in total darkness, forced his mind to clear.

"I looked through your duffel just now..." Gui Xiao asked in a small voice, "How come you're so good at lying?"

"What did I lie to you about?" He placed kiss after kiss on her ear, then used his lips to caress over it, his actions containing that type of tenderness that occurs when two people brush over and over against each other in intimacy.

"You know in your heart."

He admitted to having deceived her about one thing for more than ten years.

Gui Xiao's heart sank heavily, thinking it might have something to do with his family.

Completely outside of her expectations, though, he continued, "I was actually a lefty when I was a kid. Later on, when I started school, I was forced to change that. Only my family knows about this."