Batter My Heart,Mr Xi (Book 2)

Chapter XLII

A/N: Few chapters left to end the book. About 10 to 15 chapters. Latest by August hopefully will be done. Thanks to all readers for sticking to my book. 🤍

The city came back without asking.

One moment there was the river and the particular smell associated with the cruise ship that still faintly on their clothes and the comfortable tiredness of the days away, and then the car was moving through familiar streets and the buildings were closing in on either side.

Yang Zhilan watched it all through the window and felt the cruise slowly becoming something that had happened.

Xi Jinwei was beside her. Quiet. His hand found hers on the seat at some point and stayed there without either of them deciding it.

The traffic moved. The city did what cities did.

"Danny," he said, after a while.

She turned her head. "What?"

"The rabbit." He kept his eyes on the window. "You named it Danny."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"You told it goodnight. On the ship. I heard you."

"You were asleep."

"Clearly not."

She looked back at her window. Outside a woman was crossing the street with two children and a bag of groceries and a complete indifference to the traffic inching around her. "Danny is a perfectly normal name."

"For a ceramic rabbit you bought from a market stall."

"For anyone."

She felt rather than saw him almost smile. His thumb moved once across her knuckles and then they were quiet again and the city moved around them and it was enough.

She asked the driver to stop on Heling Street.

"What for," he said.

"Uh...lady products."

He glanced at the pharmacy on the corner. Then back at the window.

"Okay," he said.

She went in alone. He stayed in the car and she felt him watching the door behind her.

She moved through the aisles without slowing down. Found what she needed. Stood in front of it for a moment longer than she intended and then put it in the basket and went to the counter.

Outside through the pharmacy window the car sat at the curb. She could see the back of his head. He wasn't on his phone. Just sitting there, looking at nothing, waiting.

She paid. Put the bag in her purse. Walked back out into the afternoon.

"All good?" he said.

"All good," she said.

The car pulled into traffic and she held her purse in her lap and watched the city and neither of them said anything and the silence was the comfortable kind and she was grateful for it.

******

Home was the apartment and the apartment was quiet and hers now in the way things became hers when Xi Jinwei decided they were.

She took the bag from her purse while he was in the study.

Went to the bathroom. Locked the door.

Sat on the edge of the bathtub and read the instructions once even though she already knew how it worked and then she did what she came home to do and set it on the counter and looked at the frosted window and the city light coming through it and waited.