Clean, quiet, and smelling of flowers: an elegant hospital ward.
Jiaming shifted his body and felt like a zongzi—rice dumpling wrapped up tight in leaves. Not that he had any right to complain; in the other bed in the room was an even more impressively wrapped zongzi, one that wouldn't need clothes at all if she wanted to get out of bed.
Of course, that was only a metaphor, Jiaming thought. If that old man really beat a girl so badly that even between her legs has to be bandaged up tight, then he's a genuine pervert.
"Jiaming, come on. I bought you canned mandarin oranges today. Have a bite. Open up—ahh—"
"Ahh... but they say canned stuff has food coloring in it..."
"When I tell you to eat, you eat! No talking!"
"Oh..." A segment of orange was tipped into his mouth. "Shasha, you change expressions so fast—you must have studied under a Sichuan master, huh?"
"Say one more word and I'll hit you." Shasha raised her hand with a smile, and the timid Jiaming bowed to her tyrannical might, not daring to open his mouth again, and concentrated on his orange.
"By the way, Shasha, how come you're here so early today? Don't you have class?" he finally asked after a long while.
"There's a recitation contest at school today—it was planned ages ago, did you forget?" Shasha laughed and held out the remaining half can. Jiaming waved his hand to show he was full. "Lingjing's in it too. Didn't you go watch her perform?"
"Of course I watched—that's why I skipped class." Shasha grinned. "Lingjing was bound to take first place anyway. She'll probably be over in a bit with her certificate. You're not eating this, so can I give it to her?" She gestured toward the girl in the neighboring bed.
"Sure."
They had, after all, been through hardship together, and these past two days Shasha had paid the Japanese girl in the same ward a fair bit of attention, though this was the first time she'd approached her on her own.
Sensing someone come near, Tsukiike Kaoru sat up a little in bed; from the neck down, her whole body was wrapped in white bandages. But the girl was tough in body and spirit alike—she'd been able to kill people before she'd had any treatment at all, so getting around now was no problem for her.
Half-reclining there, the girl bowed a half bow to Shasha with tremendous elegance.
"Uh... hello... um... this is for you." Faced with such elegance and courtesy, Shasha seemed a little at a loss; she handed over the can of mandarin oranges with the spoon already set in it, then hastily returned a half bow of her own.
Tsukiike Kaoru looked at the half can of oranges, but her gaze slid past Shasha to Jiaming in the other bed—though Jiaming was at that moment watching the view beyond the curtains and gave no sign whatsoever. After a moment's hesitation, she reached out both bandage-wrapped hands and took the can. "Arigatou."
"Mm—arigatou, arigatou..." Shasha replied with two deeply uneducated-sounding words, then ran over to Jiaming's side. "Jiaming, what does arigatou mean?"
"It means thank you." Jiaming rolled his eyes.
"Oh, right—arigatou is thank you, and sayonara is goodbye. I forgot all of it." Shasha stuck out her tongue. "So was what I just said completely off the mark?"
"Obviously." Jiaming looked baffled. "But... why are you so afraid of her?"
"It's not that I'm afraid, exactly. I just think she's amazing. Watching that bastard Cao Dongfeng hit you for so long, I figured the pain must have been unbearable—and she took it for three whole days from that perverted old man. And look, the way she eats is so elegant." Shasha clicked her tongue and dragged Jiaming over to watch the girl eat—Tsukiike Kaoru was taking small, graceful bites of her orange like a lady in an ancient Chinese painting, and Shasha was instantly smitten. "Even more refined than Lingjing, you know."
"That's not even human anymore, is it?"
Since Shasha liked to gossip, Jiaming meanly started in on the girl's private affairs.
"Look at her—she can only open her mouth this much. What's she going to do when she has to eat a steamed bun? Hard to picture, right? She keeps her mouth shut all the time; she never shows her teeth, whether she's smiling or eating. Acting that unnatural, it's got to be because she's got a mouth full of rotten teeth—if they're not yellow, they're probably black. And the way she eats, it's like she's testing every bite for poison. There's not a shred of sincerity in it..."
As Jiaming rattled on, Tsukiike Kaoru, who was eating, glanced over with a puzzled look, then softly lowered her head again. Jiaming and Shasha—who was red in the face from stifled laughter—hurriedly bowed back.
"Go die," she said, smacking Jiaming on his uninjured shoulder, and Shasha lay facedown in the blankets giggling. Just then Lingjing, schoolbag on her back, came in through the ward door, and complained the moment she was inside: "Shasha, you didn't even wait for me."
Shasha rolled over on the bed. "Well? Did you win something?"
"I did." Lingjing nodded as if it were nothing, and produced a certificate and a notebook from behind her back. "First place, plus a notebook."
"Yay! The notebook's mine!" Lingjing had won countless awards since she was little, but ever since the three of them had been together, the prizes had always ended up with Shasha—Shasha was a mischievous sort who'd never won anything in her life, and writing and drawing in a prize notebook just felt different. Cheering, she turned to Jiaming. "Lingjing looks beautiful today, doesn't she?"
Back then, whenever students performed, pretty girls always dressed about the same way. Just now Lingjing had rosy rouge on her cheeks, lipstick on her lips, and a pure white princess dress, and she did look very pretty. But Jiaming had grown up seeing this sort of thing, and he actually thought she was more alluring without the decoration, in ordinary casual clothes, being a Lingjing true to her name. Shasha, though, had always liked her made-up look—most women do like to dress up, after all.
"Come here, as a reward—Little Beauty Lingjing, let Brother Huaisha give you a kiss." Shasha laughed and lunged at her in play, set on planting a kiss on Lingjing's red cheek. Lingjing was in the middle of pulling off her schoolbag and had no way to dodge; she could only laugh and lean her body back as far as she could.
"Don't... ah—"
"Mm... eek—"
With a thud, both girls went down on the floor, Shasha on top of Lingjing, mission finally accomplished. In fact, the two girls shared a bed three times a week at the Liu family villa; kissing each other's cheeks, and even playfully groping each other all over, was an everyday thing.
Several times, bathing together or lying skin to skin in bed, they had come close to that final step, and the yuri in Jiaming's imagination had nearly turned into the real thing. Still, here on the hospital floor it was a little embarrassing after all, and they scrambled up in a fluster. Watching from his bed, Jiaming felt... rather peculiar.
In his assassin days, it wasn't as though he'd never seen women who liked women.
Life in the underworld was dangerous; no one could claim to be sure of seeing tomorrow's sun, so some people were as austere as ascetics, and some were twisted almost to the point of perversion, and a fair few female assassins were utterly without inhibitions in bed.
Once, after finishing a job, he'd shared a hotel room with two female assassins. He came out of the shower to find the two of them going at it furiously on the bed; he sat on the sofa watching them grind against each other, screaming themselves hoarse, for half the night.
When he woke the next morning, one woman wondered why he hadn't joined them, and the other thanked him, saying that with such a formidable bodyguard nearby she'd been able to relax and enjoy herself thoroughly.
But what if there was nothing twisted about it at all? Two little girls who'd grown up together and liked each other—what happens when they fall in love and grow up? Do they live happily ever after? He couldn't help looking forward to it, brimming with curiosity.
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