Chapter 26
Ting-zhi had reserved the corner room in the Pear Blossom Teahouse two days ago. It was the quietest one, with latticed windows that overlooked the courtyard below.
Three days ago, he had sat alone in his study reading the newest letter from Yun-si—polished, charming, and full of praises for a man she had never met. A man who did not, strictly speaking, exist as she imagined him.
Esteemed Moonlit Brush, she’d written, your prose awakens the heart like spring rain upon parched earth, and your words linger in the mind long after the page is turned...
The brush in his hand had tightened until his knuckles went white, and he felt as if he had just drunk an entire bottle of aged black vinegar, sour and caustic all the way down.
Stupid. This was stupid.
He had dipped the brush and forced himself to write a reply, only to tear up the papers after when the ink bled like wounds on the page. Finally, he penned a letter requesting to meet with her.
He felt like he’d been sucked into a whirlpool with no way to escape, the current pulling him deeper with every exchange.
The letter correspondence was never supposed to continue on for so long.
It had started as a moment of impulsive mischief when she wrote to Moonlit Brush, then spiraled out of control when, against his better judgement, he continued to reply.
He meant, he really meant to stop the correspondence naturally. But somehow, against all his expectations, an honest critique had flowered out of that dishonest start. Their discussions of craft, of structure and emotion and the precise weight of a single word had been real. Too real.
He remembered the other day he’d walked into the gardens and found her there, seated on the stone bench beneath the wisteria. She’d been reading his letter, and her lips had curved into that tiny, unguarded smile. The private Yun-si smile.
“Mmm,” he’d said, leaning against the trellis with his arms crossed, deliberately drawling out the syllable. “Something amusing, Si-er?”
She startled so badly she nearly dropped the letter, her hands fumbling as she shoved the paper into her sleeve, pink flooding her cheeks. “Nothing,” she’d said too quickly. “Just—just a letter from a friend.”
He had decided then, finally, with the particular grim resolve of a man who had been putting off something necessary for far too long, that the charade must end.
He would tell her. Not as Moonlit Brush, not through some carefully constructed missive that let him hide behind ink and distance, but as himself.
Across a table. With her eyes on his and no escape.
He would take her fury and hurt and the very real possibility that she would never quite trust him the same way again.
It would be better than this slow poison of half-truths and deceptions.
He checked the angle of the sun through the window for what felt like the hundredth time. She was late. Not dramatically so, but late enough that the tenuous calm he’d arrived with, the speech he’d rehearsed in his head all morning, had started, very slightly, to fray at the edges.
A dozen reasonable explanations existed.
None of them settled the growing unease in his stomach.
The tea had gone cold by the time he finally rose, two hours past the appointed time.
He paid for a room he had occupied alone and walked home like a shadow through the bustling street stalls, with the distraction of a man whose carefully prepared confession had found no audience.
TING-ZHI PUSHED OPEN the study door and froze. Yun-si sat behind his desk, a carved moon-and-brush seal resting beside an open manuscript page on the table. His own words stared back at him: ...her gasp against his lips, sweet as stolen summer fruit...
His heart plummeted like a stone in deep water. Every carefully constructed apology he’d rehearsed for the teahouse evaporated.
She didn’t look up. Her fingers traced the familiar handwriting on the page. “I trusted you.” she said, her voice unnervingly flat.
He took a step forward. “Si-er—”
Her head lifted. Not anger in her eyes, but a hollowed-out devastation that stole his breath. The manuscripts lay scattered like fallen leaves between them—The Scholar’s Wicked Proposal, Beneath the Willow’s Sigh, all bearing his seal.
He reached for her, instinct overriding thought. “Let me explain—”
She flinched back as if burned. “Explain what? How you watched me praise your stories? How you kiss me as one person, and wrote to me as another?” Her knuckles whitened around the page. “Is this another one of your pranks? Did you mock me and think I am a joke?”
Her quiet accusations felt like a slap across his face.
She pushed back the chair, the legs scraping harshly against the floorboards.
“All those research notes,” she whispered, staring at the ink-stained manuscripts.
“Our boat. The moonlight. The kisses.” Her gaze finally met his, shattered.
“Was that research for you too? Material for your next bestseller?”
“No!” The word tore from him, raw. He moved around the desk, blocking her path to the door. “No I did not! The huabens were imagined. You are real to me.”
Her laugh was a thin, brittle thing. “Real? Or just another character for Moonlit Brush?” She gestured at the damning pages. “You turned us into ink and profit without my permission!”
He caught her wrist, trying desperately to hold on to something slipping uncontrollably out of his hands. “I wrote the huabens because I couldn’t stop thinking about you in the south—”
She looked down at his hand on her wrist, then back up at him, her eyes swimming with a betrayal so deep her voice broke. “I trusted you, Zhi-zhi. With everything.” A single tear traced a path down her cheek as she wrenched her hand free and walked away. “I do not think I wish to speak to you now.”