A marriage of convenience so rigid it could have been drawn up as a contract: Yu Shen and Nan Jinxi turned their marriage into a set of strict terms.
They scheduled time together, standardized their intimacy, and exchanged holiday gifts on time. They followed every rule, a picture-perfect match, yet remained distant for half their lives.
He was all business: “Thanks for your hard work.”
She replied with perfect decorum: “It’s only what I should do.”
Beneath the cold clauses, love quietly crossed the line.
She secretly extended the contract and treasured the candid side-profile photos he took of her. He quietly memorized her weaknesses: the dried tangerine peel candies she ate when her stomach hurt, the lights she left on late into the night. All his restrained tenderness was hidden in the details.
The rules were broken again and again whenever their hearts softened, and their mutual crush grew wildly beneath all that polite formality.
Drunk, he broke the rules and asked her to hold him. On scrap paper, he wrote the same words over and over: I’m not doing this because of the contract.
She waited up late for him to come home, murmuring sleepily as she quietly fell for him.
A minor surgery tore away every pretense.
He stayed by her hospital bed all night, and Yu Shen finally confessed that he had loved her for years: he had fallen for her the moment she changed the contract.
From then on, the contract was void and the rules no longer applied.
There were no more restrictions, only wholehearted devotion.
The southern breeze brushed their faces, and Yu Shen’s gloom gave way to tenderness. From then on, every morning and night, they would come home to each other.
