We're Not Close

Top-tier Alpha crisis manager × three-time Golden Award-winning Omega actress

Shang Qi is the uncherished second daughter of a wealthy family, cool-headed and restrained, and the entertainment industry's best fixer of other people's messes.

When celebrities fall in love, she teaches them how to distance themselves. When married couples fall out, she writes dignified statements for them. When an artist is attacked online, she can turn public opinion around within twelve hours.

But somehow, she got stuck with the one person who should never have been able to lay claim to her.

Pei Zhao is a top-tier Omega and a three-time Golden Award-winning actress, with snow-white skin, dark hair, and strikingly beautiful features. In a crowd, she always has an air of aloofness that makes her seem unreachable. The whole internet says she's cool, quiet, and hard to approach. Even her pheromones are perfectly controlled.

Only Shang Qi knows that in private, Pei Zhao is absurdly possessive, clingy, and jealous. Sometimes she even uses her beauty and pheromones to tease Shang Qi.

And yet they are still legally married, though living apart.

When they first worked together, Shang Qi pushed a PR plan across the table.

"For the next three months, don't comment on your private life. Maintain the image of being single."

Pei Zhao looked up. "I have a wife."

Shang Qi: "The public doesn't know that."

Pei Zhao watched her for a moment, then suddenly smiled. "But do you know?"

To protect Pei Zhao's new film and business deals, Shang Qi began helping her wife "pretend to be single."

She deleted suggestive interview moments and made sure their public line about Pei Zhao being single stayed consistent. If Pei Zhao occasionally forgot to keep her pheromones in check, Shang Qi reminded her.

Work went smoothly, but the atmosphere at home grew heavier by the day.

Once, backstage at a livestream, a co-star followed Shang Qi's plan and put an arm around Pei Zhao's waist.

Pei Zhao waited until everyone else had left, then cornered Shang Qi against the wall.

"Shang Qi, when you teach other people how to stand by my side, do you ever think that spot was supposed to be yours?"

Everyone said Shang Qi was rational.

But Pei Zhao knew that Shang Qi got jealous when other people approached her, and lost control when she smelled Pei Zhao's pheromones. She simply refused to admit it.

To everyone else, Pei Zhao was always cold and hard to approach.

Only Shang Qi had seen her clingy, coquettish, and jealous. She also knew that Pei Zhao would show all her vulnerability and moments of losing control to no one but her.

They had lived apart for a year. They both thought they could get by without each other, as adults do. Only gradually did they realize that maybe they couldn't.

The whole internet thought they barely knew each other.

No one knew.

They had been on the same marriage certificate for three years.

Theme: Dare to face love and responsibility