Chapter 136: Mother of My Cub

Her expression shifted. She looked down at the space between them, then back up at his face.

“I don’t know,” she said honestly. “But if it didn’t, we can try again.”

“I would be,” he said carefully, “in favor of that strategy.”

She rolled her eyes with great affection and kissed him.

It was unhurried and thorough and she cupped his face in both hands while she did it, and when she pulled back she had a very soft expression.

“Goodnight, Yàn Shū.”

“Goodnight,” he said. “Bai Yue.”

She settled against his shoulder, and he

listened to her breathing slow. He did not sleep for a very long time because there was too much to think about. Good things. Warm, overwhelming, terrifying good things.

He picked up his journal eventually, carefully, so as not to wake her.

I don’t have better words for it, he wrote, so I’ll just write the true ones.

We mated…..I don’t know what to think about that. But we did. She said it was to have a cub. She chose me. Not by accident. Not because there was no one else. She looked at me, all of me, the anxiety and the scrolls and the embarrassing number of opinions I have about medicinal root cultivation, and she chose me anyway.

I intend to spend the rest of my life making sure she knows she was right.

He looked at her sleeping face.

She is going to be the mother of my cub, he wrote. I suspect she will be absolutely terrifying about it. In the best possible way. I cannot wait.

He closed the journal and lay back, and eventually, finally, slept.

~

The Next Morning

Han Shān was eating in silence, which was his preferred state, when Yàn Shū sat down across from him.

He looked different.

Han Shān catalogued the differences with the same systematic attention he gave everything. Hair slightly less precise than usual. An unusual steadiness to his posture, like something in him had settled.

The slight distraction behind his eyes of someone who was still thinking about something that had nothing to do with breakfast.

He was also smiling in a way he was clearly not entirely aware of.

Zhāo Yàn dropped onto the bench beside Han Shān, stole a piece of his meat without asking, and looked at Yàn Shū. “You look strange.”

“I feel fine,” Yàn Shū said.

“You look like someone hit you with something. But in a good way.”

Yàn Shū adjusted his glasses and cleared his throat. “I met someone.”

The bench went quiet.

Zhāo Yàn put down the stolen meat. “Met someone.”

“From the trading group. She arrived several days ago.”

Han Shān set down his bowl with care and gave Yàn Shū his full attention, which was a significant thing.

“Tell me about her,” Zhāo Yàn said, and for once there was no mockery in it.

Yàn Shū thought about it for a moment. He thought about the scrolls and the smudge on her cheek and the way she had taken his hand in the dark. He thought about last night.

He thought about her face when she was asleep.

“She is,” he said slowly, “extremely direct.” He paused. “She took my hand before I asked her to. She kissed me before I—”

“She kissed YOU?” Zhāo Yàn said.

“Yes.”

A short silence.

“How long did it take you to kiss her back?” Han Shān asked.

Yàn Shū looked at the table. “An amount of time.”

“Yàn Shū.”

“Several seconds.”

Zhāo Yàn’s mouth fell open. “Several—”

“I was surprised.”

“It’s a kiss, not an ambush—”

“For me those are similar experiences!” Yàn Shū pushed his glasses up with slightly more force than necessary. “The point is that she stayed. She came back the next day. She stayed again. She—” He stopped. The smile that he had been mostly suppressing broke through entirely. “She told me she liked me. Directly. Without being asked. She just said it.”

Han Shān and Zhāo Yàn looked at each other.

“What’s her name?” Han Shān asked.

“Bai Yue.”

“And she just—” Zhāo Yàn gestured vaguely at all of Yàn Shū. “She looked at this and decided she liked it.”

“Zhāo Yàn.”

“I am not insulting you. I am genuinely asking. You? The cute adorable baby I know? She walked in and looked at you, the scrolls, the glasses, the twelve opinions about medicinal roots—”

“Seventeen.”

“—and said to herself, yes, that one.”

“Apparently,” Yàn Shū said, with immense dignity, “yes.”

Another silence.

Han Shān picked up his bowl again. “Who is she,” he said. Not a question. The beginning of categorizing.

“River settlements. She has—” Yàn Shū searched for the right words. “She has the type of mind that doesn’t stop. She builds on things. Every answer leads to the next question. I think I’m captivated by her.”

Zhāo Yàn’s eyebrows had been climbing steadily.

“You’re going to see her again,” Han Shān said. It was not a question.

“Today,” Yàn Shū confirmed.

Zhāo Yàn leaned forward. “I want to meet her.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Why not—”

“Because you will say something and I will never recover.”

“I will be charming—”

“That’s worse.”

Han Shān stood, collecting his bowl. “I also want to meet her,” he said.

Yàn Shū looked between the two of them. “She is not a curiosity—”

“She walked up to you,” Zhāo Yàn said, “and chose you out of everyone in Thousand Fang. That is either extremely good judgment or extraordinary bravery and either way I have to know which.”

Han Shān nodded once in agreement.

Yàn Shū looked at the ceiling of the trading post as if it might offer some relief.

It did not.

“Fine,” he said. “But you are both on your absolute best behavior. And Zhāo Yàn—”

“Yes?”

“Do not mention the grain storage incident.”

Han Shān’s ears went very slightly pink.

“What grain storage incident?” Zhāo Yàn asked, immediately and with great interest.

“Nothing,” Han Shān said.

“It doesn’t sound like nothing—”

“It was nothing.”

Yàn Shū was already standing, gathering his things, quietly and desperately hoping that Bai Yue’s patience for chaos was as deep as her patience for anxious scholars who needed several seconds to kiss someone back.

He suspected, warmly, terrifyingly, that it might be.

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