Chapter 4#

Silent Understanding#

Huo Chuanwu stepped into the bathroom. The narrow little room suddenly had two people squeezed in, shoulder and elbow movements mixed with the sound of breathing crowded together, immediately appearing cramped.

Chuanwu took out gauze, cotton swabs, and anti-inflammatory lotion from the medicine kit. Chu Xun stood in front of the mirror, curling his lip, picking up the toothpaste on the sink and swinging it in his hand to express his displeasure.

Chu Xun stared at the person in the mirror: “You, that person on the rooftop, the one you shot, didn’t you see a big living person hiding there at the time?”

Chuanwu stopped his movements: “…I didn’t notice.”

Chu Xun pulled a long face and said seriously: “I was still hesitating at the time whether to take that letter or not, I was afraid of being exposed.”

“I didn’t take it in the end. If I had known there would be an exchange of fire, since I was exposed anyway, I would have definitely taken everything, taken all the stuff away.”

Huo Chuanwu had a reserved temper, but reserved didn’t mean stupid. He could hear that Second Master Chu was blaming him for not keeping a good lookout outside.

Huo Chuanwu was silent for a while, then slowly said: “I really didn’t see him at the time, didn’t know where he popped out from.”

Chu Xun shrugged the corner of his mouth: “Just a place the size of a palm, a living thing moved and you didn’t even see it, what were you looking at then? Looking at the stars in the sky with both eyes?”

Huo Chuanwu said hoarsely: “I wasn’t looking at the stars.”

Chuanwu’s face also turned cold, staring straight at Chu Xun’s eyes in the mirror. One thing was one thing. When the two discussed work, they were very serious. A blink of an eye could mean life or death, absolutely no room for jokes.

“I was aiming at you the whole time, following you into the room. The field of view wasn’t enough, so I didn’t see the person on the rooftop outside.”

“I didn’t do it on purpose.”

Huo Chuanwu said seriously, word by word, his pupils pitch-black in the mirror.

Chu Xun swung the toothpaste tube, getting to the bottom of it: “You really have a problem. Why were you aiming at me? Just that needle-tip-sized hemisphere on the back of my head. You aim at me, what if your finger trembles one day and misfires, lighting me up directly! So every time you do a job, you don’t check the field of view, don’t look out, don’t keep watch. Your one-and-a-half-inch sniper scope just guards my head. Why do you keep looking at me…”

Chuanwu: “…”

Chu Xun: “…”

Before Chu Xun finished speaking, looking at the two figures in the mirror, he suddenly stopped.

He turned his head sharply, his fierce gaze hooked, wedging into the flickering light in the other’s eyes, undisguised, showing no mercy at all.

Chuanwu quickly looked away, turning his face, lips pressed into a solid line. His expression was as if someone had suddenly poked the most painful spot with an awl, dissecting that little secret in his heart, exposing it right there!

Chu Xun’s expression was playful, the corner of his mouth curling into a provocative arc. He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again, staring at the other’s faintly red ear.

Huo Chuanwu turned his face directly and walked out, his back straight and stiff.

Chu Xun stared unblinkingly at Chuanwu’s back, his gaze lingering on the person’s lower back. His mouth opened involuntarily, smiling childishly, revealing a row of neat white teeth.

Facing that straight back, he opened his mouth and took a fierce bite of the air, still unsatisfied.

You said you wouldn’t leave, you’d guard me, and you really guard me like this.

Huo Chuanwu, Second Master bites you…

In the blink of an eye, Comrade Little Huo came back, expression serious, holding back a bellyful of words, simply needing to get them off his chest.

Chuanwu said: “Actually, I disagreed with your plan today from the start. It was too dangerous. I said it wouldn’t work, but you insisted on doing it.”

Chu Xun replied without thinking: “I ran into Hou Yiqun today. If I hadn’t seen him, fine, but I saw him, and I couldn’t tolerate it.”

“If I don’t kill him with my own hands, I’ll anger him to death.”

Even when saying the word “death”, Chu Xun’s expression was elegant, his tone light and breezy.

Chuanwu’s pitch-black eyebrows knitted into a line: “From the annex to the main building room, taking the shortcut takes at least two minutes. You didn’t have time to install a safety rope beforehand, didn’t have sufficient preparation, didn’t scout the path. An eighty-meter-long skybridge, what if you fell from it? If you were detected in the venue at the time and couldn’t run out, what would you do? If the one surnamed Hou saw through it, what is your identity? If you were exposed, what did you plan to do? …In the future, you can’t take risks, shouldn’t act like this.”

For someone like Huo Chuanwu, it was rare to say so many words in one breath. Chu Xun stared at this person with slight surprise. Out of some professional habit and obsessive-compulsive disorder, he even counted for the other party in his heart—this one sentence actually had nearly a hundred words?!

Chu Xun snorted, unambiguous: “Did I fail? Who failed today?”

Chuanwu: “…”

Chu Xun: “Who is the team leader in this room? Who do we listen to when doing a job? Who has the higher rank between us? Do you give orders or do I? …If it’s messed up, it’s on me. Have I ever failed?”

Huo Chuanwu looked at Chu Xun with a cold face, speechless, turned his head and went out again.

Chuanwu was squeezed by Second Master Chu for a few sentences, couldn’t keep his face, and felt uncomfortable in his heart. He walked out of the bathroom but couldn’t bear to go far.

He leaned against the wall outside the bathroom door, hands in pockets, head down, standing blankly. It looked like he was being punished to stand, or like he was standing guard for the person in the room. He was long used to Chu Xun’s temper. That gentle and elegant smiling face, that modest gentleman’s romantic attitude, were all put on for outsiders to see. Damn it, fake. In private, sharing a room, this person’s occasional bad temper, unpredictable nature, and aggressive domineering were really unbearable for the Master.

Chu Xun slowly peeled off his clothes in the bathroom. Scattered bloodstains stuck the fabric to his flesh, tearing pain. Everyone feels pain, and he wasn’t made of iron. With his fine skin and tender flesh, he was most afraid of pain.

While taking off his clothes, he glanced sideways at the outside. His gaze condensed, slowly penetrating the thin wooden powder-gray wall. Chuanwu’s tall back was like the shadow of a mountain facing away from him, standing motionless and silent, breathing calmly.

Chu Xun’s mouth twitched, counting in his heart, one, two, three, you kid get in here.

Counting to three, someone indeed came in again with his head down.

…

Neither of them paid attention to the other, neither made a sound or spoke. Chuanwu stood behind Chu Xun, carefully helping Chu Xun take off his shirt. Chu Xun faced the mirror, standing lazily, raising his arms, letting the person peel off his tight white undershirt from over his head. The fine cuts on his chest and shoulders were revealed, set against his pale skin and lean ribs, looking very much like a thin porcelain vase covered with crackle patterns…

Chuanwu wiped and cleaned spot by spot with a towel, disinfected with cotton swabs, and applied medicine.

Chu Xun occasionally tilted his head, turned his shoulder, then raised his arm, turning around to reveal his back. The two were silent, as if there was a silent understanding between them, needing no verbal communication. It was as if they had done the same thing dozens, hundreds of times.

Chuanwu’s eyebrows were very black, eyelashes thick. When he lowered his eyes, the light cast two very nice shadows in his eye sockets, softening his cold and hard face.

This person’s face was very handsome, nose bridge straight, only there was a deep scar horizontally near the lower eyelid of his right eye, above the cheekbone. The scar had healed, leaving a deep concave white line, like a knife cut horizontally across the right half of the face. The knife wound blossomed recklessly, extending all the way to the temple and behind the ear.

Chu Xun squinted at the person in front of him, unblinking, staring so the other had nowhere to hide. Their faces were very close, able to smell each other’s breath and hear heartbeats.

When touching the wound on the lower abdomen, a finger touch made Chu Xun tremble all over, crying out “Ouch”.

“You touched my ticklish spot… I’m ticklish.”

Chu Xun’s voice was very soft.

Chuanwu couldn’t bear it anymore, casually picked up a large towel, and covered Chu Xun’s face with it warmly, smothering him, completely blocking this person’s relentless, hot, intimidating, and blatantly obvious staring gaze…

After cleaning and tidying up, Chu Xun had a piece of gauze on his cheekbone, wearing a bathrobe, lying on the big bed, turning on the small bedside lamp, documents and papers spread out on the bed.

Chuanwu knew Chu Xun was about to start working, so like every time before, he made a cup of coffee with the coffee machine in the room, handed it over, then retreated, sitting far away, guarding the person in front of him…

Chu Xun checked the micro-photos he took back and forth, then spread a piece of white paper on the clipboard, exhaled solemnly, and entered a silent state.

He pressed both hands on the white paper, pressing hard, closed his eyes, thought for a long time, recalling the touch of the paper with his palm prints, and then began to write.

Writing word by word.

Chu Xun wrote very slowly, with great difficulty, wishing he could think for five minutes for one word.

Having written only a dozen words, his face, neck, and back were covered in sweat, his silk pajamas damp, sweat stains oozing everywhere.

Chu Xun leaned back against the headboard, brows furrowed tight, Adam’s apple bobbing.

Chuanwu was originally sitting cross-legged in the corner of the room, silently wiping his gun, but actually, all his attention was on watching Chu Xun. At this moment, he couldn’t sit still anymore and walked over, “Feeling bad? …Can you do it?”

Chu Xun’s lips were wet, a layer of sweat beads on his nose: “I can.”

Chuanwu glanced at what he wrote: “…When did you learn Korean? I didn’t know?”

Chu Xun smiled bitterly: “Never learned it, I just don’t understand Korean.”

Chuanwu looked at the words Chu Xun wrote on the white paper board one by one in amazement. Indeed, one could tell he didn’t understand the language. Every character was drawn stroke by stroke. Drawing like this, like embroidery, when would he finish writing?

If Young Master Chu knew Korean beforehand, with a swipe of his finger, he could read the content of the letter directly through the envelope, memorizing and reciting it silently. This job would be as easy for someone like Chu Xun as an ordinary person spreading out a newspaper to read. He had been doing this for so many years.

But he just didn’t know those characters, didn’t know them at all, relying solely on rote memorization with his fingers, guessing and estimating; the letter paper full of words was folded inside the envelope, some words inverted and reversed, lines overlapping each other. He struggled to recall word by word, thinking for a long time about the position of each word. It was truly very difficult and painful.

Chu Xun laughed self-deprecatingly, comforting Chuanwu: “It’s my laziness, didn’t work hard usually. If I had known earlier, I should have mastered a few more foreign languages. It really comes in handy at critical moments.”

“Korean, I’ve only learned a few sentences from TV dramas. ‘Nice to meet you’! ‘Thank you’! ‘I am Chinese’!”

“I really only know these three sentences, don’t know a single one more! It’s really killing me…”

Second Young Master Chu had always been talented, imitating and mocking others vividly and spiritedly. Instantly possessed by a male god, transmigrating into a roaring male lead in a Korean drama, speaking with affectation, amusing Chuanwu to smile rarely, the smile fleeting.

Chu Xun wrote intermittently, twitching for a while then writing for a while, until the early morning.

Chuanwu really couldn’t stand watching anymore. He went out of the room halfway, ducked into the bathroom to smoke a cigarette. Chu Xun didn’t smoke himself and didn’t allow people around him to smoke. He couldn’t stand the smell of smoke the most, saying that smelling smoke would make his eyes blurry and unable to see things clearly. Every time Chuanwu had a craving, he had to hide from this person, squatting alone on the toilet lid, maintaining a squatting thinking and sniping posture, finishing a cigarette silently, enjoying a moment of trance in the curling smoke…

When he returned to the room, he saw the person on the bed and was startled, rushing over with big strides.

Chu Xun was lying on his side on the bed, the pen dropped on the floor, looking like he had fainted. His bathrobe was open at the chest, his chest covered with beads of sweat, blood vessels on his neck slightly protruding, several blue veins faintly visible.

“Hey…”

Huo Chuanwu sat by the bed, helped the person up, and leaned him against his own thigh.

“Feeling very bad?”

Chu Xun leaned back against his chest, wet all over, like he was fished out of water. Wet hair hung on his forehead, messy and soft. Huo Chuanwu looked at the person, stunned for a moment, involuntarily holding his breath and staring for a long time, feeling that a difficult person like Little Second Chu was only soft at times like this…

Chu Xun twitched for a while longer.

Chuanwu held the person from behind, daring not to move. To say he didn’t feel bad or heartache would be absolutely false. When Chu Xun twitched, he felt like he was about to twitch along with him.

Chu Xun moved his eyelids, the sweat on the tip of his nose rubbing onto Chuanwu’s neck.

“Sorry.”

Huo Chuanwu spoke subconsciously, murmuring.

Chu Xun opened his eyes, looking at the person somewhat dazedly.

“Sorry, I failed today.”

He didn’t know what to say either. It was useless to be anxious; there were some things he couldn’t help with at all.

Chuanwu lowered his eyes and said seriously: “I’ll report to the leader when we get back, write a self-criticism. This time it was my mistake… Sorry.”

Chu Xun suddenly laughed. This stubborn and hard-tempered Huo Chuanwu would actually apologize to someone? My fingers cramped, did your brain cramp?

A large bead of sweat dripped from Chu Xun’s chin as he sneered: “Who are you sorry to? How could that be? You were aiming at the back of my head, you weren’t aiming at or looking at anyone else, what self-criticism are you writing?”

“Go back and report to the minister that you failed the mission because you were too engrossed in looking at me, got distracted, and was bewitched?”

“It’s enough that you report this to your immediate superior, don’t tell a third person. If you tell me, I believe it; if you tell the minister, the old man will definitely think there’s something wrong with you!”

Second Young Master Chu said this with a face full of extreme narcissism. While panting with difficulty, he couldn’t hold back and started to laugh indulgently to himself, his laughter deep.

Huo Chuanwu was speechless and helpless. There was really no cure for someone like Little Second Chu. With such thick skin and such a brain structure, it was really killing him. Besides, Master Huo looking at you, does that count as “bewitched”?