Eve has always been older and wiser.
Over the years and across the provinces, they have explored together every li of what there is to offer in this between them.
The fever breaks that morning, spurring Tang Fan from the bridge between death and dreaming.
Sui Zhou must rise eventually, of course.
Sui Zhou and Tang Fan attend all manner of gatherings with great regularity, but it is rare for them to partake in much mingling as themselves.
“If there is anything else that can be said of Qinghe Nie,” Lan Xichen recites, helplessly faint, “it is that we take our weddings and our burials very seriously—”
“—For they are, to us, one and the same,” Nie Huaisang finishes for him. “You do remember.”
Silas and Jay spend a night in civilization.
No inch of his bared skin is a revelation to Tang Fan, but stripping before him still feels like an unveiling, marital. A deification of the profane.
If he cannot ask, if he cannot even bring himself to, to say, I want this of you, then how can he expect Sui Zhou to answer? Sui Zhou is a man of fewer words than he is motions, but talking is an act that most often transcends tactility in its clarity.