Tang Fan is not yet particularly panicked about his present predicament.
Ding Rong should have suspected scheming the moment he saw Wang Zhi in red.
How many nights has he entertained this very vision of Tang Fan, all lean long lines and li after li of smooth skin? Most, in some shape or another, since Tang Fan first stormed into his life and made his home in what wreckage he found there. Too many, but so few. To have it now, real enough to see, too far from reach to touch— it’s agony.
By the time Sui Zhou returns with breakfast, Tang Fan has expended every effort to do nothing more than roll over in their bed, putting his back to both the door and the day.
Ding Rong, in his narrowed dagger-keen focus on his task, is unsure of the time when he is first made aware of Wang Zhi’s approach. He knows only by the dark of his workroom, dim-lit by his low-burned candle, that it is well into the evening. He knows only that it is no other visitor but Wang Zhi, circling into his periphery, portended by a flutter of draping fabric, because no other but Wang Zhi would dare to come unannounced.
He wonders, for all the seconds it takes for Tang Fan to start to move, if he’s fallen asleep again. He’s not convinced it is at all possible for him to have a dream as odd as this, as ominous, as wonderful. The Tang Fan that is trying to kick his bare feet beneath the lifted linens while all the heat Sui Zhou’s body has pressed into them escapes is too wholly fleshed out to be one of Sui Zhou’s fantasies.
Ding Rong has walked himself through five vivid calculations of Wang Zhi’s death at his hands in the carriage before Wang Zhi speaks.
“I’m in need of a second,” he says.
On the one night of their journey that suspends itself in the in-between, not yet Hetao but no longer home, Wang Zhi joins him for dinner.
Every vicissitude and every sufferance and every imposition of Tang Fan, Sui Zhou has bent to. Bent, and bent, and bent, and— he breaks. Tonight, foretold and finally and at long last, he breaks.