The cool beauty forcibly bids for top A: Chapter 11

The man laid Shen Yanzhou down on the bedroom bed. Just as he was about to get up, his wrist was suddenly grabbed by a burning hot, slender hand.

Shen Yanzhou sank into the velvet pillow, his shirt disheveled, exposing a large expanse of his pale chest. He curved his lips into a smile, one that held a certain drunken innocence, and a certain natural, effortless arrogance.

“Thirty million, I’m thirsty.” Shen Yanzhou tilted his head slightly, his moist red lips pursing in dissatisfaction, his fingertips lazily pointing at the man’s nose from afar. “I want warm water, with honey… make it sweet.”

The man stared at his moist lips, his voice hoarse: “Yes, Master.”

By the time the warm water was brought to his lips, Shen Yanzhou refused to take it with his own hands. He drank two mouthfuls from the man’s hand, water droplets sliding down the corner of his mouth, soaking his collar. He frowned in disgust, raised his hand to randomly pull open his shirt buttons, and kicked the man’s abs with his bare feet.

“Thirty million, I want a bath. Go run the water.”

When the man returned after running the bath, Shen Yanzhou had already impatiently started tearing at his own clothes. His fingers wouldn’t obey him, the more he pulled the more tangled things became, until he finally gave up. He sat half on the edge of the bed, letting his suit pants slide loosely down to his ankles, revealing long, straight legs.

Too pale.

A pampered life that never saw the sun, pale to the point of sickness, the lines impossibly straight. From his calves to his ankles, they tapered into an extremely beautiful, fragile curve. His kneecaps were round and delicate, and because of the chill, they now carried a pitiful thin pink.

“What are you standing there for?” Shen Yanzhou tilted his head slightly, his silver hair sweeping across his flushed, drunken cheeks. “Come here. Carry me to the bath.”

“Yes, Master.” The man lifted him into the bathtub.

The warm water instantly enveloped his entire body. Shen Yanzhou let out a comfortable sigh. Under the water, his legs quickly turned red from the hot water, a white with a flush of red, like a ripe peach. It seemed that with just a little pressure, you could squeeze water out of them.

The man’s gaze grew increasingly thick, sticky.

“Why aren’t you moving yet?” Shen Yanzhou half opened his eyes, his drunkenness hazy, and hooked his finger, a little angry. “Come here. Help me wash my hair. The hair gel is sticky and gross, it’s making my scalp hurt.”

The man moved a low stool to sit behind the bathtub.

His hands were covered in old knife scars, with thick calluses on the webbing of his thumb from years of boxing. Yet now, as they fell upon that silver hair, they were shockingly steady.

His fingertips threaded through the strands, the pressure incredibly precise, massaging Shen Yanzhou’s scalp into waves of tingling numbness, causing even his taut nerves to relax.

Steam rose, and in a daze, time seemed to flow back twenty years. It was also a stormy night like this, on that cruise ship that had not yet sunk, his mother had also washed his hair like this. Outside the window, waves crashed against the hull, and the radio crooned Anita Mui’s “Years Flow Like Water.”

A massive emptiness crashed over him like a tsunami, cold to the bone.

“Thirty million.” Shen Yanzhou stared at the water droplets on the ceiling and suddenly spoke.

“Were you born in the Year of the Dog? How do you know how to do everything?”

“You can cook boat congee, you can tend to those fussy roses, and you’re even this good at washing hair?” His tone was light. “Did you practice before?”

The hands behind him didn’t stop, fine foam bursting open.

“To survive.”

The man’s voice was steady and flat, carrying a detachment that had seen life and death. “In that kind of place where people eat people, if you don’t learn to be clever, if you don’t learn everything, you would have rotted in the gutter long ago.”

Shen Yanzhou opened his eyes and leaned back slightly, looking at the man upside down.

This angle was strange. The man’s jawline was sharp as a knife cut, his brow bone high, his eye sockets deep. Even while doing the work of serving someone, the wildness hidden in his bones couldn’t be covered.

Too familiar.

This sense of familiarity made his heart jump.

“Have we… met before?” Shen Yanzhou stared into his eyes.

“Why do you even know exactly how hot I like my bathwater?”

The man’s hands paused for a moment.

Meeting Shen Yanzhou’s scrutinizing gaze, a smile suddenly curved at the corner of his mouth.

“Master really knows how to crack a joke.”

“I was born on the worst street in Kowloon Walled City, a place where even sunlight couldn’t reach. Every day I opened my eyes to dodging loan sharks, fighting for spoiled rice, the air thick with the smell of mold and dead rats.”

He lowered his eyes. “A rat like me from the gutter, how could I have the chance to see a master from the clouds?”

Shen Yanzhou stared at him for a long while. “I suppose so.”

Someone who came out of that kind of hellhole, indeed, as long as you give them a bite to eat, they’ll do anything, and they can learn anything.

“Since you stayed in there for so long,” Shen Yanzhou’s gaze, however, locked onto the man’s face through the hazy steam, “it was a mixed bag of dragons and snakes in there, you must have seen quite a few oddballs, right?”

“Oddballs?” The man’s hands didn’t stop moving, and he smiled. “The whole city was full of oddballs. There was a crazy monk who locked himself in a cage to chant scriptures, and a butcher who loved to wear women’s clothes and sing opera. Which kind does Master mean?”

“Have you ever seen a man… with only three fingers on his left hand?”

“People on the streets call him Limpy Hao.”

The fingers massaging his scalp showed an extremely subtle pause.

But the man didn’t even change his breathing rhythm. He quickly put on an expression of blank thought, and his hands resumed their normal movement.

“In the city, there are too many people missing arms and legs. Fingers chopped off from losing at gambling, hands cut off from fighting. You could grab them by the handful.”

“But that name, I’ve never heard of it.”

Shen Yanzhou studied his eyes. No evasion, no panic.

“It’s nothing.” He hid the disappointment in his eyes.

“The water’s cold. Carry me to bed.”

“Yes.” The man picked up a large bath towel, wrapped Shen Yanzhou in it, gently carried him out of the bathroom, placed him on the soft big bed, then tucked him under the silk quilt, pulling the corners tight and leaving no gaps.

However, the aftereffects of the alcohol were like waves after the tide receded, and he quickly sank into a bottomless dream.

Pale lightning, his mother’s scream torn apart by the wild wind, the salty seawater flooding his lungs, and that deformed left hand with only three fingers, raised in the pouring rain, holding a gun.

Bang! Scalding blood exploded in the freezing seawater, red and blinding.

“Help…” he screamed silently in the deep sea, extreme cold instantly seizing his heart.

“Cold, so cold.”

Someone… please save me…

Just as he was about to suffocate to death, another force suddenly smashed through the dream.

A scorching heat source barged in forcefully. That person possessed a powerful physique, a body as hot as molten lava, like a fierce beast in the deep sea, driving away the icy death, yet bringing an even more terrifying plunder.

The suffocating feeling of near death didn’t disappear; it just changed its flavor.

It was no longer the sting of seawater flooding his lungs, but the man’s heavy body holding him in its arms, making him unable to breathe.

The man’s hand stroked over his entire body, his legs forcefully parting his knees that were tightly shut from fear.

He tried to struggle in the dream, but this only made the man entangle him tighter.

“Don’t move…” The voice in the dream was low and hoarse, carrying a hair-raising lust.

The man in the dream seemed to have a near sick obsession with these legs of his. Those rough big hands would sometimes pinch the flesh of his thighs, fingertips sinking into the white, tender skin, kneading them into all sorts of shapes, wantonly playing with them with an overwhelming possessiveness.

“Too soft…” The man panted heavily by his ear, sweat dripping from his high nose bridge onto Shen Yanzhou’s trembling knees. “So good.”

Shen Yanzhou wanted to struggle, wanted to kick away this beast, but his legs were already too weak to muster any strength. He could only let his delicate skin be rubbed red and burning hot…

The next morning, the hillside villa was shrouded in a damp, cold mist.

Shen Yanzhou was woken by a burning pain on his thigh. The pain was too real. He completely ignored his hangover headache, frantically threw off the quilt, and pulled up the leg of his pajama pants to check.

White. No bruises, no broken skin, not even a single trace of lovemaking.

Only an abnormal pink faintly showing beneath the fair skin, as if it still carried the warmth left by that man’s palm from last night’s dream.

“How could it be…” Shen Yanzhou’s fingertips trembled as they brushed over that patch of skin.

There was no sticky feeling of being dirtied by a man’s fluids. Everything was clean and tidy, his pajamas were worn neatly in place.

Could it really have been a dream?

But that feeling of being forcefully parted, of being rubbed sore, why was it so clear? Clear enough to make him feel like someone had played with his legs after he had passed out drunk.

He looked up in alarm and suspicion, and his gaze shifted, instantly freezing.

Thirty million. He had actually curled up on the long fur carpet beside his bed last night, guarding his bedside like a guard dog. He was even wearing a piece of street stall trash that challenged the very bottom line of Shen Yanzhou’s aesthetic.

The fabric was as thin as paper, carrying the cheap feel of low-quality synthetic fiber. The collar hung loosely on his broad shoulders, about to fall off at any moment. The words on his chest were already starting to crack at the edges: “I [heart] hk.”

The big red heart in the middle was tacky, gaudy, and hopelessly uncool.

Shen Yanzhou looked at his muscular arms, his gaze becoming extremely deep.

Too alike. The hands in the dream that had pulled him out of a pile of dead people were also this powerful, the arms rough and hard, pressing against his leg bones until they hurt. Even this body that continuously radiated heat overlapped perfectly with the touch from the dream.

For a moment, Shen Yanzhou couldn’t tell whether it was a dream or reality.

Was it him? Was the beast that had gone crazy over his legs last night this dog?

Thinking of this, Shen Yanzhou stretched out his bare toe and unceremoniously kicked the man’s shoulder on the floor.

“Hey. Wake up.”

The man on the floor reacted incredibly fast, almost snapping his eyes open the instant he was touched.

“Master?” He immediately rolled over and sat up, kneeling on both knees by the bed, looking up. “So early, what’s wrong? Are you feeling unwell somewhere?”

“That… I, last night you said you were cold… said, um, scared… so I, I slept here.” He stammered an explanation.

Shen Yanzhou looked down at him from above. Suddenly, he slowly untied the drawstring of his pajama pants. The fabric slipped off, and his unbound legs were exposed without any covering, showing off their most primal allure.

Then, he raised his right leg, and his bare toe unceremoniously stepped onto the man’s burning hot, faintly sweating broad shoulder.

“Thirty million.”

Shen Yanzhou tapped lightly with his toe, tracing along the man’s bulging collarbone, and finally pressed maliciously against the man’s protruding Adam’s apple.

He could clearly feel the muscles beneath his foot instantly hardening like iron.

“You said you survived in that man-eating mud pit, and you learned everything.” Shen Yanzhou leaned forward slightly, his silver hair falling down, those beautiful eyes carrying a hook-like scrutiny. “Then did you also learn the art of serving people?”

The man didn’t answer immediately.

He slowly raised his head. Those eyes hidden beneath messy hair were dark and terrifying, like a deep well in Kowloon Walled City that never saw daylight all year round, carrying the hungry glint of a starving man.

He stared fixedly at Shen Yanzhou, his gaze practically licking over his white, tender calves with tangible weight, finally focusing on this arrogant young master’s face.

Their eyes met.

Shen Yanzhou was scorched by this gaze, his toes instinctively wanting to shrink back, but the man suddenly turned his head and rubbed his cheek against the top of his foot, his stubble pricking against the delicate skin.

“What kind of serving does Master mean?”

Shen Yanzhou quickly came back to his senses and let out a cold laugh.

A mouth can lie, but bodily instincts cannot.

“Open your mouth.” He tapped the man’s jaw with his toe, commanding: “Open your mouth and pleasure me.”

The man was stunned for a moment, the veins on his arms bulging, his hand tightly gripping the plush carpet. Then he lowered his eyes: “Yes, Master.”

He slowly drew close, opened his mouth, and moved toward him.

Shen Yanzhou bit his lower lip, forcefully holding back the broken sounds in his throat, staring fixedly at the top of the man’s head like a hunter examining prey caught in a net, waiting for that familiar technique to appear.

However, it was wrong.

Completely wrong.

The man’s movements were shockingly clumsy. His rough tongue surface licked around without any method, like a big dog trying to please its owner but being all thumbs. Not only did it bring no pleasure whatsoever, it actually made him itch.

What was worse was that this person seemed too nervous, his teeth heavily knocking against the delicate skin.

“Hiss…” Shen Yanzhou sucked in a sharp breath. That bit of romantic thought that had risen from his memories was instantly scattered by this clumsy pain. There was no swallowing that made his scalp tingle, no controlling force that seemed to suck out his very soul.

Only tiresome saliva.

Could it have been just a dream after all?

Shen Yanzhou narrowed his eyes, his fingers gradually tightening, his nails almost digging into the man’s scalp, his tone full of disappointment and irritation:

“This clumsy?”

“Get out.”