November 7, 2023, Tuesday, cloudy turning to light rain.
At 6:50 in the morning, the sky had just begun to brighten.
In the bathroom of the presidential suite at the Four Seasons Hotel, steam hung thick in the air.
Tang Song stood beneath the shower, letting the warm water wash over his sharply defined body.
Heat billowed upward, and his faintly heated muscles brimmed with a surging sense of power.
He closed his eyes, and the scene beneath that dim yellow streetlamp at Lanxinyuan Residential Complex last night replayed uncontrollably in his mind.
A first kiss was, indeed, wonderful.
And Zhang Yan's first kiss had given him an unprecedented, exceptionally profound feeling.
The words "I like you too" that he had said to her yesterday had not been "scumbag talk" meant to conquer her, but the truest thought in his heart at that moment.
Now, thinking it over seriously, the emergence of this emotion was actually not hard to understand.
More than ten years of emotional projection without asking for a response, a gaze so pure it was almost humble, and the feeling of being cherished by someone for so long and so solemnly, with every tiny detail related to him remembered, were enough to strike anyone's heart in an instant.
And after they had reunited, that unpolished purity in her, mixed with timidity and courage, was like a clear mirror that let him see the boyish version of himself he had once been.
Being with her was easy and natural.
It always seemed to let him effortlessly find his way back to those carefree days of the past.
From her, he could clearly feel the purest kind of "being needed" and "being looked up to."
This emotion deepened layer by layer, and finally, on that night filled with a