I came back not to take from you, but to give

Peaks in sunspot activity came seven years apart.

Global financial crises had a "seven-year curse."

The average lifespan of human cells was also about seven years.

Seven years meant the passage of time and constant change, the shifting of the stars, familiar things remaining while people changed.

It meant a thousand sails passing a sunken ship, yet also peach blossoms still smiling in the spring breeze.

For humans, to whom "may you live to a hundred" counted as an earnest blessing, it was undoubtedly an immensely long stretch of time.

If he had thought about it, why had Wen Zhiyan only come back now?

If he had not thought about it, why had Wen Zhiyan gone to such painstaking, calculated lengths to appear here, standing before Jiang Lan again in this way?

Jiang Lan could not make sense of it.

Wen Zhiyan lowered his head slightly, resting his forehead against Jiang Lan's.

He asked Jiang Lan, "Lan-ge, do you blame me for making you wait too long?"

Jiang Lan wanted to pull away, but could not bear to. He closed his eyes and nudged Wen Zhiyan with his forehead.

"How do you know I was waiting for you? Wen Zhiyan, if you hadn't suddenly appeared, I would've forgotten what you looked like by now."

There was probably no one in the world who understood Jiang Lan better than Wen Zhiyan.

He knew that Jiang Lan's scowls and cutting sarcasm toward him now were nothing but bluster, saying the opposite of what he felt.

Wen Zhiyan would neither take it seriously nor believe it.

But he played along anyway.

"That's right, Lan-ge. If I hadn't suddenly come back, you probably would've found your ideal partner after this show, wouldn't you?"

"Maybe years from now, I'd be lucky enough to run into you on some street. Your omega would be holding your arm, and your child would be calling you Dad."

"Lan-ge, if that happened, I probably wouldn't step forward to say hello."

Listening to Wen Zhiyan spout nonsense, Jiang Lan drew back, raised a hand to pinch his chin, and looked into his eyes. "What? Were you planning to hide in a corner and secretly wish me happiness?"

Wen Zhiyan shook his head, staring into Jiang Lan's eyes. "Sorry. You know how selfish I am. I couldn't give you my blessing."

Jiang Lan actually knew that if Wen Zhiyan truly had missed him as he claimed, there must have been some painful reason why he had stayed out of his life for so long.

Most likely, it had something to do with the Wen Family.

Only now, with the dust settled, had he dared to come back and appear before him.

But even so, Jiang Lan still felt resentful, resentful on behalf of the more than two thousand days and nights he had spent tossing and turning.

He released Wen Zhiyan's chin, took a drag of the cigarette in his hand, and said flatly:

"Wen Zhiyan, seven years isn't a short time. It's enough to change someone's entire life. I'm almost thirty. All that passion cooled long ago. If the person you're still thinking of is the Jiang Lan from seven years ago, who cared about nothing else, devoted himself entirely to you, and loved and cherished only you, then I'm afraid you're going to be disappointed."

Wen Zhiyan lowered his eyes, pulled a cigarette from the pack beside him, and held it between his lips. "Give me a light," he told Jiang Lan.

When Jiang Lan had first gotten together with Wen Zhiyan, Wen Zhiyan, like most omegas, had hated the smell of smoke and had often given Jiang Lan a sour look over it.

Knowing Wen Zhiyan disliked it, Jiang Lan had never smoked in front of him.

But later, during his internship year, Jiang Lan had been under immense pressure, renting a place and starting a business, so Wen Zhiyan had no longer wanted to make things harder for him over something so minor.

He had even scrimped and saved to spend several hundred yuan on a lighter Jiang Lan had wanted for ages but could never bring himself to buy.

Because a flint-wheel lighter needed refueling and replacement flints, Wen Zhiyan had set limits for Jiang Lan: each flint had to last a certain length of time, and he could only refill it at certain intervals, using this to control how much Jiang Lan smoked.

Jiang Lan wanted to ask Wen Zhiyan when he had learned to smoke, but his Adam's apple bobbed, and he could not get the question out. He only held his cigarette between his teeth and leaned toward Wen Zhiyan.

Their cigarette tips met. Wen Zhiyan drew in a deep breath, lighting his cigarette, and told Jiang Lan:

"Jiang Lan, I came back not to take from you, but to give."

He did not care how much Jiang Lan had changed, or whether Jiang Lan was still heedless of everything and wholly devoted. Since he had dared to come looking for Jiang Lan, he was not afraid that he would be unable to rekindle that passion that had gone cold.

Jiang Lan looked at Wen Zhiyan's familiar yet unfamiliar face and listened to these words that made no sense, an ache rising unbidden in his heart.

He asked Wen Zhiyan, "What if we can't go back to the way things were, no matter what?"

Wen Zhiyan had never intended to go back to the past. He said, "Then we start over. Lan-ge, life has countless new beginnings. So do we."

Jiang Lan felt that this subject was too heavy.

He did not actually care whether there was a new beginning. What he cared about was that they were both alphas.

That was a fact and a gulf between them that could not be erased or reversed, much less changed or crossed.

Even if money no longer constrained them, and even if Jiang Lan could now disregard the world's judgment, their mutually repellent pheromones remained an obstacle they could not overcome.

A lifetime together, a lifetime unable to mark each other, a lifetime of painful ruts with no release-all of it left Jiang Lan unsure whether they could truly keep going, or whether they would repeat their past mistakes.

But looking at Wen Zhiyan so close before him now, he only wanted to escape those damned realities.

He only wanted to kiss Wen Zhiyan.

So he raised a hand, gripped Wen Zhiyan's collar, and said bluntly:

"President Wen, shut up. I don't want to discuss this damned subject. We could spend this time kissing instead. What do you think?"

Wen Zhiyan chuckled, held the back of Jiang Lan's neck, and kissed his lips.

Their alpha nature made it difficult for them to be gentle and patient, to let affection flow in a steady stream. They preferred a surging torrent, spending their love freely and without restraint.

Jiang Lan was upset, so he vented all that irritation on Wen Zhiyan, their teeth clashing, their lips and tongues tangling.

Rather than kissing, it was more like fighting.

They went back and forth, losing themselves in a desperate battle in the cramped bathroom.

Only when the dull pain of teeth breaking the skin of a tongue and a faint, sweet metallic taste spread through their mouths did Jiang Lan feel satisfied.

He slipped his hand beneath the hem of Wen Zhiyan's shirt, stroking his burning-hot abs as he cursed him. "You bastard, are you a dog?"

Wen Zhiyan's fingers threaded through the hair at the back of Jiang Lan's head. An indescribable sense of satisfaction left him too pleased to take issue with Jiang Lan's curses. He only lowered his head, greedily breathing in the faint pheromones threatening to leak from Jiang Lan's neck.

Just as Wen Zhiyan was about to return the favor and slip his own restless hand beneath Jiang Lan's shirt, he heard a soft sound from the bedroom door outside the bathroom.

Wen Zhiyan's pupils contracted. He released Jiang Lan and raised an index finger toward him.

"Shh."