The snow kept piling up. Yan Ningke held out his hand, watching snowflakes drift down through his fingers.
The weather was bad, and figures on the street dwindled into the distance. With no business to be had, the vendors pushed their carts home, and the little shops on either side closed early too.
Only the dim yellow streetlights remained, bleak and wavering.
When Shao Ke arrived, treading through the white snow, he found Yan Ningke in a red knitted hat, crouching on the ground and scribbling with a twig he had picked up somewhere, humming a little tune off-key.
He stood beside him for a while before he recognized the original song.
"Loved so earnestly, loved so earnestly~"
It did rather suit the occasion.
Shao Ke could not help chuckling. "Whose poor little thing is this? Why haven't you gone home so late at night?"
Yan Ningke looked up, his eyes instantly brimming with a smile. His lips turned down, and he blinked his sparkling eyes. "Nobody wants me. Would you like to take me home, sir?"
With that little expression, it looked as though a single word of refusal from Shao Ke would bring tears to his eyes.
Shao Ke laughed and bent down to lift his chin. The hem of his ankle-length coat touched the ground as his thumb rubbed Yan Ningke's cheek. "Then what reason do you have for me to take you home? You know capitalists never make a losing deal."
Yan Ningke curled the tip of his tongue and caught his lower lip between his teeth, his eyes sparkling as he glanced at him. "What would you like, sir?"
"Blowing, bowing, plucking, singing-I'm a master of them all."
With every word he uttered, Shao Ke's eyes darkened like the depths of the sea. His fingers