Jiang Xun stopped at the foot of the bed.
He had bottled up a bellyful of questions and curses, rehearsing them over and over in his head on the way here.
Every time they spoke on the phone, he said he was fine. Fine, his ass!
If he was fine, how had he ended up buried beneath six meters of mine debris, nearly leaving them without an intact body to recover?
But when he actually stood there, looking at the man lying in the hospital bed with his eyes closed, his leg in a cast and his forehead wrapped in bandages, all the questions he had stored up along the way stuck in his throat.
Yet Shen Wangjing seemed to sense something and suddenly opened his eyes.
Their eyes met.
Shen Wangjing leaned against the headboard, his eyes as dark as ever, but perhaps because of the ward's stark fluorescent lights, something seemed to waver in them.
"What happened to your wrist?"
It was Shen Wangjing who spoke first.
His voice was impossibly hoarse, but his gaze went straight to the gauze wrapped around Jiang Xun's right wrist.
Frowning, he stared fixedly at the small patch of bruising visible through a gap in the gauze, its purplish blue standing out sharply against his fair skin.
Jiang Xun froze for a moment.
This man was lying in a hospital bed without an uninjured patch left on him, yet the first thing he said when he opened his eyes was still about someone else?
"You have the nerve to ask me?" Jiang Xun's voice was tight. He pressed his lips together again and again, forcing the corners of his mouth into a mocking curve.
"Shen Wangjing, do you think you're something special? Who do you think you are? Made of iron? Indestructible?