Xie Guan froze slightly.

For a moment, a flicker crossed his eyes, a ripple of incredulous epiphany spreading within them. Huo Mingjun almost thought he had understood.

“...” Xie Guan stared at him, bewildered. “That’s enough. First you say I have a low IQ, now you’re saying I’m like a vase. Do you really have to hold such a grudge?”

Huo Mingjun: “I didn’t... I’m not...”

“You said it yourself, the living room is too empty, doesn’t that mean it’s missing a decoration? And you’re even insulting me in a roundabout way.” Xie Guan pointed at him. “Let me tell you, even vases have tempers. If you keep this up, I’ll really act like a moron for you to see next time, believe it or not.”

Huo Mingjun was rendered speechless by this thick-headed, upright, and utterly peculiar blockhead. He really couldn't figure out how he had been so blind as to fall for him.

Teacher Xie, the number one straight man in the universe, truly lived up to his reputation.

“Alright, alright, I was wrong,” Huo Mingjun said placatingly, guiding him by the shoulder towards the living room. “You’re not a vase. With Teacher Xie sitting in my living room, you are radiant and make my humble home shine with splendor.”

Xie Guan gave him a light jab with his elbow, the force so small it was like they were just playing around. “Don’t bully me for being uneducated. Is that how you use ‘radiant’?”

“Just get the gist. As long as you know it’s a compliment, it’s fine,” Huo Mingjun said, catching the elbow that had jabbed him in his palm. Xie Guan was wearing a short-sleeved shirt; his skin was dry and cool. There were a few red marks on his exposed forearm. Huo Mingjun asked, “How did you get these?”

“Hm?” Xie Guan glanced down at it himself and said nonchalantly, “It’s nothing. I wouldn’t have even noticed if you hadn’t mentioned it. We’re fighting and killing on set all day, I probably scraped it somewhere without realizing.”

Huo Mingjun's palm was warm, and he felt that Xie Guan's skin was too cool. He walked over and raised the central air conditioning by two degrees, saying, “Be more careful. You get a souvenir every time you film. If you turn into a spotted tiger, how are you going to face people?”

“Okay, I got it—” Xie Guan drawled lazily, leaning against the sofa armrest and smiling at him. “The director, Huang Cheng, Sister Lin Yao, and my dad... no one around me can nag as much as you can.”

Huo Mingjun casually draped his suit jacket on the coat rack and, while loosening his tie, asked, “Are there any other positions available around you? You could put me in one.”

Xie Guan seemed stumped by his question. After thinking for a long time, he finally opened his mouth hesitantly, “...Godfather...?”

Huo Mingjun was so angry he almost laughed.

He rolled up his shirt sleeves with a deadpan expression, murderous intent instantly overflowing. Seeing that things were going south, Xie Guan glanced around and found his path blocked by Huo Mingjun and the coffee table. So, he propped one hand on the back of the sofa and vaulted over it cleanly. “Let's talk this out, don't use your fists!”

“Behave yourself and get over here.”

Xie Guan shuffled over to him, dragging his feet, and apologized with great sincerity, “Sponsor, sugar daddy, I was wrong.”

Huo Mingjun: “Where were you wrong?”

Xie Guan: “You’re so young and handsome, there’s no way you could have a son as old as me.”

Huo Mingjun: “...”

This time, Xie Guan finally failed to escape. He was thrown onto the sofa by Huo Mingjun, paying the price for his cheeky mouth.

The two of them tussled back and forth in a heap. In the end, Huo Mingjun was kneeling on the sofa with one knee, while Xie Guan lay beneath him like a salted fish, his hands pinned above his head. The hem of his white T-shirt was pushed halfway up, revealing a lean and toned waist.

Skin against skin, one pressing down on the other. Even the best of friends—especially two people who had already been mistaken for a gay couple—would inevitably feel awkward at such a close distance.

The smile in Xie Guan's eyes faded. He didn't dislike physical contact with Huo Mingjun, but the places he was being held suddenly felt a little hot, as if his nerves had become several degrees more sensitive, every minute sensation magnified drastically. A groundless panic exploded in his chest, making him abruptly avert his gaze, not daring to meet Huo Mingjun's eyes anymore.

He moved his wrists uncomfortably, thinking to himself: “Strange, why am I blushing and my heart is racing like a little girl being kabedon’d?”

Huo Mingjun's meticulously groomed appearance was slightly disheveled. A few stray locks of hair fell down, and the gaze behind them grew deeper and more focused, as if he were staring at a rare treasure worthy of study.

Xie Guan's evasion did not escape his eyes.

It was also at this moment that Huo Mingjun suddenly realized he seemed to be... a little too impatient.

He was backed by the massive business empire of Hengrui Group, holding dazzling wealth and power. The men and women willing to bear him an heir, spend their lives with him, or even just sleep with him without asking for status or title, could form a line from his front door all the way to his company's entrance. Yet, Huo Mingjun, already past the age of thirty, remained all alone, like an iceberg that would never melt. The one-eighth visible above the surface kept people a thousand miles away, while a vast, profound coldness lay hidden beneath the sea.

A standard-issue CEO who neither believed in love at first sight nor liked love that grows over time—in every sense of the word—sounded like complete nonsense. In the upper-class circles built on the wealth of powerful families, “staying clean” was not a compliment. Huo Mingjun had heard a lot of gossip about himself “in that department,” some hinting, others outright speculating that he was asexual, or perhaps had some unmentionable hidden ailment.

Having a private life became gossip, and not having one also became gossip. Huo Mingjun was sometimes puzzled, suspecting that when God created people, He might have swapped some people's brains with their lower bodies.

However, he was ultimately a mortal, not a cold collection of inorganic matter, not truly made of copper and iron. He had once received a soul-stirring gift from a chance encounter, and had also experienced a calculated betrayal from his closest blood relative. This chaotic combination of the world's most intimate and most distant, most profound and most shallow, was like a wrongly built bridge, turning his emotional realm into an unreachable shore.

The switch that connected to "heart-fluttering" had always been there, just hidden too deep and difficult to trigger, so it was left sealed away for a long time, coated with layer after layer of rust by time.

Xie Guan's appearance had briefly parted the fog on the other end of the bridge, only for it to gather again. Huo Mingjun had originally thought it was a mirage-like illusion, but the moment the clouds parted to reveal the sun was so vivid that he couldn't stop himself from looking back.

He began to take this person who had mistakenly wandered into his life to heart, watching as Xie Guan slowly stepped onto the bridge, slowly walked forward, until the crisis erupted, and Xie Guan unhesitatingly chose to rush towards him. That trajectory almost overlapped with the mark Cheng Sheng had left in his life many years ago.

Huo Mingjun found that he couldn't wait for Xie Guan to walk over from the other side; he had already eagerly gone to meet him.

He began to open up his private world to Xie Guan, cultivating a relationship more intimate than friendship, intentionally and unintentionally flirting with the other party like all idiots in love. However, Huo Mingjun forgot that from the very beginning, Xie Guan never intended to walk the path of love—he thought he had already reached the destination, blind to the road that unfolded on the other side.

Now Xie Guan was panicking, like a small animal that had finally realized it was not in a safe zone. Ahead lay a long and unknown road, which could be a paradise, or it could be an abyss.

But Huo Mingjun's heart ached for him.

His mind, which had been numbed by the once-in-thirty-three-years heart-thumping moment, regained its senses. He suddenly realized he had been too hasty, almost forcing Xie Guan to open his eyes and make a choice—to take a step forward trembling with fear, or to retreat back to where he was, filled with terror.

Why couldn't he wait for him?

Wait for him to feel at ease in the gentle and constant companionship, to see the path ahead clearly, and to take the step he was anticipating, without regret.

Xie Guan held his breath, not daring to move an inch, waiting for Huo Mingjun's reaction. He felt both that this sudden awkwardness was due to his own oversensitivity, and also feared that the ominous premonition in his heart would come true.

If Huo Mingjun lost his composure just like him at this moment, it would probably shatter his worldview completely.

Huo Mingjun, harboring a world-shattering, cataclysmic great epiphany, merely pulled down the hem of Xie Guan's rolled-up shirt with gentle restraint, covering his exposed stomach.

This gentlemanly action instantly soothed Xie Guan's anxious little heart. The stagnant atmosphere dissolved like a clear breeze and flowing water. He couldn't tell if he was relieved or if his fur had been smoothed down, but he suddenly found Huo Mingjun to be incredibly charming—the kind that young girls on the internet always talked about, like a small, numbing jolt of electricity passing through his heart.

“I'm going upstairs to take a shower,” Huo Mingjun patted his waist lightly and stood up. “You can just lie there.”

Xie Guan grabbed his arm, using it as leverage to pull himself up from the sofa, and ruffled his own messy hair. “I’m not going to lie down. I brought back a pile of photos and posters from the company today that are waiting for my signature.”

Huo Mingjun glanced sideways and saw a large roll of posters and photos spread out on the coffee table, at least a hundred of them. He said, “Won't you feel cramped crouching over the coffee table? Go sign them in the study.”

Xie Guan said, “Isn't your study off-limits to unauthorized personnel? I can do it at the dining table.”

“There aren't that many rules,” Huo Mingjun smiled. “Go on.”

By the time Huo Mingjun came out of the bathroom, his slight drunkenness and the intense emotional fluctuations from before had mostly dissipated. Feeling that he would have no problem facing Xie Guan in this state of mind, he dried his hair and strolled into the study.

Xie Guan's posture was usually very proper, whether standing or sitting, but the moment he sat at a desk, he looked awkward no matter how you looked at it. He had been away from student life for too long, like a wild horse suddenly saddled with reins, not knowing where to put its limbs, feeling very out of place.

Huo Mingjun walked around behind him, and when he saw the characters Xie Guan had written on the white paper, he almost burst out laughing. “What is this?”

Xie Guan's handwriting was so ugly it was hard to look at. It couldn't even be considered standard script; it was at the level of a third grader's chicken scratch, even his own name was crooked. He leaned back in his chair and scratched his chin with the end of the pen, embarrassed. “It's because I'm uncultured.”

His education level was indeed low. Others his age, even the worst off, could at least attend a third-tier university or a vocational school, but Xie Guan had entered the workforce after finishing only high school. He hadn't had many opportunities for further study over the years.

Huo Mingjun stood beside him, took two sheets of blank paper from the side, and with a flourish of his pen, signed the two characters for “Xie Guan” as smoothly as flowing water.

Xie Guan leaned in to look. He saw that Huo Mingjun had written “Xie Guan” in three or four different styles, each with a different shape. After writing, he put down the pen and asked, “Which one do you like?”

“Amazing, they all look great,” Xie Guan said, pointing to the first one he had written. “That one.”

Huo Mingjun took his right hand and adjusted his grip on the pen. His other hand, to maintain balance, wrapped around Xie Guan's shoulder and rested on the edge of the desk. “I'll guide you through it a few times. You should practice your signature first.”

His hands were long and beautiful, clearly the hands of someone who often held a pen. His wrist was very steady as he taught Xie Guan how to write his name, hand over hand. “Got it?”

Xie Guan could feel the slight weight of his arm on his back, the body heat radiating through his clothes, and the faint, moist scent of shower gel lingering in the air. Although it wasn't an embrace in the literal sense, it felt as if he was being held completely in his arms.

The intimacy of this action was no less than the awkward eye contact from before, but surprisingly, it didn't bring any discomfort, only a heavy, gentle emotion pressing on his chest.

Xie Guan felt his heart quietly curling up. “What about your name?”

“Hm?” Huo Mingjun, still holding his hand, moved it down a few centimeters and signed his own name. It was unclear whether it was intentional or not, but it ended up right in line with Xie Guan's name.

It actually looked quite pleasing to the eye.

He laughed as if he were having a fit, looking up at Huo Mingjun as he laughed. Coincidentally, Huo Mingjun was also looking down at him, his eyes filled with a deeply concealed indulgence and affection.

This scene had a kind of intimate familiarity. An indescribable tenderness and affection flowed through Xie Guan's heart. He vaguely recalled a scene he filmed a couple of days ago where the male and female leads were reading together under a lamp. There was a very fitting adjective in the dialogue, what was it again?

...A beauty adding incense by his side?

Xie Guan carefully savored the artistic conception of the phrase, then glanced at Huo Mingjun's tall and slender figure, and was instantly fried to a crisp by his own thought.

What the hell, “a beauty adding incense by his side.”

The author has something to say:

Teacher Xie probably doesn't know that when we young girls describe someone as 'charming', we always follow it with "I want to marry him."