Page 57 of The Scholar's Improper Wife

Yun-yao did not look she believed this. But she took Yun-si’s arm and turned. “Deliver everything to the General’s Residence.” she said to the shop attendants before sweeping out of the shop with perfect poise.

Outside, the guards fell into formation without comment. Yun-si let herself be steered down the street in a daze.

“The teahouse,” Yun-yao said quietly, once they were clear of the shop. “You’re meeting Moonlit Brush in—” she checked the angle of the sun, “—half an hour.”

“I’m not going.”

“Yun-si?”

“I’m not going to the teahouse.” Her voice was very flat. The particular control of someone holding something extremely heavy and unwilling to set it down in the street where anyone could see. “Help me send someone. Tell them I’m unwell.”

Yun-yao studied her for a long moment. Whatever she saw in Yun-si’s face stopped her from asking further questions in the open street.

“I’ll send word,” she said instead. “Where are you actually going?”

Yun-si was already walking, the direction clear in her heart.

“Bamboo Heart Abode,” she said.

Chapter 26

Ting-zhi had reserved the corner room in the Pear Blossom Teahouse two days ago. It was the quietest one, with latticed windows that overlooked the courtyard below.

Three days ago, he had sat alone in his study reading the newest letter from Yun-si—polished, charming, and full of praises for a man she had never met. A man who did not, strictly speaking, exist as she imagined him.

Esteemed Moonlit Brush,she’d written,your prose awakens the heart like spring rain upon parched earth, and your words linger in the mind long after the page is turned...

The brush in his hand had tightened until his knuckles went white, and he felt as if he had just drunk an entire bottle of aged black vinegar, sour and caustic all the way down.

Stupid. This was stupid.

He had dipped the brush and forced himself to write a reply, only to tear up the papers after when the ink bled like wounds on the page. Finally, he penned a letter requesting to meet with her.

He felt like he’d been sucked into a whirlpool with no way to escape, the current pulling him deeper with every exchange. The letter correspondence was never supposed to continue on for so long. It had started as a moment of impulsive mischief when she wrote to Moonlit Brush, then spiraled out of control when, against his better judgement, he continued to reply.

He meant, he really meant to stop the correspondence naturally. But somehow, against all his expectations, an honest critique had flowered out of that dishonest start. Theirdiscussions of craft, of structure and emotion and the precise weight of a single word had been real. Too real.

He remembered the other day he’d walked into the gardens and found her there, seated on the stone bench beneath the wisteria. She’d been readinghisletter, and her lips had curved into that tiny, unguarded smile. The private Yun-si smile.

“Mmm,” he’d said, leaning against the trellis with his arms crossed, deliberately drawling out the syllable. “Something amusing, Si-er?”

She startled so badly she nearly dropped the letter, her hands fumbling as she shoved the paper into her sleeve, pink flooding her cheeks. “Nothing,” she’d said too quickly. “Just—just a letter from a friend.”

He had decided then, finally, with the particular grim resolve of a man who had been putting off something necessary for far too long, that the charade must end.

He would tell her. Not as Moonlit Brush, not through some carefully constructed missive that let him hide behind ink and distance, but as himself. Across a table. With her eyes on his and no escape. He would take her fury and hurt and the very real possibility that she would never quite trust him the same way again. It would be better than this slow poison of half-truths and deceptions.

He checked the angle of the sun through the window for what felt like the hundredth time. She was late. Not dramatically so, but late enough that the tenuous calm he’d arrived with, the speech he’d rehearsed in his head all morning, had started, very slightly, to fray at the edges.

A dozen reasonable explanations existed. None of them settled the growing unease in his stomach. The tea had gone cold by the time he finally rose, two hours past the appointed time. He paid for a room he had occupied alone and walked home like a shadow through the bustling street stalls, with the distractionof a man whose carefully prepared confession had found no audience.

TING-ZHI PUSHED OPENthe study door and froze. Yun-si sat behind his desk, a carved moon-and-brush seal resting beside an open manuscript page on the table. His own words stared back at him:...her gasp against his lips, sweet as stolen summer fruit...

His heart plummeted like a stone in deep water. Every carefully constructed apology he’d rehearsed for the teahouse evaporated.

She didn’t look up. Her fingers traced the familiar handwriting on the page. “I trusted you.” she said, her voice unnervingly flat.

He took a step forward. “Si-er—”