After My Rebirth, My Husband Pampers Me Everyday!

Chapter 157: DINNER AND A SHOW

Guiying had his bag in his lap and his eyes on the window. His heart was still doing that warm, inconvenient thing it had been doing since Liuxian touched his face.

The driver pulled away from the kerb.

"Are you tired?" Liuxian asked.

Guiying considered it honestly. His body ached from the shoot, and the day had been long in ways that went beyond physical, but tired wasn’t quite the right word. "Not really," he said.

Liuxian glanced at him. "Have dinner with me tonight. Outside."

Guiying turned to look at him.

"Somewhere that isn’t the house," Liuxian added simply.

Guiying studied him for a moment, the particular stillness in his expression, the way he said it. It wasn’t a question or quite a command. It was just honest, without dressing itself up as anything else.

"Okay," Guiying said.

Liuxian reached forward and said something low to the driver, too quiet for Guiying to catch.

The car shifted direction smoothly.

Guiying turned back to the window and watched Beijing move past in the early evening gold, and he didn’t ask where they were going. He would find out when they got there.

Twenty minutes later the Boat Tail pulled up outside a building with no visible signage. Two attendants in black stood by a pair of dark lacquered doors, and one stepped forward and opened the car door before they had fully stopped moving.

Guiying got out and looked up at the building, then at Liuxian.

Liuxian said nothing and gestured toward the doors. They opened before either of them reached them.

The smell hit him first. Something floral and warm and layered, like stepping into a garden in a season that hadn’t been invented yet. Then the sound reached him, low and string-based. An erhu played somewhere deep in the space, its voice threading through the air like something alive.

Then he looked up.

The ceiling was covered in cherry blossoms. Thousands of them cascaded downward in dense violet-lit clusters, and the purple light moved through them slowly, like wind through an actual canopy.

Pendants of warm light hung between the branches and cast everything below in a glow that sat somewhere between dusk and dream.

The walls were dark, almost black, and across them ink wash projections shifted and breathed.

Mountains dissolved into mist, cranes lifted from water, and petals fell in slow, deliberate arcs that made the room feel perpetually on the edge of something.

Tables were set in dark woven chairs around marble surfaces, and wine glasses caught the candlelight.

At the far end of the room a low stage held a woman in full traditional costume. Her sleeves moved with a slowness that suggested she had all the time in the world and intended to use every moment of it.

Guiying stood in the entrance and didn’t move for a full three seconds.

"Wànhuājìng," Liuxian said quietly beside him. "You’ll like the food."

An attendant appeared and led them through the main floor and through a curtained archway into a private room.

The room opened onto a full view of the stage through a floor-to-ceiling screen of latticed dark wood.

The private room had its own cherry blossom ceiling, smaller and more intimate.

The purple light was warmer here, and the table was set for two with a single candle and a small arrangement of white peonies in a celadon vase.

Guiying sat down and looked through the lattice screen at the dancer on the stage, at her sleeves catching the light, at the ink wash projections shifting across the walls behind her.

Then he looked at Liuxian sitting across from him, studying the menu with that composed, unhurried expression.

Guiying picked up his own menu, looked at it for a moment, and set it back down.

"Order for me," he said.

Liuxian looked up. "You’re not looking?"

"You know what I like," Guiying said simply.

Something moved in Liuxian’s expression, quiet and warm, and he nodded once and set his own menu down. He flagged the attendant, and Guiying turned back to the lattice screen and let him handle it.

Outside the screen the erhu player had joined the dancer. The music and movement found each other with the ease of two things that had always belonged together.

The cherry blossom ceiling shifted above them, and the candle between them burned steadily.

Guiying looked at all of it and felt something in his chest that was almost unbearable in the best possible way.

The food came out dish by dish, and Guiying didn’t stop looking at the stage once.

He ate with one hand, chopsticks moving almost on autopilot while his eyes tracked the ink wash projections bleeding through the lattice screen.

Violet light hit the table, then rose gold, then violet again.

"This is distracting," he said around a mouthful of abalone.

Liuxian smiled and pushed the rice next to him.

"What is? Dinner or the show?"

Guiying swallowed a mouthful before replying. "Both. The food is delicious and the performance is spectacular, I don’t know which to focus on.."

Liuxian smiled and picked up his chopsticks. "Don’t worry too much, there’s another show after your meal, so you can eat with your mouth and listen with your ears.."

Guiying smiled and placed some abalone on his rice.

"You should eat too. Don’t be creepy and just watch me eat.."

Liuxian nodded and started eating as well.

Guiying smiled, the food here was delicious, ten over ten across boards.

He also knew the bill would be something else but he choose not to think about it.

Closing it off as "it’s my husband’s money.."

"So, how was the meeting with your European business patners? Since you said it was a show of wealth, then it should be an interesting conversation.."

Liuxian smiled, it certainly was.

He thought back to earlier this morning, when they had arrived.

Earlier, this morning.

Zhang Wei was at the lobby at nine forty-five.

He had been there since nine thirty, because that was how he operated, and because Liuxian had said nine fifty-eight and Zhang Wei had learned a long time ago that with certain guests the margin between prepared and unprepared was exactly the difference between a good meeting and a disaster.

The doors opened at nine fifty-eight precisely.

Whitmore entered first. He was perhaps forty-two, tall, silver at the temples, dressed in a suit that had been made by hand by someone whose entire professional existence was the making of suits for men like this.

He walked into the Liu Corporation lobby and looked around with the unhurried expression of a man making a quiet assessment that he would not be sharing.

Cavendish came in beside him, perhaps thirty-eight, equally dressed, with sharp eyes underneath the studied boredom he wore like a second suit.

Zhang Wei stepped forward. "Mr. Whitmore, Mr. Cavendish. Welcome to Liu Corporation. I’m Zhang Wei, Mr. Liu’s executive assistant. He’s expecting you — if you’ll follow me."