After My Rebirth, My Husband Pampers Me Everyday!

Chapter 167: DID YOU PAINT THAT IN ONE AFTERNOON?*

He changed quickly in his bedroom, pulling on an old grey T-shirt with a small tear at the collar and a pair of loose dark trousers he’d worn once to move boxes and never quite returned to regular rotation. He looked at himself in the mirror for one second, decided it was fine, and picked up his laptop.

The art room was warm when he pushed the door open. North-facing windows let in flat, even light that lay across the work surface in a clean, unbroken line. He set his laptop on the table, opened YouTube, and typed:

How to paint for absolute beginners.

The video was forty minutes long, presented by a woman with paint on her forearms and the unhurried energy of someone who genuinely loved what she was talking about.

Guiying watched with his chin in his hand, pausing occasionally, rewinding twice over the section on brush pressure and once more over blocking in shapes before adding detail.

By the end, he understood three things. He needed a muse. He needed to feel it rather than think it. He needed to stop being afraid of making something ugly.

He closed the laptop and looked at the blank canvas on the easel.

The muse part required no deliberation.

He picked up a pencil and began to sketch.

Two figures, one above the other. The lower figure in shadow, dark robes pooling around them, a crown of black stone on their head, a skeletal hand reaching upward out of the darkness.

The upper figure radiant, long pale hair streaming as though caught in wind from below, robes of white and gold, one hand extended downward toward the darkness.

Between them, where they almost met, a rose with a thorn apple vine wound tight around its stem, the thorns pressing into the petals without breaking them.

He mixed the first color and loaded the brush.

The video said: feel it, and have fun with your hands.

He pressed the brush to the canvas.

For the first ten minutes he was careful, deliberate, following the logic of the sketch beneath, checking proportions, lifting the brush to look before putting it down.

Then, somewhere around the eleventh minute, something shifted. He stopped checking.

Stopped lifting the brush to look.

Stopped thinking about the video.

His hand moved the way hands move when the thinking part has stepped aside.

The room was quiet around him.

Paint on his fingers, a smear of grey-blue on the back of his wrist, the north light sitting flat and even across the canvas as morning moved toward afternoon.

He didn’t notice the time passing.

He only noticed, when he finally set the brush down and stepped back, that his hands were shaking slightly and his chest felt open in a way it hadn’t when he sat down.

The proportions in the lower left were slightly off.

The thorn apple needed another layer. The light figure’s hands were better than he had any right to expect from a first attempt, and not as good as he wanted them to be.

But it was there on the canvas, all of it, and it was his.

He pulled his notebook from the shelf, uncapped his pen, and wrote:

Once there was a person who lived at the bottom of the world.

They had been there so long they had forgotten there was a top.

The darkness was all they knew, all they had ever known, and they moved through it the way fish move through water, without questioning whether anything else existed.

They were not unhappy. You cannot miss what you have never seen.

Then one day, from somewhere far above, a light fell through.

It did not ask whether the darkness was ready. It simply came, the way light always comes, without apology, without permission, and it found the person at the bottom of the world and stayed.

They looked up at the light.

The light looked back.

The thorn apple wound around the rose is what grew between them.

Beautiful and dangerous and so thoroughly entwined that separation is no longer a question either of them is asking.

The thorns press into the petals and the petals hold their shape, and neither of them is going anywhere.

This is what the darkness learned about love. It is not painless. But it stays.

Xue Guiying.

He read it back once, capped the pen, and closed the notebook.

Then he took a photo of the painting on his phone and sent it to Liuxian without a caption.

Then he went to wash his hands.

The water was cold against his skin, and Guiying watched the grey-blue paint dissolve and disappear down the drain. The feeling behind his ribs did not leave with it.

His phone rang on the counter with a sound that was too loud for the quiet room. Liuxian’s name appeared on the screen with a video call.

Guiying answered with water still dripping from his fingers.

Liuxian’s face filled the screen, but his eyes were not looking at the camera. His gaze was fixed on something behind Guiying, on the canvas that stood on the easel in the north light.

For several seconds Liuxian did not speak.

Guiying could hear him breathing through the speaker, and each breath sounded sharp and unsteady.

Then Liuxian spoke, and his voice was low and rough.

"Xue Guiying," Liuxian said. "Did you paint that today. Did you paint that in one afternoon."

Guiying nodded once. He did not trust himself to speak.

Liuxian leaned closer to his camera until Guiying could see the lines around his eyes. He lifted his hand and pressed his palm flat against his screen, directly over the rose on Guiying’s painting. His fingers trembled against the glass.

"Do you know what this is," Liuxian said. "This is not a painting. This is someone taking the thing they are most afraid to admit and putting it where the whole world can see it. That rose with the thorn apple wound around it is not an image. It is a confession."

He dragged his finger down the screen, following the line where the skeletal hand reached up toward the light figure’s hand.

"My hands are shaking right now," Liuxian said. "You made my hands shake with a first canvas. Do you understand what that means."

Guiying shook his head.

Liuxian’s jaw tightened, and his eyes were wet, but he did not blink.

"It means you were brave today," Liuxian said. "And bravery leaves marks. So do not wash your hands again until the paint is dry. Leave the grey-blue on your wrist. That is not a mess. That is evidence that you were here and you chose to stay when it became ugly."

Guiying set the phone on the counter and did not pick it up again. The grey-blue smear on his wrist began to dry, and he let it. Each time his hand moved, he saw it, and each time he saw it, he remembered Liuxian’s words about evidence.

He returned to the easel and loaded the small brush with a deeper green for the thorn apple vine.

The first layer had been tentative, but this layer went down with certainty.

The thorns pressed harder into the petals now, and the petals held their shape without breaking.

He worked in silence, and the only sound in the room was the soft drag of bristles against canvas.

The north light stayed flat and even across the work surface as afternoon moved forward.

He did not check the time.

He did not check his phone.

He only checked the place where the two hands almost touched, because that space between them was the heart of the painting.

When he finally stepped back, his shoulders ached and his eyes burned from focus. The painting was still wet, and it was still imperfect.

The proportions in the lower left were still slightly off, and the light figure’s face needed more work. But the truth of it was there, and it was undeniable.

He walked to the shelf, pulled his notebook down, and opened it to the page where he had written earlier. He added one more line beneath his name.

He wrote: Bravery leaves marks, and I will not wash them away.

He capped the pen and closed the notebook. Then he stood in front of the canvas again and looked at it without speaking.

The room was quiet, and the painting stayed.

Guiying cleaned his brushes one by one, working the bristles against the edge of the cloth until the colour ran clear, then set them handle up in the ceramic jar on the work surface.

The grey-blue smear on his wrist had dried completely, the edges of it crisp against his skin.

He left it there.

He covered the palette, capped the tubes, stood back and looked at the painting one last time before turning the light off and pulling the door closed behind him.

He was halfway down the corridor when Uncle Wang appeared at the top of the stairs with his hands clasped in front of him.

"Master Xue," he said, his eyes moving briefly to the paint on Guiying’s wrist and the smear below his left ear and the state of his shirt, taking all of it in with the practised calm of a man who had seen considerably worse in this house and expected he would see worse again.

"Dinner is ready. Old Li has been asking about you for the past hour."