Chapter 260: I Was Horrible At This
For the first time since I had woken up in this body, I was finally alone.
The house was quiet, I could hear my own thoughts, and best of all, I didn’t have to put a smile on my face for anyone. Not like I really did, but you know what I meant.
There were no soldiers staring at me like I was either a miracle or a disaster waiting to happen.
There was no Commander Li suggesting relocation like he had personally decided that dying tired was his next career goal.
There was no Zhenlan politely explaining why my ceiling was trying to murder me with facts, no Chenghai inspecting my walls like they had failed a performance review, and no Lingyun laughing somewhere nearby while turning Jiang Meilan into a bad smell with a cautionary message attached.
It was beautiful.... everything that I had dreamed of in my last life.
And I absolutely hated it.
I missed them. I missed the noise that they brought with them, especially Lingyun. I missed not being alone. I miss.... them.
Then I remembered that I wasn’t actually alone.
Yuche was still there, still beside me. And that caused my body to start panicking in a completely different way.
I turned my head and looked at him. He stood a few steps away from the couch, close enough that I didn’t have to raise my voice if I wanted to complain, but far enough that I could pretend I wasn’t paying attention to him.
His arms were crossed over his chest, and his eyes were fixed on me with the kind of focus that made me feel like I was either precious cargo or an especially difficult criminal who had already tried to escape twice.
Given my recent history, both options were probably fair, but that didn’t make it less annoying.
"I can feel you staring," I said, trying to settle my nerves that had nothing to do with the quiet.
"I’m not staring," he replied, his voice blank. He raised a single eyebrow and it really shouldn’t have been as sexy as it was. The man was born with an unfair advantage over every unsuspecting girl in his vicinity.
"You are absolutely staring," I snapped back, sounding like a petulant child. Great... just the image of me that I wanted to give him... a child throwing a temper tantrum.
"I’m watching."
"That is worse." Because apparently, my mouth didn’t know when it should have stayed sewn shut.
"You keep looking at the hallway."
"I live here," I replied, lifting my brows. Sometimes, the best defense was a good offense. "Sometimes I look at parts of my own house for recreational purposes."
"You’re thinking about getting up."
"I am thinking about many things." And getting up was not that high on my list, if I was to be completely honest.
"Most of them are bad."
I opened my mouth to argue, then closed it again because the man had an irritating habit of being right when it was least convenient. Sure, not all my decisions were.... the best ones.... but it wasn’t like all of them were bad.
The decision to steal all his weapons was a fantastic one, given the fact it had resulted in him standing in my living room looking like some Greek God or something.
But that was more than half of my current problems.
It wasn’t that I had suddenly noticed him. I had noticed him plenty of times. I had noticed him when he carried me, when he stood too close, when he put himself between me and things I didn’t want to deal with, and when he looked at me like the rest of the apocalypse could wait its turn.
The problem was that there had always been someone there to interrupt before I had to decide what to do about any of it.
Now, all the cockblockers had finally left my house.
That should have made things easier.
Only it really didn’t.
It felt more like someone had put a bucket of my favorite ice cream in front of me, handed me a teeny tiny spoon, and then expected me to remember how hands worked.
I knew I wanted it. I knew I had been wanting it. I even had the spoon, technically. I just had no idea where to start without making a complete idiot of myself.
That was a completely new feeling for me, and I did not enjoy new things at my age.
In my first life, there had not been room for this kind of thing. I had fooled around a little before everything went to hell, but after the world ended, romance had become one of those luxuries that belonged to people with locked doors, clean water, and enough food to waste energy making bad decisions with other people.
I, on the other hand, had been busy trying not to starve, not to freeze, not to get bitten, not to get robbed, and not to get murdered by the kind of people who smiled while calling themselves survivors.
Dating hadn’t even made it to the top 100 things to get done in my old life.
Now I was fed, healed, warm, and sitting in my own house with a man I actually wanted, and somehow that was more confusing than figuring out which zombies could climb walls.
Yuche shifted his weight, and my eyes immediately went to his hands.
I hated that.
Not because I hated his hands. I liked his hands. That was the problem. I liked them when they carried me. I liked them when they held weapons. I liked them when they tightened slightly every time I did something he considered dangerous, which was apparently everything from standing too quickly to breathing with too much personal ambition.
He noticed me looking.
Of course he did.
His gaze lowered to my face. "What is it?"
"Nothing."
"Rouxi."
"I am allowed to look at things."
"You looked at my hands like they offended you."
"They are suspicious hands."
His expression didn’t change, but something in his eyes did. "Suspicious."
"Yes."
"How?"
"They keep picking me up."
"You keep needing to be picked up."
"I do not need to be picked up. People keep deciding that I need to be picked up. There is a difference."
"You were jumping earlier."
"I was demonstrating."
"You were jumping."
"I was demonstrating with enthusiasm."
See? Right there... that was the reason why I needed to sew my mouth shut. I didn’t even know what I was saying half the time and it came out.... like that!
Fuck my life. Getting a guy really shouldn’t be this hard.
Yuche’s mouth tightened, but I saw it. That tiny movement at the corner, like he wanted to smile and had decided against encouraging me.
I should not have found that attractive either, but apparently my standards had been dragged into the apocalypse and beaten until they developed terrible taste.
Except that wasn’t fair.
Yuche wasn’t terrible taste.
Yuche was the opposite of terrible taste.
He was dangerous, loyal, painfully controlled, annoyingly calm, and currently looking at me like he would fight the ceiling itself if it made one wrong move in my direction. That was not terrible taste.
That was exactly the sort of thing a woman could develop a serious problem over if she had recently started allowing herself to want things.
I shifted on the couch and tried to arrange myself in a way that looked casual.
It did not work.
I had no idea what casual looked like when someone was trying to be desirable on purpose. Did I lean? Did I stretch? Did I lower my voice? Did people still toss their hair? My hair had been through enough today, and frankly, I did not trust it to participate in seduction without making me look like I had been attacked by static.
Maybe eye contact was enough. That didn’t require me to open my mouth and then put my foot in it. I could do eye contact.
Probably.
Hopefully.
Fuck.
I was horrible at this. I really was.
