Free Web NovelChapter 133: Chapter 133: Normal
I sit on the edge of the bed for a long time without moving.
The room is bright now. Morning settled in properly while I was too busy being angry to notice it arriving, and the light coming through the curtains is the flat, honest kind that doesn’t flatter anything.
My body hurts.
Not dramatically. Just the specific, deep ache of muscles used past their usual limit, soreness that sits low in my back and radiates outward whenever I shift position. I’m aware of it the way you’re aware of a bruise, constantly, involuntarily, every small movement bringing it back before I can forget it again. freewёbn૦νeɭ.com
I don’t want to think about why it hurts. ƒrēewebnoѵёl.cσm
I think about it anyway.
I press both hands flat against my knees and stare at the door.
Nobody has knocked.
I don’t know whether I expected someone to. Mrs. Wen usually appears eventually, with tea, with food, with some small errand that isn’t really an errand. The quiet concern she delivers without naming it.
But the hallway outside has been still since I closed the door. The estate sounds the way it sounds on any ordinary morning, distant staff movement, the faint sounds of the city beyond the windows. Nothing that suggests anyone is particularly concerned about me.
Which is fine.
I don’t need anyone to knock.
I rub one hand slowly over my face and exhale.
The anger from this morning has mostly gone. It went out fast the way that kind of anger always does, the kind that comes from fear more than anything else, burning bright and then leaving almost nothing behind. What’s left is quieter and considerably less comfortable.
I said I don’t care.
I said it loudly, directly into his face, with everything I had. I told him he could spend every night at Xue Lian’s apartment. I told him I didn’t care who he was with.
The problem with saying things loudly and directly is that the sound of them stays in the room with you afterward.
I lie back slowly against the headboard and close my eyes.
The apology surfaces again immediately.
It keeps doing that. I’ll push it to the edge of my thoughts and something drags it back before I can get any distance from it.
*I’m sorry. About that day too. Me coming home with someone else’s scent. I’m sorry. For telling you it wasn’t your concern.*
He said it quietly. That’s what keeps snagging. Not performed, not strategic. And his face... I’ve been trying to place it since I walked out of the room. It wasn’t the expression he uses when he’s handling something, not the careful composed look he has when he’s managing a situation at a distance.
It was something underneath that. Something rawer. Like he genuinely didn’t know if I would accept it or not, like the answer mattered to him in a way he couldn’t quite contain.
And I slapped his hand away.
I stare at the ceiling.
The easy version of events, the one I was running on this morning when the anger was still hot enough to feel like armor, goes like this: the apology came right after the rut, his instincts were still warm and muddled, it means nothing, it will be gone by tomorrow the same way rut-feeling always disappears, and I was right not to receive it.
I want that version to hold.
Except Bael was already himself this morning.
I keep coming back to that. When he stopped me at the door, when he held my hand and turned my face toward him and said what he said, his eyes were clear. Not glassy, not fever-dark, not the blown-out pupils of someone still half-lost in rut. Just gray and steady and entirely present. He knew exactly what he was saying. He chose to say it anyway.
Which means I can’t blame the rut.
Which means the easy version doesn’t hold.
I stare at the ceiling and feel the mild irritation of someone whose own brain has refused to cooperate.
But here’s the thing about Bael.
He has always been the most genuinely confusing person I’ve ever been in a room with.
Giving warmth with one hand and distance with the other, capable of noticing every small thing about me and then walking through the door one night smelling like someone else and telling me it wasn’t my concern. He contains contradictions I’ve never fully mapped, and I have been wrong about him before, spectacularly wrong, in directions that cost me a great deal.
So I’m not going to sit here and decide I suddenly understand him.
But the apology didn’t feel like rut-warmth talking.
It felt like something he had been carrying for a while.
And even if I accept that, even if I let the apology be real, it doesn’t fix anything.
That’s the part I keep circling.
Bael wants things to go back to normal. I can see it in everything he’s done for weeks, the careful distance after I set the boundary, the study sessions, the kisses, the ginger biscuits from that specific bakery, the qualification folder. He wants proximity again, ease, the version of us that existed before everything broke.
But that version of us is gone.
Because I’m in love with him.
Not the manageable kind. Not something I can call fondness or attachment or gratitude or any of the softer, safer words I’ve been reaching for instead.
I’m in love with Bael, and acting normal with someone you love who doesn’t love you back isn’t normal at all. It’s just a slower way of falling apart.
Every small moment of warmth becomes something I read too far into. Every time he pulls back, something small breaks. I’ve been living that pattern for months and I already know what it costs.
So even if I accept the apology, and some quiet part of me already has, in the way you accept something painful because refusing doesn’t actually change it, I still can’t give him what he’s asking for. Not without losing something I can’t afford to lose again.
It’s not about blame.
He hasn’t done anything wrong today, not really. He apologized. He tried. The problem isn’t what Bael did this morning. The problem is that what I need from him is something he hasn’t offered, and I don’t know if he ever will, and going back to normal while carrying that knowledge quietly inside myself is not something I can do.
Not again.
Elliot’s question passes through my head briefly.
*Do you plan to stay in the marriage after the birth?*
I already turned it over last night in the dark, already arrived at the only honest answer I have, which is that I don’t know, and that leaving feels like something I can’t finish picturing, and that both of those things frighten me in different ways. There’s nothing new there this morning.
What’s new is noticing that the question, asked by someone who clearly wanted the answer to be no, didn’t make me want to say no.
I sit with that briefly.
Then I set it aside.
The qualification exam is coming. The Dingshan site visit is before the board presentation. Grandmother’s project has its own separate timeline, and there’s a site I haven’t seen in person yet, which I need to do before I can start designing anything with real honesty.
Everything is moving forward regardless of what I resolve or don’t resolve about my own feelings, and there is something almost comforting in that. The work doesn’t pause. The deadlines don’t adjust themselves around the state of my heart.
I can do the work.
Whatever else is true, I can always do the work.
I reach for the glass of water on the nightstand and my hand brushes the edge of the qualification folder. Dark blue, slightly worn at one corner from being picked up and put down too many times.
I don’t open it.
I just rest my hand on it for a second.
Months of quiet work, done without telling me. Three professors individually convinced, scheduling arranged around commitments I hadn’t even mentioned to him. Not because it was strategic or because someone asked him to.
Because you should have it properly.
That’s what he said.
I take my hand off the folder.
The apology was real.
The folder is real.
The ginger biscuits from the specific bakery, the footrest at exactly the right height, the tea blend restocked without comment, all of it real, all of it quiet, all of it offered without expectation of anything in return.
I don’t know what it means that someone can care that much about me in all these small accumulated ways and still not love me.
Maybe caring and loving are just genuinely different things.
Maybe Bael has been telling the truth this entire time about which one this is, and I’m the one who keeps failing to accept it.
I take my hand off the folder.
The morning light has shifted slightly across the floor.
I pull my knees up and rest my chin on them.
Outside the door, the hallway is quiet. Somewhere in this house, Bael is probably already working.
I don’t go to him.
Not because I don’t want to.
Because I don’t know yet what I would do if I did.
