“He has a million suits. As long as I can figure out how to get inside his room, it shouldn’t be a problem. Worst case, you can use my suit from the Chen’s event, but I think it’ll be too big for you.”

The thought of wearing Xingyu’s clothes made Weiran feel weak. To wear something that belonged to Xingyu, to have his smell surrounding him—

“It’d be better if I could wear one of Xiaokai’s suits,” Weiran agreed.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

What Xingyu could do was, frankly, not a lot. His original plan was to go to Xiaokai, make up some kind of excuse—he wanted to return something, or look for something, but there wasn’t anything he could think of for that ‘something,’ certainly nothing that wouldn’t be able to wait until Xiaokai returned home, and there was a bigger problem:

Xiaokai was doing his damnedest to avoid going anywhere near Xingyu.

It was possible that this was just because he was a very busy young man—he was a director after all. He had a lot of meetings to go to, he had a lot of people to talk to, he had a lot of deals to make. It was also possible that he just didn’t want to talk to Xingyu.

Xingyu took this as further evidence that Xiaokai was innocent of all crimes. His didi was just a kid still in every way that mattered—their parents may have shattered his sense of humor before it could ever form and irreparably warp his perception of familial relationships, but he was innocent of the crimes that Weiran suspected him of. He wasn’t a part of the empire their parents were leading.

At breakfast, the conversation had been just as supremely awkward as the day before: their father had said something about how Xingyu couldn’t go with Xiaokai today, as he was packed with meetings, but he could go with his father. Xingyu waved it off with a smile—he was just going to relax at home, thank you.

He’d regretted it for a while. He thought at the time that he was being smart; for now, he was supposed to be maintaining that he had no interest in the family business. It wouldn’t make sense that he would suddenly want to be back in just because he’d returned to the city. It was also intensely unappealing to be around his father while he worked again. He knew it would just bring about a flood of memories that he usually kept tamped down.

He didn’t expect that being in the house all alone would do the exact same thing.