At the time, he’d challenged everyone, “Punish me. I was the one who seduced her.” They said nothing more, just exchanged a deep smile.

It wasn’t clear who began it, but then they were hugging. Perhaps she was the instigator. She told the secret talker, It felt like I was the only guilty party. Jianjun carried her into the bedroom but seemed to lose his strength as he shut the door. She had her back to the door, and he was already kissing her. His lips had a trace of distant smoke. He felt so much younger as he kissed her eyebrows, her eyes, her lips. She returned this with ten times the frenzy. He reached out and traced her features, across her brows and down to her nose, along the bridge and slowly farther down, outlining her lips, stopping on her lower one, the moist inside, sketching it over and over. This provocative, seductive, maybe even destructive finger, made her whole body clench. It was Jianjun’s finger. She felt like she’d found something she’d lost. Jianjun continued his tracing, his finger going everywhere, a line of sparks along her skin. There were tears in his eyes, and hers too. He didn’t recognize this woman’s body—another man’s incursion had made it unfamiliar and mysterious again. How could it take pleasure in the embrace of a foreign man? Jianjun couldn’t imagine it. The earliest jealousy and rage had passed, and now he just found the whole affair inconceivable.

She’d never expected it would end up this way. They were making this perfect. So it turned out Jianjun could be this sensitive, this responsive to her needs. Tears covered her face, and she asked herself, Why did you leave him? So you still have feelings for Jianjun. So you still love him.

They lay in the same positions as before. His tears plopped onto her forehead, while hers dampened the hollows of his collarbones and shoulders. After a bout of weeping, they grew passionate again. In the small hours of the night, they grew exhausted. At dawn, she said she should be going. Then she said she wasn’t leaving, she would never leave. She said, “Jianjun, if I stayed, if I didn’t go, would you be happy?”

He sighed heavily and asked why she wouldn’t go.

She said, “Because I’ve only just understood you. Isn’t that terrible, Jianjun? I had to make such an awful mess and hurt us both so badly before I could understand you.”

Jianjun asked what she understood. She said she understood how loving he could be. He laughed bitterly and said hadn’t he always been like this?