Mistakenly Marked – Chapter 7
by Little PandaCherry
“Then do I need to stand up?”
The doorbell rang a little over ten minutes later.
Xu Jialuo waited a few seconds before rising. She opened the door and looked at the person outside.
Wrapped in a long beige trench coat, belt cinched around a slender waist, hat, sunglasses, mask — nothing missing, fully armored.
Only at the trench coat’s neckline did the collar of a qipao peek through, now and then.
Someone hailed by fans as a walking exemplar of styling would never dress in such disarray.
She’d come straight from work, without even changing.
Xu Jialuo stepped aside and watched Bo Suiqing enter, removing each layer of concealment one by one, revealing that impossibly exquisite face.
Her gaze slid off without pausing. Xu Jialuo shut the door and walked back to the sofa, sitting down first.
She sat on the side farthest from the fruit plate at the table’s center.
Bo Suiqing followed, understood the deliberate avoidance, and slowed her steps, stopping beside the fruit plate.
Before sitting down, she glanced sideways at it.
She blinked, then leaned down, fingertips still sheathed in white lace gloves, and picked up a tender red cherry.
A hint of moisture bled onto her fingertip.
Which meant the cherry had been washed not long ago.
Deliberately placed here.
Butterfly-wing lashes trembled faintly. Curling the cherry into her palm, Bo Suiqing walked on and sat down at Xu Jialuo’s side.
“…?”
Utterly outside her expectations. Xu Jialuo tilted her head up, her eyes tracking Bo Suiqing downward, and held there for a few beats.
Her brow furrowed, then smoothed.
Bo Suiqing said nothing, but she was sitting far too close — her arm nearly pressed against Xu Jialuo’s.
Through several layers of fabric, there was nothing intimate about it. Yet Xu Jialuo’s brow furrowed again, and she turned her head aside, shifting away.
She didn’t notice Bo Suiqing dip her head toward her and quietly breathe in.
No pheromones to be caught.
Only a scent familiar from memory.
Warm. Cool and clean.
Inches away, and impossible to possess.
Bo Suiqing lowered her thick lashes, suppressing the flash of heat at her scent gland, concealing the doubt in her eyes without a trace.
Fingertips wrapped in white lace lifted the cherry from her palm into her mouth. She chewed a few times and swallowed the sweet, tender flesh down together with the restlessness in her throat.
Then she turned to look at Xu Jialuo and blinked.
This close, Xu Jialuo could see the tinted contacts — those silver eyes now a pool of ink black.
Reflecting her face.
And reminding them both just how little distance remained.
Xu Jialuo turned her head away. Rarely, her ink-wash-cool features were veiled in a layer of impatience. Frowning, she grabbed the pack of tissues at her side and threw it at Bo Suiqing.
The pack landed softly on Bo Suiqing’s pressed-together knees. The person it hit, remarkably, showed no reaction at all.
She merely pulled out a tissue, expression unchanged, lowered her head, and spat the cherry pit into it, calmly wrapping it up and dropping it in the wastebasket by her feet — all while watching Xu Jialuo relocate a full meter away.
Throwing things at her. Moving away outright.
In Xu Jialuo’s life, moments of such “poor breeding” were vanishingly rare.
Anyone else who had ever spent time with Xu Jialuo would have found it unthinkable.
But this was Bo Suiqing.
Between the two of them, such moments were merely routine.
Xu Jialuo’s lashes drooped, listless. With the siren1 voice fans swore could steal a person’s seven souls2 within three seconds of her speaking, she asked, in a chill, distant tone that wanted the visit over the very next second, “Is there something important?”
Important enough to come to her door.
“There is nothing important.”
“Then I think,” Xu Jialuo’s gaze lifted, sweeping past the crescent-shaped pearl earring on Bo Suiqing’s earlobe before settling on her unreadable face, “ours is not a relationship where we can sit and chat.”
They weren’t even friends. And within the entertainment circle alone, their grudges — large and small — came by the handful.
Search “Xu Jialuo” and “Bo Suiqing” together online, and an endless stream of feud gossip and tabloid posts came pouring out.
From their first public meeting — cold faces and mutual disdain right in front of a live-stream camera — all the way to the recent forced termination of Xu Jialuo’s theme song collaboration with the production crew.
Every last incident, long since excavated down to the bone by entertainment reporters and netizens.
And her reason for hating Bo Suiqing —
Predated all of those entertainment-circle events by far.
It began at her mother Jiang Yi’s wedding.
From their very first meeting.
Xu Jialuo looked at Bo Suiqing, already preparing to rise and see her out.
After all, with things said this plainly, going by the woman’s usual track record — cold face every time, avoiding her like the plague — she ought to have stormed out the door by now.
But against all expectation, Bo Suiqing didn’t move an inch. She only repeated, unhurried, “We can’t sit and chat…”
Her eyes lifted. Her head tilted, and the pearl earring swayed gently against that porcelain-white earlobe. Softly: “Then do I need to stand up?”
“…”
?
Xu Jialuo had never imagined the day would come when she’d sit here listening to Bo Suiqing tell a deadpan joke.
She dug a nail into her palm.
A sharp, clear pain. Proof she wasn’t dreaming.
The second hand swept circle after circle. Ten minutes had now passed — long since shattering the all-time record for every encounter she’d ever had with Bo Suiqing.
And the person before her still showed no sign of leaving.
Near noon, sunlight flooded the apartment. Xu Jialuo kept no flowers, disliked home fragrance, and there was no special scent anywhere in her home.
But in the places Xu Jialuo could not perceive, the scent of snow-cherry was seeping out, thread by thread.
Like a living vine, it crossed that one-meter distance with ease, twining gently around her body, then slowly tightening.
Enveloping. Smothering.
Intimately entangled, kissing every inch of her exposed skin.
Her nape burned again, inexplicably. Xu Jialuo asked, “Why do you have my number?”
And a private number at that — one even her manager, Zhou Fu, didn’t know.
“Director Xu gave it to me.” Bo Suiqing watched Xu Jialuo’s every movement without blinking. What came out of her mouth was half true, half false.
“We crossed paths at a gala a while back. She said she hoped I’d spend more time with you and clear up the misunderstanding. So she gave me your number.”
That was, indeed, exactly the kind of thing Xu Shangning would do.
The heat at her nape crept along her spine, spreading slowly through her whole body, until her joints ached and went soft.
Xu Jialuo raised a hand and pressed it to the back of her neck.
The pajama sleeve was wide; it slid down with the motion, baring a stretch of cold-pale wrist — thin, but strong.
Long, lovely fingers climbed the snow-white curve of her neck.
These were lounging clothes — nothing like the high collars Xu Jialuo usually wore — and the slightest movement made the V-neck gape easily open, spilling out a dazzling expanse of white.
And the jade-toned contours beneath it, sheened with shifting light and shadow.
Bo Suiqing’s breathing slowed, just slightly.
And the person doing all this was entirely unaware.
Unaware of how far past the limit that allure was — that sensuality, utterly inadvertent, worn beneath such a coldly indifferent face.
The pheromones in the air stalled for an instant. The next second, they surged — violently, as if spiraling out of control — several times over.
Xu Jialuo’s hand stilled.
The scarred nape beneath her fingertips seemed to burn hotter.
And… it seemed…
There was some kind of scent…
The heat seeping into her limbs and marrow abruptly intensified. Xu Jialuo’s fingers tightened against the sofa, and she began, gradually, to lose focus to the unfamiliar sensation spreading through her.
Then she heard Bo Suiqing ask: “Xu Jialuo, do you know why I like eating cherries?”
“…”
Her mind snapped clear. Xu Jialuo’s brow drew tight, and her perception of the strange scent vanished in an instant.
“Bring this plate of fruit over too… aiya!”
Fruit still beaded with water crashed onto the wooden floor and went rolling in every direction.
The middle-aged woman in the maid’s uniform crouched down in a fluster, muttering, “Just washed, and the Eldest Miss and the guest are about to arrive — honestly, what am I supposed to…”
A cold-pale hand reached down, and a soft pink palm stopped a fragrant pear still making a bid for freedom.
The woman looked up, met the girl’s small, coolly composed face, swallowed, and said stiffly, “…Thanks.”
Xu Jialuo didn’t answer. She crouched on the floor and quietly finished picking up the rest of the fruit alongside her.
“Wang Ma.” Watching the woman scramble to rewash the fruit, the girl said quietly, “I can help.”
The woman’s hands paused. She turned her head, conflicted for a few seconds, then finally gruffed out, “Then make it quick.”
By the time the fruit was washed, the guest had already arrived.
Xu Jialuo stood at the corner of the kitchen, her slender frame of those years tucked out of sight, listening to Xu Yunxing make conversation in the living room.
“Suiqing, try some. I remember cherries are your favorite — freshly picked from the orchard.”
“Are they good?”
A crisp, indifferent voice drifted in from the living room. “Mm. Very sweet.”
Not long after the guest was seen off that day, Xu Yunxing found her room.
“Wang Ma says you washed today’s cherries.”
The girl one year her senior stood blocking the doorway, in the manner of a host, looking down from on high, her tone that of a king commanding her subjects. “You wash them well. From now on, whenever Suiqing visits, you’re in charge of washing the cherries.”
“This is also part of atoning for your mother’s sins.”
Wrong.
The king wasn’t commanding a subject.
She was commanding a criminal.
The sky had turned overcast, and the light in the room dimmed.
Xu Jialuo raised her eyes and looked at Bo Suiqing.
She remembered it perfectly clearly — Bo Suiqing’s favorite food was cherries.
Because for nearly two years, every single cherry that had passed Bo Suiqing’s lips at the Xu family’s Old Residence had been washed by her own hands. One by one.
So.
Bo Suiqing had known all along, too.
That was why she was deliberately bringing it up now, all these years later. To humiliate her.
“Miss Bo.” Xu Jialuo’s lips curved abruptly, the smile baring a small tiger tooth3.
Breathtakingly lovely — and yet the chill in it ran straight down to the bottom of her eyes. “Should I know?”
She was angry.
Meeting those mist-black, abyss-deep eyes, Bo Suiqing caught the shift in Xu Jialuo’s mood almost the instant it happened.
Over what?
Or perhaps hating her was simply an old, old matter — one that had never needed a specific reason at all.
Bo Suiqing watched Xu Jialuo. The fingertips resting on her lap curled slowly in, pressing against the wound on her hand that had yet to heal, and a wave of pain flared through it.
She lowered her voice and asked the next question, the one she’d planned. “Do you know what my pheromones smell like?”
…Could the Xu Jialuo of today actually perceive pheromones?
And what of that night — the pheromones with their light scent of wine, the ones that had so easily soothed her?
The color drained from Xu Jialuo’s eyes entirely, leaving them cold. She stood up abruptly. “My memory is excellent.”
“No reminders needed. I remember perfectly well that I’m a beta.”
So this whole visit was just to say these things to her face and make her sick.
Xu Jialuo obliged her, adding in a flat voice, “A lowly beta who can’t smell a single pheromone.”
Bo Suiqing tilted her head up to meet her eyes, lashes trembling. “…”
The instant their gazes locked, Xu Jialuo felt this moment resemble some other scene —
That night. An omega’s wet, pink, gorgeous eyes.
But the thought was flung behind her the very next second.
Because she heard Bo Suiqing’s voice — the pretense finally, it seemed, beyond maintaining — return to its coldness with a thin edge of anger. “I wasn’t reminding you of anything. Can’t you speak like a normal person?”
“I can.”
Xu Jialuo said, “Depends on who I’m talking to.”
“…”
It had started raining again.
Tap.
Tap-tap.
Raindrops struck the floor-to-ceiling window, filling the silence in the room.
Resisting the urge to haul the woman up and throw her out, Xu Jialuo crossed to the door in a few strides and pulled it wide open. “I have things to do. I won’t see you out.”
The author has something to say:
The gold and silver medalists of the Miscommunication Championship.
But cherries (chomp chomp chomp) really are delicious (chomp chomp chomp)
Good night, mwah mwah
Footnotes
- 塞壬 | sai ren | Siren, the bewitching bird-women of Greek myth whose song lured sailors to their deaths; here a nickname for Jialuo's spellbinding voice.
- 七魄 | qi po | In Daoist belief the human soul comprises three hun and seven po; 'seizing the seven po' idiomatically means to utterly captivate or spellbind someone.
- 虎牙 | hu ya | A slightly protruding canine tooth, prized in Chinese pop culture as an endearing, charming feature; here the bared tooth reads less as cuteness than feline menace.
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