A wedding anniversary—on such an important day, what would a husband normally do?
My wet, dripping hair clung to my bare shoulders. I only had a bath towel loosely wrapped around my body, and the chilly night wind slipped in through the crack of the window, cold enough to make my lips tremble.
My body was nearly frozen into ice, yet I felt as though a blazing fire was burning fiercely in my chest, so hot that even my vision turned misty and blurred.
Both my hands clutched my phone tightly, my eyes fixed on the time at the very top and on Gu Fan’s chat window in the center of the screen.
My cat tail curled around my stomach, shivering again and again under the cold wind.
But colder than my body was my heart, which was gradually sinking into despair. After pumping hot blood through the vessels in my chest and lungs, it seemed to fall silent and freeze all on its own.
I felt that if I so much as moved slightly, it would shatter into pieces of icy shards, dropping into the flames fueled by my very lifeblood—burning away until nothing was left.
Why… won’t you say a single word to me?
In the past years, on every wedding anniversary, hadn’t Gu Fan always timed it exactly at midnight to give me a huge surprise?
Why is it that this time, there’s not a single message at all, as if he vanished from this world? Is this supposed to be some kind of joke?
As this thought struck me, I forced my frozen, stiff fingers to awkwardly tap at the screen. But because they were trembling too much, I kept pressing the wrong letters. It took me a long time just to finish typing this one message.
“…Hehe.”
I stared blankly at the screen for a long time. For no reason, I let out a cold laugh—and all of a sudden, I felt a strange sense of release.
Turning off the phone, I climbed onto the bed without caring about my appearance, using both hands and feet, and wrapped my still-damp body tightly in the thick quilt.
“Uuuhh…”
So cold… so very cold.
After freezing in the chill for so long, once I returned to the warmth of the bed, my once-burning body instead felt as though the cold had seeped deep inside, so icy it made me want to vomit.
My teeth chattered. I couldn’t tell whether the liquid flowing down my face was tears, or just water dripping along my hair.
In any case, my entire face was drenched as I buried my head tightly beneath the quilt. My stiff fingers reached through the bedding and pressed down on my own neck.
Even the thick cotton couldn’t block out the iciness of my touch. That cold, mixed with the heat of my body, pressed into the flesh of my throat with an uncontrollable force.
“Guhk!”
I couldn’t breathe…
My head was like a bucket of stirred paste—messy, chaotic, incomprehensible.
I didn’t even know why I was doing this. Maybe deep down, my subconscious felt that living like this had already become so painful there was no point in holding on any longer.
Gu Fan’s habit of staying out all night was nothing new—this wasn’t the first or second time. These past few months, it had been constant.
I had always been weak since I was little. Ever since reconnecting with Gu Fan, and later officially starting a relationship two years after, I had always been the passive one.
In everything I did, Gu Fan always came first. Whatever happened to him, I never asked on my own. My thinking back then was: if he wanted to tell me, he would tell me naturally.
That kind of belief might have worked well in the early stages of love. After all, men usually don’t like their partners being overly controlling.
Not prying into his privacy was also a kind of respect. From what I had read about other women’s relationships online, many of them mentioned this too.
Men like to go out and have fun. They usually have plenty of friends and brothers. If a wife keeps nagging nonstop, of course it would make them feel mentally and physically exhausted.
So, holding onto this mindset, I chose to give Gu Fan complete freedom. No matter what he did outside, I simply stayed quietly at home, waiting for him.
When he came back, exhausted, I would thoughtfully serve him and let him rest.
The affection Gu Fan gave me in return was exactly as I had hoped—filling my heart completely, leaving me immersed in the happiness of thinking, “I’m so lucky to have such a perfect husband.”
But whenever Gu Fan went to work or left the house for social gatherings, the loneliness of being all alone would trap me once again.
Often, I would start doing housework at those times. But even when I busied my body with chores, my overactive mind was like a wild horse galloping across a vast prairie, never willing to stay tied to a small wooden stake while looking out at endless open land.
Whenever I lost focus, those thoughts would sneak out, hijacking my brain, dragging it into unhealthy imaginings.
I couldn’t help but wonder—while I was washing dishes, what exactly was Gu Fan doing at the company?
When Gu Fan chose to eat lunch at the company cafeteria, I would sit there listlessly eating my own unappetizing food, imagining him laughing and chatting with his colleagues over their meal.
And more than once… in the lonely depths of night, I sat on the living room sofa in the dark, without even turning on the lights…
I turned the TV volume up high, quietly waiting for Gu Fan to return from his gathering.
I don’t know when it started, but the meaning of my life had already been replaced by the two words “Gu Fan.” Almost everything I did was for him.
Normally, moving forward toward one’s own life goals should be something joyful. But for me, my heart always felt hollow, empty.
Unfathomable… as if Gu Fan could leave me forever at any moment…
It seemed like only in this house could I have any true intimacy with Gu Fan. Each time after we made love, I would lie sideways on the pillow, staring at the sleeping Gu Fan, with a strange current of emptiness drifting through my heart.
If I could… I wished that the places where Gu Fan and I made love weren’t limited only to the bed at home.
I also hoped that sometimes Gu Fan would take me out on trips, let me see more of the world.
Best of all, just the two of us—not one of those company-organized tours.
Occasionally, I would hint at these thoughts in the most subtle ways. With Gu Fan’s intelligence and emotional awareness, he should have understood what I wanted to express.
But every single time… he would smile flawlessly, and find reasons I couldn’t refute, to reject my request.
“Too busy.”
“When the long holidays come, I’ll take you.”
“My mom wants us to have a baby—how about we focus on preparing for that right now…”
Each time my wish was turned down, my timid nature left me no choice but to exile my desires to some faraway corner, locking them up in heavy chains.
I was afraid. Afraid that when Gu Fan rejected me, the heartbreak would make me want to cry out loud.
Afraid that if I kept bringing up such requests again and again, Gu Fan would find me so unreasonable that he wouldn’t want to come home to me anymore.
There were just too many things I was afraid of. And so, weighing all the pros and cons, I could only accept Gu Fan’s decisions.
I accepted everything he demanded of me, like a numb puppet, letting myself be controlled at will.
If I had to say what the clearest difference was compared to before we got married… perhaps it’s that during lovemaking, I could no longer truly feel the love.
It was me who first fell for him.
And it was also me who first lost myself.
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