Absolutely completely normal June story

You’d been Hu Yetao’s bodyguard for the better part of two months, and in that time he’d made no fewer than twenty-five passes at you.

Twenty-five. You’d started counting after the fifth one, partly out of professional habit and partly because it gave you something to do with the tension that built every time he smiled at you like you were the only person in the room.

Most of them circled the same territory — an invitation for the night, phrased in some new way each time, like he thought the right combination of words would finally unlock you. They never did. Not because you weren’t tempted, which you absolutely were, but because you were serious about this. The job mattered. He mattered, which was exactly why you couldn’t afford to blur those lines.

The first pass had been deceptively innocent.

You’d been rolling your neck between rotations, working out a knot that had been sitting in the same spot for three days, when Yetao appeared at your elbow as he’d materialized out of thin air.

“I give excellent massages,” he said, and the way he said it managed to be both completely sincere and entirely shameless.

You saw through it in about half a second. “I’ll pass.”

“You haven’t even considered it.”

“I considered it and I’ll pass.”

He tried once more — something about tension being bad for reaction time, which was almost an argument — and you declined again, politely, firmly, the way you’d been trained to hold a line. He went away looking like a man who’d dropped his ice cream, and you went back to rolling your neck alone.

Professionalism mattered. That was the whole point.

The twenty-second pass happened the night of the Sakura Festival.

The concert had run long. You’d been on your feet for four hours, the crowd noise was still ringing faintly in your ears, and you were already mentally halfway to the subway when Yetao caught you near the venue’s side exit, still in his stage clothes, makeup catching the light.

“Where are you going?”

You glanced back. “Shift’s over. Heading home.” You paused. “Raizo mentioned an ice cream place nearby. Might stop there.”

Yetao tilted his head the way he did when he was about to say something he’d already decided you couldn’t refuse. “Can I come?”

You looked at him for a moment. Public place. Off the clock. No real reason to say no.

“Sure.”

The smile he gave you was immediate and entirely too satisfied, but you were already walking.

The place Raizo had recommended was small and warmly lit, tucked between a souvenir shop and a flower stall that was still doing business despite the hour. The blossoms were out everywhere — on the trees lining the path, in the hair of people passing by, drifting loose across the pavement in slow pink spirals. The whole city felt like it was in on something.

The line stretched out the door. Yetao fell into step beside you without being asked, close enough that his shoulder kept finding yours in the crowd.

“The blossoms are so pretty,” he said, tilting his face upward.

You looked up too. He wasn’t wrong. “Easy to see why people travel just for this.”

He lowered his gaze to you then — stage makeup still perfect, liner making his eyes deeper than they had any right to be this late at night — and said, “It’s also very romantic.”

You kept your eyes forward. “I’ll cover yours, but this isn’t a date.”