The night was a void, so profoundly still that the silence itself seemed to ring in my ears. Every breath I drew felt too loud, too heavy, a desperate noise in a room where the air refused to settle. My body had finally ceased its frantic trembling, but the space behind my eyes pulsed with an unbearable, internalized rhythm—the echo of a single voice.
Dr. Lan.
His words had infiltrated my system, threading through my veins like a slow-burning narcotic. "Don't waste your money… treasures aren't made in your body." The audacity, the cruel dismissal, had no right to sound so utterly seductive, but they replayed in a consuming loop until they grew warm, wet, and deeply dangerous.
The sheets beneath me were shockingly cold, a stark contrast to the persistent heat radiating from my skin. I couldn't lie still. My fingers twitched, restlessly tugging at the pillow, the hem of my shirt—anything to claw some purchase on reality. But even the air itself was tainted with the faint scent of him: a sterile, metallic tang like hospital-grade cleansing, laced with a smoky, forbidden danger.
I clenched my eyes shut, attempting to force my breath into the long, deliberate counts of my old discipline—the xianxia training for the harmonization of fire and breath, for supreme mental control. But the harder I tried to summon focus, the faster my rebellious heart hammered in betrayal.
Inhale. One. Two. Three.
Exhale. Three. Two. One.
The image sharpened anyway, cutting through the darkness.
Lan's fingers—the deliberate, almost agonizing slowness of his touch when he had tilted my chin earlier. His eyes, half-lidded, utterly unbothered, dissecting me as though my very thoughts were glass and he could see the shameful impurity in every curve.
The sound of his voice was impossibly clear—that careless, dark whisper that no doctor should ever use:
"Imagine… me… in or on you."
My entire body convulsed as if I'd been hit by a physical blow. The sound escaped before I could stop it—a raw, strangled gasp that the pillow could only partially muffle. Shame flooded my face, hot and immediate, but the internal fire refused to stop; it climbed and spiraled through my nerves, a feeling both cruel and exquisitely necessary.
I turned my face deeper into the pillow and bit down hard, desperate to smother the sound that desperately wanted to rise. My hips shifted of their own accord, grinding against the soft fabric. My breath hitched and stuttered. I wasn't even touching myself, but my body was helpless to the rhythmic demand that rose from my core. It was humiliating—animal, needy, a catastrophic loss of every layer of composure I had spent years cultivating.
The fantasy of him standing over me—that familiar, knowing smirk, those impossible eyes that saw too much—struck me harder than any physical reality could.
"Ah—" A sound broke out of me, trembling, raw, followed by a thick, ringing silence that made the noise even worse.
I froze.
What was I doing?
The question died, unable to save me. My hand blindly scrabbled for the nightstand, finding the cold glass of my phone. I didn't think, didn't breathe—my thumb simply unlocked the screen. My pounding pulse drowned out any semblance of reason. The name sat there, glowing like a forbidden sigil:
Dr. Lan (Private)
My chest rose and fell violently, struggling against a sudden constriction. The number had been his final challenge, spoken with such unnerving calm it had felt like a dare issued from the edge of a cliff. "If the side effects worsen, call me directly. No nurse. No queue. Just me."
I had memorized the digits before I even typed them in.
Now I stared at the screen, my finger hovering over "Call." It trembled, betraying the seismic craving flaring in my stomach—electric, poisonous, and addictive.
I imagined the perfect pitch of his voice on the other end: slow, perfectly confident, utterly unhurried.
"You couldn't sleep, could you, Rei?"
"Tell me what your body's doing right now."
My heart slammed against my ribs so violently I nearly dropped the device. The air felt too thick, too heavy to draw a breath. The only way to escape the pressure was to hear him—even if hearing him meant complete annihilation.
I pressed the button.
The dial tone began: one second. Two. Then—
"The number you are trying to reach is not in service."
The words hit me with the stinging shock of ice water. My hand instantly went cold.
Not in service.
For a moment, I simply stared at the glowing screen, frozen. The mechanical voice repeated its flat, meaningless message, each repetition slicing a little deeper into my chest. I hung up. Called again. The same, definitive rejection.
He had given me a dead number.
No—he had given me a number he knew would become dead, deliberately timed to the peak of my need. Perhaps this had been the point all along: a seed of frustration planted just to see how violently I'd struggle.
My pulse refused to slow. The rejection was disproportionately painful, a tight clenching in my throat, as if my entire physical being had structured itself around the possibility of his voice—and now, stripped of it, I didn't know how to function.
I tried to move—to walk to Lian's room, to find some physical reality, some functional outlet—but my muscles refused to obey. My legs were dead weight. It wasn't her I wanted. It wasn't even relief anymore.
It was him. Only him.
My reflection caught my eye in the dark glass of the window. For a fleeting instant, my pupils gleamed faintly violet, an unsettling, perfect mirror of his own. The sight jolted me; I stumbled back, gasping, my hand pressed against my chest as if I could claw the infection from my heart.
"This isn't real," I whispered, desperate to reclaim my sanity. "You're not real."
But the voice that answered didn't sound like my own at all. It was low, impossibly faint, yet perfectly clear, curling around the edges of my hearing:
"Come back to me, Rei."
My phone slipped from my numb hand. The sound of it hitting the carpet broke the spell, but the words clung to me like smoke, refusing to dissipate.
Morning crawled in through the curtains, gray, merciless, and anticlimactic. I woke up drenched in sweat, my heart still hammering from the dream—if it had been a dream. The untouched chocolate box sat like a mocking monument on the table, the air heavy with the stale scent of last night's exquisite shame.
Then I saw it.
A faint glow on my phone screen.
1 New Message – Dr. Lan (Private)
"wet dream came true ? Or did you wish to create a new one?"
My breath froze in my lungs.
The number shouldn't exist. It wasn't supposed to work.
And yet, his voice was already there—between the words, between the lines, whispering the same devastating promise:
"You'll call again."
The line is dead, but the message is delivered. What should I do now