The knot deflates slowly, and the moment Bael pulls out, my legs decide they’re done working.

I would have gone straight to the floor if he hadn’t caught me.

He turns me around, kisses me once, brief and almost businesslike, then tries to deposit me on the desk like I’m something he’s finished with.

I don’t let go.

My arms wrap around his waist before I even decide to do it, my face pressing against his chest, and I just... stay there. Listening to his heartbeat, which is still not entirely steady, which makes me feel marginally better about the state I’m in.

He’s quiet for a moment.

I can feel him deciding whether to bother arguing about it.

"What now," he says finally, and it’s not really a question. His hand comes up anyway, patting my head with the particular patience of someone who has accepted their situation. "You’ve already taken half my day. You’re still not going to let me work?"

"N... no."

A pause.

Then his hand moves through my hair, once, unhurried.

"Runze."

"Mm."

"Let go."

I do. Reluctantly, slowly, like my arms need separate convincing from my brain.

He steps back and I watch him put himself back together with that maddening efficiency he applies to everything.

Shirt straightened, cufflinks found and fastened, jacket retrieved from wherever it landed. In under two minutes he looks exactly like Bael Wuchen, CEO, and not at all like someone who just had me bent over his desk.

I’m still leaning against said desk because the floor remains a genuine possibility.

He reaches for his phone and makes a call in that clipped decisive way he has, like the last two hours didn’t happen and his afternoon is entirely on schedule.

"Bring the car around," he tells the driver. "Five minutes."

"Why?" I ask.

"You’re going home."

I blink at him. "You’re kicking me out?"

"I’m sending you home." He pockets his phone. "You submitted the designs. You’re clearly not dying. You’ve been here long enough."

Something shifts in my chest at that.

Something I don’t have a name for and don’t try to find one. 𝙛𝒓𝒆𝙚𝒘𝒆𝓫𝙣𝓸𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝒄𝒐𝓶

He was worried.

That’s the part that keeps snagging, that I can’t quite move past.

Bael had arranged for me to come here directly after the submission. Not because it was convenient. Not because of anything practical I can point at and say, yes, that makes sense, that’s just efficiency.

Just because today was the day, and apparently that mattered enough to rearrange his afternoon around.

I don’t know what to do with that information so I leave it where it is. Filed away with everything else about Bael that I’ve stopped trying to interpret because it never lands anywhere comfortable.

"So you can go home," he continues, "and stop distracting me."

"I was barely here an hour."

"Two and a half."

"That’s not—"

"The car will be ready in five minutes." A brief pause. "Go rest. You’ve been pushing yourself too hard for weeks."

I open my mouth.

Close it.

The argument dissolves before I can locate it.

"Fine," I say.

***

I sleep most of the drive home.

Drifting in and out, aware of the city moving past the tinted windows, of sunlight shifting across my face in slow warm intervals, of the faint ache settling into my body that falls somewhere between soreness and satisfaction.

Not entirely unpleasant.

The estate is quiet when we pull through the gates, that particular afternoon stillness where even the grounds seem unhurried.

I get out of the car on steadier legs than I had an hour ago and stand there for a moment just breathing in the garden air.

Mrs. Wen appears in the entrance before I reach it, which means someone called ahead. Bael probably, or Shen Rui on his behalf.

Of course.

"Young Master." She looks me over the way she always does, quick and thorough and pretending she isn’t. "Lunch?"

"Maybe later."

She gives me the look that means it’s arriving in an hour regardless of what I say.

"I’m fine, Mrs. Wen."

"Of course you are." She holds the door open. "Your room is ready."

I head upstairs.

My room is exactly as I left it this morning.

Desk cleared, competition files gone, everything returned to the kind of neutral order that only exists when you’ve been too consumed by one thing to make a mess of anything else.

I sit on the edge of the bed and look around at the empty surfaces.

No sketches to revise.

No calculations to recheck for the fifth time.

No deadline ticking steadily at the back of my skull like something I couldn’t turn off no matter how tired I got.

Just... nothing.

The absence of urgency is strange in a way I wasn’t expecting.

Like putting down something heavy you’ve been carrying long enough that you stopped registering the weight, and now your arms don’t know what to do without it. I keep waiting for the next thing.

The next problem demanding attention, the next adjustment, the next reason to sit back down at that desk.

Nothing comes.

Two weeks until the results.

Two weeks of waiting with nothing to occupy my hands except trying not to think too hard about whether it was good enough.

Whether the circulation design reads the way I intended, whether the sustainability metrics are strong enough, whether the judges will see what I was trying to do with the green corridors or just mark it as unconventional and move on.

I should use the time for something. Read, sketch something new just for myself, call Ling Yue back about the coffee he mentioned weeks ago. Sleep a full night for the first time in what feels like longer than I want to calculate.

I lie back against the pillows instead.

The ceiling is the same ceiling it always is.

My body is heavy in that specific way it gets when exhaustion has been accumulating for so long it finally wins, warm and slow, every muscle deciding simultaneously that today is where they stop.

The competition is submitted. The designs are out of my hands. Nothing I do in the next two weeks changes what’s already sitting in that folder at DingShan’s offices.

It’s done.

The afternoon light comes through the curtains soft and unhurried, and somewhere in the quiet of the room I notice that the thing that’s been coiled tight in my chest for weeks has finally loosened.

Just slightly.

Just enough that breathing feels like less effort than it did this morning.

I close my eyes.

Sleep finds me before I finish deciding whether to fight it, pulling me under the way it does when your body has simply been waiting for you to stop arguing with it.