The smell hit me before I even opened the front door, and my stomach clenched so hard I had to stop walking.
The tantalizing scent of meat and rice welcomed me inside with open arms and I promised myself, I would never leave it again as I dropped my shopping bags on the floor.
I didn't want to look like a dog drooling over food so I tried to breathe through my nose, tried to remember that this was just food, and that I could handle food like some civilized lady who had never been hungry a day in her life.
That was going to be hard for me, considering that I spent ten years of my life surviving on scraps and stolen garbage and whatever I could scavenge before someone else got to it first.
Control. I needed to have control.
But when my stomach started to knot in on itself, demanding that I go to the room that smelled the best, I forced my legs to move and walked toward the dining room.
The massive table in the center of the room was loaded with more food than I'd seen in one place in years.
There was roasted chicken with crispy skin that glistened under the chandelier light, steamed vegetables that were arranged in picture perfect rows, and rice in a bowl big enough to feed six people.
That wasn't even counting the soup that smelled like ginger and something I couldn't name but wanted desperately or the dumplings that were stacked on a plate like they were infinite.
It stunned me that people lived like this... that to them... this was normal.
Xu Zhenlan stood at the head of the table with his hands in his pockets, watching me with an expression I couldn't quite read.
"I thought you might be hungry," he said, his voice calm and controlled. He still seemed to be talking to me like I was a wild animal that would bite him at any moment, but it was probably smart.
If he got between me and all this food, I couldn't promise not to bite.
I stared at the food and felt something crack inside my chest.
My hands were already moving before my brain caught up to their actions. I reached for the chopsticks closest to me as I pulled out a chair with the other hand. I sat down without asking permission, but I really couldn't have been bothered.
Even if Xu ZhenIan said I couldn't eat, I was going to eat.
Not paying attention to anyone else in the room, I started eating and couldn't stop.
The chicken was tender enough to fall apart under my chopsticks. The rice was perfect—not too sticky, not too dry. The dumplings were hot enough to burn my tongue and I didn't care.
I ate like someone was going to take it away, because that was all I knew.
Xu Zhenlan sat down across from me but didn't eat. He just watched with that careful expression, like he was trying to understand what I was doing and why.
Not wanting to make him suspicious, I forced myself to slow down, to chew properly, to breathe between bites like a normal person... the like OG Rouxi.
Unfortunately for me, it didn't work.
Instead, my chopsticks moved faster. My bowl emptied and I refilled it without thinking, without asking, without caring what he thought of me.
"Rouxi."
I looked up and tried to focus on his face instead of the food.
"I wanted to apologize," he continued, picking up his own chopsticks and reaching for a dumpling. I had to fight back the urge to punch him and take his food. This dinner was a lot harder than it looked.
"For grounding you. I overreacted."
I blinked for a second, not sure if I missed something while I was daydreaming. Oh... he was apologizing... again.
Right.
I swallowed a mouthful of rice that was too big and felt it scrape down my throat. "Got it," I replied before starting to stuff my face again.
He frowned like that wasn't the response he'd been expecting. "I know you're upset—"
"I'm not."
"You didn't spend all the money I gave you. That clearly means that you haven't forgiven me and that you are upset."
I reached for another dumpling and bit into it as I tried to figure out the logic of his statement. "I didn't spend the money because I didn't see what I wanted."
He didn't seem to understand what I was saying, and I could see it in the way his eyebrows drew together, in the way his mouth tightened at the corners.
He thought I was still mad about being grounded when in reality, I could not have cared less about it.
Seriously, I wasn't mad.
I was eating.
Forcing myself away from the food, I put down my chopsticks before I could make an even bigger fool of myself and looked around the room instead of at the table.
The main floor was a lot bigger than I'd thought, with hallways leading in different directions that had been hidden from me this morning when I had first come downstairs.
I would definitely have to explore the house more thoroughly because if it was a big as it was promising to be, I really did die and went to heaven.
When the apocalypse hit—and it would hit, I knew it would—this might be a place I could actually call home.
I'd been toying with the idea since I woke up, but now that I was fed, now that my stomach was full and my hands had stopped shaking, it felt a lot more realistic.
This house was massive. Big enough to secure against anyone, living or dead and big enough to stock up so well that I wouldn't run out of supplies for years. The security system was already in place, not that it would work after a few years, but the walls were solid, the location was good—far enough from the city center to avoid the initial chaos, and it was close enough to supply routes that I could make runs when I needed to.
And Xu Zhenlan and Zhou Chenghai would be dead by then. Or zombies. Either way, they wouldn't need the house anymore.
I'd have it all to myself. Food. Shelter. Space to store everything I could hoard before the world ended. The dimensional storage space in my hair stick would help, but this house—this fortress—would be the real prize.
Meilan's voice echoed in my head from a lifetime ago. 'In your next life, stay home.'
Now, I never took advice from a friend, let alone an enemy... but she just might have a point.
Settled now, I picked up my bowl and drank the last of the soup, feeling the warmth spread through my chest and settle in my stomach like a promise.
Xu Zhenlan was still watching me with that careful expression, waiting for me to say something that made sense to him, something that fit into his understanding of teenage girls and their emotions.
I set the bowl down and met his eyes. "Thanks for dinner."
He blinked. "That's it?"
"That's it."
He looked like he wanted to say more, like he was waiting for an argument or an apology or some kind of emotional breakdown that would let him fix whatever he thought was broken. But I didn't have anything else to give him.
"I'm going to bed," I announced and left the dining room and climbed the stairs.
With a full stomach, a plan started to form in my head as I thought about supply runs, about how much I could hoard before anyone noticed, about how long it would take to fill the dimensional space completely.
I wasn't thinking about how to get along with others or stop myself from repeating the mistakes of my past, I was thinking about what I needed to do to sit on the couch and never move again.
Meilan told me to stay home.
And for the first time in my life... I was going to listen to someone's advice.