Chapter Text
The first time Luo Wenzhou receives flowers at the office, it is greeted by the entire Yancheng Criminal Investigation Team with equal parts bemusement and amusement. Lao Liang from the gatehouse brings it in with a peculiar look on his face but he is too nice to say anything, unlike certain team members.
They descend upon the mysterious delivery on the desk like crows sensing carrion, surrounding it from all sides. While it isn’t unheard of for the team to receive bouquets from victims or their family members as thanks for their work on a case, red roses aren’t normally the flower of choice.
Lang Qiao is the first to reach the object of interest, as she always does with gossip and food. She roots around until she pulls out a little card and reads: “‘In my heart, a cluster of flowers grows facing the burning sun’. It’s signed Fei.”
“Fei?” Tao Ran repeats, as at the same time Luo Wenzhou says, “What the hell?” and reaches over to grab the card out of her hands.
He stares at it for a while, bringing it closer to his eyes then lifting it up to examine it under the ceiling lights, but neither action yields any satisfactory explanation. In the end, he just tucks it into his pocket.
“Boss, you have a new boyfriend?” Lang Qiao pipes up, eyes shining with nosy interest. “You didn’t tell us!”
Luo Wenzhou glares. “I don’t have to tell you shit,” he says, then remembers to add, “and he’s not my boyfriend.”
“Future boyfriend?” For some reason that makes Lang Qiao even more excited.
“No.” Luo Wenzhou stares at the bouquet for another moment. “Take it apart and see if anything’s off.”
Then he stomps off to his office to the sound of Lang Qiao cooing in the background, “Ohhh, homoerotic nemesis!”
The bouquet ends up in little clumps of twos and threes, spread across the desks in the office in mugs and water bottles, with no sign of any secret message or listening device. Tao Ran brings one such clump to Luo Wenzhou’s office, and it remains on his desk until the petals begin to brown despite much grumbling.
The next day Fei Du texts Luo Wenzhou with an invitation to lunch. With no urgent cases needing attention, Luo Wenzhou accepts and calls out to Tao Ran in the main office. He refers to Fei Du as “the brat” to avoid giving more ammunition to the likes of Lang Qiao.
Lunch is at a restaurant on the top level of a nearby mall, fancier than the roadside mom-and-pops the team usually goes to (and in Luo Wenzhou’s opinion, not as good), but at least it’s still a place where normal people eat. Luo Wenzhou walks in after Tao Ran and sees that Fei Du is already there, looking at them with an unreadable expression. Then he blinks, and it’s replaced by a genial smile.
“What’s with the flowers?” Luo Wenzhou asks at one point during the meal.
Fei Du smiles his eyes into crescent moons and leans forward over the table, gaze piercing directly into Luo Wenzhou’s. “Wasn’t it clear from my card?”
Luo Wenzhou suddenly feels his goosebumps rising. “How would I know what kind of bullshit you’re up to?”
“I’m sure you’ll get there eventually, Captain Luo,” Fei Du says condescendingly, and Luo Wenzhou has the sudden urge to reach across the table and strangle him. Too bad there are too many brightly-coloured, chilli-filled dishes in the way.
Despite Fei Du being his usual annoying self, the rest of the meal passes without incident. Luo Wenzhou has almost forgotten about it all until near the end, after Tao Ran gets up to go to the washroom and Fei Du waves down a waiter for the bill.
“That was rude of you, Luo Wenzhou,” he says with one raised eyebrow and a tone of voice that means nothing good. “Always inviting a third wheel along. If you aren’t careful, you could give someone the wrong idea.”
Luo Wenzhou runs the words through his head a few times and still has trouble parsing it. “You mean Tao Ran? Since when do you not want to see him?” Then realizes there is more than one thing wrong with what Fei Du said. “What did you just call me? Respect your elders, say ‘Ge’!”
“Gege,” Fei Du returns without missing a beat, voice light and teasing and clearly inviting a slap upside the head.
The third wheel himself returns then, and Luo Wenzhou doesn’t get the chance to question Fei Du any more. But back at the office, he scrolls back through his phone to the last few times they had met up, and realizes that Fei Du had messaged him directly instead of the group chat every time.
The next week, Fei Du proposes to treat him to dinner. Despite the last conversation, he still pauses momentarily beside Tao Ran’s desk before leaving for the day, but the man himself waves him off.
“I’m not coming today. Fei Du said he has something he wants to talk to you about.”
There it is, Luo Wenzhou thinks. Fei Du’s head is like a labyrinth, with more thoughts and schemes and lines of logic (both twisted and otherwise) than anyone’s should. He doesn’t always say what he means, and sometimes you just have to give him some time to get there (though not too much).
Still, he can’t think of what Fei Du could possibly have to say that he can’t in front of Tao Ran.
Then, an image of the roses and their accompanying caption from the other week flashes through Luo Wenzhou’s mind. He shakes his head to clear it. Surely, the brat can’t be serious; he has always delighted in getting under Luo Wenzhou’s skin, and it seems like he has found a new, extremely effective tactic.
When he gets downstairs, Fei Du is waiting in front of the City Bureau gates, leaning against his obnoxious sports car parked right outside. He is holding another cursed bouquet of roses, this time in soft, snowy white.
Luo Wenzhou eyes them dubiously. “Did someone die?”
Fei Du sighs. “It’s so hard courting an uncivilized brute,” he says as he pushes the bouquet at Luo Wenzhou. “To those of us who are more refined, white roses mean pure, innocent love.”
Luo Wenzhou feels like he is simultaneously under attack on multiple fronts, and decides to focus on the one part of Fei Du’s words that he knows how to respond to. “You, innocent?”
To corroborate Luo Wenzhou’s words, Fei Du steps in close, grabs Luo Wenzhou’s hand and holds it around the stems of the roses. He leans forward to put his lips to the side of Luo Wenzhou’s head and whispers, so that his hot breath tickles the shell of his ear. “I can be as innocent as you like.”
Luo Wenzhou can’t help but take a sharp breath in, and ends up with a lungful of Fei Du’s woody cologne. It is just the right amount of musky, there but not overwhelming, and the scent sends a tingle down the nerves to his fingertips.
Luo Wenzhou shakes off the reaction and scowls. But before he can react with a shove or some other kind of low-grade violence, Fei Du steps back. In one smooth motion he pulls open the passenger side door and stands behind it, for all purposes appearing like a perfect gentleman. Luo Wenzhou glares at him for a second but soon realizes that in the situation he finds himself in — with an armful of roses, in front of (Luo Wenzhou realizes with chagrin) a good-looking man holding open the door to a fancy car, possibly under the eyes of nosy coworkers peering from above — the only way to maintain some dignity is to get in without making a fuss.
Despite knowing he is stepping into a trap, Luo Wenzhou is still disgruntled to find Fei Du pulling up to a high-end Western restaurant, the kind with dishes more for show than filling one’s stomach. The hostess greets Fei Du by name and leads them to a semi-secluded booth at one edge of the restaurant, where a candle is waiting along with another rose in a skinny, elegant vase.
“Really? Isn’t this overkill?” Luo Wenzhou says as he appraises the scene. “The lack of subtlety isn’t very classy, President Fei.”
“Sometimes one has to accommodate the people around him,” Fei Du replies sweetly.
Dinner turns out not to be as excruciating as Luo Wenzhou had imagined. The food is pretty good (for what it is) and while Luo Wenzhou was right that each portion is tiny, there is an obscene number of courses such that he can’t complain about being hungry either. He also gets to insult Fei Du’s taste, which the other man responds to in kind, and it almost feels like just a minor variation in routine.
Their easy banter is broken by two simultaneous buzzes. Fei Du trails off in the middle of his sentence as his eyes sweep over the screen of his phone where it is resting on the table. He freezes, and Luo Wenzhou immediately knows it isn’t a message from Tao Ran; he digs his own phone out of his pocket and sees the notification: “Zero Degree Reading: The Red and the Black, Chapter 1. Brought to you by the Reciter.”
When Luo Wenzhou lifts his gaze again, all signs of teasing have vanished from Fei Du’s demeanor. “They’re back.” Fei Du murmurs. “Has something happened?”
“Nothing today. Not that we’ve gotten word of, at least.”
Fei Du tightens his lips, and Luo Wenzhou doesn’t need to be a mind reader to know what he is thinking: Not yet.
He reaches out to pat Fei Du’s hand where it’s clenched on top of the table. “If something comes in, I’ll let you know.”
Fei Du nods. For a moment, his eyes remain sharp and his posture rigid. Then with a blink of his long lashes, his gaze softens and his lips curve. He raises an eyebrow and glances down at where Luo Wenzhou’s hand is still resting on top of his.
Luo Wenzhou jerks back. Fei Du lets out a tinkling laugh and Luo Wenzhou curses internally at his own reaction. It had been a perfectly innocent gesture, one he had made without a second thought for seven years; how did Fei Du manage to make him feel embarrassed about it?
After dinner, Fei Du insists on not only dropping off Luo Wenzhou but walking him up to his apartment. Luo Wenzhou is jittery the whole time as they walk across the parking lot and up the stairs, each step feeling like another tick in a countdown.
Act normal, he orders himself. It isn’t like he is a stranger to being hit on, and Fei Du is an annoying kid who likes to flirt with pretty things for kicks. He knows that if he can just manage to not react then Fei Du will get tired of this game soon.
“Are you coming in?” He asks as he opens his door, hoping his tone is somewhere in the vicinity of nonchalant.
Fei Du pauses at the threshold and looks at him, again with that piercing gaze. Then he seems to come to a decision and smiles. “Not today. I wait until the second date at least.”
Luo Wenzhou rolls his eyes at the blatant lie, knowing full well what Fei Du is like. “There’s no second date. Or first date,” he says even as he silently admits that he has somehow let Fei Du con him into one. Still, that moment of hesitation has him a little concerned, reminding him of the excruciating task of drawing out Fei Du’s secrets. So even though he knows he might be setting himself another trap, he asks, “Tao Ran said you wanted to talk about something?”
Fei Du grins, a sharp-edged one that is all tease and no pretense, and Luo Wenzhou immediately knows Fei Du has already accomplished what he had set out to do tonight. He is expecting some atrocious line and gets ready to tell him to fuck off. He is not expecting Fei Du to dart forward and drop a peck on his lips then step back just as quickly.
“Good night, Ge. Dream of me!” Fei Du says with a cheery wink then saunters off, leaving Luo Wenzhou standing there frozen and his heart suddenly beating out of his chest.