Chapter 295: HE WAS MY RAP*ST

Yet the man standing before him now looked as though that composure had been stripped away piece by piece, leaving behind someone who seemed unable to hear the relentless buzzing of the phone still trapped inside his own hand.

Following Guiying’s unfocused gaze, Fu Pei slowly lowered his eyes until they settled upon the sentence that had halted the scrolling.

There wasn’t a single photograph attached to support the accusation, nor any evidence capable of convincing a rational person that such a thing had ever happened.

Yet, those few words sat quietly among thousands of comments with a cruelty that made every other rumor seem almost insignificant.

They didn’t need proof because they appealed to something far easier to spread than truth.

They appealed to disgust. Another notification appeared.

@Anonymous884: Incest. Pregnancy. Abortion. He should’ve disappeared years ago.

Another.

@NewsToday: Sources claim more victims may come forward.

Another.

@CoffeeAndMelons: Watch him cry and play the victim tomorrow.

Fu Pei frowned.

The comment section had become so detached from reality that it no longer resembled a discussion.

It resembled a crowd waiting impatiently for another stone to throw, every person scrambling to make their insult sharper than the last in the hope of earning a few hundred likes from strangers who would forget both the comment and its author before the day was over.

He instinctively reached towards Guiying, intending to take the phone away before another notification appeared.

Yet, the instant his fingertips brushed lightly against the sleeve of Guiying’s shirt, the latter recoiled so violently that the movement happened before conscious thought had the chance to catch up with it.

The phone slipped several centimeters through trembling fingers before being caught again, while Guiying himself stared blankly ahead with uneven breaths that sounded increasingly labored, his shoulders remaining rigid long after Fu Pei had already withdrawn his hand as though his body had mistaken a familiar touch for something else entirely.

Fu Pei’s expression gradually changed. He didn’t understand what Guiying was remembering.

He didn’t know why those few words had shattered him when accusations of murder, infidelity, and countless fabricated pregnancies hadn’t managed to provoke so much as a frown.

He only knew that the man standing beside him wasn’t reading Weibo anymore. Whatever Guiying was seeing...

...it wasn’t on the screen.

Fu Pei remained where he was, his eyes never leaving Guiying as the latter continued staring at the darkened phone screen without so much as blinking.

He had already locked it moments ago, yet Guiying’s gaze never shifted away, as though those words had burned themselves into the back of his mind, refusing to disappear even after the screen itself had gone black.

The bedroom felt unnaturally quiet, every sound beyond the closed door fading into the distance while the man standing before him seemed to drift further away with every passing second.

He had never seen Guiying like this.

Even when the Xue family cornered him, even when reporters shoved microphones into his face, or when Shen Zihao had done everything possible to destroy his reputation, Guiying had always stood his ground with that infuriating composure of his, smiling when everyone expected him to lose his temper and speaking with a calmness that unsettled the people trying to provoke him.

Fu Pei had once joked that nothing in the world could shake him, yet the person standing in front of him now looked as though something invisible had reached inside his chest and quietly hollowed him out.

"Guiying."

He called him once, keeping his voice deliberately soft, hoping the familiar sound would pull him back. Still, the only response he received was another uneven breath as Guiying’s lips parted slightly before closing again.

Whatever he wanted to say never reached his voice, leaving him standing there with his eyes fixed on nothing at all while the fingers hanging stiffly at his side trembled so faintly that most people would have missed it.

Fu Pei resisted the urge to ask another question.

Some instincts didn’t need explaining.

He stayed where he was, allowing the silence to settle naturally between them because every attempt to rush someone out of panic only buried them deeper inside it, and something about Guiying’s expression told him he wasn’t refusing to answer.

He genuinely couldn’t.

Time passed without either of them noticing.

Guiying’s breathing gradually became steadier than before, though every inhale still sounded strained, as if the simple act of drawing air into his lungs required conscious effort.

His eyes remained lowered, fixed upon the floorboards beneath his feet until they slowly blurred together with another place entirely, somewhere Fu Pei couldn’t see but had suddenly become painfully aware existed.

"...It wasn’t..."

The words escaped so quietly that Fu Pei almost believed he’d imagined them.

Guiying swallowed hard, the movement visible against the tense line of his throat, before trying again with a voice that sounded raw enough to make every syllable seem painful.

"It wasn’t like that."

Fu Pei never interrupted him. He knew better than to fill a silence someone else was struggling to cross.

Guiying’s hands gradually curled into fists, the fabric of his sleeves wrinkling beneath fingers that no longer seemed aware of how tightly they were gripping.

At the same time, his breathing once again lost its rhythm under the weight of memories that had remained buried for so many years they no longer felt like memories at all.

"They..." His voice faltered before he forced himself to continue. "They turned it into... something else."

Fu Pei followed every word without speaking, watching Guiying’s gaze remain fixed somewhere beyond the room as though he wasn’t talking to another person anymore but trying to convince himself that what had happened all those years ago had been real, that he hadn’t imagined it, and that the pain he still carried belonged to something that had truly existed.

"He wasn’t my lover."

The sentence came out almost instinctively, spoken with the certainty of someone correcting a lie that should never have existed in the first place.

Guiying drew another shaky breath before continuing, his voice dropping so low that it was little more than a whisper.

"I never... chose any of it." The room became quiet again.

Fu Pei lowered his eyes without meaning to, his gaze settling upon Guiying’s hands before slowly lifting back to his face.

He had spent years believing that some wounds healed simply because people stopped talking about them, yet the man standing before him looked as though time had never passed at all, as though every attempt to move forward had merely buried the past beneath enough work and enough smiles to keep it hidden until someone cruel enough decided to dig it back up.

Guiying finally closed his eyes.

When he spoke again, there was no anger left in his voice, only an exhaustion so deep that it sounded older than the years he had spent carrying.

"He was my rapist."

Fu Pei’s fingers tightened unconsciously around the phone, still resting in his hand.

He wanted to say something. Anything.

But the words refused to come.

Every question he had been ready to ask, every explanation he thought he needed, every assumption he’d almost made disappeared so completely that all he could do was look at Guiying and understand, perhaps for the first time since they had met, that there were some scars another person could spend an entire lifetime hiding without anyone ever realizing they existed.

Then the phone in Fu Pei’s hand vibrated.

The sharp sound cut cleanly through the silence.

The caller ID lit up. Liu Liuxian.