CH 51

Jiang Xu stiffened for a moment and stopped in his tracks. A subtle look flickered in his eyes, but then it was instantly replaced with disgust: “Isn’t it shameless to say such things to a man like me?”

“Don’t be stuck on the gender.” Shen Fangyu handed him the warmed-up dish.

The two of them went for a meal of a few thousand yuan and ended up eating it as a box lunch.

The news came through from the ICU that Wang Qin’s condition had basically stabilized, and the family, who were perhaps tired or just happy, had calmed down considerably; although they were still cursing and swearing, they were at least not yelling about going after Shen Fangyu.

Jiang Xu sent a WeChat message to Tang Ke and returned to his(Jiang Xu) house amidst a barrage of question marks from the other party.

Shen Fangyu had just changed his slippers when Jiang Xu whisked him off to the bathroom. He was sweating like he had been fished out of the water due to the efforts to save Wang Qin.

Jiang Xu was afraid he would catch a cold, so he originally asked him to take a shower at the hospital after eating, but Shen Fangyu refused, insisting that he accompany him home before he would take a shower, saying, “I’m afraid you’ll run away while I’m in the shower.”

Jiang Xu didn’t know where Shen Fangyu had gotten his childish temperament from.

Shen Fangyu had brought back both the roses and the rabbit costume, and they were now placed on the coffee table. Jiang Xu was uncomfortable with the mess on the coffee table and walked into the bedroom with the head stuffed with the costume in his left hand and the roses in his right.

He straightened the rabbit head and placed it by the window. The big rabbit happened to be at an angle where it could look at the little rabbit on the bed, which looked extra cute. He thought for a long time and concluded that Shen Fangyu would not be scared of the rabbit suit he had worn himself, so he patted the rabbit’s head and decided to leave it in the bedroom.

As for the roses ……

Jiang Xu looked down at the buds in full bloom, most of the bright red petals were blooming enthusiastically, except for the outermost petals, which had been tossed around for too long and were probably a little dehydrated and showing signs of wilting and yellowing.

He washed the empty vase In the study, took the flowers out of the wrapping paper, and stuffed them into the water-filled vase. The fragrance of the flowers was so refreshing that Jiang Xu thought it would be good for relieving fatigue, so he put the bouquet in the study.

Ever since Shen Fangyu had moved in, Jiang Xu’s study had been divided into two. The original solid wood table for one person had been set up with two computers, and Shen Fangyu had bought a chair and a bookend to sit opposite Jiang Xu.

Jiang Xu placed the vase of flowers where the two computers touched and took another step back to survey the layout. After a long time of evaluation, Jiang felt that the bouquet seemed a little too close to his right hand and would easily get bumped into.

He stepped forward, Intending to adjust the position of the vase, but his hand accidentally touched Shen Fangyu’s file bag.

He subconsciously looked over and found that in his absence these days, Shen Fangyu’s papers were a mess and scattered all over the desk.

He didn’t care much about the tidiness in his bedroom, but he valued a well-organized office, where good sorting and arrangement helped him find the information he wanted more quickly, so both his office at the hospital and his study at home was very neatly tidied up.

Jiang Xu had mentioned this to Shen Fangyu when he first moved his things over, and when he was there, Shen Fangyu had always kept his papers well organized.

Jiang Xu knew that Shen Fangyu kept folders like this for difficult cases, that he would collect a lot of information before surgery and put it into a kraft paper bag, and he had a stack of these kraft paper bags next to his computer before.

However, while he was not here, Shen Fangyu had obviously become lawless, and the kraft paper bags were scattered all over the table, with no intention of being cleaned up.

Jiang Xu had planned to leave, but his obsession with tidying the papers made him unable to look away, so he sighed and shook his head, reaching out to help Shen Fangyu stack the kraft paper bags together and fold them neatly.

Most of the bags had numbers or initials of various diseases on them, but when he reached the most superficial one, Jiang Xu’s fingertips suddenly stopped.

The paper bag was very thick, and there was neither a bed number nor an abbreviation for the name of the disease on the cover, only the two letters “JX”.

Jiang Xu often had to write his own initials, so he was very sensitive to these two letters and immediately associated them with himself.

He didn’t think Shen Fangyu would start compiling his data so early, as he had nothing to compile.

Still, he opened the bag with a hint of suspicion and planned to close it immediately if he found it had nothing to do with him.

At the top was an A4 printout of an email addressed to ‘Dear Prof. Shen’.

He dropped his eyes and read it.

“Hello, regarding your inquiry about the male pregnancy case ……”

Jiang Xu took out all the documents straight away.

The person who addressed this email was familiar to Jiang Xu, and he remembered that he was one of the lead surgeons in those failed surgical cases he had checked. He took away this piece of paper to reveal the next one, which was still a reply to an email. He flipped through it page by page, finding that the senders of those emails included almost all the doctors he had looked up about male pregnancy cases.

They each talked about their own failed surgical experiences, and some included erased copies of the patient’s pathology reports, some of whom were not even the first or corresponding authors but merely participants in the surgery.

He never thought that Shen Fangyu had actually gone and emailed those people one by one to ask them.

The articles covered a wide range of countries and a large number of people, all at different institutions, so it was actually quite a tedious task to link them up, and although there was value in reflecting on the failed cases, the effective information they could provide was far less than the successful ones.

But knowing that it was a drop in the bucket and a tedious inconvenience, Shen Fangyu still set aside a large chunk of his time to do it.

Jiang Xu roughly calculated that, according to the date, Shen Fangyu’s first letter had come just a day or two after their first discussion about the pregnancy.

Further down the page were copies of his entire prenatal examination results, with the occasional annotation on them. At the bottom was Dr Kenn’s article, which was most heavily marked, with dense small print in the margins of the page. It also had Shen Fangyu’s analysis of the case and notes from the video of the surgery pressed underneath the article. The notes were more detailed than what he had said at the department meeting that day, all the way down to the last minute in the video.

Jiang Xu thought there wasn’t a second more perfectly organized and analyzed medical case in the world.

He put the document back into the kraft paper bag, and his dazed gaze drifted around the study, finally settling aimlessly on the bouquet of roses in full bloom.

Jiang Xu suddenly thought that maybe the 250 gold medal teacher Shen Fangyu had hired had something to do with him. Although yellow roses were recognized as apology flowers, the red roses were so bright that they caught his eye like a red heart cut open in front of him, so sincere and honest that he couldn’t help but be moved.

When Jiang Xu returned to the bedroom after his shower, Shen Fangyu was already asleep on the floor. He was so exhausted today that he fell asleep almost as soon as he hit the pillow.

Jiang Xu took a glance at his bed, which was still the same as when he had left it.

When he was here, Shen Fangyu used to come and harass him, trying to lie on his bed in every way possible, exaggerating how difficult it was to lie on the floor and how it made all his bones ache.

When he wasn’t there, Shen Fangyu didn’t touch his bed at all.

Jiang Xu glanced at Shen Fangyu, who was sleeping so soundly. He hadn’t even blow-dried his hair, and it was damply resting on his forehead. He had his arms over his closed eyes, and Jiang Xu wondered if it was because the light was too harsh before he went to bed.

In fact, he could have turned out the light or put it into sleep mode before he slept. Jiang Xu muttered to himself, ‘He is not night blind, he can see even if the lights are off, and if he couldn’t, he could still use a torch.’

Even when he was studying in the past, he had never had a roommate as careful as Shen Fangyu: he would knock on the door before he entered, he would ask him about the laundry, he would never turn off the lights as long as he didn’t say he was going to sleep, and when he was working, Shen Fangyu would go to the balcony for video conferences.

Jiang Xu didn’t feel the slightest bit self-conscious at that time. It was he who had set these rules, and now he changed them without any psychological burden: “Actually, you don’t have to be so polite.”

Shen Fangyu was sleeping soundly, and when he heard him speak, he opened his eyes in a daze, but closed them again when he saw that nothing was wrong, and hummed a few times.

Jiang Xu turned off the light with an expressionless face.

He did not sleep peacefully that night. First, he had some inexplicable insomnia, and then, not long after he had fallen asleep, his body was once again visited by a cramp that had not appeared for a long time.

He woke up from his sleep with a muffled groan as he clutched his stiff leg. He took a deep breath, but the cramp showed no sign of recovery.

As usual, he would have thrown the rabbit on Shen Fangyu’s bed, and the latter would have woken up to give him a leg massage, but today… Jiang Xu thought of his exhausted appearance and decided to let him sleep more.

But Shen Fangyu woke up on his own.

He sat next to Jiang Xu’s bed, his eyes still closed, as his hand fumbled into the warm quilt and massaged his leg, asking while still half asleep, “Why didn’t you call me?”

“How did you know?”

Shen Fangyu pressed firmly, dissolving the sharp pain in no time. He slowly woke up from his drowsy state and answered, “The sound of your breathing was different.”

Jiang Xu’s heart suddenly fluttered.

“Shen Fangyu,” he sat up, “I want to talk to you about something.”

“Mmm?”

Shen Fangyu answered him very softly, not sure if it was because he was sleepy and confused, but his tone seemed gentle.

Jiang Xu covered Shen Fangyu’s eyes with one hand and turned on the sleeping light beside the bed with the other.

Shen Fangyu adjusted to the bright light for a while and said to Jiang Xu, “I’m fine now.”

Jiang Xu let go of his hand and looked into his sleepy, dazed eyes.

“I want to give birth to the baby.” Jiang Xu said.

“Give birth… give birth?!”

Shen Fangyu was suddenly awake, even his speech was much clearer. “You ……” he hesitated, as if he didn’t quite believe what he was hearing. “Are you serious?”

Jiang Xu let out an “mmm.”

“Why?” Shen Fangyu did not understand, “Now you can have the surgery, you don’t have to just wait to have the baby a few months later. Do you not trust my skills?” He said, “I got my visa too, if you don’t trust me, I’ll go with you to country M. You don’t have to worry about the money; I’ll talk to the agent about lowering the price of the house again, it should sell faster.”

Jiang Xu glanced at him and turned his face away. “There’s no evidence that giving birth is more dangerous.”

“But you,” Shen Fangyu’s brain crashed, not understanding what Jiang Xu meant for a moment, “you…”

Before Shen Fangyu could add another “you,” Jiang Xu interrupted him, “Or do you not want that?”

“I ……” Shen Fangyu’s voice paused, he was silent for a moment, then he raised his eyes and said, “You are the one who is pregnant, you are the only one who is qualified to make the decision. The choice is now there, and it’s not like that time when we were desperate before. You don’t have to consider my opinion; everything is subject to you. I respect you, and if you don’t want it, then it’s okay.”

Jiang Xu looked at him for a long time, then he suddenly pressed Shen Fangyu’s hand to his lower abdomen, looking straight into his eyes, “Then listen carefully, Shen Fangyu,” he said. “I want her.”

The soft touch fell Into Shen Fangyu’s palm, and a warm fire burned all the way to the sky, his pupils plummeting as he looked at Jiang Xu in disbelief.

“Jiang Xu ……”

As soon as the words left his mouth, he suddenly felt a slight but distinct pushing sensation on his hand. The hand is extraordinarily full of nerves, and even though the bump was fleeting, Shen Fangyu still felt it. He jerked his eyes up and bumped into the subtlety and surprise in Jiang Xu’s eyes, which he couldn’t retract in time.

Jiang Xu felt it too, like a small fish spitting bubbles of delight, or a butterfly breaking out of its cocoon and flapping its pretty wings for the first time. Xiaoxiao in his stomach was announcing her presence for the first time and letting them know that she could no longer be ignored.

“Do you think …… she can understand us?” Jiang Xu suddenly said.

On the night when both parents had willingly decided to give birth to her, the first fetal movement of the more than four-month-old baby appeared, and the child, who was finally welcomed, rejoiced in his stomach, overjoyed at being expected and joyfully tugging at the hearts of her two fathers.

Jiang Xu suddenly raised his hand and gave Shen Fangyu a brief but sincere hug.