Chapter 079: Su Qingying’s Hidden Trait

Chapter 079: Su Qingying’s Hidden Trait

Su Qingying was a little wild. She didn’t know how to kiss. She was simply wild.

This was an act that could bring down the image she had maintained for years, and every ray of light around her, in one stroke. The nearer someone stood to perfection, the less they could afford a flaw, and once a flaw appeared, everything collapsed with it.

Ordinary people, even people who already had serious problems, didn’t face this.

Consider a bad man who had done a great many bad things, and then suddenly began doing good. Everyone around him would say a prodigal returned was worth more than gold. For a bad man to turn good, even to become a Buddha, was too easy. Put down the butcher’s knife and you could become a Buddha on the spot.

But a good person…

Let a good person who had done too much good suddenly do one bad thing, one thing the people around them couldn’t accept, and it was a fall from heaven to hell. They would say it had all been an act. That this was what she’d really been all along. That every good thing before it had been fake.

Su Qingying had carried the weight of being that kind of “good person” her whole life. The burden on her was far, far too heavy. It pressed down until she could hardly breathe.

She had been sick of it for a long time.

“Ssss—” Wu Chen sucked in a sharp breath and shoved her back. He touched the corner of his mouth, then looked at his fingertip. Blood.

“If you’re going to kiss me, kiss me. Why the biting?” He pressed the corner of his mouth again. It wasn’t bad, but it had bled.

Pushed back into her seat, Su Qingying stared straight at him, her breathing violent. Then she came at him again, arms around his neck, kissing him.

“Hold on. No, no, no. Wait a second—” He pushed her off twice in a row, and each time she came right back and wound herself around him again.

“Can you calm down for one second?”

Smack!

A crisp slap.

He hadn’t hit her hard, in fact. Su Qingying still had to be seen in public; there could be no mark on her face.

But inside the sealed cabin of the car, the slap was genuinely loud.

Her left cheek reddened at once under it.

She covered her face and went obedient in an instant. It was her left cheek he’d struck, yet her whole face was red, red straight through. Her breathing was very fast. She pressed her legs together in a way that wasn’t natural and turned to look at him, her eyes… very distinctive.

No resentment. No anger. No disbelief. Instead… a trace of anticipation.

“Are you sick or something?” Wu Chen snapped, and reached out and pinched her arm.

She flinched back from the pain and covered the spot where he’d pinched.

It really hurt.

And still she stared straight at him, her face redder, red enough to drip, her eyes still that… distinctive.

Wu Chen had slapped her on purpose. He had pinched her on purpose too.

He wasn’t actually angry. It was deliberate.

Wu Chen wasn’t the kind of man who hit women whenever his temper went. What kind of man would that be? But if a woman wanted to be hit… that was a different matter.

This was Su Qingying’s unspeakable secret.

She was an M.

The M in S and M.

Those two letters were, in fact, the initials of two men’s names.

One was an eighteenth-century French nobleman, in full Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, known as the Marquis de Sade. He was famous for certain books and certain social scandals. He was a sadist, and his breakthrough work was The 120 Days of Sodom, which was later adapted into a banned film ranked first among the world’s ten banned films.

The other was the nineteenth-century Austrian writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whose Venus in Furs told the story of a slave-and-master love built on cruelty. Its influence was enormous, and it circulated widely.

S came from the Marquis de Sade’s name, and stood for sadism.

M came from the writer Masoch’s name, and stood for masochism.

Su Qingying was an M.

Wu Chen knew.

She had discovered this trait in herself three years ago, by chance. After a long stretch of punishing work, to bleed off the pressure of family, social obligation, work, and everything else, she went down to the fitness room at home to hit the sandbag.

The female bodyguard attending her offered a few casual pointers, explaining how to generate force behind a punch. Su Qingying got interested and wanted to spar with her in the ring.

They actually fought. The bodyguard went easy on her and was very careful, but still slipped up.

That was the first time in Su Qingying’s entire life that she had ever been struck. And that sensation… she had found a certain pleasure in it.

It felt good. Her own words.

The reason Wu Chen knew it so precisely, knew how she had discovered it, down to the details, was that Su Qingying had told him all of it herself.

That was during the loop, after one of the times he had taken her down.

That was how she found her “hidden trait.”

But she never sparred with anyone again after that, and never hit the sandbag again either.

Because after the bodyguard’s slip, her mother found out and forbade the training, forbade the sandbag. Keep at it long enough and visible definition would appear in her arms, and that would ruin her perfection.

So afterward Su Qingying used other means, more than once, to verify the trait.

She pinched herself. She pushed a needle into her own finger. She even bought candles in secret and let the scalding wax drip onto her arm.

She confirmed she had the tendency.

Perhaps it came of being controlled too harshly. Perhaps she had repressed herself so long that things had turned into their opposite at the extreme. In those slender threads of pain she found a sense of belonging. It eased her pressure, released her feelings, let her relax, even enjoy.

Once she was certain, she had been afraid. Terrified. She thought she was a deviant.

She had searched online for a great deal of material on the subject.

A great deal.

Including some related films.

Only then did the fear gradually loosen.

While she was reading, she also came upon a forum. A gathering place, in effect. The people on it were either S or M, and there were many just like her.

The posts were all bound up with these things.

Some were looking for partners. Some described their confusion. Some believed they were deviants and were seeking acceptance. There were videos of “completed tasks,” and text along the same lines.

Su Qingying watched the forum quietly, in private, for a long time. She read and never spoke. The very few times she replied, it was under posts seeking acceptance, encouraging people as frightened and lost as she was.

It went on that way for a full year.

Until two years ago.

Su Qingying finally made her first post. Her only post.

A full three thousand words.

In it she set out her confusion and mentioned her family—not their background, only how they treated her. There was a great deal of unguarded venting about her family and the other people around her.

She even voiced despair about her life, calling herself an exquisitely dressed puppet.

She vented above all about her mother: traditional, immovable, overbearing, with an overwhelming need for control.

And yes, she mentioned her hidden trait too. The whole point of the post was release, so she said everything she should have said and everything she shouldn’t. Online, facing strangers rather than people in the flesh, where no one knew anyone and no one could possibly know who she was, she dared to say it.

She said she wanted to fall in love. She wanted to be hit. She wished the people around her would stop handling her so carefully, stop holding her up so high. She said she wanted to defy her mother, wanted to do every single thing her mother forbade her, and the more outrageous the better.

At bottom the post was a venting post. Su Qingying said everything, but she said nothing in it about looking for a partner or anything of that kind.

The point was to vent.

But on that forum, nobody cared why she had become an M.

After it went up, Su Qingying was frightened.

Her post not only became one of the forum’s hot threads for a time, drawing over a thousand replies, but overnight she also received several hundred private messages on the site. Almost every one of them was an invitation to meet.

She was truly terrified.

And bitterly sorry.

She felt she wasn’t the same kind of person as the people on that forum. The people on that forum were a pack of lunatics.

She regretted the post, and she had no way to delete it. She contacted the forum administrator; the administrator refused. The servers were overseas, and it would be very hard for her to pull strings and have the site shut down. Or rather, she didn’t dare pull any strings to shut it down at all.

Because she didn’t dare let anyone learn she had any connection to that forum.

For many days afterward she checked the forum constantly, watching for her thread’s heat to die away.

Once it did, she rarely looked in again. Gradually she stopped looking altogether.

She decided to forget all of it, and let her particular trait become a secret buried in her heart forever.

Two years passed. She no longer thought of it on her own.

Until—

She met Wu Chen.