Reborn: The Return of the Villainous Mr. Liu

Alix stared at him as if she didn't even know him anymore. "Mrs. Liu?"

"Yes."

"I don't think you are hearing yourself. All this time when you said that you wanted to talk to me, it was about this?"

"So you were reading my messages," he smiled.

"Why are you smiling?"

"Because despite you drawing the line between us yourself, you never really completely cut me off from your life."

"Do not test my patience because right now, I am very tempted to seriously cut you off," her gaze darkened. "I didn't come here to talk about this. I want to know why in your idiot mind would you let Wang Xia win? Clearly, she is out for revenge. Clearly, she approached you in the bar precisely to trap you in that situation. Clearly, she wants to see you miserable."

"It feels that you don't like to see me miserable."

"Why…" Alix couldn't properly articulate herself. "Sorry, what?"

"If you didn't feel anything for me, if you really wanted to be so far away from me, if you truly wanted our paths to go separate, then you wouldn't have come to meet me here today."

"Isn't it because you are fucking refusing to meet anybody else!?" She banged her palm, her line of control and voice breaching her patience levels.

"Still, you didn't have any business to come here anyway," Jin remained calm despite her outburst. "It's my problem. You should have let my family figure out what to do."

"Are you out of your mind?"

"I haven't seen you for more than four months now. What do you think?"

Alix continued to stare at him with a blank state of mind. Suddenly, she felt like she didn't know how to converse with him. The Liu Jin before her, at this moment, was a completely different person than the one from whom she had asked that twenty million check from.

"What…do you exactly want?"

"I want to talk to you."

She gritted her teeth. "You are not talking to a ghost."

"No, I am not. But your agenda of coming here is different from mine. I don't want to talk about Wang Xia or that bar night."

"Just what exactly happened?"

"I want to talk about us."

Closing her eyes, Alix took a deep breath. The realization of how his family must be feeling at this moment resonated in her mind.

"It's like I am talking to a wall. Do you have any idea what you are putting your family through?"

Jin didn't respond.

The audacity of him showing this attitude…

Alix chuckled angrily, her fingers twitching with an urge to strangle him. She leaned back on her chair and folded her arms.

"Fine. Let's talk about what you want to say but only if you will also answer my questions after this."

"Okay."

Jin bent forward, looking her in the eye. "I thought a lot about what you said. I understand your position too because I have been in a similar place."

"Then what is left to talk about?"

"The fact that it was you who said to me to keep walking at the green signal. You don't have to forget the mistakes you made but that doesn't mean you have to get stuck on the red signal."

"Don't throw my words back at me."

"Aren't they applicable to you too?"

"Come to the point."

"The point is that the green signal for you is my family."

"What?"

"The problem is not whether you like me or not. The problem is that you cannot accept becoming a part of my family because you feel unworthy. But my family doesn't think that way. You have already seen that through Zhou Ai, Mom and Dad. Everybody else feels the same."

Alix silently clenched her fists.

"But unless we bridge the distance between you and my family, you will continue to feel that you deserve to live a lonely life and in no way that's true. So the only way to change your mind is not running away from the Liu family but to become a part of it. Only that way will you see what's the truth and what's just your self-deprecating imagination."

Alix chuckled. "And why didn't you feel this way about Shui? That if you bridge the distance between you and her, you will realize that deserving to live a lonely life was also just your self-deprecating imagination. What you're telling me now - will you listen to Shui too if she says this to you?"

"No."

"So you do realize that this smells a lot like hypocrisy?"

"Yes, it's hypocritical of me. But I don't care because…" a misty glint passed his eyes. "It was you who told me that it was okay to not forgive myself."

She blinked twice.

"You told me that I shouldn't forget my sins nor forgive myself for them. I can hate myself for the person I was. They should always be…just there. Everybody kept saying not to be so harsh on myself. To forgive myself and let it go. Shui, everybody…started expecting me to move on. Six years passed and it felt foolish not to do so. But really…"

His cheeks ached as he said, "Maybe all this time I just wanted somebody to tell me that they hated what I did but everybody defended me, including…Shui. I know she meant well but even in the face of my blunders, somewhere in her heart, she blamed herself. She thought that she pushed me to go that far. But there was nobody else to blame but myself. But everybody kept saying the opposite and it just…felt too tiring."

He slowly placed his palm on the glass wall.

"You don't know how much your words that day meant to me. That's why I cannot let you go, Alix. I cannot lose my love a second time. I know you don't want forgiveness and I am not giving it to you anyway. I still hate what Yahui did to us but I love the Alix she became. It's what my family feels too. It was then that I realized that you don't need to understand my love for now but my family's first. That's why…"

A steely determination replaced his misty eyes. "I will ask you to marry me. Not to become Mrs. Liu as my wife but Mrs. Liu as the Liu family's daughter-in-law."