Chapter 35 The Legitimate Husband Identity

Chapter 35: The Legal Identity of a Husband

Cheng Ye's face looked troubled, his brows tightly furrowed. "Don't go too far. Since when is there a time limit for using the bathroom?"

Just a while ago, he'd thought Shen Xu was cute, but now he figured he must have been out of his mind. Sure enough, when your husband becomes your boss, even the most handsome face becomes repulsive.

The more he thought about it, the more absurd it seemed, and the angrier he became. "Besides, I'm an adult. Whether I smoke, where I smoke, how much I smoke—that's my freedom. Who made you my boss? You might as well put a camera on me to see exactly when I light up."

He'd held back before because he didn't want to mess up his beta husband role. But he hadn't expected to lose control so quickly and expose his true nature. For the sake of Shen Xu's looks and money, he'd endured and endured. When he was told not to smoke, he smoked in secret. Then he got caught.

Shen Xu listened to his barrage of complaints and accusations, his expression didn't change. He tapped his fingers lightly twice on the smooth desktop, as though he were actually thinking it over.

On second thought, setting a time limit for bathroom breaks was indeed a bit excessive, and it wasn't really practical. So Shen Xu simply acted as if he'd never said such a thing, completely ignoring Cheng Ye.

Cheng Ye, after putting on a tough front, immediately regretted it and started to backtrack. "Honey, I was talking nonsense earlier. After all, you're doing this for my own good. Smoking isn't good for me. I won't smoke anymore, alright?"

Shen Xu didn't say a word, just gave him a quiet look. Then he pulled open the drawer and took out the confiscated pack of cigarettes, still more than half full, along with a small lighter.

Cheng Ye stared at the two familiar items, a bad feeling creeping into his chest. He watched Shen Xu warily, instinctively leaning back a little, widening the distance between them.

What was Shen Xu going to do? Give the cigarettes back? But knowing Shen Xu, that was absolutely impossible. He was probably thinking up some new way to take him down a peg.

Under Cheng Ye's vigilant gaze, Shen Xu picked up the cigarettes and lighter, stood up, walked around the large desk, and headed straight for the office door.

*Click.* The soft sound of the door being locked.

The moment he heard the lock, Cheng Ye instinctively wanted to stand up and put more distance between himself and Shen Xu.

But Shen Xu had already turned around, walking back at a leisurely pace, and stopped in front of Cheng Ye's small desk. Then, under Cheng Ye's shocked and confused look, Shen Xu did something utterly incomprehensible.

He shook a thin cigarette out of the pack and put it in his own mouth. He picked up the silver lighter, flicked it on, and the orange flame touched the tip. He lowered his head slightly, took a deep drag, and lit the cigarette.

But he didn't smoke it himself.

He held the lit cigarette, walked over to Cheng Ye, leaned down slightly, and brought the burning tip right up to Cheng Ye's lips.

Cheng Ye was completely stunned, his eyes wide, staring at Shen Xu, who was now inches away.

He didn't know what Shen Xu was trying to do, but something fishy was going on. He tried to turn his head away, but Shen Xu was faster. Just as Cheng Ye started to move, Shen Xu's free hand grabbed his chin firmly. Applying a little pressure, he forced Cheng Ye's mouth open.

Then, Shen Xu placed the lit cigarette between Cheng Ye's lips.

"Bite down," Shen Xu said, his voice low and calm, with a detached indifference, like it was no big deal. "Don't let it drop."

Cheng Ye's mind went blank. The familiar feel of the filter tip pressed against his lips. He subconsciously obeyed Shen Xu's order, gently clenching his teeth on the cigarette to keep it from falling.

Shen Xu released his chin and took half a step back. Cheng Ye remained frozen in his chair, the cigarette held between his teeth, not daring to move. Only his eyes darted around in panic, looking at Shen Xu, then at the door, then at the burning cigarette. The smoke rose in thin wisps, blurring his vision.

Time ticked by. The air in the office felt like it had frozen. Only the faint *hissing* sound of the burning cigarette and the increasingly rapid, heavy thumping of Cheng Ye's own heart could be heard.

He began to find it hard to breathe, not because of the smoke, but from extreme tension and unease. Some of the smoke from the burning cigarette was unconsciously inhaled, carrying a cool mint flavor and a bitter tar taste, but he didn't dare exhale, didn't dare take a deep breath. He just held it in, his face gradually flushing red.

He tried to ask Shen Xu with his eyes what the hell he was doing. But Shen Xu just watched him quietly, his gaze falling on Cheng Ye's trembling eyelashes and the cigarette carefully clamped between his lips. His eyes were deep, revealing no emotion.

Just as Cheng Ye was about to burst from holding his breath, with his lungs nearly empty and tears welling up from the physiological stimulus and extreme suffocation, Shen Xu moved again.

He leaned down once more, close to Cheng Ye.

A sudden chill and pain at the back of his neck—Cheng Ye finally understood what Shen Xu was doing. He'd given himself another shot, the one that allows betas to experience a rut period and smell alpha pheromones. He'd learned that the hard way when he got into a fight and ended up in a cell.

But this was the office. How could Shen Xu be so reckless here?

Cheng Ye struggled, trying to push Shen Xu away. He didn't want to have an office romance. But as soon as he got close to Shen Xu, he could smell that enticing vanilla scent, and he was completely bewitched.

Within minutes, Cheng Ye was at Shen Xu's mercy, lying face-down on the desk.

Shen Xu wasn't gentle—in fact, he was deliberately rough, like a punishment. As he deliberately messed with him, he still managed to keep an eye on the cigarette in Cheng Ye's mouth.

"Bite down," Shen Xu's voice whispered in his ear. "Be careful not to drop it again. I've already lit it for you a bunch of times."

Cheng Ye's violent reaction from earlier had almost made the cigarette fall again. But some ash had shaken loose, falling onto the front of Cheng Ye's shirt, leaving a few tiny burn holes.

Tears rolled down Cheng Ye's face in big drops, mixing with sweat, wetting his temples and cheeks. Through his blurry vision, he could only see the flickering light at the other end of the cigarette, swimming in his tears.

"This is the office," Shen Xu seemed to sense his nearing breaking point and "kindly" explained, his voice right against Cheng Ye's ear. "I can't give you my pheromones, or they'll leak out, right?"

He paused, his actions not stopping, even heavier. "So you'll just have to tough it out. But tonight, you can smoke as long as you want, until you're satisfied. I won't stop you."

Cheng Ye's whole body trembled, his tears flowing even harder.

Nice words, but Cheng Ye was shaking like a leaf in a storm. He didn't even have the energy to smoke. And here, in the office, he was terrified of being heard. To stay quiet, he just had to grit his teeth. His calves cramped from excessive tension, twitching involuntarily a couple of times, kicking against the desk panel with a muffled thud.

But Shen Xu was an alpha—those weak struggles were useless against Shen Xu's absolute strength and control. They were like a drowning man splashing around—splashing a bit of water before being swallowed by a bigger wave.

Shen Xu seemed satisfied with his reaction. He freed one hand, pulled a tissue from the desk, and gently wiped Cheng Ye's face, all messy with tears.

Cheng Ye felt the tissue that had wiped his tears move to his mouth. He spat out the cigarette and asked, trembling, "Shen Xu, you're gonna kill me."

Shen Xu picked the cigarette back up for him.

"You won't die."

Cheng Ye's calf twitched again. "I'm dying."

His worst fear had come true. A big desk wasn't such a good thing after all. Cheng Ye lying on it gave Shen Xu plenty of room to have his way, turning the desk into Shen Xu's dining table, where he ate Cheng Ye alive. But throughout the whole process, Shen Xu didn't give Cheng Ye any pheromones to soothe him.

Even when Cheng Ye crawled forward, his instincts would make him retreat back to Shen Xu's side, lured by the sweet vanilla smell, curling right back into him.

When Shen Xu tried to put the cigarette back to his lips, Cheng Ye immediately turned his head away, wanting to get as far from it as possible.

And Shen Xu had the nerve to play innocent, asking him why he didn't keep smoking. "I'm not stopping you. Smoke as many as you like."

Cheng Ye shook his head frantically, accidentally knocking over the little paper box he used as an ashtray. The paper-folded box scattered everywhere.

Shen Xu pulled Cheng Ye, who was clinging to him, down and smacked him twice. "Was I wrong to stop you from smoking? At the end of the day, all smoking does is give you a black lung. You never listen. Later, I said I wouldn't stop you, and when I told you to smoke, you said no. Tell me, isn't that just being stubborn?"

The slaps weren't hard; to Cheng Ye, they felt like dusting off his shirt. But they were loud.

"Besides, Cheng Ye, I have every right to control you, period. I'm your legal husband, and I'm your older brother. I'm willing to spoil you and indulge your little trivialities. But smoking is all harm and no good. You need to quit and stop giving me lip."

For once, Cheng Ye didn't retort, not because he'd seen the light, but because his brain was already a fog. Otherwise, he definitely would have argued back with Shen Xu.

Shen Xu felt better after lecturing Cheng Ye, so he finally released some pheromones to calm him down.

...

However, when Cheng Ye woke up again, he didn't remember what Shen Xu had done or said afterward. He only remembered that Shen Xu had given him an injection the night before and kept him dangling, refusing to give him any soothing pheromones.

Staring at the ceiling, he said one thing: "Shen Xu... you don't really love me, do you?"

"Why do you say that?"

Shen Xu stayed in bed with him until noon, only for Cheng Ye to say something like that as soon as he woke up.

"I said I was dying, and you completely ignored me."

"Then you don't love me either. Did you think of me when you were smoking yourself to death?"

Faced with a magical attack, Shen Xu naturally fought back with magic.

"...I can't explain it to you." Cheng Ye turned over, his back to Shen Xu, trying to recall what had happened yesterday, but his mind was a mess and he couldn't remember a thing.

"You don't need to explain it to me. Just remember what I said."

Shen Xu was very satisfied with the lesson he had taught him last night, but in truth, Cheng Ye hadn't taken in a single word, his mind full of wanting Shen Xu's pheromones.

"What'd you say..."

Cheng Ye frowned, wanting to ask, but seeing Shen Xu's expression, he knew asking would probably set him off, so he pretended not to have heard and changed the subject, "Are we late again?"

"We'll go in the afternoon."

Shen Xu slipped back under the blankets, as if he hadn't just claimed they were never late.

When Cheng Ye saw him slip back under the blankets, he followed suit. In the afternoon, Shen Xu finally brought Cheng Ye to the office, both of them yawning widely.

The mess in the office from yesterday had been cleaned up long ago, but Cheng Ye still felt a chill of unease looking at that desk.

What made him even more uneasy was when he pushed open the door to the bathroom stall.

The previously bare stall walls now prominently featured, besides the essential toilet paper holder and hook, three brand-new white disc-shaped objects—smoke detectors.

These three smoke detectors were installed extremely "cleverly," forming a triangular distribution: one on the ceiling directly above, and the other two on the high walls to the left and right, creating a monitoring triangle with no blind spots that covered the entire stall.

Not only that, on the inside of the stall door, next to the toilet paper holder, and even on the toilet tank cover, wherever he looked, there were eye-catching red sticker signs with bold black printed letters:

"No Smoking!" "Smoking is Harmful to Health!" "Smoke detector installed. Alarm will result in penalties!"

Each sign had bigger characters and more glaring colors than the last, as if terrified someone might miss them.

Cheng Ye looked at this setup, and his mouth twitched uncontrollably.

Holy crap.

Shen Xu's tactic... was really something else.

Three detectors in one stall, stickers plastered like decorations, packed full, regardless of whether it looked nice or not.

He had no doubt that if he dared to light a cigarette here, even just one puff, these three smoke detectors would immediately set off a piercing alarm that would ring through the entire floor, and security would break in within three minutes to catch him red-handed.

Cheng Ye swallowed his frustration, washed his hands quickly, and returned to the office dejectedly.

As soon as he walked in, he saw Shen Xu sitting behind his big desk, head down signing documents. And on the edge of Cheng Ye's small desk, right in front of him, there was now a nicely made acrylic triangular stand.

The stand was transparent, with a silver metal trim, looking expensive and matching the style of the luxurious office. But the words printed on the stand made Cheng Ye's blood pressure spike instantly.

Right in the center of the stand, in bold, red letters, were four big characters:

"NO SMOKING"

Below that, in smaller font: "Creating a smoke-free environment starts with you and me."

This stand was placed squarely in Cheng Ye's line of sight; whenever he looked up or opened his eyes, he would see those four glaring red characters, like a silent, constant reminder and warning sign from Shen Xu.

Cheng Ye: "..."

"What the..."

He stood at the door, looking at the stand, then at Shen Xu beside him, who seemed completely unbothered and focused on work, and a feeling of helplessness washed over him.

What did Shen Xu take him for, some kind of addict? He didn't think his addiction was that serious; he just smoked a few whenever he got the chance.

He gritted his teeth, walked to his seat, purposely making a lot of noise with his chair, then forcefully pushed the stand aside so it faced the wall—out of sight, out of mind.

Shen Xu seemed to hear the commotion, looked up, glanced at him, his gaze lingering on the turned-away stand for a moment, but said nothing and went back to work.

Cheng Ye figured that was that.

However, in the following days, Shen Xu intensified the company's smoking ban.

He targeted not only the executive bathroom he often used, but also all men's and women's bathrooms on every floor, even the stairwells, some remote corridor corners, balconies...

Any corner that might have been frequented by "smokers" before was now equipped with brand-new, highly sensitive smoke detectors, and covered with no-smoking signs.

The Admin department issued an official notice, reiterating the company's smoking policy, specifying penalties, and encouraging employees to keep an eye on each other and report violations, with generous rewards for reporters.

For a time, the long-time smokers in the company were miserable. They used to be able to sneak a cigarette in the stairwell or some secluded corner to relieve their cravings, but now there was nowhere to hide; they didn't dare let even a spark show. Several heavy-smoking middle managers looked green around the gills those days, yawning and fidgeting during meetings.

However, many more people cheered the move. Especially those who didn't smoke or were sensitive to smoke—they practically saw Shen Xu as a hero. The company air became fresher, their clothes no longer carried the nasty smell of smoke, and going to the bathroom no longer meant enduring the residual tar odor.

Thus, smoking in the company became almost impossible for Cheng Ye. Reluctantly, he had to settle for the next best thing: he brought a few colorful lollipops from home. Those were the ones that Shen Xu had bought him before.

The candy was very sweet, cloyingly sweet, but Cheng Ye didn't care. He stuffed them into his mouth one after the other.

But soon, Shen Xu got annoyed that he was eating too much candy, quietly had the housekeeper throw away all the candy in the house without telling Cheng Ye, leaving him searching for ages. The housekeeper finally told him it was on Shen Xu's orders.

"Why throw them away? That whole big jar—what a waste!"

He was getting angry, feeling that Shen Xu was picking on him. First he wouldn't let him smoke, and now he couldn't even have candy, and Shen Xu had bought the candy himself.

Although the candy was gone from the cabinet, there were now several tins of cookies.

"What's this?" Cheng Ye picked up a tin, puzzled, and shook it. From inside came a rustling sound of hard objects colliding.

"Open it and see." Shen Xu came out of the bathroom.

Cheng Ye opened the tin, still grumbling: "It's such a waste to throw away all that candy."

Inside the tin, neatly arranged dozens of long, caramel-colored cookie sticks. The cookies looked evenly baked, with fine honeycomb pores on the surface, giving off a faint natural aroma of toasted grains.

He picked one up and pressed it. It was quite chewy, not like ordinary cookies that are crispy and crumbly.

"Finger biscuit sticks," Shen Xu explained. "Low sugar, low fat, healthier. Eating so much candy every day is bad for your teeth—can cause cavities. These are way healthier."

The cookies were indeed chewy, with a light sweetness and caramel fragrance, the more you chewed, the tastier they became, much better than those cloyingly sweet lollipops. So Cheng Ye just muttered something and shut up.

Therefore, Cheng Ye's daily routine in the office shifted from chewing on lollipops to clutching a tin box and crunching on biscuits.

"Is it good?"

Cheng Ye was munching away at his computer. He paused at the question, looked up, and met Shen Xu's gaze. Then he reached into the box, fished out two finger biscuits, and held them out to Shen Xu.

"Try some."

Shen Xu took them, chewed and said, "Not bad," and casually grabbed two more from Cheng Ye's box.

Then, after finishing the second one, Shen Xu grabbed a third...

The biscuits in the tin box were already a third of the way empty.

Cheng Ye: "?"

Wasn't it just a taste? Why couldn't he stop eating? But Cheng Ye didn't say anything. He let Shen Xu keep eating, and even opened another box and set it on the table.

But Shen Xu was the kind of person who, if he ate one of yours, would buy you a whole case. The next day, Cheng Ye found a cardboard box next to his desk.

The box was pretty big, printed with the same logo as the tin box from yesterday. Inside the cardboard box, neatly stacked, were at least twenty boxes of the same finger biscuits, packed to the brim.

Cheng Ye: "..."

He looked up at Shen Xu, who had already started working nearby.

"These are healthy. You can eat as much as you want."

Then Shen Xu added, "There's a dinner tonight. The person is in the import-export business, and I have some business dealings with him. Do you want to come along?"

Cheng Ye, still munching on a biscuit, didn't even think before shaking his head and refusing: "No."

He hated dinners. In his memory, those occasions were filled with fake pleasantries, boring socializing, and annoying toasts. If he went, he'd just be there for show, always watching what he said and did for fear of embarrassing Shen Xu. It was exhausting, and he'd rather just go home and lie down. He remembered the last family dinner at Shen Xu's—Shen Xu's godfather had scolded him the whole time.

Shen Xu didn't seem surprised by his refusal, nor was he angry. He paused for a moment, then added, his tone still calm but meaningfully:

"I heard that the boss is from the same hometown as you."

Cheng Ye's chewing suddenly stopped. Half a biscuit was still in his mouth.

Same hometown?!

His ID was fake. He doesn't have a hometown.

And if he actually went, and the other side started chatting with him in their hometown dialect, he wouldn't be able to respond at all. That would be a disaster. Shen Xu wasn't stupid—he'd probably start checking if his ID was real.

Cheng Ye's heart skipped a beat, and a chill went down his spine. He forced down the biscuit, but swallowed too fast and nearly choked. He coughed twice, his face turning red.

Shen Xu, seeing his reaction, quickly handed him a glass of water.

"You okay?"

Cheng Ye took the glass, gulped down several mouthfuls, and barely caught his breath. He didn't dare look Shen Xu in the eyes. He kept his head down, his fingers unconsciously picking at the edge of the biscuit box, clearly nervous.

Was this a test? Was Shen Xu already suspicious and using the "hometown" excuse to lure him in?

Or was it really just a coincidence, and Shen Xu genuinely wanted him to go out and meet a "fellow townsman"?

Whichever it was, he absolutely couldn't go to that dinner. The risk was too great.

"I don't want to go, and I don't want to see him," Cheng Ye's voice was still a bit hoarse from choking. "I'm not familiar with him. We have nothing to catch up on. And you know, I don't like those occasions, honey."

After all, last time he'd been chewed out by Shen Xu's godfather.

He looked up at Shen Xu and forced a weak smile: "You go ahead, honey. I really don't like having dinner with people I don't know well."