"There are many things I will ask for, when I have left seclusion, but only one for now," Xichen clarifies, a gentler smile on his lips as he looks at the shorter man. There is little distance between them and the teasing tone, the sudden lightness in the air, allows him to relax again.

"To kiss you, at least once, before you return to Lotus Pier," because he can't not know, improper as it is if following Gusu Lan's precepts on the matter of courting. He is not a blushing virgin, not a stranger to intimacy and the touch of another, but to properly and publicly court another Sect Leader is a different thing that what he has known.