Phei left Eleanor behind as she continued toward the lounge she had apparently been heading for before walking straight into him, although when he glanced back one last time, he caught a small smile lingering on her face that he could not quite understand. It had not looked like the ordinary embarrassed smile of someone replaying an awkward encounter in her head either.
There had been something warmer beneath it, almost private, as though Eleanor had just walked away from a conversation carrying a joke Phei had somehow participated in without ever being told the punchline.
That bothered him more than he wanted to admit because Phei had always trusted his memory.
He remembered faces, conversations and tiny details people usually discarded, and after everything his soul and cultivation had gone through, forgetting something as specific as a beautiful woman crashing into his back inside Sovereign Tower should have been extremely unlikely.
