The second night of the holiday, ten o’clock.
Everything had happened too quickly, and it ended just as quickly.
Lu Xingyan was thrown out before he could even finish dressing. The romantic image from his imagined first night, where “shoes and clothes fly out of frame,” had actually come true. The only difference was that Jiang Ji had thrown Lu Xingyan’s jacket and shoes out the door, nearly hitting him in the head.
“Bro, I’m sorr—”
Before the final syllable could leave his mouth, the door shut directly in front of his nose.
So the temperature really had dropped tonight. Lu Xingyan finally felt it.
He stood there blankly for a while, put on his jacket, then knocked hard. “Bro, I was wrong. I really know I was wrong.”
He waited for Jiang Ji to ask, “What exactly did you do wrong?” so that Lu Xingyan could present the full contents of his heartfelt repentance.
Instead, even after nearly ten minutes of knocking, there was not a single sound from inside.
Jiang Ji simply ignored him.
There was absolutely no possibility that he would be allowed back into that room tonight.
…
Inside, Jiang Ji washed his face twice.
As the saying went, if you constantly walked beside the river, sooner or later your shoes would get wet. Jiang Ji had spent years wickedly teasing this dog until smoke practically rose from his lack of morals.
Today, the dog had finally bitten him.
Had Lu Xingyan done that on purpose—or had he done it on purpose?
The idiot had very little brain but an incredible amount of nerve.
Jiang Ji could not help thinking again: Am I really that hungry? What exactly is so entertaining about Lu Xingyan?
If Li Ling had invented this idiotic game—if Li Ling had planned to win Jiang Ji over, dump him viciously, and humiliate him—Jiang Ji would merely have thought, Is this idiot sick? He would never have thought, Let’s see how I can play with him.
Admittedly, teasing Lu Xingyan had become a habit accumulated over many years. It was like someone waving a cat teaser in front of him; he would instinctively reach out and swat at it a couple of times.
But before, he had only casually dug pits for Lu Xingyan when he was bored. He never wasted much time and certainly never suffered losses himself.
Now he had wasted time and gotten genuinely angry.
What exactly was he getting out of this?
Jiang Ji lay on the bed and felt with startling clarity that the “idiot virus” had already occupied half his heart and was now spreading through his blood toward the other half.
Otherwise, why would he be thinking, Lu Xingyan, just you wait. This isn’t over.
Jiang Ji spent the night at the hotel.
He did not fall asleep during the first half of the night and only slowly drifted off close to one in the morning.
Perhaps because what occupied the mind during the day entered one’s dreams at night, Jiang Ji remembered some of the stupid things Lu Xingyan had done, along with the day Jiang Ji had discovered his own sexual orientation.
Realizing one’s sexuality was a major event, but for Jiang Ji, that particular day had been completely ordinary.
It happened during the second semester of his junior year in university, on an unbearably hot Sunday. Jiang Ji unexpectedly became sick with a fever and headache. He asked someone to cover his part-time shift and went home to rest.
At the time, he had not been home in another month. Because he had not warned anyone beforehand, neither Jiang Wanyi nor Lu Yong was there. Lu Xingyan’s room was silent too.
Jiang Ji took fever medicine and lay down in his own bed. After sleeping in a daze for a while, he woke to discover he had forgotten to turn on the air-conditioning. Sick and overheated, his entire body felt miserable.
He could not find the remote within reach and did not want to get out of bed to search for it. So he stubbornly remained there, his consciousness foggy.
The sensation was more than simple discomfort.
There was something else mixed in, difficult to describe. It took him a while to identify it. In his haze, he remembered that he had just been dreaming.
An erotic dream.
Someone had been intimate with him in the dream but had not allowed him any release. So beneath the fever and the heat there remained another form of ache, the discomfort of unfulfilled desire.
Jiang Ji closed his eyes and tried to continue the dream, attempting to see the other person clearly.
What kind of girl was she? Quiet and sweet? Lively and dazzling?
Jiang Ji was normally busy with classes and had little social life, let alone romantic experience.
Many people liked him, but he had never responded to any of them. He had assumed he was simply cold by nature and therefore felt nothing toward women. On the rare occasions when he dreamed about someone, their image was vague and disappeared from memory the moment he woke.
This dream was the same.
The more he tried to see the person clearly, the less visible they became. Jiang Ji could not even invent an image that suited his preferences. Long hair, short hair, curvy or slender—every version felt slightly wrong.
Jiang Ji tried to sink deeper into the dream.
The more blurred his consciousness became, the clearer the sensations grew.
The other person was calling his name. The voice seemed distant, neither unmistakably male nor female.
They were only embracing, sometimes holding each other tightly and intimately, sometimes separating briefly. No matter what happened, that nearly melodic calling never stopped.
Jiang Ji. Jiang Ji. Jiang Ji.
He finally approached the peak. Trembling beneath his fever, Jiang Ji breathed out a hot breath while the voice beside his ear continued calling.
Jiang Ji. Jiang Ji…
Then the bedroom door suddenly burst open.
“Jiang Ji!”
Lu Xingyan barged in for no apparent reason, his voice bright and his tone as rude as ever, abruptly destroying everything.
Jiang Ji’s eyes flew open.
He stared in shock.
“When did you come back? Why didn’t you tell me?”
Lu Xingyan stood aggressively in the doorway as though Jiang Ji had committed some unforgivable offense by coming home during vacation without finding him first.
Fortunately, a thin blanket covered Jiang Ji’s body, so Lu Xingyan could not tell what his brother had been doing.
Yet the atmosphere was ambiguous. The air felt thick with hot currents, and Jiang Ji’s expression was not normal. Lu Xingyan walked a few steps closer. “What’s wrong with you?”
“…I caught a cold.” Jiang Ji coughed lightly and pulled the blanket tighter. “Get out.”
Lu Xingyan refused to leave and began nagging. “Did you take medicine? Did you check your temperature? You look like you have a really high fever.”
“None of your damn business.” Jiang Ji was close to losing his mind but could not let his little brother notice. “I told you to get out. Do you not understand?”
“…”
They had not seen each other in a month, and the first thing Lu Xingyan received was a scolding. He had no idea what he had done wrong, but even if he had done something wrong, it was obviously Jiang Ji’s fault.
“Who wants to bother with you?”
Bang!
Lu Xingyan slammed the door and left.
Jiang Ji exhaled in relief.
But the interrupted dream had shattered like a mirror. Even gathering every fragment could not restore the original picture.
Jiang Ji tried to reconstruct the appearance and voice of his dream lover.
The appearance remained indistinct, but the voice had become specific because someone had just shouted “Jiang Ji” from close range and his brain had automatically substituted it.
It was Lu Xingyan’s voice.
Jiang Ji wanted to die.
He tried to drive Lu Xingyan’s familiar voice out of his mind.
He failed.
And because the voice had become male, the figure in the dream became slightly more concrete too, turning into a man whose face remained blurred.
Thankfully, it did not directly become Lu Xingyan.
Any desire Jiang Ji had left disappeared completely, and his fever felt even worse.
He finally got out of bed, found the air-conditioning remote, and set it to eighteen degrees Celsius. Soon the room became cold enough to resemble a refrigerator, and then he felt chilled instead.
That was the problem with fever: one moment hot, the next cold.
The medicine he had taken had not begun working yet, and now he could not sleep. Jiang Ji forced himself to gather some energy, washed up briefly, and decided to go downstairs to find something to eat.
Unexpectedly, the instant he opened the door, he discovered Lu Xingyan had not left at all.
He was squatting outside the door as though sulking at someone. The moment Jiang Ji appeared, he looked up and called again, “Jiang Ji.”
“…”
Jiang Ji wanted to beg him to shut up and use another form of address.
At least for today, stop saying his name.
“Feeling any better?” Lu Xingyan asked awkwardly, attempting to show concern. “You’re really rude, but I’m not going to stoop to your level. You have to take medicine properly when you have a high fever, okay? A fever that gets too high can be dangerous. Did you take it or not? Answer me.”
“I did.”
Jiang Ji frowned and headed downstairs. His steps were slightly unsteady, and Lu Xingyan followed closely behind as if terrified he might fall. “Why did you suddenly get a fever? Is it because you’re exhausted from studying and working part-time at the same time? That crappy job barely pays anything. You should quit.”
“None of your business.”
“Heh. You’d rather suffer than lose face.”
“…”
For once, Lu Xingyan had said something correct.
Jiang Ji truly was the sort of person who would suffer rather than lose face.
But sometimes face was not merely face. It was the breath a person clenched desperately between their teeth. Once he let that breath go, Jiang Ji no longer knew how he was supposed to live his life.
That was not the important issue right now, so Jiang Ji ignored him.
He asked the housekeeper to make some sweet porridge, then sat at the dining table thinking about why his dream lover had turned into a man.
At the instant the figure became male, aside from the fright caused by Lu Xingyan’s interruption, Jiang Ji had felt no rejection.
If anything, he had experienced a faint sense of sudden understanding, as though he had brushed against an answer buried somewhere inside himself.
The answer was not yet clear.
It was only a guess from his subconscious.
Jiang Ji stared into space.
Lu Xingyan stared into space too.
After a while, Lu Xingyan reminded him, “Eat. The porridge is getting cold.”
Jiang Ji began eating.
Lu Xingyan continued staring blankly.
Finally, Jiang Ji noticed something was wrong with him. “What happened? Are you feeling sick too?”
Lu Xingyan lowered his head anxiously and stared at his empty hands. “I bombed an exam.”
“What exam?”
“A mock exam.” Lu Xingyan said, “I did really badly. There were tons of questions I couldn’t answer. I’m finished.”
“…”
When Jiang Ji was a university junior, Lu Xingyan was in his final year of high school.
The college entrance exam was approaching. Jiang Ji belatedly realized he had never really asked about Lu Xingyan’s grades.
It was not that he did not care.
Lu Xingyan normally performed well, so Jiang Ji had never thought there was anything to worry about.
“It was only a mock exam. What are you scared of?” Jiang Ji said. “Finding your weak points now is a good thing. Treat it as a chance to figure out what you still need to work on.”
Lu Xingyan did not listen. He remained immersed in a kind of anxiety Jiang Ji could not understand.
That usually energetic, arrogant face rarely displayed such deep negativity.
Jiang Ji looked at him a few more times.
Lu Xingyan twisted his fingers together and murmured, “If I do badly on the real exam too, I won’t get into your university.”
Jiang Ji froze.
Realizing he had just said something embarrassing, Lu Xingyan immediately straightened and became arrogant again. “I’m definitely going to score higher than you did. Just wait until I crush you under my feet, Jiang Ji!”
“…”
Idiot.
Jiang Ji withdrew all concern, finished his porridge, and left.
It really had been an extremely ordinary day.
By evening, Jiang Ji’s fever had broken and Lu Xingyan was no longer anxious. Claiming that the pressure of senior year was suffocating and he needed to relax, Lu Xingyan lowered his young-master dignity enough to invite Jiang Ji to play games with him.
While playing, Jiang Ji continued wondering, Do I really like men?
In the end, he reached a conclusion.
Whatever. It doesn’t matter.
Jiang Ji did not agonize over his sexuality. Lu Xingyan had no idea what he was thinking.
For one brief night, the two of them set the entire world aside and stayed up playing games until morning.
It was a two-player game in which both players worked together to clear stages, requiring considerable coordination.
Clearly, Jiang Ji and Lu Xingyan possessed absolutely no coordination.
From the moment they entered the game, Lu Xingyan remained on the verge of losing his mind until sunrise.
At first, he lost his mind over mistakes, blaming Jiang Ji, blaming himself, and blaming the difficulty of the game.
Later, when they finally learned to work together and Lu Xingyan began calming down, Jiang Ji became bored and started deliberately making mistakes just to drive Lu Xingyan crazy again until he finally broke.
“I’m done!”
At the end of the dream, Lu Xingyan shut the computer down in agony.
Jiang Ji felt refreshed and gave him hypocritical encouragement. “Don’t get discouraged. I’ll clear the stages with you again next time.”
Lu Xingyan was not truly stupid. He glared at him for a long time. “Jiang Ji, this isn’t over between us.”
Many years later, it still was not over.
Jiang Ji woke at first light. His phone was beside his pillow, filled with nearly a hundred messages from Lu Xingyan.
He skimmed them.
Once all the flashy stickers were removed, the written content was remarkably unvaried. Over and over, there were only two sentences: “I really know I was wrong” and “Are you still angry?”
It made Jiang Ji deeply concerned about whether Lu Xingyan’s graduation thesis would someday be equally concise.
At around four in the morning, Lu Xingyan had still been persevering, sending pathetic puppy stickers one after another: “Dog sad.” “Human bad.” “I’ve been abandoned.” “Master, Master, where are you?” “Will you still open the door?” “Do you still want me?”…
A person with this kind of persistence and lack of shame could probably succeed at anything.
Unfortunately, his opponent was Jiang Ji.
Jiang Ji finished reading the newest message, thought for a moment, then replied.
“Still outside? I forgive you, Lu Xingyan.”
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