Whether it was “a little” or “two little bits” did not matter; what mattered was that Lu Xingyan had suddenly gained a real sense of being loved.
Jiang Ji had clearly not said much—only given him a look and a laugh—yet Lu Xingyan received some secret signal exchanged between lovers, and his floating heart seemed to find something beneath it, slowly settling into place.
But he still worried: What if I’m imagining it?
Jiang Ji was so good at keeping him in suspense; no matter how Lu Xingyan asked, he refused to give a direct answer, maintaining that mysterious-to-the-end attitude until Lu Xingyan’s heart itched unbearably.
If only one of them could be the winner, there was no question that it would always be Jiang Ji; but Lu Xingyan was no longer trying to win, and even losing made him happy—so this was what flirtation meant, because there was no reasoning between lovers.
As for the plan…
He could deal with it when the time came.
Lu Xingyan did not care when exactly “the time” would be. He set the photo the passerby had secretly taken as his phone wallpaper and unlocked his screen every few minutes just to admire his beautiful brother in the picture.
He wanted Jiang Ji’s phone password but could not get it, and he wanted Jiang Ji to change his wallpaper to Lu Xingyan too, but Jiang Ji refused that as well; it was infuriating.
But Lu Xingyan knew this was also part of keeping him in suspense. He took another look at the super-handsome guy on his wallpaper, and his anger disappeared.
P.S. “Super Handsome Guy” was Jiang Wanyi’s WeChat contact name for Jiang Ji, which Lu Xingyan had secretly copied.
Jiang Ji knew nothing about this; his contact name for Lu Xingyan was “A Guy Who’s Way Too Dramatic.” Lu Xingyan had accidentally seen it once and was deeply unhappy. “I’m just ‘a guy’? And am I really that dramatic? Change it!”
Jiang Ji changed it to “A Younger Brother Who Isn’t That Dramatic,” but Lu Xingyan was still dissatisfied. “Can’t your keyboard type the word ‘husband’? I’m hurt…”
Jiang Ji ignored him, deleted the contact name altogether, and restored Lu Xingyan’s original username.
Lu Xingyan had no choice, but still wanting some kind of special status, he pestered his brother until Jiang Ji pinned their chat to the top.
It was not entirely Lu Xingyan’s fault that he thought Jiang Ji was a “mama’s boy”: before Lu Xingyan got pinned, Jiang Ji had only one pinned WeChat chat, Jiang Wanyi’s, saved as “Mom 3.27,” with the numbers representing her birthday.
Seeing this, Lu Xingyan asked, “Bro, do you remember when my birthday is?”
“I don’t.” Jiang Ji answered so quickly that it made the truthfulness of his reply highly questionable.
Lu Xingyan’s face fell. “Then why don’t you add my birthday to my contact name too?”
As he spoke, he put on a fake, heartbroken crying face, snatched Jiang Ji’s phone, and changed his own contact name to “Husband 11.26,” finally satisfied. “Don’t change it again.”
As for Lu Xingyan’s contact name for Jiang Ji, it was never fixed. Sometimes it was “Super Handsome Guy,” sometimes “Wife,” sometimes “Bro,” and occasionally “A Cold and Heartless Man,” “Has Jiang Ji Quit Smoking Today?”, “Lu Xingyan’s Creditor,” or “I Miss You, Message Me Now”…
He had endless creativity and entertained himself immensely with it.
As Jiang Ji put it, “You really have nothing better to do.”
But the phone was in Lu Xingyan’s hands, so Jiang Ji did not care; as long as Lu Xingyan did not post anything on Moments, everything was negotiable.
Today, however, Lu Xingyan’s sunglasses photo showing off their relationship had been spotted by Jiang Wanyi, who asked the moment she saw him that evening whether he had gotten a girlfriend.
Lu Xingyan said no, that he had only been joking.
Jiang Wanyi assumed he had just started dating and was embarrassed to make it public, smiling as she said, “Bring her home for us to meet sometime. Is she pretty?—You’re doing better than your brother; he still hasn’t made any progress.”
“…” Jiang Ji, who was drinking water beside them, nearly choked and thought that if his mother ever learned the truth, he really had no idea what expression she would make.
Once the weekend ended, Jiang Ji returned to his usual busy schedule and no longer had so much time to spend with Lu Xingyan.
Although Secretary Lu had already been fired, his informant was still there—he had added Jeanne on WeChat.
Over the past two days, Lu Xingyan had been preparing for his thesis defense while finding time to harass Jeanne, asking what Jiang Ji had eaten for lunch, whether he had lost his appetite after Lu Xingyan left, whether any suspicious strangers had visited the company…
Jeanne inexplicably became a spy, forced to report President Jiang’s daily activities to him while tearfully accepting his red envelopes.
Lu Xingyan said, “You know, there’s a reason I got fired.”
Jeanne really was curious. “What reason?”
Lu Xingyan said, “My brother cares about me too much. Every day, the moment he sees me, he gets so distracted he can’t focus on work, so he had no choice but to send me away.”
Jeanne: “…”
This was Lu Xingyan’s own guess.
Their relationship was steadily improving and nothing bad had happened, so naturally he could only speculate in a positive direction.
But Lu Xingyan was not sure whether he was simply flattering himself, and in the middle of his restless agitation, inspiration struck: he changed Jiang Ji’s contact name to “Wife Who Loves Me but Can’t Say It Out Loud,” then even took a screenshot and sent it to Jiang Ji himself.
Jiang Ji was already used to his bizarre behavior, shuddering from the goosebumps before pretending he had never received it.
On June 4, Lu Xingyan finally went to school for his thesis defense.
Jiang Ji still remembered how he had felt during his own thesis defense several years earlier; he had not been especially nervous, but neither had he been relaxed.
Graduation was an important turning point in life. Before that, he had been a student, with parents and school to shield him from the wind and rain; afterward, he was an adult who had to shoulder responsibility for himself. Setting aside how difficult it was to be responsible for others, simply being responsible for oneself was hard enough.
It was not as though Jiang Ji had never felt lost back then, but he kept doing what needed to be done even while feeling lost, and before he knew it, he had made it to where he was today and established a life for himself.
Jiang Ji messaged Lu Xingyan: “I’ll take you out to eat after your defense.”
Lu Xingyan was not polite about it. “I want a bouquet of flowers. Can I have one, big brother?”
Jiang Ji agreed and left work early to visit a florist, choosing orange roses and asking the florist to add two brilliant golden sunflowers along with several smaller flowers and greenery with positive symbolism, creating a large, overflowing bouquet that he brought to the university.
Jiang Ji had not returned to his alma mater in a long time. Since he was here to meet Lu Xingyan today, he took the opportunity to walk around campus as well.
Back when Jiang Ji’s class in the computer science department graduated, he had gone onstage as the student representative to give a speech and had also received an Outstanding Graduate award. At the time, Jiang Ji had been rather proud of himself, but looking back now, it did not seem like such an extraordinary achievement after all.
Jiang Ji strolled around campus as old memories surfaced one after another, almost as though he had returned to his student days; he found a bench and sat beneath the warm afternoon sun, waiting until Lu Xingyan messaged to say his defense was over before heading over and giving him the flowers.
Lu Xingyan had always done well academically, so there had been no need to worry. What little intelligence this man possessed had mostly gone into his studies, which Jiang Ji found very reassuring.
They left the university and went to the restaurant Jiang Ji had booked in advance. On the way, Lu Xingyan sat in the passenger seat hugging the bouquet as though he could not bear to put it down, then suddenly revealed something about himself. “Jiang Ji, did you know? I gave you flowers on the day of your graduation ceremony too.”
“Really?” Jiang Ji searched his memory. “How come I didn’t know?”
“Hmph. I had someone else deliver them.” Lu Xingyan spoke evasively. “I wasn’t planning to give you any, but you were my brother, after all. Graduation was such a big deal, and you were the student representative. What if all the other representatives got flowers and you were the only one who didn’t? Wouldn’t that have been embarrassing?”
“…”
That was obviously an excuse. How could Jiang Ji possibly have received no flowers? His admirers could have lined up from the computer science building all the way to the branch campus, and the bouquet Lu Xingyan had asked someone else to deliver had been buried among countless roses and lilies without leaving the slightest trace of color in Jiang Ji’s memory.
Later, Lu Xingyan heard that there had been so many flowers Jiang Ji had nowhere to put them, so he had thrown them all in the trash.
Someone with too much time on their hands had photographed the trash can overflowing with flowers, and the picture had spread through every computer science group chat overnight as proof of a certain Senior Jiang’s cold-heartedness.
The male spectators fell silent and the women wept, all lamenting, “Just who could possibly win Jiang Ji over?”
Lu Xingyan had been one of the spectators too, secretly relieved while also grinding his teeth in resentment, and even now he could not resist speaking sarcastically when he brought it up. “Ah, such a heartthrob…”
Jiang Ji laughed at him. “If you’d brought them to me yourself, I wouldn’t have thrown your flowers in the trash.”
“Like I’d believe you.”
“I’m serious,” Jiang Ji said. “There were just too many back then. I couldn’t fit them all in my dorm, and bringing them home wasn’t convenient either. At first I planned to throw away only some and keep as many as I could, but then I thought that wouldn’t be fair to the people whose flowers got thrown away—”
Lu Xingyan could not take it anymore. “You even knew to treat everyone equally? How kind of you.”
“So sour.” Jiang Ji sniffed and asked with a perfectly serious expression, “Do you smell something sour?”
Lu Xingyan did not catch on. “Where?”
They happened to be stopped at a red light. Jiang Ji suddenly took his hands off the steering wheel and leaned over, his cool fingers gripping Lu Xingyan’s chin before he pressed a kiss to his lips. “Such a sour mouth.”
Lu Xingyan: “…”
The thirty-second red light ended, and Jiang Ji resumed driving. Lu Xingyan belatedly began to blush, heat rising all over his body.
They had shared much deeper kisses before, so one light kiss should not have meant anything. But that indescribable “sense of being loved” appeared again: Jiang Ji’s gaze and tone seemed perfectly ordinary yet somehow laden with another meaning, making Lu Xingyan’s heart race wildly and leaving his whole soul feeling as though it were drifting away.
Lu Xingyan instinctively tried to hide it by changing the subject. “What kind of food are we having again?”
“Cantonese,” Jiang Ji said. “There’s a new Cantonese restaurant I want to try.”
“Okay.” Lu Xingyan answered in a daze. “Oh, right. Didn’t you say you wanted to treat Sun Cheng to dinner? I set a time with him. How about this Saturday? We can decide what to eat later.”
“Sure.” Jiang Ji glanced at him from the corner of his eye: sitting perfectly upright, ears bright red, gaze darting everywhere.
Jiang Ji could not resist teasing him. “Lu Xingyan, why are you so innocent?”
“…I’m not.”
Lu Xingyan firmly rejected the label. “I just wasn’t mentally prepared. You startled me, that’s all. Besides, shouldn’t you be reflecting on why you’re so practiced at this? You’re practically a natural-born scumbag…”
Some people really were born with certain talents—for example, someone’s extraordinary ability to refuse to admit anything.
Jiang Ji did not expose him and continued glancing at him from the corner of his eye while driving.
Jiang Ji rarely behaved like this, openly paying attention to him without trying to hide it, as though he wanted to memorize every tiny change in Lu Xingyan’s expression. The heat on Lu Xingyan’s face refused to fade, and he practically squirmed in his seat. “Can you watch the road properly and stop looking at me?”
“What’s wrong? Afraid to be looked at?”
“…” If they had not been in the car, Lu Xingyan would not have been afraid at all; at worst, he could have bitten back.
But Jiang Ji was driving, so he could neither kiss him nor fool around, and his heart was being toyed with until it was a complete mess, as though it might leap straight out of his chest.
“Jiang Ji…”
With a faint plea in his voice, Lu Xingyan threw all dignity aside and pathetically begged for mercy. “I was wrong, big brother.”
Jiang Ji felt no guilt whatsoever. “What did you do wrong?”
“Whatever you say I did wrong is what I did wrong. I’ll listen to everything you say.” Lu Xingyan tugged at the hem of his clothes with the frequency of a puppy wagging its tail. “Okay?”
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