Silence. Oppression. It felt as though there were no air left in the room, leaving them suffocating.
Ke Bu threw the crushed milk carton at Zhi Li and shouted, “Answer me!”
At last Zhi Li reacted. He moved and lazily pushed himself upright with his right arm.
“Hao Yu, are you here? I came to return something.” Someone pushed open the door.
Zhi Li continued staring at Ke Bu, his tone frightening. “Close it.”
The person shut the door with impressive speed.
“I’m calm and indifferent?” Zhi Li asked. “Tell me, what does it feel like to be calmly and indifferently ignored by me? What does it feel like when I’m told not to touch you and not to talk to you?”
Ke Bu had come to question him and ended up being questioned instead. He turned his face away, refusing to answer or show weakness. He knew every word he had said had hurt Zhi Li.
“What, nothing to say? All I did was pass my feelings back to you. Or are you the only one allowed to say those things and I’m not? Your feelings matter most, and mine mean nothing?”
Ke Bu knew exactly how ruthless Zhi Li could become when provoked. This was Zhi Li. This was the way he loved. Love or pain, whatever Ke Bu gave him, he returned twice over. It was almost like an instinctive defense mechanism.
“I can’t beat you. You can even take revenge on me this calmly.” Revenge was probably too strong a word. The real reason Zhi Li had silently left yesterday was simply that he hadn’t known what he might do to Ke Bu if he stayed.
Zhi Li pinched Ke Bu’s face. “Calm? Look carefully. This is my angry face. You tell me to leave and you think I’ll really leave? Ke Bu, saying something like that is too dangerous for you. If you dare leave me, I’ll make you hurt until you’ve cried out every tear you could shed in an entire lifetime. I’ll make it hurt worse than death. And I don’t only mean mentally. I’ll make your heart and your body hurt until you don’t have enough strength left to say the words ‘leave me’ again.”
There was a reason so many people had called Zhi Li a monster since childhood and avoided him. The Zhi Li who normally lacked common sense and could be strangely innocent wasn’t an act, but this Zhi Li was closer to his most primitive nature, another side of himself he rarely revealed.
For now, the sleeping demon merely opened its eyes from time to time.
Of course.
How could the child of two devils possibly be an angel?
There was no such thing as a perfect person. Not even Zhi Li and his family. Every member of that family had some serious weakness—or, to put it less kindly, some flaw in which they were far weaker and worse off than an ordinary person.
Lan Yin’s weakness was singing.
Zhi Zuo Si’s was noise.
Lan Yin loved music but almost never sang. Her voice became so piercing when she did that it seemed capable of shattering glass at any moment. It didn’t only hurt the people around her; it could injure her own eardrums as well.
Zhi Zuo Si, meanwhile, developed headaches when he heard certain kinds of noise.
Those weaknesses were things that could torment them—and things that could control them.
Then what was Zhi Li’s weakness?
He had once told Ke Bu himself.
Feelings.
Emotion and Zhi Li’s body repelled each other. Emotion was what kept the demon inside him asleep. In truth, Zhi Li could have been even more perfect, but his body and whatever lived inside it were both held back by emotion.
Ke Bu didn’t want Zhi Li to become more perfect.
Because that would mean taking emotion away from him.
Taking Ke Bu away from him.
Worse than arguing was not knowing how to stop arguing.
Ke Bu couldn’t lower his head. He couldn’t apologize.
Was male competitiveness something people were simply born with?
If I were a girl, maybe I’d be allowed to cry and act spoiled with you… but I just had to be a man.
“You have your reasons to be angry with me,” Ke Bu said. “I have mine too.”
“Then tell me.”
Ke Bu looked directly at him. “I saw you with Xiong Le Le. I know this sounds petty, but why did it have to be him? I don’t want to see someone imitating me standing beside you. I thought I was the one person beside you who was unique. Then suddenly another person appears who can smile like me, talk like me, act like me… someone who makes me start questioning whether there’s any meaning to me existing at all. Do you understand?”
Ke Bu shoved Zhi Li hard with both hands, but Zhi Li didn’t move.
Instead, Zhi Li caught both of Ke Bu’s wrists. “Ke Bu, can’t you just lose your temper at me properly like this?”
He pulled Ke Bu into his arms and sat down on the sofa. “Ke Bu, as long as you let me touch you and let me talk to you, you can get as jealous as you want and lose your temper at me however you want.”
“I’m not jealous,” Ke Bu muttered into him.
“It sounds like jealousy.”
“You heard wrong. If I ask what the two of you talked about, will I look too—”
Before Ke Bu could finish, Zhi Li answered, “I gave him a final deadline.”
“I’d like to kick him a few times too, but I can’t do that. Zhi Li, just ignore him too. Once he gets bored with the game, it’ll pass. My mom…”
“Ke Bu, your mother is an adult. Problems that belong to her should be handled by her.”
One sentence.
So simple.
Apparently, in Zhi Li’s mind, the problem had always been that simple.
Ke Bu muttered quietly, “My mom isn’t your mom.”
“If she can’t even deal with something like this, she won’t be able to be happy later either.”
Ke Bu couldn’t argue with that. Zhi Li’s words might not have sounded nice, but they were the truth.
Ke Bu fell silent, thinking about what he should do next.
“Are you going to keep losing your temper?” Zhi Li suddenly asked.
“How am I supposed to keep going in this situation?”
“Then can I continue?”
Ke Bu raised his head and pulled away from Zhi Li’s arms. “You dismissed the reason you met Xiong Le Le in one sentence and I haven’t even finished questioning you about it, yet now you want to keep scolding me?!”
His head was pressed straight back into Zhi Li’s chest.
“Mm. I’m not finished. You bullied my person, so I’m not letting you off easily. Can you stop comparing my Ke Bu to other people? In my world, there’s only one person who can be called Ke Bu.”
Ke Bu’s fingers tightened around Zhi Li’s clothes before slowly relaxing again. “Is your Ke Bu really that good? He does nothing but throw tantrums.”
“That only proves my taste is unusual.”
“Was that a compliment or an insult? Careful, I’ll tell him.”
Ke Bu rested quietly against Zhi Li and continued, “Then your Ke Bu would probably get angry if he saw you hugging me like this.”
“So hide before he sees.”
“You two-timing scumbag.” Laughing as he cursed him, Ke Bu bit down on Zhi Li’s collar.
At that moment, a man who didn’t belong to the school appeared outside the door carrying sticky-rice dumplings. He handed one to Su You Yan, who was waiting outside for them to finish. “I’m Xia Qi. I used to be a reporter until bad people fired me. Then I became a radio host and bad people fired me again, so now I can only squeeze through loopholes everywhere to build up some name recognition. Happy Dragon Boat Festival.”
Ke Bu shouted from inside, “Go back to your parallel universe! It isn’t even Dragon Boat Festival over here yet!”
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