Someone once said that when a person truly wishes for something, the whole universe will lend a hand to help them achieve it.
After finishing the exam, Haiqing spent several days on tenterhooks. Whenever Pinjun had neither class nor work, he came over to keep him company. The result of coming and going from Haiqing’s home so often was that he blended perfectly into the family; Grandpa even thought he had always had two grandsons.
Only Haiqing’s father, Shichen, seemed thoughtful about Haiqing applying to art school.
Why study art? Aren’t you afraid you’ll starve?
Tuition and fees are expensive. Have you thought about how you’re going to pay for them?
And after graduation, what are you planning to do? Can you actually make a living from this in Taiwan?
He was afraid Haiqing had simply been dazzled for a moment by the satisfaction and sense of achievement that painting gave him, forgetting to consider the difficulties of real life. Getting in was only the first step. The road ahead was still unimaginably long.
Shichen was someone who had struggled his way up from an older generation. Naturally, he hoped his son would amount to something. With his only son choosing art, a field that depended so heavily on talent, he could not help worrying.
And yet, looking at the acceptance notice in his hands, proof that the exam Haiqing had worked so hard to prepare for had finally gone the way he hoped, Shichen could not completely hide a father’s pride in his son. Still, he chose to keep a stern face. These thoughts, his worry, his happiness, Shichen would never let Haiqing know. That included the fact that for several nights in a row, he had carefully held that acceptance letter in his hands, smiling as he drank in celebration. In front of everyone else, he remained the same strict father.
One day near Grandpa’s birthday, Haiqing and Pinjun booked a restaurant under the pretext of celebrating his birthday. In such a cheerful atmosphere, even Shichen loosened up, and after a few drinks he began to smile from time to time.
Grandpa seemed to be completely liberated by the festive mood and the karaoke livening things up. Not only did he go up and sing, but with Haiqing and Pinjun egging him on, he even danced. The atmosphere seemed infectious enough to change the light itself, and Haiqing kept feeling as though he were seeing Grandpa as a young man again, passionate and free-spirited.
Haiqing was very happy.
But Haiqing also deeply regretted organizing this family birthday celebration.
Compared with the wild joy he had felt only days earlier after learning he had gotten into school, Haiqing was now, without question, little more than a walking corpse.
The living room had always contained a lot of things but had at least been kept neat. Now it was a complete mess. Empty drink cans, snacks, and instant-noodle bowls had been tossed carelessly across the table and floor; if he was not paying attention, it was easy to kick one away, yank his foot back with an “ow,” then kick another. Haiqing curled up like an abandoned child in the chair Grandpa used to sit in. His clothes barely covered his body, leaving both ankles exposed to the chill.
On the family altar sat a conspicuous photograph beside burning incense sticks. Grandpa’s smile was as warm and cheerful as it had been when he was alive.
Haiqing shifted uneasily on the recliner. No matter how he turned, he refused to face the altar. He did not want to face this outcome. Who could have imagined that Grandpa would wander off again during a lull in the family gathering and then die in a park? Haiqing’s tears had long since run dry, and his voice was hoarse and inflamed from wailing, yet the discomfort in his body was nothing compared with the emptiness inside him.
Grandpa was gone, and Dad was leaving him too.
Bad news rolled downhill like a snowball, thudding larger and larger as it came. Only a few days after Grandpa died, Shichen pulled Haiqing aside in the middle of the night and told him that the company’s assignment sending him to the United States had actually come through a long time ago. He had originally planned to wait a few more days before telling Haiqing, but after something so enormous happened so suddenly, Shichen could only lay everything out.
A morning exercise program was playing on television. Haiqing had always found it boring, yet now he desperately wanted to hear its sounds. The host looked fairly young. In his forties? No, maybe already in his fifties. People who appeared on television always looked younger than they really were. Grandpa had been the opposite. He had looked old and tired.
“All right, now we’re moving on to arm exercises. Draw big circles with me. One-two-three-four, two-two-three-four—”
The cheerful noise from the program reminded Haiqing of how Grandpa used to solemnly count along every morning. Listening, Haiqing curled beneath his clothes and cried. The pain and fear of being abandoned by the entire world seemed to clamp around his windpipe, leaving him painfully trapped between the instinct to survive and the urge to give up. He looked unbearably fragile.
The television’s cold glow washed over the side of Haiqing’s face, making him look haggard and withered.
So tired.
So fed up.
Haiqing bit his lower lip, refusing to let the sound of his crying spread through the space that now held only him. Sheets of notepaper lay on the table, and sticky notes covered the house, all of them filled with reminders. Before leaving the country, his father had done everything he could to make sure Haiqing could live properly without either him or Grandpa there, but none of that care had reached Haiqing’s heart.
No one could make Haiqing feel that he was not alone, or that he was needed. Not even Pinjun.
Half asleep and half awake, Haiqing twitched restlessly. He had no idea how many days and nights had passed. When he was hungry, he got up and grabbed whatever he could find to eat; when he was tired, he lay down and slept. Classes, getting out of class, skipping class. Whenever he thought of Grandpa or could not fall asleep, he turned on the television and listened to the morning programs or professional baseball broadcasts, drifting once more between waking and sleep.
So lonely…
Haiqing clutched his clothes tightly and curled even smaller, like a very young child, helpless and pitiful.
So noisy.
A rapidly escalating series of doorbell rings woke Haiqing. His muddled mind could not immediately understand the change in his surroundings, so he stayed curled up and waited for his consciousness to catch up with his body.
The doorbell grew more urgent with every ring until whoever was outside began pressing it repeatedly. The old apartment had terrible soundproofing. In the past, Haiqing would have panicked about disturbing the neighbors and rushed to open the door, but after being worn down by several days… or had it been several weeks? his reactions were no longer sharp enough. By the time he finally registered that he was supposed to answer the door, the bell had already stopped.
At least it was quiet now.
Haiqing figured the other person must have given up. Who could it have been? He could not think of the likeliest candidate. He had only just driven Xiao K away yesterday. Who was going to come next because they were worried about him, only to get driven away too and stop contacting him? A bitter, almost self-punishing smile touched Haiqing’s face.
I’ll just keep sleeping…
He found the remote trapped beneath his backside and switched the singing program over to a professional baseball channel. Listening to the familiar crack of the bat and the continued shouting of “Su Haiqing! I like you!” he started drifting back to sleep…
Haiqing’s eyes flew open. He listened carefully to the sounds outside. When a second shout that sounded suspiciously like a confession reached his ears, he involuntarily made a startled sound.
It was not his imagination. Someone really was outside yelling his name.
“Su Haiqing! I like you! Su Haiqing! I like you!”
Haiqing slowly walked to the window and looked outside. Sure enough, Pinjun was standing beneath the covered arcade across the street, shouting at the top of his lungs. His voice had already drawn quite a few people to open their windows and look. At this rate, someone would probably call the police any minute.
“Su Haiqing! I like you!”
Listening to the confession grow louder and more frequent, Haiqing silently walked to the intercom and pressed the button to unlock the entrance. As though he had been switched off by remote control, the shouting stopped instantly, followed at once by the sound of the front door being yanked open and footsteps racing upstairs.
Haiqing barely reacted.
He walked woodenly back to where he had been sitting and curled into a ball again.
Pinjun could hardly believe his eyes.
A home that had once been so warm now looked as though several house parties had been thrown there without anyone ever cleaning up afterward. He noticed several cartons of goods dumped unopened in the corner by the entrance. The bowls in the sink had turned black and gray; he did not even want to imagine how long ago they had been used, and in the shadows he could faintly see cockroach antennae twitching.
Pinjun drew a deep breath, picked up the trash can, and began throwing away the rubbish on the table. When he crouched beside Haiqing, his movements were as gentle as ever.
“Why haven’t you been answering my calls?” Pinjun frowned and lightly pinched the back of Haiqing’s hand. He had lost so much weight that there was almost no flesh left to pinch.
“I put my phone on silent,” Haiqing said hoarsely. He sounded weak and listless, like someone seriously ill, making Pinjun’s frown deepen.
“You haven’t even been reading my messages?”
“I read them… I just didn’t know how to reply.” Haiqing knew Pinjun had sent him a lot of messages. At first he had opened every one, but he never replied. Later, the notification sounds annoyed him, so he switched the phone to silent. It was probably dead by now, and none of the later messages had been marked as read.
Pinjun looked around. Cleaning the entire apartment would take an enormous amount of work, so he decided to clear away the trash around Haiqing first. Even that alone filled the living-room trash can until the rubbish formed a little mountain.
“Where’s your dad? He’s just letting you live like this?” Pinjun remembered how particular Shichen was about keeping the home clean. How could he allow the place to become such a mess?
“He’s gone.” Haiqing sucked in a sharp breath. “He went to the States for work for six months.”
The news made Pinjun’s eyes widen.
A work assignment like that could not possibly have been arranged at the last minute, yet Haiqing had never said a word about it during any of their earlier conversations, not even when the two of them went drinking at a bar. He had only said, “Dad doesn’t want me anymore.” Pinjun had assumed Haiqing was simply grieving Grandpa’s death and had not pressed him on what he meant.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“What good would telling you have done? He would’ve left anyway.” Haiqing was used to being independent. He knew that telling someone about something could not stop it from happening, so if that was the case, he might as well tell no one.
Pinjun did not see it that way.
“Something this big happened and you didn’t tell me. What am I to you, exactly?” He understood what Haiqing meant. Shichen would not have stayed just because Pinjun knew, but Pinjun felt that talking about it might at least have prevented things from getting this bad.
Too much pressure, pain, and grief had all piled onto one person. Even Iron Man could not take that. To Pinjun, the point of “telling someone” was not to “avoid or prevent something from happening,” but to “let the feelings out.”
The more important someone was, the more you hoped to have a place in their life, perhaps even to become someone who could give them courage and peace. Pinjun had already made a place for Haiqing in his own heart, so naturally he hoped Haiqing saw him the same way.
Faced with such a direct question, Haiqing froze for a moment and could only stare blankly at Pinjun.
What kind of person was Pinjun to him? Haiqing had never thought about that question before.
A friend he was happy spending time with? An important brother? A sworn brother who could support him and cheer him on when it mattered? Haiqing hesitated over every explanation. Rather than never having considered it, perhaps he simply could not understand why anyone would truly want to occupy those places in his life.
“I don’t know either,” Haiqing murmured after a long silence, burying his face deeper into the shadows.
“All right, forget it. How long has it been since you ate?” Looking at all the food wrappers and instant-noodle bowls on the table, Pinjun figured that even if it was unhealthy, Haiqing had at least kept eating enough to maintain his basic energy. There probably was not too much to worry about on that front.
“I don’t know either.” As Haiqing spoke, he hid farther under the blanket. The instinctive way he tried to escape made Pinjun suddenly impatient, an emotion that appeared so rarely he could count the times on one hand and still have fingers left over.
Haiqing, curled under the blanket, was trembling. Pinjun could not tell whether it was from cold or fear. He believed Haiqing was trying to avoid possibilities that Pinjun had dragged right in front of him. Words that had nearly burst out several times before but never made it past his throat lodged there again. This time, Pinjun decided he would not hold back.
He abruptly pulled away Haiqing’s blanket, making the boy curled beneath it flinch.
“Su Haiqing, I’m telling you seriously now.” Pinjun tossed the blanket onto the sofa beside them and leaned over Haiqing. In the shadow his own body cast, only a pair of large, bright eyes stared back at him, like a puppy that had just been adopted.
“I love you.” Pinjun said it firmly, leaving Haiqing no room to refuse.
“Even if you’re a complete mess like this, I still love you. I don’t care what you think of me. Get up right now!” He grabbed Haiqing by the shoulders and hauled him upright before Haiqing even had time to react.
“What did you just say?” Several seconds passed before Pinjun’s words finally traveled from Haiqing’s ears to his brain. “Can you say it again?”
In the middle of his confusion, Haiqing was still questioning whether he had really heard a certain word that had always seemed so far away from him.
Seeing Haiqing’s dazed expression, Pinjun could not help feeling that he was unbearably cute. He brushed Haiqing’s messy hair back, revealing his whole face.
“Haiqing, I love you. I’m not going to let you keep living like this.” Pinjun wiped the stale sweat from his shoulder.
“You’re not even going to class. You look like death warmed over…” Pinjun glanced up and caught the faint dissatisfaction on Haiqing’s face at the criticism. At last, laughter escaped his lips, flooding the room, which had gone days and nights without distinction, with a little life and color.
“I’ll take care of you. No, I want to take care of you! Let’s live together.”
Haiqing could not get a single word out.
“In a minute, we’ll clean this place up first and take out the trash.”
“Then you’ll take a shower, and we’ll go buy groceries and come back to make dinner together.”
“I make really good fried rice. Even my little sister says mine is the best!”
Warmth flowed into Haiqing’s cold, lifeless body. To Haiqing, Pinjun’s smile was dazzlingly bright.
“Do you understand?” Seeing little reaction from him, Pinjun waved a hand in front of his eyes.
“……”
There was still someone in this world willing to care about him, to cherish and protect him. He was not alone…
“Then say you like me.”
“What?”
Haiqing suddenly remembered the day Pinjun had accompanied him through the exam. When Haiqing had thanked him with a bit of polite distance, Pinjun had made a rare, willful request.
“Say you like drawing me. That you like having me study with you, like having me tutor you, like eating xiaolongbao with me, like having me talk with your grandpa, like having me stay by your side all the time…”
“I like you. I really, really like you.”
Haiqing answered and leaned in to kiss Pinjun first. It was fierce and passionate, almost leaving them both breathless.
And now, that familiar warmth had returned.
In an instant, Haiqing knew the answer to the question Pinjun had asked earlier. The uncertainty and confusion that had still lingered in him became clear and firm at this moment.
Haiqing wrapped his arms around Pinjun and buried his face in the hollow of his neck, sobbing softly.
“Haiqing, I don’t want to lose you.”
“You’ll never lose me. Never.”
Yan Fei felt as though he was about to lose his mind.
He entered the office, used his employee card to unlock the door, and stepped inside. In the empty darkness, there was nothing but the sound of his own breathing. To him, the silence was almost a kind of salvation.
He did not want to face anyone while he was in such a sorry state.
“Damn it.” He swore under his breath and dropped straight onto the sofa used for meetings. The blanket that usually stayed buried deep in a drawer finally came in handy. It was not warm enough, but it would do.
Tonight had been an absolutely awful night for him.
He had gone to all that trouble having the new intern gather information on overseas vacations, then picked an itinerary Jimmy might like and asked Pinky to book the flights. Wanting to make things up to Jimmy, he had even taken him to an expensive, luxurious restaurant for dinner.
But things did not go according to plan.
Yan Fei had not even had a chance to mention the plane tickets or invite Jimmy by saying, “Let’s go on a trip together,” before Jimmy snatched his phone, called Yan Fei’s mother, and outed him against his will with no chance to prepare himself.
Just thinking about how much effort he had spent afterward explaining to his mother that it had only been a joke made Yan Fei feel exhausted from head to toe.
Why was Jimmy so fixated on having a label for their relationship?
Yan Fei did not understand. To him, as long as the two of them were happy together, wasn’t that enough? Why did they have to announce to the whole world that they were a couple? Thinking of the suspicion and anger in his mother’s voice as she kept demanding reassurance from him over the phone, then comparing it with Jimmy’s wounded expression, Yan Fei felt nothing but exhaustion.
They had already put up with things this way for four years. Why had Jimmy suddenly begun obsessing over their status?
Couldn’t he be a little more understanding of me?
With a long sigh, Yan Fei covered his eyes with one arm. Without even showering, his body sticky with sweat that had dried and dampened again, he fell asleep.
“As long as you’re still living there, I’m never setting foot in that apartment again!”
Jimmy turned on the lights at home. Faced with a room full of silence, he knew Yan Fei had meant his declaration that he was not coming back.
Jimmy slumped onto the sofa and sniffled quietly, forcing himself not to let the tears fall.
He did not understand why Yan Fei could not grasp how important the most basic problem between them was to him. It was not that the love was gone, and not that they were wrong for each other. It was the uncertainty of having to hide, of never being able to be properly together, that left him unable to see a future.
Yan Fei’s definition of love, of a relationship, was simple… as long as they were happy together, that was enough.
Sometimes Jimmy wondered what difference there was between that and a one-night stand.
Their coworkers and close friends all knew about their relationship. The only barrier they could not get past was “family.” How long were they supposed to maintain this awkward, neither-here-nor-there state, hiding and dodging until it barely resembled a real relationship? They were not children anymore. In four years, Yan Fei had shown no sign of wanting to improve the situation at all, while Jimmy had only grown more hysterical as time passed.
Truthfully, when Jimmy heard Yan Fei say they should “start over,” he thought Yan Fei finally wanted the same things he did. Those infuriating matchmaking photos would stop appearing, and Jimmy would be able to go home with Yan Fei for New Year’s…
But reality proved that what Jimmy wanted and what Yan Fei wanted were never quite the same.
Yan Fei only wanted them to reset everything between them, to use a trip to recover the feeling they had when they first got together. But that kind of cycle was not what Jimmy wanted.
Yan Fei wanted only the present.
What Jimmy wanted was to know that he mattered, to know that the person he loved had included him in his future.
Lifting his head, Jimmy looked around the home he had decorated with his own hands. It had the warm colors he loved most, careful little details everywhere, but most importantly, the person Jimmy had imagined from the beginning was Yan Fei. He had built this home while imagining what it would feel like to live together with him.
When had their relationship reached a hurdle like this?
The security Jimmy needed was clearly not something Yan Fei was willing or able to give him.
Where are you?
Are you really not coming home?
Can’t we talk?
Baby?
Not one call was answered. Not one message was read.
His fingers slowed from flying across the screen to gradually coming to a stop. Jimmy suddenly felt like an idiot.
Leaning back, Jimmy let the sofa envelop him as the darkness of night carried him back several years to the night he had met Yan Fei at the night market. Things had not been like this then. Why, after they finally got together for real, had everything only drifted further and further off course?
He thought about it for a long time, but found no answer.
The phone in his hand remained silent as well. No messages came in, whether from Yan Fei or anyone else.