Late that night, Lu Qingyang went home once more. This time, Mr. Ling had blackmailed him with the affair video, forcing him to sneak back and steal the files.
They waited downstairs beneath the shadows of the trees. Lu Qingyang lived on the second floor, and they could even hear the fierce middle-aged couple arguing through the Lu family’s window. The legendary “Tiger Lei” truly was a tigress. Her roars never stopped, and even from a distance they could practically feel Principal Lu being cursed bloody and scrambling for cover.
Lu Qingyang shot out the door at a run. The instant it slammed shut behind him, a kitchen cleaver flew toward the back of his head and buried itself squarely in the wooden door.
In a foul mood, Lu Qingyang slapped several battered kraft-paper folders into Mr. Ling’s hands and snapped, “It’s all here, everything you wanted, so don’t come looking for me again!”
“That kid Chen Peng is studying at Fanjiang University now. Go find him yourselves. And whatever you do, don’t tell him I was the one who gave you the information. I don’t want trouble.” Lu Qingyang added the warning with considerable caution. In his mind flashed the heavy brow bones and vicious temperament of Chen Jiu’s son, violence seemingly steeped into the boy’s very blood. Pale scars from an axe blade could still be found on Lu Qingyang’s temple and fingers. Back when Chen Peng was only seven or eight and living at the welfare home, the little brat had already left marks on the director’s husband with knives and axes. As far as Lu Qingyang was concerned, someone born that stubborn and vicious was simply a scourge on the world, hard-lived and impossible to kill, forever dragging down everyone around him.
Sitting in the car, Yan Xiaodao quickly leafed through the old documents inside the folders. The papers had been stacked together in a chaotic mess, revealing just how casually those children had been handled back when they were sold off for money.
Yan Xiaodao suddenly pulled out one file sheet. “Who does this kid look like to you?”
Yan Xiaodao was exceptionally good at remembering faces. He narrowed his eyes at the interesting photograph. Although the boy in it had not yet permed his hair into great rolling waves and still wore a clean, neat crop, the resemblance was unmistakable.
Ling He leaned closer, surprise faintly showing on his face. Mao Zhixiu simply vaulted over from the front seat like some demon cat whose body could stretch at will. After carefully studying the file photo, she exclaimed, “Whoa, he looked this pure and normal back then? Isn’t that Zhe?”
Ling He nodded. “That’s Su Zhe.”
Yan Xiaodao finally understood. “So Tiger Lei and her husband sold Su Zhe back then? …Sold him to your family?”
Su Zhe in the photograph was fair-skinned, obedient-looking, and pretty. He must have been exactly the sort of boy many families wanting a son would have chosen.
Yan Xiaodao earned himself another vicious eye roll from Mr. Ling. Ling He frowned. “How did that become ‘sold to my family’?”
Ling He explained, “All I ever heard was that he had been adopted from mainland China by a Chinese-American couple. I genuinely didn’t know he had been bought this way. His adoptive family later went through some upheaval. His adoptive father fell ill and died, the family fortunes collapsed, and things became very difficult. Zhe dropped out of school and ended up working in a Western restaurant. I was a kitchen helper, he was a bartender. That’s how we met.”
So he too was an orphan whose fate inspired pity and regret.
Yan Xiaodao had long wondered how someone as young as Mr. Ling had managed to gather a group of loyal, like-minded companions around him. Beyond Ling He’s personal magnetism and the authority with which he won people over, there had to be other reasons ordinary people could hardly imagine, reasons these people were willing to stay together and trust and rely on one another so firmly. Their young lives had already been crooked and difficult enough, and there simply had not been many people they could depend upon. They had only themselves as they struggled forward, trying to find a harbor where they could finally stop, perhaps even a “home” willing to shelter and accept them for the rest of their lives.
Yan Xiaodao asked with some confusion, “Then what about that aunt of his?”
Mao Zhixiu shrugged. “That’s the aunt of one of his ‘sworn older brothers.’ She’s not his biological aunt at all! He just has too many sworn brothers. If he catches sight of a handsome guy, he calls him bro!”
Yan Xiaodao carefully put that page away. “Don’t call Zhe and tell him yet; when we get back, find a chance to ask him about it and see whether we can still help him locate his real family.”
The group searched for temporary lodging in the middle of the night, planning to go to the university first thing in the morning and catch Chen Jiu’s son. Now that they had a name and a school, the boy could not simply disappear.
The nearest star-rated hotel by the university that did not look too terrible turned out to have only one standard room left.
Whenever something required negotiation, Mr. Yan generally took charge without any need for democratic nominations or a show of hands, as though handling such matters naturally fell to the group’s older brother because he had experience and knew how to talk to people.
Yan Xiaodao patiently negotiated with the front desk. “Could you check again for us? We have both men and a woman, so one room really isn’t convenient.”
“We’ve got one room and nothing else. If you don’t want it, try the place next door. It’s worse than ours.” The receptionist did not even lift her eyelids. That was the attitude reserved for out-of-town guests whose accents she did not recognize: take it or leave it.
Mao Zhixiu poked Yan Xiaodao in the shoulder from behind. “Mr. Yan, don’t worry about me. I’m fine.”
It was late, and everyone was exhausted. In the end, all three of them entered the same room.
Yan Xiaodao headed straight for the long sofa, but having an injured leg came with certain unavoidable disadvantages. He somehow failed to beat Miss Mao to the couch. Mao Zhixiu had already planned ahead and moved faster than his eyes could follow, practically vaulting over Yan Xiaodao in a nimble somersault before landing across the sofa with a thump, occupying every inch from end to end so there was no chance Yan could steal it back.
Yan Xiaodao was so annoyed he almost laughed, pointing with his cane as he said, “Young lady, you take the bed; I’ll sleep on the sofa.”
Mao Zhixiu widened her narrow willow-leaf eyes. “If you take the sofa, how are Mr. Ling and I supposed to sleep? Am I supposed to share a bed with him? Obviously I’m sleeping on the sofa. Mr. Yan, please take the bed and don’t stand on ceremony!”
Ling He had been completely left out of the discussion. No one asked him anything, as though he were the wild tile in a mahjong set, able to pair with anyone. Their Mr. Ling apparently went with everything.
Yan Xiaodao and Immortal Mao traded playful barbs, yet both of them were plainly thinking about Ling He, and neither spoke his name. Mao Zhixiu lay down fully clothed, pulled the thin towel blanket over her head, and spoke through the muffling layer. “I sleep incredibly deeply. I don’t hear anything, and I don’t see anything. You two do whatever you like.”
The moment she finished, Mao Zhixiu went perfectly still and silent, playing dead like a lifeless cat. That left Yan Xiaodao and Ling He staring at one another in the dim room lit by a single small lamp, each harboring his own thoughts.
Ling He lowered his eyes as he sat at the edge of the bed, silently yanking one shoe off with unnecessary force.
Only after pulling off one shoe did he remember that Xiaodao would have trouble removing his own. With the other shoe still on his foot, Ling He deliberately walked around to the far side of the bed, crouched down, and began taking Xiaodao’s shoes off for him.
Yan Xiaodao said quietly, “No need. I can do it myself.”
Ling He did not even look up. “I want to.”
Yes. He wanted to.
Only while Yan Xiaodao was injured and lame could he remain so harmlessly by Ling He’s side, giving the two of them the luck and opportunity to stay together. For every day Yan Xiaodao remained lame, they could support each other and remain together for another day. The truth was so cruel and helpless that the half of Ling He’s heart already devoured and occupied by a demon was almost intoxicated with satisfaction. With its desire fulfilled, it beat its chest and roared: Good. Stay lame!
Yet the other half of him, the soft half where kindness and reluctance still survived, hurt beyond bearing: I crippled you; I’m selfish, I’m a bastard, and I’m sorry, Xiaodao.
The wound on Yan Xiaodao’s right foot had already healed. Precisely because the external injury was gone, the internal damage now stood out all the more clearly, impossible to avoid or ignore. The foot was nearly useless. When he put it on the ground, he could not push off with any strength at all. The place where flesh and tendon had been split felt weak and soft, with little sensation left.
Sharing a bed was supposed to be one of those romantic pleasures beneath flowers and moonlight, taking advantage of misty mountains beyond the window and a gentle dawn breeze. Yet with three people in one room, the questions Yan Xiaodao wanted to ask remained trapped inside him until the restraint itself was nearly becoming masochistic. The slightest movement from the person beside him sent faint ripples across his skin. Every subtle shift of their bodies reminded him that when it came to Ling He, he would always have sensation, always have feeling, and would never be able to stop caring.
Their feelings for one another seemed almost like something that had happened in a previous life. Now the two of them were living this life over again, rediscovering the occasional sweetness fate allowed after taking them around and around in circles.
“Mr. Yan, stop shaking. It feels like an earthquake.” Ling He’s voice had gone inexplicably hoarse.
“…I’m not shaking,” Yan Xiaodao argued.
Yan Xiaodao truly was not shaking. But to Mr. Ling, whose own heart was just as restless, every beat of Yan Xiaodao’s heart and every breath sounded like drums. They tortured him just as deeply.
The two shared one quilt, which made sleep almost impossible. Considerate as ever, Yan Xiaodao shifted the entire quilt onto Ling He, propped himself up, pulled his jacket over his own body, and turned onto his side with his back facing him.
Ling He suddenly sat up and flung the entire quilt back over Yan Xiaodao. The sheer temper of the gesture made it look as though Yan Xiaodao had somehow bullied him.
Ling He strode into the bathroom and shut himself completely inside the little dark room.
The behavior was strange enough that even the “dead cat” on the sofa came back to life. A pair of eyes appeared through a slit in the towel blanket: Well, well?
Ling He truly could not take it anymore. Both his heart and his body were slipping out of control.
The one suffering an “earthquake” had never been Yan Xiaodao. It was Ling He himself. Every muscle in his body seemed caught in quakes and landslides while a tsunami raged through his blood vessels.
Back at the riverside stilt restaurant, when he had leaned close and watched the handsome profile of Yan Xiaodao lighting a cigarette, he had already fallen deeply under the man’s spell.
His body seemed to be undergoing the violent movements of mountains and continents at the birth of the world. Humanity’s most primitive sexual impulse had taken tens of thousands of years and countless generations of reproduction and evolution to grow from animal mating into love rich with human emotion, even marriage. Yet for him, it took only a brief instant to understand what it meant to fall utterly and completely for one person.
At that moment, Ling He needed only to lower his eyes to imagine mountains collapsing across his own body, rivers changing course, plants awakening, blood surging. Everything was different from before, colliding and transforming at a speed he could not control. The self-control he had always taken pride in had become a burden, mercilessly mocking his agitation and embarrassment. Countless hidden currents seemed to run beneath muscle and blood, converging at a single turning point into one great river. Under pressure, the dam suddenly burst and floodwater tore through his veins.
There were things he had never experienced before. It was not that he was an idiot ignorant of human affairs. He simply had never experienced them, and had believed he never would.
Even before, when Yan Xiaodao had pinned him down, sought sex, and tried to force himself on him, Ling He had shown no physical response. His feelings for Xiaodao had always existed in the mind: respect, fascination, worship, adoration. Holding Xiaodao’s hand, kissing his lips, had once seemed enough to satisfy him for an entire lifetime.
Ling He fought one final desperate battle with himself. Rarely had he ever been so flustered, solving one problem only for another to rise. Finally unable to endure it any longer, he snatched up the thick roll of toilet paper in the bathroom.
He pressed his forehead against the cold, damp mirror. Raising his lashes, he could see straight into the depths of his own pupils, straight into his own heart: he loved Xiaodao.
Then he narrowed his eyes and glanced lower. A helplessly intoxicated smile tugged at the corner of his mouth, even as he frowned with a trace of disgust and shame. The ordinary physical desire of an adult man struck through him and gave him a fleeting pleasure he could barely describe, making him shiver. Ling He tipped back his beautiful neck and let out a long breath. Under the bathroom light, his features softened into a rare, private sensuality. Only when no one could see him would he allow himself such an occasional indulgence with his own hand.
Fingers trained on the piano were exceptionally nimble even at this, able to move fast or slow, harder or softer, deeper or shallower.
Xiaodao played piano too… Ling He imagined Yan Xiaodao’s handsome, well-shaped hands, all five fingers almost unbearably appealing.
The air around him was still and windless, yet somewhere deep inside his memory the bathroom curtain suddenly seemed to rustle.
His body contracted in memory into the bones of his adolescence: long hair falling to his shoulders, beautiful and slender, a pair of green eyes blurred by steam, his features always carrying that mysterious quality of mist and cloud.
A beautiful orphaned boy with looks capable of toppling a city. Such beauty had never been a blessing. It was disaster.
Behind the shower curtain, increasingly heavy breathing crashed through his dazed awareness. A pair of turbid, spying eyes burned dark red beneath the torment of frustrated desire. The sound resembled a throat being pinched until only the thinnest noise could escape, suspended there as though it might snap at any instant, before dissolving into even rougher, more brazen panting. Scenes like that had driven straight into the rebellious blood in Ling He’s bones and his instinct to answer tooth for tooth. They made him want to draw a blade at any moment and stab.
If he never drove that blade home, the resentment would never settle.
He had never expected that in the end the blade would strike the utterly innocent Yan Xiaodao. In some twisted sense, perhaps it had finally canceled out that nameless evil fire in his heart. Yet had he not struck that blow, the frustration and unwillingness would surely have haunted him even longer. The shadow of his youth had never been easy to escape. In the end, it had still hurt the person he cared about most.
Xiao He.
You look too much like your father.
A man blessed with beauty so devastating could only survive if he also possessed sharp teeth, cold armor, and defenses sturdy enough to withstand the whole world. Without a fierce temperament and a powerful mind to protect his dignity, his ending could only be tragic. He had already seen the warning with his own eyes.
Ling He, on the road of your life, do you dare reveal even the slightest weakness and let others humiliate you?
No.
……
Ling He’s left hand, which had been bracing his body, suddenly struck the mirror. His long, spread fingers gripped the edge and trembled slowly.
He had long grown used to facing the world with coldness and sharpness. This kind of private tenderness and sensuality, however, he had given only to Yan Xiaodao.
He looked down at the shameful slickness in his palm, rubbed it once between his fingers, brought it briefly toward his nose as if studying the unfamiliar scent, then washed it away quickly in disgust. This unfamiliar surge of passion was another first for him.
All of his firsts had gone only to Yan Xiaodao.
Ling He forced himself to calm from his harsh breathing, lowered his head, zipped his trousers, and straightened himself. When he looked up again, he imagined Xiaodao’s handsome, carefree sleeping face in the mirror, hair slightly disordered. He hurriedly kissed the reflection and left the bathroom.
……
That same night, both of Qi Yanxuan’s civil-servant parents happened to be away on business, once again giving the secret young couple a chance to stay together off campus.
Snack bags and emptied beer cans covered the coffee table. A dubbed foreign film with somewhat steamy content played on the computer, the male lead’s murmured declarations of love masking two restless hearts standing at a turning point in their lives.
Qi Yanxuan went to the bathroom midway through the film. When he came back, he sat down on Chen Jin’s lap. Chen Jin said nothing, simply wrapped both arms around him from behind, locked them around Xiao Xuan’s waist, and bodily nudged him toward the bedroom.
Chen Jin knew the layout and furnishings of Qi Yanxuan’s bedroom extremely well. He had been there many times, whether openly visiting the Qi family as a guest or secretly slipping over for a private rendezvous.
Qi Yanxuan was pushed onto the bed and knocked over a stack of books. A model student from childhood indeed. There were no discs or comics on the bed, only a pile of study guides. Chen Jin silently mocked him for it while straightening up, quickly pulling off his own T-shirt and deliberately revealing his strong, rugged build before slowly undoing his trousers.
Compared with the softer, prettier male style currently fashionable on campus, Chen Jin had a distinctly masculine appeal. Put another way, within one particular hidden circle among university students, there were plenty of boys like Qi Yanxuan, while someone like Chen Jin was much harder to find. Supply was scarce and demand plentiful. Qi Yanxuan liked him and could not bear to let go.
Chen Jin signaled with his eyes. “You.”
Qi Yanxuan was eager but trembling slightly, uncertain what Chen Jin intended. Whenever they did this at his family home, Chen Jin became unusually rough for reasons he never understood.
Chen Jin switched their positions. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed several tall stacks of study guides at the head of the bed and read the spines more carefully. “You’re taking the postgraduate entrance exam?”
Qi Yanxuan lifted his head. “Mm, yeah; graduate school is one possible path.”
Chen Jin said, “You’re really going to do it? …Then take the exam yourself.”
Qi Yanxuan tested the waters. “You’re not?”
Chen Jin shot back, “With my grades, you think I’d get in? Forget it. Don’t make life hard for the professors.”
Qi Yanxuan said, “You’ve got your athletics background too. Graduate admissions take special skills into account, and there are extra-point policies. We could both apply here…”
Chen Jin cut him off stubbornly, saying aloud the truth as he saw it. “It wasn’t my athletics that got me in. I got admitted on the ‘hardship student’ quota!”
Qi Yanxuan endured it for a long moment before finally saying the truth. “Chen Jin, can you stop bringing up those three words all the time? Nobody looks down on you. It’s a knot in your own heart.”
Chen Jin slapped several books off the bed and onto the floor. “I mention it once and you can’t take it? And you still say you’ve never looked down on me?!”
I’m a hardship student.
I only got to know you, Xiao Xuan, because my family was poor.
I only got the chance to stay in school because my family was poor, because I was swept into that charitable political showcase they called a ‘poverty-relief program.’
I only got into university because my family was poor. Every school was forced by the education authorities to fill a three-percent quota with impoverished and disabled students, and somehow I got circled into that target too.
How could students like you, born into good families with both parents and every advantage, ever understand what goes through my head? None of you understand. You’ve never swallowed that contempt or those looks. You’ve never lived in the man-eating cracks at the bottom of society, enduring humiliation and living worse than a dog. People are unequal from birth. No matter how hard you work, no matter how many times you change your name, you can’t change a rotten fate like this.
Nearly ten years of feeling had brought Qi Yanxuan to the point where he too felt trapped and exhausted. “I want to take the postgraduate exam, stay here, maybe sit for the civil-service exam later. But you’re always thinking about leaving. If you go, what happens to us?”
“I want to leave. I’ve wanted to leave for years. If I hadn’t stayed because of you, I never would’ve applied to this university!” Chen Jin finally told the truth. “I don’t want to spend one more day on Rongzheng Street. I don’t want to see those ugly faces looking down on me. I don’t want to watch those people spit contempt at me and my mother. I’ve had enough of all of you!”
That night became living hell for Qi Yanxuan.
After their vicious argument, Chen Jin actually dragged him into his parents’ bedroom. The last time they had fought this badly was before the college entrance exam, when they had argued bitterly over which university to apply to. Chen Jin had talked tough then too, but in the end he had compromised, unwillingly remaining in the Three Rivers region for Qi Yanxuan’s sake. That had convinced Xiao Xuan that Chen Jin truly cared about him.
Qi Yanxuan could not understand at all why Chen Jin liked doing that shameful thing in his parents’ bed.
The undeniable gap between their strength meant Chen Jin could act without restraint, willfully venting the thick, feverish conflict churning through his blood. A family photograph of Qi Yanxuan and his parents stood at the head of the bed. Chen Jin deliberately turned Xiao Xuan’s face toward it, as though forcing the Qi family, forcing everyone, to witness what he was doing.
Chen Jin knew perfectly well that he was repeating the same crude behavior, even using the same kind of posture, as the man from long ago. Years earlier, through a broken wooden door, he had listened to a woman beg in humiliation and had watched that monster commit the same brutal acts again and again. He could not stop himself from returning to that road even though he did not want to.
Only these occasional violent, distorted releases could cover the wound in his chest and briefly numb the torment he felt whenever he saw that disgraceful, universally condemned name in newspapers or online, whenever he heard people in streets and alleys discussing every faint clue surrounding the fifteen-year-old case.
Years of such torment had already twisted and transformed a heart that had never been broad or strong enough to contain it.
The innocence of his childhood had been destroyed completely on that blood-soaked rainy night fifteen years ago. Those shadows in his memory might cling to him for the rest of his life.
As his body jerked through release, fragments of truth occasionally slipped from his mouth. Whether Qi Yanxuan understood them then, Chen Jin did not know.
“I’m trash. I’m not a good person. I can’t become one.”
“Xiao Xuan, what do you know? I’m a murderer’s son. You’ll never respect me… I’m that murderer’s son…”
Chen Jin’s eyes were red too as he pulled the nearly unconscious Qi Yanxuan into his arms.
He felt himself falling uncontrollably into an abyss, unable to pull free, unable to escape, drinking poison to quench his thirst and sinking deeper with every swallow. It was another cruel cycle of fate, turning back toward the same old road in that narrow, dark alley behind Rongzheng Street all those years ago…