Summer Part 2 (Dylan)

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5 years later

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5 years later

Lately I think about Yue often. It's hard not to with her face on the billboards all over Beijing. It turns out we live in the same city now. She is the new broadcast journalist on the nightly news and I get to watch her every day. She looks so beautiful and sophisticated, and my mind always wanders back to the summer I met her. After the slap in the kitchen, she avoided me for the rest of that day and then left really early the following morning. She made some excuse about an emergency at home but I know it was because of me. I tried to tell myself that it was better this way and I that I didn't care that she left, but I ended up drinking a lot that summer...I couldn't get her out of my thoughts. I kept replaying the night we spent together in my head and how good it felt holding her while she slept in my arms.


Zi Wei has never found out about us and Yue has never visited our house in Kunming again. She and Zi Wei are still the best of friends and over the years I have seen her only a handful of times. I was there for her and my sister's graduation day in Shanghai. She came over to greet my parents and she even posed for a few pictures with us, but she was physically as far away from me as she possibly could be. The single word she said to me was hello, in response to my greeting her, and even I know it's only because my parents were present. The other two times I have seen her were at Zi Wei's birthday dinners, the ones where my schedule allowed me to travel down to Shanghai when they were still in university. Both times she had a date with her...the same guy, and no matter how hard I tried to talk to her she just maneuvered herself away from me and never once spoke to me or even looked at me.


I can't blame her...I took her virginity and treated her like shit. Sometimes when I visit Zi Wei in Kunming, I will find myself eavesdropping on her conversations whenever she is talking to Yue on the phone. It always sounds so lively and exciting, whatever it is they will be chatting about. I cringe when I remember referring to Yue as not being stimulating company...as being a mute girl. I couldn't help but stare at her during those birthday dinners as she sat at the furthest end of the table from me, laughing generously and talking animatedly to her date. I also couldn't help but compare him to me and wonder what she saw in him...probably the fact that he wasn't a total dick to her like I was. I also didn't know if I liked the fact that she was still seeing the same guy two years in a row. The jealousy burned in me exactly the same way it did that first day I met her, when Fai was drooling all over her like a kid in a candy store.






I'm sitting in my living room eating my dinner and watching Yue on the news, when my phone rings. I glance at the screen and see that it's Zi Wei.

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