His tone was very nasal and congested when he spoke. It seemed his cold had worsened. Chu Jian’s conscience had already been laden with guilt as she mumbled that sentence, and now, after he so resolutely interrupted her, she completely wilted.
It was not that her heart had never softened before. Twenty years. It began from when they were kids and, with her schoolbag on her back, she had trailed after his every step, to when they were a little older and she had sat at the back of his bicycle to go to primary school. At that time, she had not understood why he had removed the rear rack on his mountain bike so that every day, she had no choice but to scrunch herself up and sit closer forward.
Winter and summer breaks, New Oriental[1]classes, remedial classes, the Senior High School Entrance Exam[2]—they had been together for all these things.
In the regional standardized physical education test, she had run a time of two minutes and thirty-odd seconds and was the best in the group. However, when she fell to her knees at the finish line from overexertion, her hands and feet numb, it was also he who had picked her up and carried her away in front of the entire region’s exam candidates. At the time, she had actually thought that she was going to die and had burst into tears from fear… She remembered all these things.
To say the truth, in this entire world, apart from his dad and her own parents, she was the person who most did not want to see him hurt or upset. She could support him—wholly and unconditionally support him—during his times of greatest difficulty, but there were some things…
Chu Jian avoided his gaze. Her head bowed, she glanced at the bag in her right hand and explained very sincerely, “When I signed for the delivery of this, my mom was also there. She even guessed that someone who likes me had sent it, and I didn’t explain. If I don’t throw it away, I’m scared she’ll pull it out for you to see. Once you tell her you were the one who sent it, she’ll definitely get the wrong idea.”
“Get the wrong idea about what?” He looked at her with an insipid expression.
“The wrong idea about… you and me.”
Out of the blue, there was the deafening sound of an electric drill.
What great timing.
He frowned. Amidst this loud noise that roused short-temperedness and feelings of unsettledness in a person, he questioned, “If you’re worried about your mom getting the wrong idea, why don’t you take it to your nail salon?”
That was true. Her dad and mom had never been to the nail salon before. It definitely would not be seen if it was left there.
She nodded. “Oh, okay.”
In the end, when Chu Jian sat outside the Starbucks that was downstairs of her nail aesthetics training business, holding that bag of dolls and drinking her iced tea lemonade under a green sun umbrella, she still had not really figured out what the conclusion was from the morning’s conversation. Why had they switched from talking about such a very serious topic to discussing the childish question of where she could keep the dolls so that her parents would not discover them?
Why did it feel as if every time she was around him, she would very easily slip back into her ways of thinking from when she was in junior and senior high school?
Chu Jian pulled her mind back with some difficulty. Looking at Tong Fei, she asked, “It doesn’t taste good? I bought it just for you.”
“Doesn’t taste good. It isn’t sweet, and it has no coffee flavour.” Tong Fei’s face had an expression that declared she had been duped.
“The young girls in our company have all been drinking this the last couple of days,” Chu Jian replied puzzledly.
From griping about the coffee, the two’s conversation topic meandered around and around until it arrived at the subject of that rich investor and hugely popular idol artiste whom they were going to be working with—Jian Bianlin. All these years, Tong Fei simply could not understand how Chu Jian could have such a person around her, and moreover, the two of them knew each other so well, but they had not managed to become a couple.
