The Healing Sunshine (一厘米的阳光)

Chapter 9.1 - Inch After Inch of Time (1)

The day Jì Chengyang returned to China was a Thursday.

Jǐ Yi sat in her classroom. Her seat was next to the window. Bringing her legs closer to the heat, she silently rejoiced that luckily, this year the heating had been turned on early. Otherwise, like all the other years, the dozen or so days before the heat was turned on would truly have been so cold it would have been hard to bear. She was worried he would be cold.

Her heart and mind were restless. For the entire day, she had been flipping through her math tests. She had looked over her latest ones several times and even repeatedly confirmed that the score she had achieved had reached the agreed-to range.

The dismissal bell rang. Holding her schoolbag, she was the first to rush out of the classroom.

All along the way, any orchestra members who saw her would be especially astonished and think that she was heading to the practice room. Contrary to their expectations, her feet did not even pause, and she dashed directly to the school's main gates. It was not the weekend, so there were not many vehicles outside of the gates. Soon, she spotted Jì Chengyang standing beside his car on the opposite side of the road.

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She ran over. Before she had even steadied herself on her feet, she fixed her eyes on him and smiled.

She was unable to stop her pounding heart and the flush that climbed onto her cheeks. Oh no, she could not control them at all.

Jì Chengyang pulled open the front passenger door and led her into the car. Then, circling around the front of the vehicle, he got in as well and shut the door. "Your hair has gotten longer?" he asked out of the blue.

"Just a bit. Too lazy to cut it." This time, seeing him, she dared not even look directly at him.

In fact, her hair had always been kept at a length just below her ears, and if she put in some effort, she could tie it up. However, it was more convenient not to... As for why she was now working so hard to tie her hair into a little tail at the back, it was mainly because she frequently heard her schoolmates say one thing: boys tended to like girls with long hair.

And Zhao Xiaoying had also said before, only if you tied your hair up often would your hair grow faster.

And so, she had been tying her hair up every day, hoping that by the time she went to university, she could have long hair that fluttered in the breeze.

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She thought they would still need to wait for Nuannuan, but surprisingly, Jì Chengyang drove the car away.

This was... the special gift?

He was rewarding just her with a night with him.

Jì Chengyang brought her to have dinner. It was not until the car was driving towards the Beijing Exhibition Centre that he told her, tonight they would be watching a ballet.

On the way, Jì Chengyang suddenly spotted a small shop by the roadside. In the glass cabinet at the front of the shop were freshly-made tanghulu.

He smiled. "Do you still remember the red bean paste tanghulu I bought you when you were little?"

Jǐ Yi nodded. "Yup, I do. I even gave a lot of the red bean paste to you to eat." And what's more, it was one that I had bitten half of... She silently added this.