WC ⋆ Chapter 35

In Jiang Yishen’s original plan, his staying at Qi Lin’s home was meant to provide remote companionship. If Qi Lin and Xing Yun got into an argument, he could step forward and shield Qi Lin behind him.

If things went smoothly and without incident, he would stay quietly in the room and find an opportunity to leave.

But there was absolutely no scenario in which Xing Yun would barge into the room without a word and fling open the wardrobe door.

Now not only had everything been exposed, but he had appeared before Xing Yun in the manner of a divine soldier descending from heaven, the awkwardness so severe it was hard to breathe.

He had managed to cobble together a lie with great difficulty, only for it to be punctured with ease, and now he had the additional undeserved charge of talking nonsense.

“Xiao Qi is in the habit of locking his door at night. When I arrived I only heard him unlocking it, so I should have been the first person through the door today,” Xing Yun said.

The evidence was ironclad and irrefutable. Jiang Yishen wavered for one second between doubling down and admitting fault, then said decisively, “I’m sorry, Auntie. I was wrong.”

Qi Lin was stunned by his groveling. Xing Yun looked at the two of them with a meaningful expression, hung the clothes she was holding in the wardrobe, rolled up her sleeves, and walked straight back to the living room.

“What do we do?” Jiang Yishen asked quietly.

Qi Lin shook off his hand. “I don’t know either!”

“Come here,” Xing Yun’s voice drifted over.

“Oh!” Qi Lin answered, and half-dragged, half-pulled Jiang Yishen to sit down at the living room dining table. The hanging lamp loomed overhead like an interrogation room.

Xing Yun sat across from them, drinking tea. “Did you buy this tea?”

“Ah?” Jiang Yishen sat up straight, his words stumbling over each other. “Not exactly, well, yes, it’s what my mom brought… my mom gave it to us… my mom…”

He cleared his throat and repeated himself in crisp, precise tones, “Yes.”

“You can tell just by drinking it that it was a gift.” Xing Yun smiled slightly, not pressing him on his rambling. “Xiao Qi doesn’t drink tea, so he couldn’t have bought anything this good. Does your mother know about you two?”

“She does.” Jiang Yishen glanced guiltily at Qi Lin.

The tea ran out. Xing Yun raised her hand and poured another cup, then turned to ask Qi Lin, “You want to stay here?”

“Yes.” In order to make his answer sound more convincing, Qi Lin tried to come up with many reasons. “The city here is more developed, and besides…”

“All right, I understand.” Xing Yun lifted her cup. “What about the New Year? What are your plans?”

Jiang Yishen finally found an opening to bring up the old topic and pour oil on the fire, “What are your plans?”

Cornered by two people at once, Qi Lin could no longer use “let me think about it” as an excuse. He stomped on Jiang Yishen’s foot under the table, wiped the sweat from his brow, and said, “I… I’ll spend it alone.”

“Why would you spend it alone!”

“You have a home and you won’t go back, you’d rather suffer by yourself?”

Qi Lin’s scalp went numb. Two pairs of furious eyes were nearly burning holes through him. He licked his lips, his mouth dry with nerves, and simply tossed the question back, “Then what do you two think?”

“Come home with me!” Xing Yun said.

“Come…” Jiang Yishen stopped short and closed his mouth.

The moment he pictured his dad’s face, Qi Lin’s fighting spirit deflated by a full head. “Didn’t I say I’d go back after the exams?”

“You’re not even working. What are you doing here all alone with no one to rely on?” Xing Yun was getting a little annoyed. In the pause between adjusting her glasses she glanced at Jiang Yishen.

Jiang Yishen was especially sensitive to being watched by others, and Xing Yun’s gaze in particular carried a kind of pressure, the kind laden with scrutiny and judgment. Xing Yun made no effort to conceal the purposefulness of her stare, and Jiang Yishen read in it the invisible implication of standing up for Qi Lin.

“I don’t want to go back yet,” Qi Lin said, his fingers twisting the hem of his clothes.

He took a deep breath, as if making up his mind, and spoke the truth from his heart, “I don’t want to go back without having accomplished anything.”

It was an unexpected answer. Even Jiang Yishen hadn’t anticipated this would be the reason.

The last time they had talked about going home for the New Year, Qi Lin had only mentioned family conflict. Jiang Yishen, taking it as a given, had assumed that Qi Lin didn’t want to go home for the holiday because he didn’t want to make things awkward for his family.

Qi Lin had always been this kind of person, thinking more of others and less of himself. When they broke up, he wondered whether Jiang Yishen had fallen out of love with him. When he argued with Xing Yun, he wondered whether his mom was angry. When he didn’t go home for the New Year, he wondered whether his family would feel uncomfortable because of his return.

But he had his own private desires too. He hoped that what began with Jiang Yishen would never end. He hoped to tell his mom he had met someone he liked. He hoped to achieve something before going home with his head held high.

In the past he had buried these private desires deep in his heart, like frozen dumplings pressed to the very bottom of the freezer, compressed for so long that they had become solid and hard. Hold them too long and your fingers ached from the cold, and gradually you forgot they were there.

But Jiang Yishen had told him to take them out and let them air more often. A partner and family are people who will walk with you for a very long time. Let too much distance accumulate, and the gap grows wide. Separated by thick glass, even a crack becomes hard to knock through.

Sometimes a single sentence carries the force to move a thousand pounds. After Qi Lin finished speaking, the room fell into silence. Xing Yun stared somewhat absently at the foam swirling on the surface of her tea.

Not until Jiang Yishen accidentally bumped the table leg, making the tea tremble, did Xing Yun come back to herself. In her eyes was an emotion Qi Lin couldn’t quite read.

“Once you’ve made up your mind, do it the way you want.” She stood up. “This trip wasn’t wasted after all.”

Her lips moved slightly, as if she had something to say but held it back.

“You’re leaving?” Qi Lin stood up with her. He didn’t understand why his mom’s attitude had shifted so quickly. “You’re not staying for dinner?”

Xing Yun lowered her head to straighten her clothes, and when she raised it again the earlier look of being moved was gone, replaced by her usual composed and calm expression. She gave Jiang Yishen a nod, walked to the entryway, and began changing her shoes. “You two eat. I’ll head straight back.”

“Let me see you out then.” Jiang Yishen hurried over to help her.

“No need.” Xing Yun waved him off. “Add me on WeChat in a bit.”

Jiang Yishen felt as though he’d been struck by lightning. He said flatly, “What?”

“All right, I’m going. Remember to bring the vegetables in from the balcony tonight, don’t let them freeze and wilt.” With that, Xing Yun closed the door in front of the dumbstruck Jiang Yishen.

A bang, and the room returned to quiet, a quiet so complete that people didn’t quite know what to do with themselves.

Qi Lin let out a long breath and collapsed onto the sofa, drained of energy. He undid the collar that had been digging into him uncomfortably and lay there without speaking.

Jiang Yishen stood at the doorway like a stone statue, his expression completely blank.

One lying down, one standing, they both recovered for quite a while before Qi Lin finally spoke, “Aren’t you tired of standing?”

Jiang Yishen walked over, his movements clumsy and uncoordinated, took out his phone, and resigned himself to opening WeChat. “Send me your mom’s WeChat.”

Qi Lin lay sprawled on the sofa, stifling a laugh. He opened his phone, only to find a message from an uninvited guest in his WeChat.

Yin Yu: How have things been lately?

Qi Lin had nearly forgotten this person entirely. Seeing the message now, he realized that apart from the initial transfer for coffee, their chat window was completely empty. He hadn’t had a chance to tell him about the strange things Jiang Yishen had experienced.

By now he had complete and total faith in Yin Yu, so he replied, “Not bad. We got back together.”

The other side replied almost instantly, “Did the loop break?”

Qi Lin said, “Don’t know.”

Yin Yu sent back a long string of question marks, and a second later a WeChat voice call popped up.

Qi Lin was startled. The ringtone went off and he fumbled to hang up, then typed under Jiang Yishen’s puzzled gaze, “Just say what you have to say, why are you calling!”

“Whose call was that? Auntie?” Jiang Yishen leaned over.

“No, no.” Qi Lin moved his phone further away, not sure what he was trying to hide. “Someone I don’t know well.”

“Someone you don’t know well can just call you directly!” Jiang Yishen could see things were going sideways and immediately moved to grab the phone.

Qi Lin had no way to defend himself. “As long as you’re thick-skinned enough, you can have a direct-calling relationship with anyone!”

Jiang Yishen stopped trying to grab it and sat there looking at him pitifully.

“Fine, fine, I’ll tell you. It’s Yin Yu.” Qi Lin couldn’t stand seeing him like that and, to his own shame, went soft again. “Fan Zi’s leather jacket friend, the one you said shared your number.”

“Oh, I know.” Jiang Yishen said in a tone dripping with sarcasm. He walked to the edge of the balcony and crouched down to poke at the cactus. “You two left Fan Zi’s hospital room together and never came back.”

Qi Lin laughed, “Didn’t you know what we went to talk about?”

The hung-up call didn’t come through again. Instead Yin Yu sent a string of voice messages, every one exactly sixty seconds long. Qi Lin was too lazy to listen and tapped the voice-to-text option, but as he read, his expression darkened.

Yin Yu first berated them for losing sight of the big picture for the sake of a kiss, saying that checking whether the loop still existed was extremely important, and yet two days had passed and they still hadn’t tested it. He called it inexcusable.

Qi Lin relayed this word for word to Jiang Yishen, earning a scoff in return. “We’ve got nothing to lose. I already went back to the past once. What could be more bizarre than that? Going to the future?”

He rubbed his chin, as if genuinely thinking it over. “In that case, we might as well go back to the past together, right to that argument before the breakup, and see once and for all who was right and who was wrong.”

Qi Lin couldn’t bear to hear the words “break up.” He immediately pulled down the corners of his mouth. “Can you not bring up the breakup? Why don’t you say we go to after the breakup and see who suffered more.”

“It’s precisely because it was painful that we can’t not bring it up. If we don’t bring it up, we’ll just break up again,” Jiang Yishen said. He glanced over and saw that Qi Lin was genuinely unhappy, and felt something like a cactus spine pricking his heart. So he said, “All right, I’ll stop. No breaking up.”

“You…” Qi Lin watched him playing with those few not-very-sharp little spines and couldn’t help but warn him, “You’d better not say things like that in front of the cactus.”

“Why?”

Because something is off about the cactus. Qi Lin felt that phrasing sounded terrifying, so he found a more roundabout way to put it, “That cactus is a bit strange.”

That somehow sounded even more terrifying, but Qi Lin had no time to comfort Jiang Yishen, who had been frightened into jumping three feet in the air. Right now he was deeply regretting the suggestion he had casually made.

Absolutely, absolutely could not let Jiang Yishen see what he looked like after the breakup. He didn’t want to see that period of Jiang Yishen’s life either.

The last several months of the previous year had been gray and dreary for both of them. The days were like the sky at five in the afternoon on a foggy winter evening, not quite dark enough to be dark, and he walked through the mist with nothing but a vast, empty white as far as the eye could see.

The moment he cried the most was doing laundry. He would crouch down to get the laundry detergent, unscrew the cap, and then find himself unable to stand back up. His eyes, brimming with tears, couldn’t see clearly. Through the blur he had the illusion that Jiang Yishen was still standing behind him, pressing close and teasing him with familiar warmth, a familiar scent curling around the tip of his nose. It felt as though, as long as he didn’t screw the cap back on, the two of them could stay like that forever.