TA •Chapter 69

For Jiang Yuduo, what Cheng Yi had said today, that sentence said in front of so many people, should have been his biggest blow.

Cheng Ke had never once directly asked him about anything mental or psychological, because he could feel that Jiang Yuduo was desperately hiding it, disguising it. No matter how Jiang Yuduo saw himself, he had at least always wanted Cheng Ke to think he was a normal person, or rather, he used the fact that he admitted he was seeing a therapist to prove to Cheng Ke that he was already "better."

Compared with whether Jiang Yuduo was really better or what exactly was wrong with him, Cheng Ke cared more about how much of a blow it was when a secret like that was made public.

From him telling people to hold it in if they had ideas, with absolute confidence, to thinking it was fine to be called somebody’s boyfriend, from him saying, "I know what it feels like when someone has designs on me," to carefully asking this question now.

Someone like me, me being said to have a mental illness, do you still like me?

The moment Jiang Yuduo pointed at his own head, the soft, aching feeling in Cheng Ke’s heart was something he had never experienced in either of his two lifetimes.

"Yeah, I like you," Cheng Ke said. "When I met you, you were already like this. There’s no difference between now and before."

Maybe his sympathy for Jiang Yuduo made that "like" heavier than its real weight at this stage. In a sense, that could also be called unfair, but Cheng Ke temporarily abandoned the reason that had still been intact five seconds ago.

Even if it was unfair, he still wanted to give the Jiang Yuduo standing right in front of him, careful and tense and desperately trying to prove himself, yet already having lost confidence, at least a tiny bit of comfort.

He had never thought he would have such a gentle, kind, tender side, and he practically had to look at himself in a new light.

Jiang Yuduo looked at him without speaking, but his expression loosened a little. Embarrassed, he hooked a very small smile at the corner of his mouth.

"Oh." He rubbed his nose.

Cheng Ke did not continue talking about whether boyfriends should like each other. He picked up his cup and took a sip of water.

"Tomorrow’s your birthday," Jiang Yuduo said, glancing at his phone.

"Mm." Cheng Ke nodded. If Jiang Yuduo had not said anything, he would already have forgotten about it.

What was also very coincidental was that on the day before his birthday, he had used true violence, violence he had never used since birth, to sever himself from all his relatives and from all of his life in one clean cut.

"Sleep in my bed tonight," Jiang Yuduo said. "I’m not sleeping tonight."

"Why?" Cheng Ke looked at him. "Can’t sleep?"

"No," Jiang Yuduo said, a little embarrassed. "The gift I’m giving you… it’s not done yet. I was originally planning to work on it tonight too."

"I’ll keep you company," Cheng Ke said.

"Where’s the surprise, Young Master?" Jiang Yuduo said. "If you stay with me, what surprise is left? You’d see everything."

"…Can it still be a surprise? Aren’t you making me a lamp? If you can’t finish it, you’ll just buy one," Cheng Ke said. "I’ve already memorized the whole process."

Jiang Yuduo laughed. "There’s still a little surprise left. Don’t look, I’ll do it in the yard."

"It’s freezing. Do it in the living room, or in that room," Cheng Ke said. "I won’t peek."

"I’m not afraid of the cold." Jiang Yuduo still said the same thing.

To leave time for "what if I can’t do it, I still need to figure it out" and "what if I mess it up, I can still take it apart and do it over," Jiang Yuduo took a big bag of things out to the back yard as soon as Cheng Ke finished showering.

Cheng Ke sat in the living room wearing Jiang Yuduo’s pajamas, with a pair of underwear Jiang Yuduo had given him underneath them, which looked new.

Jiang Yuduo had even scrubbed his back for him in the shower tonight. He had been wearing big shorts, but neither of them had said a word the whole time. Cheng Ke had not let his mind wander, and Jiang Yuduo had not sneaked curious glances either, as if the events of the day had been too many, and both of them had become almost pure because their heads were crammed with too much stuff.

"You actually have pajamas…" Cheng Ke looked down at the pajamas again. Because the sleeves were fairly loose, he could put them on easily and completely. They were pretty comfortable.

"Sister Xi gave them to me," Jiang Yuduo said from the backyard. "I only wore them once. Sleeping in them was too uncomfortable, so I never wore them again… If you don’t want to sleep, then watch TV."

"Mm." Cheng Ke answered.

Jiang Yuduo started clanging around in the backyard making the lamp.

Cheng Ke endured the urge to go look and opened the TV instead, holding Miao while staring at a documentary.

But all he could hear was the noise from Jiang Yuduo’s side, the sound of a saw cutting wood, then sandpaper rubbing against wood, then the saw again, then the sandpaper again.

Cheng Ke very much wanted to say, why don’t you just saw everything first and then sand it all at once?

After listening for a while longer, he really could not hold back and glanced toward the backyard.

The door leading from the next room to the backyard had been closed by Jiang Yuduo, but there was a window beside it, and he could see the yard. After hesitating for a second, Cheng Ke put Miao down on the sofa. "Stay here and sleep. Don’t go over there and meow."

Then he used two cushions to wedge Miao in the middle.

As he got up and walked toward the backyard, he suddenly remembered what Jiang Yuduo had told him before… He abruptly turned his head and found that the place he had been sitting just now was probably the exact spot where Miao had pooped last time.

Jiang Yuduo had said he was going to replace the sofa. Clearly he had not, and even the sofa cover was still the original one!

Cheng Ke clicked his tongue and slapped his own butt once as he walked.

When he reached the window, he moved forward very carefully, inch by inch, and saw the situation in the backyard.

A fairly bright light was hanging in the backyard. Jiang Yuduo had his back to him, squatting on the ground, and at his feet were wooden strips of varying lengths and widths.

It should have been wenge wood… wasn’t he supposed to be using leftover treated wood?

Was this the surprise?

This surprise was really huge…

Jiang Yuduo picked up a long strip of wood and sawed it into several pieces. The lengths did not seem fixed, very casual, but he sanded each piece very carefully, taking an astonishing amount of time.

Just sawing the long strips into short ones about a chi long, then sanding them smooth, had already taken more than an hour.

Cheng Ke’s heels were starting to ache from standing, so he quietly went to fetch a chair and sat down. Only then did Jiang Yuduo finally switch to another kind of work.

He took a sheet of paper out of his pocket and looked at it, then picked up two wooden strips and measured them against each other, crossing them from the front, crossing them from the side, then started drilling holes in the wood.

Cheng Ke did not know what kind of lamp he was making, but based on his earlier description, it should have been a wooden lampshade with many round holes, with a bulb inside, casting speckles of light all over the room when turned on.

But the materials he was working with now looked like they were tens of thousands of li away from that.

Cheng Ke glanced at the time on his phone. They had already come back from the hospital pretty late today, and after this whole mess, it was already past midnight. Only then did he remember that they had not eaten dinner yet…

Jiang Yuduo was someone who had strict rules about the three meals a day, and even if a meal was pushed back, he still had to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner in full. Yet today he had actually forgotten dinner.

Jiang Yuduo screwed a couple of wooden pieces together. There did not seem to be any standard angle, just a random X, and not even a symmetrical one.

Cheng Ke gave up on guessing and stared at Jiang Yuduo’s profile. The light fell from above, and Jiang Yuduo’s eyelashes cast a small trembling shadow.

He very rarely got this focused. Only when he was eating did he seem fairly serious. Right now, standing in the cold wind and concentrating on measuring and fitting the wooden strips, he looked both cute and sexy.

Another strip of wood was drilled and screwed together with the previous irregular X, turning into a Z that did not lie in the same plane.

Cheng Ke suddenly felt as if he understood what Jiang Yuduo was thinking.

Wooden strips of different lengths were screwed together one by one. Some were connected in pairs, some linked three at a time, with no fixed direction and no neat edges, like a small, haphazard heap of wood suspended in midair, or like a dismantled birdcage.

Probably because he did not have enough screws, Jiang Yuduo stood up and went to look in the small flower bed beside him, pulling out an old wooden rail and taking several screws from it.

Cheng Ke no longer bothered to look at the time. This method of assembling an irregular three-dimensional space out of intersecting wooden strips looked very simple, but making it look good was extremely difficult.

He did not know how Jiang Yuduo had come up with such a structure. For someone who was a "Third Brother," it really surprised him a little.

Jiang Yuduo spent a long time screwing all the strips together, taking it apart several times in the middle. Someone who could tear a duvet cover while shaking it out was showing astonishing patience here.

After the last screw was tightened, Jiang Yuduo set the finished lamp shade… no, the lamp frame down on the ground, stepped back a few paces, and walked around it once, probably checking it over.

The lamp frame was roughly fifty or sixty centimeters in diameter. The interwoven wooden strips had beautiful grain patterns, and under the light, it did not look as ugly as Cheng Ke had imagined earlier. In fact, it had a kind of clumsy, down-to-earth beauty.

It was indeed a surprise, even though Cheng Ke had already seen the whole process of making it in advance.

Because he had seen the whole process, the surprise felt even more profound.

Jiang Yuduo walked over to the side, opened a box, and took out a light bulb, a very retro Edison bulb used specifically for showing off, and a lamp head connected to an electrical cord, the cord wrapped in hemp rope.

Putting the lamp in the middle of the wooden strips, then screwing on the lamp head, and finally fixing it to the top strip, the lamp was considered finished.

When he saw Jiang Yuduo lift the lamp and hang it on a clothesline pole strung across the middle of the yard, Cheng Ke stood up and suddenly felt his heartbeat speed up a little.

The lamp was done, and the surprise was big enough. Jiang Yuduo should come in and call him now.

But he could not bear to rush back to the living room and pretend he had fallen asleep while watching TV, so he still stood by the window and watched Jiang Yuduo.

Jiang Yuduo hung up the lamp, plugged the cord into the socket, then switched off the light that had been on in the yard.

Just as Cheng Ke was about to hurry back to the living room with the chair, Jiang Yuduo suddenly turned around, looked toward the window, and said, "Happy birthday, Cheng Ke."

The moment he finished speaking, he pressed the switch and the lamp lit up.

Dim yellow light spilled out from behind the intersecting wooden strips. Scattered patches of light and shadow covered the entire yard, along with Jiang Yuduo standing under the lamp.

Cheng Ke froze in place.

"Happy birthday," Jiang Yuduo walked toward him. "I… Chen Qing said I sing off-key, so I won’t sing you the birthday song…"

Cheng Ke reached out and pushed open the door beside him. Jiang Yuduo stood in the doorway and smiled at him. "How about you sing it yourself… though I didn’t buy a birthday cake…"

"When did you realize I was here?" Cheng Ke asked.

"I noticed as soon as you came over," Jiang Yuduo said. "The living room light was on, and the shadow of your head on the window was as big as a basketball."

"…Fuck." Cheng Ke said.

"Do you like it?" Jiang Yuduo pointed back at the lamp. "This lamp? Is it a surprise?"

"I like it," Cheng Ke nodded. "It’s a very big surprise."

"Didn’t expect that, huh," Jiang Yuduo said with a little smug lift of his chin. "Aren’t I pretty awesome?"

"Yes." Cheng Ke stared at him for two seconds, then lifted a hand and grabbed his collar. "Come here."

"Huh?" Jiang Yuduo took a step forward and stood face-to-face with him.

"I’m going to kiss you now," Cheng Ke said. "It’s different from all the ones before."

"…Ah," Jiang Yuduo clearly froze for a moment. "Saying that… out loud… isn’t that a little… stupid?"

"It is a little stupid, but I’m saying it not to ask for your consent. I just want to tell you," Cheng Ke said. "Don’t hide, and don’t push me away. I’m injured."

Jiang Yuduo said nothing, looking a little dazed.

Cheng Ke cupped the back of his head and kissed him.