WC ⋆ Chapter 36

Regarding their performance in today’s meeting with Xing Yun, Qi Lin and Jiang Yishen reached a consensus: they must loop again, until it was perfect.

Holding back from kissing was a little difficult for both of them. Jiang Yishen turned into melted White Rabbit candy, clinging to Qi Lin wherever he went, and Qi Lin’s heart always softened when facing him, always unable to resist touching and pinching him.

Before bed, Qi Lin specifically took Jiang Yishen to examine the cactus, pointed out the spot where he had pulled out a spine, then pulled out another one beside it, and reminded Jiang Yishen to be sure to come look immediately after the loop reset.

As midnight approached, the two of them sat properly on the bed, waiting for the loop to arrive.

Qi Lin even took a moment to imagine the scene. If at midnight they had just finished rolling around in the sheets, drenched in sweat, kissing each other breathlessly, and then were suddenly reset to that instant, the situation would probably be somewhat awkward.

He could only be grateful that the two of them hadn’t argued today. If they had just finished a fight and then got reset back to that moment, after a few more times like that they might end up impotent.

Watching the second hand tick forward one notch at a time, he involuntarily recalled what Yin Yu had said, and felt a persistent unease in his heart.

A sixth sense was quietly stirring. Qi Lin’s heartbeat kept accelerating until it reached the point of nausea. In the very last instant, as the three hands aligned, Qi Lin suddenly grabbed Jiang Yishen’s hand: “Something’s wrong!”

It was too late. The ground beneath his feet vanished in an instant, the surrounding space folded and flipped, and the familiar filmstrip flashback appeared once more.

Qi Lin fell into a brief daze. His mind was hollow and empty, and before him was a void of nothingness. He didn’t know how much time passed before sounds gradually reached his ears, calling his consciousness back.

It was voices. Someone was talking.

Qi Lin’s brain couldn’t process the information. Like a lab mouse suddenly dropped into the human world, he went through a brief phase of self-recognition confusion, and only when the scene before him became completely clear did he make out what the person was saying.

“…right? Anyway, they broke up as soon as he came back. Mainly the timing of their long distance was really bad, they’d only just started dating.”

Qi Lin turned his neck, took in his surroundings, and stood up abruptly. Then his head phased through the ceiling like it had clipped out of the world.

He was so startled he quickly crouched back down, and only then realized he was sitting on an upper bunk, gripping the bed frame and looking down. It was the school’s four-person dormitory.

He had been to this dormitory before. If he remembered correctly…

“Why does just starting out make it bad timing for long distance? I thought it was easier to break up when you’d been together a long time.”

Qi Lin turned toward the voice. It was Jiang Yishen.

Jiang Yishen was lying lazily on the bed, one hand propping up his head, the other idly swiping at his phone.

Qi Lin raised his hand in disbelief and pinched himself. He felt nothing.

He opened his hand and reached out to touch the bedding, passing straight through it without surprise, his forearm sinking in up to the elbow.

He drifted down from the bed and floated over to Jiang Yishen’s side, using the light of his phone to check the time.

April 20th.

“It depends on the person,” Fan Zi said, bouncing his leg on the chair. “Some people lose interest after being together a long time, but others are different. When you’ve just met and don’t even know what the other person is like yet, and then you’re suddenly long distance right from the start, who could handle that?”

Jiang Yishen didn’t respond. Qi Lin watched as his movements paused, and then he switched to the WeChat chat interface, staring blankly at the quiet conversation window.

Qi Lin leaned in beside him to look. The contact name on the other side was his full name.

The last message had been sent by Jiang Yishen. He had asked: Are you coming back this weekend?

He himself had not replied.

Qi Lin suddenly remembered. This was the only period of long distance in their entire campus relationship.

In April, he had been doing his graduation internship. The two of them were long distance. This was the beginning of the path toward their breakup, the period of greatest accumulation of friction.

If you asked whether there had been any truly major conflict, he couldn’t really think of one. There hadn’t even been many fierce arguments, at most the occasional squabble that lasted less than a day.

But one small thing after another had piled up like that, pressing down until a person couldn’t walk, couldn’t breathe.

“He still hasn’t replied to you?” Fan Zi asked.

Jiang Yishen pressed the lock screen, tossed his phone aside, rolled over, and buried his face in the pillow.

Fan Zi listened to the sounds from the upper bunk and tried to smooth things over: “Maybe he’s just really busy.”

Qi Lin stared blankly. He had no memory at all of what had happened on this particular day.

“Does he hate it when I keep sending messages?” Jiang Yishen said, his voice muffled.

Not at all, Qi Lin answered in his heart.

“He never reaches out to me first, so I have no choice but to reach out to him,” Jiang Yishen said, as if talking to himself.

“Didn’t I tell you to post more on Moments? If he sees your Moments, won’t he come ask about them?” Fan Zi said.

“I do post. I post every day,” Jiang Yishen said, hugging his head in distress. “He only ever asks about the Moments stuff when I’m the one who reaches out to him first.”

Qi Lin was rooted to the spot, unable to move. He remembered now. Back then, Jiang Yishen would post on Moments every now and then, talking about coursework, things he encountered around him, basketball games.

He had assumed Jiang Yishen was very busy, so he rarely sent messages to bother him, only calling occasionally for a chat.

The greatest difficulty of long distance was the mismatch of information. The two of them were living completely different lives, and he was always worried that his messages might come at the wrong time, landing right when Jiang Yishen was busiest or most unhappy.

This was his first relationship. No one had ever taught him how to carry himself in love, and he could only use the most shallow method of putting himself in the other person’s shoes, trying hard to be a good partner who didn’t cause trouble.

But he soon knew he had gotten it wrong. The Qi Lin standing here now could identify his own flaw, but the Qi Lin who had been inside that relationship at the time was still muddling along, only able to realize one thing: he had not managed to be a good partner.

Jiang Yishen had waited a long time before Qi Lin’s call finally came.

Qi Lin sat on the edge of the bed, silently listening as Jiang Yishen lifted his mood and talked on the phone with “himself,” the two of them laughing as if nothing was wrong, as if all the distance and separation throughout had been nothing but an illusion.

The call went on for a long time, long enough that the tip of Qi Lin’s heart went numb and ached with a dull pain. From this angle he could see Jiang Yishen’s desk, where a simple calendar for the current month was stuck in the corner.

On it were some little stick figures drawn in pencil, some smiling, some with tears falling. He spotted a line of small writing that read: Qi Lin sent me egg roll pastries today.

In the small box for April 20th, there was a crooked little telephone drawn, accompanied by a stick figure with the corners of its mouth turned down.

So Jiang Yishen had been unhappy today. Yet he hadn’t noticed it at all during the call just now.

The call ended. Jiang Yishen stared at his phone for a moment, then lay back down on the bed. The tone he had lifted moments ago fell back to the bottom, and there was a heavy sigh.

Exhausting. Just watching it, Qi Lin felt exhausted.

“I’m sorry. I changed,” he said quietly.

Naturally, no one could hear him.

Jiang Yishen ate dinner alone. By the time he walked to the cafeteria, the sky had gone completely dark. He ordered a serving of braised chicken, and it seemed to taste quite good. He took out his phone and photographed it, switched to Qi Lin’s chat page, thought for a moment, then closed it.

The newly taken photo lay quietly in the album, never shared by its owner again.

Qi Lin sat across from him, watching him eat with his head down, and said softly: “I know that braised chicken place is really good now. You took me there together afterward.”

There weren’t many people in the cafeteria. The lights at the few outermost windows had been turned off. Jiang Yishen sat at the table, not knowing what he was thinking about.

Qi Lin couldn’t bear to stay. He began trying to find a way to leave this memory. The past couldn’t be changed. He could only return to the Jiang Yishen of the present and tell him everything, all the longing he had never been able to express.

But no matter what he tried, he couldn’t leave Jiang Yishen’s side. The binding had turned cruel, forcing him to witness all of this pain.

Qi Lin had also had a very hard time during that period of long distance, but because he had been acting in what he believed was a considerate way, he had always felt he was doing well enough, never imagining that Jiang Yishen would be this hurt by it.

He followed behind Jiang Yishen on the walk back to the dormitory. The streetlights stretched his shadow out behind him, a lone figure, quickly swallowed by the darkness.

Everyone else in the dormitory was already back, chattering away about some gossip. When Jiang Yishen pushed the door open, Fan Zi was just getting to the part about “harassing new employees all the time.”

Seeing Jiang Yishen come in, everyone looked like they had been waiting forever, and they all rushed to ask: “Hey, did Xiao Qi tell you about that thing at his company?”

Jiang Yishen was stopped in the doorway and frowned. “What thing?”

Fan Zi was the first to catch on. The smile at the corner of his mouth stiffened for a moment, and he immediately raised his voice to change the subject. But there was one straightforward soul who hadn’t noticed anything was off, and he grabbed Jiang Yishen and launched into a detailed account.

“It’s about Xiao Qi’s company. Xu Baili is at the same post as him, right? A few days ago he said there’s this senior person at their place who’s really full of himself, and he likes to contact new employees during personal time, doesn’t matter if they’re male or female, old or young, if you’re new he’ll bother you!”

Fan Zi saw that Jiang Yishen’s expression wasn’t great, hooked an arm around the speaker’s neck, put him in a headlock, and dragged him away: “Aiyou, he just likes bossing people around, what kind of gossip is that, let me show you this couple on my Moments, now they’re actually something…”

“He never told me about it,” Jiang Yishen said suddenly.

His voice wasn’t loud, but all three people in the room went quiet. The person who had just been telling the story finally understood, and immediately fell silent.

Jiang Yishen looked at Fan Zi and pressed: “Xu Baili said this?”

“Ah… yeah.” Fan Zi was a little awkward too, scratching the back of his neck a couple of times. “It was just said offhandedly, probably not a big deal.”

Qi Lin felt a pang in his chest. He bent forward slightly, staring at the floor, a slow and helpless feeling rising in him.

He hadn’t known that Jiang Yishen had found out about this. Jiang Yishen had never once asked him about it.

That person was the mentor for Xu Baili’s group, and did indeed frequently contact them outside of work hours with remarks that carried hidden meanings. But Qi Lin, knowing he wasn’t going to be converted to a full-time position and that his direct supervisor was a level above that person, hadn’t played along with the workplace politics game and hadn’t taken the matter to heart.

He had never told Jiang Yishen about any of it, not wanting him to worry from so far away, and it had also felt a bit like making a mountain out of a molehill. After thinking it over and over, he had just let the matter go.

He shouldn’t have said nothing. He had done so many, many things wrong.

Jiang Yishen stood there for a moment, then walked over and sat down at his own desk. He opened Qi Lin’s chat interface once more, stared at it for a long time, then reached up and took the calendar.

The little figure in the April 20th box had its mouth corners drooping. Jiang Yishen held the pen and, very carefully, drew two teardrops on the little figure’s face.

Four days had already passed since the last smiley face. The egg roll pastries Qi Lin had sent were already gone.

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