TA •Chapter 42

Looking at Jiang Yuduo’s careful, earnest expression, Cheng Ke really didn’t know whether there was any point in talking to him anymore.

"Give what?" Jiang Yuduo asked again.

"The rent," Cheng Ke said irritably, keeping his head down and continuing to eat his noodles.

"It’s not due yet," Jiang Yuduo said. "I just didn’t understand that word of yours. Is that enough to make you mad? Isn’t your temper a little too hot?"

"GAY bar," Cheng Ke swallowed the noodles. After a pause, he wrote on the table with his finger, "G-A…"

"It’s an English word?" Jiang Yuduo said, suddenly enlightened. While fumbling in his pocket, he went on, "No wonder I couldn’t understand it."

He took out a pen and a trimmed piece of cigarette box paper, then laid them in front of Cheng Ke.

Cheng Ke glanced at him, took the pen, and wrote down the three letters before pushing the cigarette paper back to Jiang Yuduo.

"How do you spell it?" Jiang Yuduo picked it up and looked at it. "Ge-a-ye-gay?"

Cheng Ke collapsed onto the table. "Just give it a random spelling."

"What does this word mean?" Jiang Yuduo asked.

Cheng Ke didn’t answer. He closed his eyes.

Jiang Yuduo didn’t ask again either. After quite a while with no sound, Cheng Ke opened his eyes and saw Jiang Yuduo frowning at his phone.

He was probably looking up the meaning of the word. Cheng Ke sighed and sat up properly to keep eating his noodles.

"Got it," Jiang Yuduo said. "A gay bar, right? Lin Xu asked you to go there, so he’s gay too."

"Mm." Cheng Ke nodded.

"Oh." Jiang Yuduo nodded too, then put down his phone. "How come everybody knows you’re gay?"

"I wasn’t hiding it," Cheng Ke said. "If enough time passes, everyone’s going to know."

"Oh." Jiang Yuduo agreed. After thinking it over, he frowned again. "Then does Lin Xu want to chase you? Like a normal guy chasing a girl, or a girl chasing a guy?"

"No," Cheng Ke said after eating the last bit of noodles and soup. He wiped his mouth with a tissue. "He just wants to make a friend. What happens after that isn’t certain."

"Got it," Jiang Yuduo said.

Cheng Ke glanced at him, not sure what he was thinking, sitting there with such a contemplative look.

The next day was still filming videos, and there was no real difference from the day before. Jiang Yuduo still sat in the little sofa in the corner, holding a cup of tea and watching.

There was one more person today, someone who hadn’t come yesterday. Everyone who had been there yesterday was there today, and this one was extra. Jiang Yuduo had stared at him for a long time but still couldn’t figure out what his specific job was.

When Xu Ding came over and sat next to him for a break, Jiang Yuduo asked, "There are more people today than yesterday, right?"

"Mm," Xu Ding said with a smile. "A friend of mine came over. He wants to talk to Cheng Ke about a collaboration."

"…Oh." Jiang Yuduo didn’t ask further.

Anyway, no matter what the collaboration was, he wouldn’t understand it.

Filming ended earlier today. They were done just after lunch, but Cheng Ke still hadn’t left. He talked with Xu Ding and that friend for another two or three hours, and they still weren’t done.

When Jiang Yuduo went to the bathroom halfway through, Cheng Ke followed him out.

"It’ll be a while longer," Cheng Ke said. "Want me to have someone send you home first?"

"No, that’s too much trouble, making a special trip," Jiang Yuduo said. "Just talk. Don’t worry about me."

"Bored?" Cheng Ke asked.

"Mm." Jiang Yuduo smiled. "I’m bored every day. I don’t really feel anything."

"You can go upstairs and take a look," Cheng Ke said in a low voice. "There’s a room upstairs, and in it they collect…"

"What?" Jiang Yuduo asked just as quietly.

"All kinds of… pleasure toys," Cheng Ke said.

"What pleasure toys?" Jiang Yuduo froze. Two seconds later, he reacted. "Holy shit? They even collect that kind of stuff?"

"Not the kind you can buy in stores normally," Cheng Ke cleared his throat. "If you’re bored, you can go look at that to pass the time. That room isn’t open to the public on ordinary days. It’s just Xu Ding and the rest of us here today, so you can go in."

"You’ve seen it?" Jiang Yuduo asked.

"No," Cheng Ke said. "I haven’t had time to go look yet."

Jiang Yuduo hesitated, then asked in an extremely low voice, "Want me to take some pictures for you?"

Cheng Ke looked at him, and after holding it in for quite a while, he finally couldn’t keep himself from laughing. Leaning against the wall, he laughed for a long time. "No need. I just didn’t want you to be bored, so I was trying to find you something entertaining."

"Mm." Jiang Yuduo smiled.

"Then I’m going back in," Cheng Ke said, glancing at the people sitting in the room. "We should be done talking in about half an hour."

"Okay. I…" Jiang Yuduo looked toward the stairs. "I’ll go up and take a look in a bit."

Cheng Ke turned and went back inside.

After Jiang Yuduo came out of the bathroom, he hesitated. Seeing no one around, he went up the stairs.

For the past two days, he had been sitting on the sofa and had basically blended into the background of the hall where the videos were filmed. Several times, staff members had walked over, and only when they got close did they suddenly notice him sitting there and get startled.

That feeling was very good, very safe.

So this was Jiang Yuduo’s first visit to the little rooms in this private museum.

But after he looked through each exhibit room one by one, he suddenly felt as if he understood why Cheng Ke had told him to go look at those pleasure toys. Probably Cheng Ke also knew that he couldn’t make sense of the things in the other rooms at all.

To him, a painting was just a painting, a bottle was just a bottle, a plate was just a plate, and a lump of iron was just a lump of iron…

He stood at the doorway for a very long time, and in the end still didn’t go in. Instead, he turned and leaned on the hallway railing.

A small ashtray hung from the railing. Based on the past two days of observation, that meant smoking was allowed here. He took out a cigarette and lit it.

Sometimes he wondered whether it had been too rash to treat Cheng Ke as a friend.

In all these years, this was the first time that he had only known someone for a few months, didn’t even really understand them yet, and had already taken them as his friend.

He even didn’t know whether someone like Cheng Ke would consider him a friend, or whether he would be able to accept having a friend like him.

The more he came into contact with Cheng Ke, the more he felt that a friend like this was destined to disappear. Maybe he had spent too long living through boring, drab days. Cheng Ke was like a tiny patch of brightness. He stared at that bit of light and couldn’t see the grayness around him. Once that light disappeared, the original gray would turn black, and it would take a very long time before it faded.

But now it was already too late to back away. No matter what Cheng Ke was thinking, he had to stay by him.

Friends could disappear, but friends couldn’t disappear because of him.

Voices came from downstairs. Cheng Ke and the others must have finished talking and come out.

Jiang Yuduo stubbed out his cigarette. Just as he turned to go downstairs, he saw a shadow flash past outside the window diagonally across from the hallway on the first floor.

He whipped his head around and stared at the window.

Outside the window was the parking lot, where everyone’s cars were parked. He could see it through the glass, but right now he only saw the snow on the ground, crushed into a mess by the cars, and a few patches of exposed black-yellow earth.

Cheng Ke had just taken out his phone and was about to call Jiang Yuduo when he saw him coming down from the second floor.

A room full of pleasure collectibles, and this guy had actually looked at it for nearly forty minutes. As expected of someone who had mixed around on the streets for a long time.

But when Jiang Yuduo walked over, he noticed Jiang Yuduo’s expression didn’t look right.

Maybe other people wouldn’t be able to tell, but he could see it very clearly. Jiang Yuduo was a little tense. After forcing a smile at him and Xu Ding and the others, his gaze kept locking onto the window on the right.

Cheng Ke followed his line of sight and looked over, but aside from the several cars parked outside, he didn’t see anything.

"If you said you don’t want to eat, then we won’t eat," Xu Ding said, checking his watch. "Want me to have the driver send you and Third Brother back?"

"Mm." Cheng Ke nodded.

"Then in a couple of days, when I get back from my business trip, we’ll pick a time to go take a look at the shop," Liang Yi said.

Liang Yi was Xu Ding’s friend. The sand painting themed restaurant Xu Ding had mentioned before had been done with him, but Liang Yi only put up the money and didn’t take part in management. After the early arrangements were finalized without any problems, he stopped caring about it.

"Okay," Xu Ding said. "For anything else, it’ll just be me and Xiao Ke handling it."

The group went to the parking lot together. When they passed by the outside of the window, Cheng Ke deliberately looked again, but he didn’t see anything unusual. There was no one in the parking lot.

He even specifically stared at the wall below the window and only saw a layer of snow, not even any paw prints from stray cats or dogs.

Xu Ding drove them back, Cheng Ke and Jiang Yuduo, and after getting in the car, Jiang Yuduo still looked a little tense, turning around twice to look behind them.

After they left the suburbs and returned to the busy streets full of people, he seemed to finally relax. He didn’t say anything the whole way, but he didn’t look like he was spacing out because he had nothing to say either.

Once they got back downstairs and Xu Ding’s car drove off, Jiang Yuduo finally opened his mouth as if he had been holding it in for a long time. "Did you see something?"

"Hm?" Cheng Ke was startled.

"The person in the parking lot," Jiang Yuduo said.

"No." Cheng Ke answered. He had guessed right after all. What Jiang Yuduo had been tense about was this.

His answer made Jiang Yuduo frown. "Really nothing?"

"Really nothing," Cheng Ke said softly. "There was only that one window that could see the parking lot. If someone really had been standing there, there should’ve been footprints, right?"

Jiang Yuduo looked at him but didn’t speak.

"From the wall under the window to the parking line, there wasn’t even a single footprint," Cheng Ke said. "I checked on purpose."

Jiang Yuduo was silent for a very long time, staring at him with a complicated expression. Cheng Ke couldn’t even tell what any of those emotions in his eyes were.

"You didn’t see anything," Jiang Yuduo said softly too, "so why did you specifically go check for footprints?"

Cheng Ke sighed. "When you came down from upstairs, you kept looking over there. I thought maybe you saw something, so when we went to the parking lot I specifically took a look."

"But you didn’t tell me." Jiang Yuduo’s brows pulled together.

"What could I say?" Cheng Ke asked.

This time, he could clearly see the emotion in Jiang Yuduo’s eyes. It was full of pain.

He had never seen eyes like that before. In an instant, they made a person feel that pain so clearly.

When Jiang Yuduo spoke again, his voice was very low and a little hoarse. "Cheng Ke."

"Mm?" Cheng Ke answered.

"You don’t trust me," Jiang Yuduo said.

Cheng Ke froze, not knowing how he should answer.

"You don’t trust me," Jiang Yuduo repeated softly. "Right?"

"I don’t know what I should… trust," Cheng Ke said with some difficulty. The Jiang Yuduo before him was faintly frightening, but he was also heartbreaking. More than anything, Cheng Ke wanted to pull him into his arms and pat his back, but he didn’t dare. So he could only rub his arm through his coat. "I don’t even know what happened."

"It’s okay," Jiang Yuduo said.

Dinner was still a problem. The refrigerator, already empty and seeming like a waste of electricity, had after being stripped of eggs and ham sausages by Jiang Yuduo yesterday truly become something that could be unplugged and used as a cabinet.

"Delivery?" Cheng Ke picked up his phone.

Jiang Yuduo didn’t say anything. He looked a little hesitant.

"Fine, delivery gets annoying. Then… how about we order a few dishes instead," Cheng Ke said. "When I’m by myself, ordering one dish is boring. Ordering two is too much…"

"Okay." Jiang Yuduo nodded.

After thinking it over for a while, Cheng Ke ordered a beef bone soup, steamed pork with rice flour, and a portion of sweet and sour spare ribs.

"That should be enough, right?" he asked Jiang Yuduo.

"You…" Jiang Yuduo looked at him. "How do you keep your figure?"

"Hm?" Cheng Ke blinked.

"Two dishes and a soup, all pure meat, not even a bite of vegetables," Jiang Yuduo said in admiration. "No wonder you have to go to the gym."

"Get lost," Cheng Ke laughed. "I just like eating meat. If I want vegetables, I can buy fruit instead."

"Where’s the fruit?" Jiang Yuduo said.

"We’ll buy some tomorrow," Cheng Ke said.

The all-meat dishes arrived quickly. Cheng Ke had been talking with Xu Ding and the others a bit too long today and hadn’t used his brain like this in a while. The moment he smelled the meaty fragrance, he wanted to pounce on the whole two dishes and soup and eat it all himself.

Jiang Yuduo, though, was still the same as usual. He ate very seriously and didn’t snatch anything.

"Aren’t you hungry?" Cheng Ke asked while eating.

"I didn’t do anything all day," Jiang Yuduo said. "I just sat there. I didn’t burn anything."

Cheng Ke sighed. "I really admire you. If I had to spend the whole day like that…"

Before he even finished speaking, a sudden boom came from downstairs. Cheng Ke flinched in alarm, and then there was another one.

The cars parked downstairs all began to sound off, beeping and wailing in a mess.

"Shit!" By the time he reacted and realized someone was setting off firecrackers, Jiang Yuduo was already standing by the window, looking down.

He put down his chopsticks and looked at Jiang Yuduo. After waiting a bit and seeing that Jiang Yuduo had no intention of coming back to eat, he said, "It’s probably kids setting off firecrackers. New Year’s is almost here."

"Mm, I know." Jiang Yuduo said, but he still didn’t move.

Cheng Ke didn’t bother with him anymore and kept eating with his head down.

After he finished one bowl of rice, Jiang Yuduo finally came back to the table.

After dinner, Cheng Ke wanted to find a movie to watch, something non-horror. But after Jiang Yuduo finished eating, he barely said a few words for almost an hour.

The tension probably wasn’t there anymore, but he was still on guard.

Cheng Ke didn’t know how to get him to relax. It also felt like there was no way to get him to relax.

Lying on the sofa, he only felt a kind of oppression.

Not knowing what to do was the most maddening, most frustrating state of all.

He had no idea how long he had stayed frozen there. It felt like the cat lying on his lap was about to have all its fur rubbed off by him. He turned on the projector and randomly picked something to watch.

It was a romance film. Apart from knowing these two people were in love, Cheng Ke had absorbed absolutely none of it.

Just as the movie was about to end, his phone buzzed.

A message had come in.

That vibration suddenly made him feel like he could breathe again. He picked up the phone and looked at it.

The message was from Lin Xu.

– Brother Cheng, are you free tonight?

Cheng Ke looked at the message, but didn’t reply right away.

Free tonight? He was free.

But he actually didn’t really want to go out. Still, the current restless, oppressive mood made him feel terrible.

He didn’t make up his mind even after the phone screen went dark. He just held it and turned it over in his hand again and again.

In the end, he opened the phone again, tapped a few times, and went into Lin Xu’s Moments.

Lin Xu didn’t post much. They were basically all photos, but not a single one of the private photos Cheng Ke had imagined was there. They were all work shots, and all of them had been taken casually during the work process.

For some reason, that gave him a bit of favorable impression.

After staring for a while at the photo on Lin Xu’s profile picture, he sent Lin Xu a reply.

– Where

Lin Xu replied very quickly, still with the same "give it a shot" from that day.

Cheng Ke thought about it and asked another question.

– Who else is there?

– Just me drinking alone

– Fine

After replying, Cheng Ke put his phone on the coffee table and turned to look at Jiang Yuduo, who was reading a novel nearby.

"Hm?" Jiang Yuduo looked up at him.

"I’m going out for a bit," Cheng Ke said. "A friend asked me to drink."

Jiang Yuduo was stunned. He subconsciously glanced at the time on his phone, then answered, "Oh."

Cheng Ke didn’t say anything else and stood up to put on his coat.

As he got ready to leave, he realized Jiang Yuduo had been looking at him with some confusion, so he thought about it and walked over in front of Jiang Yuduo. "Paper and pen."

Jiang Yuduo fished a pen and the cigarette paper from his pocket and handed them to him. He wrote down the name of the bar on it.

"I’m just going here," he said.

Jiang Yuduo took the cigarette paper and looked at it. He seemed to want to say something, but didn’t know what to say anymore.

He didn’t want Jiang Yuduo to worry too much, but from his own perspective, he really couldn’t find any reason to tell Jiang Yuduo where he was going. In the end, he could only stop talking.

A car stopped in front of Jiang Yuduo. Chen Qing poked his head out. "Third Brother."

"Didn’t you already go home?" Jiang Yuduo got in and sat in the front passenger seat.

"Yeah, but there wasn’t anything to do at home anyway," Chen Qing said as he turned the car around. "Where to?"

"A bar called Similar." Jiang Yuduo told Chen Qing the address.

"That’s pretty far," Chen Qing said. "Jiajia’s really good at having fun. If it were me going to a bar now, I’d definitely pick one closer."

This area probably didn’t have GAY bar, ge-a-ye-gay. Probably didn’t have… Jiang Yuduo recalled that GAY, those three letters, also had the meaning of happiness.

What’s so happy about being gay? Finding a boyfriend or girlfriend was already harder than it was for other people.

After the car had been driving for a while, Chen Qing glanced at the rearview mirror. "Third Brother, that car behind us…"

"I know." Jiang Yuduo said.

The car behind them had been following since they left the neighborhood, and by now it had trailed them for nearly three streets.

"It turned the corner," Chen Qing said again.

"Mm." Jiang Yuduo agreed.

After that car peeled off, no other cars followed them.

But Jiang Yuduo still didn’t feel safe. After all, their target now wasn’t just him anymore, it was Cheng Ke too.

Following the navigation, they had already reached the street where the bar was located. Jiang Yuduo looked out the car window.

The bar streets in this world all looked about the same, with all kinds of neon lights everywhere in the dark, streets that no matter how much neon there was, still couldn’t be lit up, and music changing every ten meters. When people were happy, they cried and shouted. When they were sad, they cried and shouted. In a place like this, emotional expression became monotonous and hysterical.

"A little farther ahead should be the one that’s called something like that," Chen Qing said, looking outside. "There are so many of them, it’s making my eyes go blurry. Third Brother, keep an eye out too."

"What do you mean, something like that?" Jiang Yuduo looked at him.

"The bar, isn’t it called something like Similar or alike?" Chen Qing thought for a moment. "Oh, I think it was two characters…"

"Similar." Jiang Yuduo pinched the bridge of his nose.

"Right, Similar… That’s the one!" Chen Qing pointed ahead.

Jiang Yuduo followed the direction he pointed. There was a very large sign. At a glance, he could see a broad expanse of silver, with black cutouts in the middle and two simple black characters.

"Yeah," Jiang Yuduo said. "Find somewhere to park."

Chen Qing drove slowly, inching forward. After about twenty meters, a car just happened to pull out.

"Got one, got one, got one," Chen Qing hurriedly jerked the wheel. Another car was also coming up ahead, apparently trying to take the spot. Chen Qing immediately slammed the gas, snatching half the space first, then cursing as he backed up. "Fuck your grandfather! Trying to steal a spot from your grandpa, you’re still too green for that! Idiot! Let your grandpa show you how to park!"

Jiang Yuduo smacked his arm. "You’ve got ten seconds. If you’re not getting out to beat him, shut up!"

Chen Qing shut up.

After the car was parked, that other vehicle drove past in front of theirs. The driver turned his head and glared at them, looking openly provocative.

"Getting worked up, huh." Chen Qing opened the door and got out.

Jiang Yuduo sighed. Someone like Chen Qing, even if ten of them went down, the other side still wouldn’t bother giving them a second glance.

He opened the door and got out too, slowly walking to the front of the car and staring at the man.

After the man glared back at him for two seconds, he withdrew his gaze and kept driving forward.

"This right here is called abusing a tiger’s power under a fox’s skin, right?" Chen Qing said.

"So now you’ve found your brain again," Jiang Yuduo said as he got back into the car.

"We’re not going in?" Chen Qing froze. "Just sitting here?"

"Mm." Jiang Yuduo lit a cigarette, head down.

"No, if anything happens to Jiajia," Chen Qing said, confused, "we won’t be able to help just sitting here."

"I’m afraid if I go in and run into him," Jiang Yuduo said. "I don’t want him to know I followed him out just because he came out for a drink."

"You’re protecting him, and he still can’t know?" Chen Qing frowned. "Besides, we usually go to bars too. Can’t we go in and have a drink? There are so many people, not many of them can spot someone in a crowd the way you do."

"…Do you know what kind of bar this is?" Jiang Yuduo sighed.

"A bar is just a bar," Chen Qing said, looking at him.

"This is a GAY bar," Jiang Yuduo said.

"For who?" Chen Qing froze.

Jiang Yuduo didn’t answer, just stared at the bar entrance. Seven or eight people had gone in just now, all of them men. Probably everyone inside was men too… If he and Chen Qing went in, they probably wouldn’t stand out too much.

And like Chen Qing said, if they just sat here, and something really happened to Cheng Ke, by the time they noticed the movement it would probably already be too late.

"For who?" Chen Qing asked again.

"Fine," Jiang Yuduo clenched his teeth and pushed open the car door. "Let’s go in."