WC ⋆ Chapter 54

The roast duck dinner cost an arm and a leg. Yin Yu generously picked up the tab, and on his way out he swept the entire table clean, taking everything that was left.

The restaurant was only one street away from school, so Jiang Yishen planned to head back to campus after the meal. Running into his dad during the last loop had reminded him: once the exams were done, he needed to go home for a visit. The loop had blurred his sense of time, and after this long he couldn't keep drifting around outside all day.

As they left, Yin Yu was still staring at the two of them like a ghost. Qi Lin felt uncomfortable under his gaze and edged away. Jiang Yishen moved closer, and Qi Lin retreated half a step.

"What are you running for?" Jiang Yishen grabbed him in one motion, fingers interlacing with iron firmness. Qi Lin was nearly scared out of his wits. In the middle of his panic he turned to look at Yin Yu, who was standing a few steps away, watching them with an expression of undisguised disdain.

Jiang Yishen's grip was too strong to shake off. Qi Lin steeled himself and let himself be dragged along, the two of them walking toward school as though no one else existed.

Jiang Yishen strode along without a care. Qi Lin walked beside him in a state of quiet terror. He kept feeling that the moment they stepped out the door today, something was bound to go wrong.

Based on the pattern of Fan Zi's two car accidents and Yin Yu appearing twice, certain things seemed difficult to avoid through the loop. He couldn't be sure whether running into Father Jiang was something fated to happen.

He shared his concern with Jiang Yishen, who responded with a perfectly reasonable argument: "Impossible. My dad goes to the supermarket in the morning and usually stays home in the afternoon. Besides, that supermarket is miles from here. He wouldn't wander all the way over."

Qi Lin thought that made sense. He mentally ran through every errand a person might need to leave the house for and couldn't come up with a single task worth Father Jiang making a trip to this neighborhood in the afternoon.

"There is one other possibility, though." Jiang Yishen suddenly rubbed his chin, as if something had just occurred to him. "He might come here to…"

Before he could finish, both of them suddenly felt the hair on the back of their necks stand up. A gaze with an overwhelming presence sliced through the air, lunging at them from the right with unstoppable force, like a tidal wave.

They spun around. They were still some distance from school, on a strip of storefronts outside a residential area, the kind of street that had everything: a barbershop, a small convenience store, a shop selling duck-neck snacks.

A bus stop stood here. Jiang Yishen and Qi Lin went pale as a bus slowly pulled in, its arrival announcement playing over the speakers, briefly blocking that suffocating stare.

A few seconds later the bus pulled away. The two of them were working with all their might to pry their interlocked fingers apart.

What Jiang Yishen hadn't finished saying was: "He might come here to buy firecrackers."

"Hey, big bro?"

Parked beside the duck-goods shop was a truck selling strawberries.

"Big bro! What are you looking at? How many did you order?" A man in a baseball cap lowered his voice, speaking like a contact in a spy thriller.

Jiang Changpeng paid him no mind, eyes fixed warily on the direction of the bus stop.

"If you didn't order in the group chat, you can still place an order now and pick it up tomorrow. The crackdown's been really strict this year, so we only brought exactly what was pre-ordered. Or if you're not interested, these strawberries aren't bad either. Dandong big strawberries, huge and sweet."

Jiang Changpeng had no attention to spare for strawberries. He watched as the person who looked uncannily like his son finally let go of the other young man's hand. The next second, the two of them seemed to snap out of a dream and immediately moved to blend in with the crowd and flee.

"Hey, hey, hey!" Jiang Changpeng snapped back to his senses at the same moment and immediately gave chase.

The fireworks seller was startled by him too: "Big bro, are you a plainclothes cop?"

"Jiang Yishen!"

Jiang Yishen heard his dad call his name and nearly jumped out of his skin. He and Qi Lin put their heads down and walked faster.

"Your dad is here buying firecrackers?" Qi Lin said each word with heavy emphasis, as if every part of that sentence deserved to be in bold.

"This is the only spot in the whole urban area!" Jiang Yishen was full of regret. "I should have thought of it! Fan Zi is in that fireworks group chat. Xu Baili added us both when it was his birthday, don't you remember?"

Qi Lin was speechless for a long moment.

"Jiang Yishen!" The voice behind them called out again.

Qi Lin felt a touch of despair. "Your dad looks like a cop chasing down a fireworks dealer."

"Stop right there!"

Neither of them could bring themselves to make a man in poor health sprint down the street, so they resigned themselves to stopping.

Jiang Changpeng caught up red-faced and out of breath, hands on his knees, panting for a long time before he could breathe evenly again.

Jiang Yishen kept a few meters between them and asked Qi Lin quietly: "If we tell him he just misunderstood what he saw, what are our odds?"

"Zero," said Qi Lin.

Jiang Yishen thought for a moment, then said: "Should we hold hands again, then."

"Are you out of your mind?" Qi Lin quickly moved a step away. "What if it upsets your dad?"

"It shows we have nothing to hide," Jiang Yishen said.

Qi Lin pointed at the bus stop nearby. "We already ran a whole stop away. Who exactly are we being open in front of?"

While they were talking, Jiang Changpeng had already reached them. His expression was something to behold, a whole spectrum of colors.

"I recognize you." Jiang Changpeng looked at Qi Lin for a few seconds and said with complete certainty, "You were in cahoots with this rascal, you barged into my bedroom at seven in the morning and dragged me off to the hospital."

Why was the script different from last time?

Jiang Yishen made one last attempt at damage control: "Dad, this is my senior…"

"Shut it!" Jiang Changpeng had no patience for his excuses and went straight to the point. "What were you two just doing?"

Qi Lin struggled to hold himself together and produced a lie of spectacular absurdity: "Just now, that… there was a bug on my hand, and Jiang Yishen was helping me get rid of it."

Jiang Changpeng clearly didn't believe him and shifted his gaze to Jiang Yishen's face.

Jiang Yishen wanted to build on the lie, but he genuinely couldn't get the words out. His hands moved around in the air for a long time. Finally, with the air of someone walking calmly to their own execution, he closed his eyes and said: "Dad, let's go home and talk."

Those few words settled the matter like a hammer falling, cutting off every line of retreat. This round was do or die.

The loop could reset a blunder, but if the hypothesis about a 30-day limit was true, they were now standing at a brand-new fork in the road.

These "30 days": were they 30 days in the real world, or 30 days counting the mental experience of both of them, loops included?

If it was the latter, then their loop was about to end at any moment.

Jiang Changpeng didn't immediately grasp what his son meant. In the four years he had raised his son alone, he had never once asked about his emotional life, and the phrase "sexual orientation" was something close to foreign to him.

He only felt a vague sense of a derailed train hurtling forward, impossible to stop.

After forty or fifty years of living, nobody was a fool. If it had been two girls he might have convinced himself they were just close friends, but Jiang Changpeng had never seen two men with their fingers interlaced like that. At least, he had never seen it before. When he'd caught that sight, goosebumps had erupted all over him.

Jiang Yishen watched his dad's expression gradually go blank, a blankness of confusion and the unknown. The wrinkles at the corners of his eyes were even deeper than they had been last year at the hospital, layer upon layer, carved out by the real passage of dozens of days and nights. His heart felt a dull ache. He said: "Let's go home, Dad."

He pressed a hand lightly against his dad's lower back and steered him back the way they'd come, then reached out with his other hand and gave Qi Lin a gentle nudge, gesturing for him to go ahead.

Qi Lin shook his head at him and insisted on going together.

Jiang Changpeng's car was still parked beside the duck-goods shop. The strawberry seller watched them return with curious eyes.

"Dad, what did you buy?" Jiang Yishen made conversation. "I'll pick it up for you. Whatever else is going on, we still have to celebrate the New Year."

Jiang Changpeng said nothing.

Jiang Yishen studied his expression for a moment. In the past, watching his dad sulk at him, he wouldn't have been willing to offer an out either. The two of them could stay stubborn like that all the way to the front door.

But he knew perfectly well that his dad was just being stubborn to save face. He looked at Jiang Changpeng's tightly set lips, and the image slowly overlapped with that genuinely warm smile at the supermarket during the loop. He found he couldn't harden his heart.

Jiang Yishen took his dad's phone, unlocked it on his own, and found an order number on the screen.

Jiang Changpeng didn't stop him. He stood there for a few seconds, then pulled his car keys out of his pocket and walked toward the parking spot.

Qi Lin and Jiang Yishen collected a large bag of firecrackers from the strawberry vendor, who was now on the highest alert, and put them in the back seat. They found a few more shopping bags already there, and on top was a box of snow fungus.

Dad was sitting alone in the driver's seat, not clear what he was thinking. When Qi Lin got in, he lifted his eyes and stared hard at him through the rearview mirror, then looked away just before Qi Lin could meet his gaze, and clicked the turn signal on with a loud, deliberate snap.

Not a word was said the whole way. Jiang Yishen sat in the passenger seat as if on pins and needles. Qi Lin, on the other hand, felt no particular tension. He gazed idly at the bare roadside trees passing outside the window, and found his heart was, unexpectedly, quite calm.

Before the loop, he had always felt that learning to face family was an enormously difficult proposition. He couldn't relate to families where love was expressed easily. He had never learned to say "I love you" growing up, and as an adult he was too embarrassed to say it out loud. It was the same with the person he loved.

But after looping through this day several times, it was as if he had been fast-forwarded through ten-odd years of growing up. Many of the chasms that had once seemed impossible to cross had shrunk into the tiny gap between two bricks.

The feeling was like suddenly being reborn into primary school. Everything that had once felt like the sky was falling now seemed too trivial to mention. Difficulties had become manageable, and troubles no longer felt so impossible to let go of.

He hadn't had many encounters with Jiang Yishen's father, but those brief meetings had been enough to sketch out a clear picture in his mind.

Compared to his own father, who was mild-mannered but had firm principles, Father Jiang was obviously easier to win over.

Stubborn on the surface, heavy-hearted, but soft enough inside.

Just like Jiang Yishen.

The car pulled up downstairs. The parallel parking job was spectacularly ugly, but no one cared.

They pushed open the heavy iron door. No one had even had time to change their shoes when Jiang Changpeng struck first. It was as if something had clicked into place for him on the drive over, and the anger in his voice was undisguised: "I already felt something was off last time. This kid never brings people home, especially after I… after that."

Qi Lin stood against the door as if being punished. Jiang Yishen planted himself firmly in front of him, but hung his head in a thoroughly defeated way.

Jiang Changpeng took off his down jacket and tossed it over the back of a chair, then stood in silence looking at the two of them.

The entryway was dim, heavy with shadow. The sound of the building's main door opening and closing downstairs drifted up.

Jiang Yishen heard his own breathing, loud and conspicuous, as if it were giving him away. He tried deliberately to slow it down and suppress it, but it only seemed to get faster and faster. He looked up and realized it was his dad's breathing he was hearing.

"Dad." He called out, but didn't know what to say next.

Jiang Changpeng turned his back to him and didn't look at him. Time passed. Qi Lin's entire back, pressed flat against the iron door, had gone cold through his jacket. Only then did Jiang Changpeng speak.

"Tell me the truth. Are you two together?"

Qi Lin heard no answer. His instinct told him it wasn't his place to jump in and respond, so he poked Jiang Yishen and said in a very small voice: "What do we do?"

Jiang Yishen was drenched in cold sweat. His mind, under extreme tension, had gone strangely still. He was replaying last night's scene frame by frame.

When they'd gone to bed last night, had he actually kissed Qi Lin or not?

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