WC ⋆ Chapter 56

Qi Lin had no idea how the conversation in the next room was going. He sat upright and listened for a long while without catching a single word, and began to suspect that Jiang Changpeng hadn’t made any phone call at all.

Jiang Yishen seemed completely unbothered by any of it. He propped his chin on his hand and dozed off.

Ten minutes later, Jiang Changpeng finally pulled the bedroom door open a crack, showing only half his face, making sure his voice could carry through: “You two go on.”

Hearing the movement, Jiang Yishen stepped closer, but the door slammed shut again with a bang, shutting him out without a shred of mercy.

“Dad, I just finished my exams. Where am I supposed to go?”

Jiang Changpeng ignored him at first. Jiang Yishen kept knocking until he’d been pushed to his limit and squeezed out a single reply: “Stay at school.”

“Okay.” Jiang Yishen turned to glance at Qi Lin, then asked, “What did Mom say?”

“Go ask her yourself.” Jiang Changpeng’s answer was particularly merciless.

Jiang Yishen hesitated for a moment, then picked up his coat and put it on.

Qi Lin lowered his voice: “Really leaving?”

“Leaving.” Jiang Yishen took Qi Lin’s hand. The heavy security door let out a creaking groan as it opened, which served as their farewell, and Jiang Yishen added one more line: “I’m heading out.”

Jiang Changpeng still said nothing.

After the second half of the year spent together, Jiang Yishen had actually learned to tell when his dad was just sulking and when he genuinely had no energy left to talk.

Coming out had been a messy, clumsy affair. His dad’s anger was real and solid, but it was only in these ten-odd minutes alone in the bedroom that he had truly begun to process it.

“Is Uncle okay?” Qi Lin was a little uneasy. “He looked kind of…”

“I’ll come back and check on him tonight.” Jiang Yishen helped him tie his scarf.

He already had a sense of it in his heart. What was hard for his dad to accept wasn’t the coming out itself, but the fact that he had told Xu Huaying and not him.

Jiang Changpeng’s trip to the hospital had been a brush with the line between life and death. After that, he’d come to see many things more openly than before. In the past he’d ask Jiang Yishen about his post-graduation plans every now and then, always with the air of someone preparing for a rainy day. But ever since he came home from the hospital, he’d stopped worrying about those things. When Jiang Yishen chose to sit for his own graduate entrance exams and the results turned out less than ideal, he never once interfered.

Compared to Jiang Yishen dating a boyfriend, the fact that his own son was closer to his ex-wife was clearly what stung him more.

Sitting in the car back to the rental apartment, Jiang Yishen cradled his phone and sent his mom a message, but she was probably at work and hadn’t replied.

Words said in the heat of an argument, with no care for what came out. Looking back now, every single one had landed right in the chest.

He’d been hoping today might loop again, but thinking back on the hazy, tangled process of the night before, there was a ninety-nine percent chance they’d kissed at some emotionally charged moment.

That evening he went home once more. He knocked for a long time with no answer, and when he used his key to open the door there was no one inside. He called and found out that Jiang Changpeng had gone out for a walk after dinner to digest his food. In the end the two of them never managed to see each other, and he didn’t know whether it was coincidence or someone’s deliberate doing.

He waited painstakingly until midnight, and as expected, entered January 11th. Jiang Yishen accepted his fate completely.

His mom replied very late, saying that Jiang Changpeng had indeed reached out to get the full picture from her, only it hadn’t been a phone call but a WeChat message.

Jiang Yishen didn’t ask her how she planned to reply. That was a matter between his parents, or more precisely between a divorced couple, and he had no desire to get involved.

Even if the whole process had been chaotic and messy, the closet door had at least been kicked open successfully. With that weight off his mind, Jiang Yishen finally had room to breathe. He dragged Qi Lin out to wander around the supermarket and brought home the egg roll crisps they hadn’t managed to buy last time.

The good mood didn’t last. The moment the egg roll crisps landed in the shopping cart, Fan Zi delivered a piece of news that was like cracking a rotten egg into a pot of delicious food.

This supermarket might have some kind of magic that bred misfortune. Jiang Yishen mentally added the place to his blacklist.

Fan Zi put it gently, saying that lately someone had been going around spreading word about Jiang Yishen’s relationship status.

The moment he saw that message, Jiang Yishen felt like eight boils of fury had erupted on his face within a single second. He glanced at Qi Lin beside him, who was carefully checking the production date on something, and fired back in outrage: What status?!

Fan Zi said: Saying you’re gay.

Jiang Yishen’s fury settled a little. He replied: I am.

Fan Zi’s typing indicator flickered on and off for a full minute: ? Did being in a relationship make you stupid?

Jiang Yishen took an inexplicable scolding and stood there for a long time not knowing what to say.

Fan Zi added: Yu Jiaming spread it.

Those three characters were so foul the screen itself felt dirty. The moment Jiang Yishen saw that name he held the phone at arm’s length, as if afraid the person might crawl out through the screen.

A ghost, this is an actual ghost!

Fan Zi: Honestly everyone who knows you already knows you have a partner, but what he’s doing is pretty low, you know?

Low didn’t even begin to cover it. This was pure retaliation. Most likely he’d been stewing over what Qi Lin’s mom had said to him last time and was taking it out on the two of them.

Jiang Yishen asked: How do you know about this?

Fan Zi: An Yufeng told me.

Jiang Yishen was thoroughly confused, feeling like he’d missed a lot of plot: Who’s that?

Fan Zi sent a question mark, then quickly recalled it, spent a long time deleting and rewriting, and finally said: Oh wait, wrong person, sent to the wrong chat.

Jiang Yishen: ??

The next second, the pocket of Qi Lin, who was carefully selecting egg roll crisps, buzzed once.

Jiang Yishen watched helplessly as Qi Lin set the egg roll crisps neatly into the shopping cart, then took out his phone to check the new message.

He didn’t even need to guess to know it was from Fan Zi. For some inexplicable reason, in that instant he felt a flash of empathy for how his dad must have felt upon discovering that he and his mom had been in frequent private contact.

“Who’s looking for you?” Jiang Yishen asked in a tone of absolute shock.

Qi Lin didn’t look up, typing away seriously: “Lu Fan.”

“What does he want?” Jiang Yishen felt like a helpless bystander facing a criminal suspect in a TV drama.

Qi Lin glanced at him and smiled a little: “What do you mean, what does he want. You’re allowed to secretly go to Xu Baili, but I’m not allowed to secretly go to Lu Fan?”

“That’s completely different!” Jiang Yishen grew more flustered by the second. He walked straight over and grabbed Qi Lin’s wrist, trying to stop him from keeping his attention on the phone. “What are you two hiding from me now?”

“We’re not hiding anything.” Qi Lin thought for a moment and realized he really hadn’t had a chance to sync up the plan with Jiang Yishen. “Oh, I was planning to get the Rights and Interests Department to help expose Yu Jiaming and the others for embezzling funds.”

The shopping cart rumbled along, the sound of it making one feel a little on edge. Qi Lin pushed the cart at a leisurely pace, picking out snacks as he talked: “Do you remember back on September 11th at the welcome gala rehearsal, when we eavesdropped on the Rights and Interests Department’s conversation?”

Jiang Yishen remembered that clearly. It was how they’d found out that the Rights and Interests Department head had some personal grudge with He Jian.

“There was a girl standing next to the department head at the time. Do you remember her?”

Who could possibly remember that? Backstage was full of people, boys and girls everywhere you looked.

Qi Lin gestured vaguely: “She was the one complaining about He Jian, and she also mentioned some gossip about the external liaison department, saying a junior who’d just been recruited was putting on airs, keeping a lot of fish outside of school, and got exposed and called out online.”

Jiang Yishen searched through his memories for a long time and was surprised to find he actually did have some recollection of it: “Oh, I remember.”

Only they’d been busy looking for He Jian himself at the time and hadn’t paid much attention to the idle chatter, so they’d left before hearing it all.

Qi Lin tapped his phone a few times, enlarged a photo, and held it up in front of Jiang Yishen.

“I went and searched the school’s super-topic and found this. This is the external liaison junior who got called out at the time.”

Jiang Yishen looked at the face in the photo and his pupils contracted slightly: “Ah, this is…”

“Someone we know, right?”

The photo was a cropped portion of a group shot. Jiang Yishen stared at the image, and the young man’s features peeled away from the flat two-dimensional surface, gradually overlapping with a vivid figure from memory. The person wearing that face pushed open a deep brown door and walked toward them step by step.

He was holding a stack of receipts, and a hand reached over to take them. The camera followed that hand and turned to reveal a bright, spacious office with the air conditioning running cold. Two people, one seated and one standing. Behind the computer desk sat He Jian, watching this side with an indifferent gaze. The person taking the receipts flipped through a few sheets, his expression carrying a look of disdain.

Next he would say: Why did you only claim forty thousand? Didn’t I say to claim sixty thousand?

The memory cut off there. Jiang Yishen looked at Qi Lin.

“That’s the junior we saw at the External Relations Office. The one doing errands for Yu Jiaming.” Qi Lin put his phone away, confirming his guess.

Jiang Yishen’s thoughts surged: “You…”

“The girl who was gossiping at the time is called An Yufeng. She’s a friend of Fan Zi’s. I added her on WeChat and chatted with her a bit. She really dislikes the way the external liaison department operates and is willing to help us stir things up a little. She’ll find the right moment to casually tip off the Rights and Interests Department head about where that person’s money came from, and after that it’s up to the department head.”

Qi Lin said all of this with a calm, unhurried expression, while busy trying to fish out a bag of chips from the very back of the shelf, firmly convinced that the ones placed furthest back had a more recent production date.

Jiang Yishen was somewhat at a loss for words. He was silent for a long moment before saying: “When did you do all this?”

“Just these past couple of days.” Qi Lin finally managed to pull out the chips and very carefully smoothed out all four corners that had been pushed in. “An Yufeng and I were originally planning to meet in person to talk it over, but then your dad showed up to buy fireworks…”

“I…” Jiang Yishen felt a pang in his chest. He’d known nothing about any of it. “I didn’t know. You did all of it on your own.”

“It’s nothing. You had enough to worry about these past couple of days.” Qi Lin finished saying this and set the chips down next to the egg roll crisps.

He was about to push the cart forward when he suddenly remembered something. He turned to look at Jiang Yishen, who was rooted to the spot, and explained: “What I mean is, there were a few times I wanted to tell you, but you were dealing with things with Uncle at the time, so the timing wasn’t right, and I didn’t say anything.”

The chips sitting beside the egg roll crisps toppled over. Qi Lin bent down and stood them back up.

The next second, Jiang Yishen suddenly closed the distance, yanked the shopping cart that had been between them out behind him with one hand, and pulled Qi Lin into a tight embrace.

His grip was too strong, locking the person hard against his chest, his head rubbing forcefully against the side of Qi Lin’s neck, pressing until his nose stung.

“How are you so incredible.” Jiang Yishen murmured into him. “I like you so much.”

Held in his arms, Qi Lin could only tilt his head back slightly. He looked into the shopping cart that Jiang Yishen had sent crashing away and saw that all the items he’d just neatly arranged in a row, the yogurt, the wafer biscuits, the chocolate, the egg roll crisps, and the chips, had toppled over all at once, every single one of them face down.

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