WC ⋆ Chapter 40

Even though “Qi Lin” was this angry, he didn’t contact Jiang Yishen directly. He went home alone and spent half an hour cooking himself a meal.

Jiang Yishen and Qi Lin sat openly on the sofa, watching “Qi Lin” fume and clatter around with pots and pans, the noise so loud it made you wonder if he’d installed a drum kit in the kitchen.

Before the meal was even finished, “Qi Lin” received a phone call from “Jiang Yishen.”

The atmosphere in the apartment had turned ice-cold. All three of them, one living and two ghosts, watched the vibrating phone with tense eyes.

“Qi Lin” didn’t yet know what he was about to face, but the two people on the sofa naturally knew perfectly well. With unspoken understanding, neither of them looked at the other, each turning their head away.

The call connected. The opening exchange was still relatively calm. “Qi Lin” was listening to “Jiang Yishen”‘s explanation, and judging by his body language, he was clearly unsatisfied with those explanations, just holding himself back from erupting.

After a few rounds, the situation gradually grew more serious.

“Qi Lin” asked: “So you’d never met this person, didn’t even know his name clearly, and you lent him over five thousand yuan?”

“The situation was genuinely urgent. He only has Fan Zi as a friend here…” said “Jiang Yishen” from the other end of the line.

Sitting on that sofa was deeply uncomfortable. Qi Lin glanced sideways at the person beside him.

Jiang Yishen felt his gaze and stopped holding back, explaining: “You trust my judgment, okay? Can’t I tell what’s a real emergency and what isn’t?”

Qi Lin and the version of himself who couldn’t eat at the dining table formed a stereo chorus, surround sound: “Transferring money doesn’t require a face-to-face meeting. How does him having only Fan Zi as a friend here affect his ability to borrow money from someone else?”

Jiang Yishen tried hard to stay calm: “I’ve known this person for a long time. He has no family to help him, otherwise he wouldn’t have borrowed money from us. It’s not like Lu Fan set up a honey trap with him!”

“Someone in his situation can’t even get a credit card approved, and you still dared to lend out that much money?” Qi Lin grew angrier the more he thought about it. “And why didn’t you tell me in advance?”

At that, Jiang Yishen was struck speechless. He kept quiet and listened to the argument between the two at the dining table for a while, and found that “Qi Lin” back then spoke far more harshly than he did now.

“Why don’t you just hire him a full-time caregiver while you’re at it, or invite him to move into the dorm and sleep on the lower bunk, and take care of him all the way through retirement!”

Jiang Yishen nearly choked. He said through gritted teeth: “Why are you being so vicious!”

“Obviously!” Qi Lin showed no mercy at all. “We know now that he paid the money back, but at the time I genuinely thought you’d been scammed!”

Jiang Yishen had worn these two sentences down to nothing from repeating them so many times: “Can you not trust my judgment? I thought it through carefully!”

Neither could convince the other. The two of them sat at opposite ends of the sofa, a vast distance between them.

As things went quiet on this side, things grew louder over there. “Qi Lin” stabbed forcefully at the noodles on his plate with a fork, cutting them into short little pieces: “Why didn’t you tell me before making a decision like that? Since you told Fan Zi it was a joint gesture from both of us, I should at least have had the right to know!”

There was silence from the other end of the phone. The Jiang Yishen of that time had also been stumped by that same question.

Qi Lin turned to look at Jiang Yishen, who was leaning against the other armrest with his arms crossed. He took a deep breath to settle himself and asked: “So what were you thinking? Did you not tell me because you were afraid I wouldn’t agree?”

Jiang Yishen didn’t look at him.

The phone call on the other side ended. All three of them fell into silence, each lost in their own thoughts.

What lay before them was a scene from the past replaying itself, yet the feelings inside were no longer the same as before. The things that “Qi Lin” from half a year ago couldn’t understand, the Qi Lin who had come from the New Year’s in January suddenly caught a thread of.

It was a thought that flashed past in an instant, like a sudden spark of insight. Qi Lin stared steadily at Jiang Yishen and broke the silence: “Did you just not want to fight with me?”

Jiang Yishen still had his head down, staring at the floor, and didn’t respond. But Qi Lin knew he’d guessed right.

Their relationship was hanging precariously by a single thin thread, and Jiang Yishen didn’t want anything to come along and disturb that thread. He wanted to paper over the cracks, to at least get through the Qixi Festival first before dealing with anything else.

It was less about avoidance and more about exhaustion, and so he had chosen to hide it.

Qi Lin felt unsettled inside. He looked at the small jewelry box sitting on the dining table, the ring inside it that he’d never found an opportunity to give away even up until their breakup.

It was now on the finger of Jiang Yishen, who was sulking alone in the corner.

Qi Lin let out a sigh and shifted over to sit beside him, saying awkwardly: “I’m not going to fight with you anymore.”

Jiang Yishen turned his face away.

Qi Lin found it almost funny. He leaned over to the other side and looked into his eyes: “It’s been so long already.”

“But you still think I act without thinking things through.” Jiang Yishen said.

Qi Lin clicked his tongue: “When did I ever say that?”

Jiang Yishen accused: “You said my brain had been kicked by a donkey.”

“That was in the heat of the moment!” Qi Lin argued back. “You hadn’t told me anything beforehand, so of course I panicked when I suddenly found out. What if you’d been scammed?”

The word “scammed” seemed to act like a trigger. The two of them looked at each other, already knowing that what followed would be a repeat of the exchange they’d just had, like a tape stuck on a loop.

Qi Lin had a vague sense that he still hadn’t touched the core contradiction of this argument, but he couldn’t find any clear thread to follow. Jiang Yishen looked like he was still sulking, aggrieved beyond measure, and it left Qi Lin equally at a loss, his own temper flaring up and making him unwilling to keep talking.

Neither of them had any desire to speak. They started a silent competition to see who could go longer without talking to the other. Qi Lin was still turning the matter over in his mind before sleep, going through it again and again, and every time he reached the same conclusion: that Jiang Yishen was easy prey for scammers.

The relentless single-day loop had thrown off his body clock so completely that he felt no sleepiness before midnight, but lying there with his eyes open meant he risked looking at Jiang Yishen, so he simply decided to put it out of sight and out of mind. He hadn’t been pretending to sleep for long, however, when he suddenly sensed something off.

Qi Lin opened his eyes. An unmistakable feeling of mental dissociation swept over him. He thought it meant he was finally about to leave the Memory Rewind and return to reality, but instead, after a wave of dizziness, he found himself standing in Jiang Yishen’s dormitory.

The dormitory was deep in the night. All four bunks had their small reading lights on. Qi Lin spotted the digital clock on Fan Zi’s desk: August 2nd, 00:00, the early hours of the day they’d gone to the shopping mall to buy the ring.

Qi Lin understood immediately. Even in their transparent, ghostly state, they were still caught inside the single-day loop. Without a kiss, they would be trapped in the same twenty-four hours, clinging on like a ghost that refused to leave.

This meant that today he would once again have to trail “Jiang Yishen” on a meandering trip around the shopping mall, run into “Qi Lin” buying the ring, and finally kiss a Jiang Yishen wearing a sour expression.

Qi Lin had been worn down to the bone by the relentless emotional whiplash, having gone through every extreme of grief and joy. Faced with the warm and ordinary scene of the dormitory, he couldn’t summon a single ounce of energy. Right now he only wanted to sleep properly first.

He drifted over to “Jiang Yishen”‘s bunk and found him searching on his phone for “where to buy a Qixi gift for your boyfriend.” It was enough to soften his heart. He let out a sigh and lay down beside him.

But the very next second, Jiang Yishen actually sat up, climbed quietly down from the bed, and passed straight through the middle of Qi Lin’s body.

Lights-out in the dormitory seemed to be some kind of signal. Even though all four of them kept their small reading lights on as they stayed up late, once the main light was off no one spoke anymore. Fan Zi had no bed curtain and glanced over at Jiang Yishen when he heard the movement, but didn’t pay much attention and looked back down to keep playing his game.

Qi Lin followed behind him and watched Jiang Yishen walk into the bathroom, where he didn’t come out for five minutes.

His mental load was too heavy and his mind had long since stopped working properly. He hadn’t thought much of it at all, and by reflex drifted in through the door, only to be confronted with a shocking scene.

Qi Lin retreated three steps in a row, half his body sinking into the wall behind him. His heart pounded, and all the blood rushed to the top of his head.

Jiang Yishen was leaning against the wall with his head bowed. His sleep-tousled hair fell across his forehead, hiding the murky, unreadable look in his eyes. There were water droplets on his sharply defined brow bone, traces of water he’d splashed on his face without having dried off afterward.

He had rolled up the hem of his shirt a little. His underwear was only pulled halfway down. The movements of his fingers were unusually rough, startling to watch. His other hand was braced against the sink, gripping his phone tightly. The screen showed an audio file that had just started playing from the beginning. His fingertips were still damp, leaving streaks of water across the screen.

Suppressed, heavy, burning gasps came from him. Then suddenly, Jiang Yishen jerked his head up and looked directly in his direction.

Qi Lin startled, convinced for a moment that he’d been seen. By reflex he stepped back and retreated out of the bathroom. Everything around him darkened, and he was standing in the dormitory again.

He was so tense he was almost hyperventilating. It took a long while before his heartbeat settled. He walked back into the bathroom and found Jiang Yishen still leaning in the same spot as before.

He had his head tilted back against the wall. His chest was heaving violently. His throat worked in a hard swallow. He gripped his phone with white-knuckled force. His breathing paused for a second. His lower abdomen trembled. He drew in a deep, heavy breath, then slid down slightly as though drained of all strength, before bracing himself on his elbow and slowly straightening back up.

But Qi Lin could see that nothing had come of it.

Jiang Yishen looked somewhat wretched. His lips moved, and Qi Lin made out what he said: “Not enough.”

His legs felt like they might give out. He genuinely didn’t understand why Jiang Yishen would rather endure this than come to the rental apartment to find him, why he had to push himself to this state. If he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes, he might never have guessed the reason behind Jiang Yishen’s sudden harshness back then, and would have assumed it was simply a bad mood.

A few strands of hair were damp with sweat. Qi Lin moved closer to him and heard him quietly calling his own name.

Not Xiao Qi. Not the “baby” he loved to call him. His name. Qi Lin. Two proper, upright characters, and coming from a Jiang Yishen like this, they carried a different kind of feeling, as though love was mixed with grievance, and the grievance was tangled up with tender longing.

Jiang Yishen murmured softly to himself: “Why does it feel like you don’t like me anymore.”

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