Chapter 54: “Fox, Fox, You’re Giving All My Good Luck to Her.” Part 1

Just before they parted at the room doors, Qiu Yiran called out to Li Wuhui again.

“This—”

She carefully took out the silver film camera, her face bathed in a layer of warm yellow light under the lamps, “Do you want it back?”

“This is your birthday gift.” Li Wuhui answered patiently, “What would I do with it if I took it back?”

Qiu Yiran slowly let out an “oh.”

She gripped the camera in her hand a little tighter.

“Pocket it.” Li Wuhui issued the command bluntly, “Don’t keep holding it in your hand.”

Qiu Yiran obeyed her and instinctively tucked the camera away.

She turned around.

Facing the tightly shut room door.

Qiu Yiran didn’t swipe her key card right away.

Instead, she paused for a moment, then mustered her courage and spoke up, “Li Wuhui, thank you.”

Li Wuhui’s movements halted.

She turned around too, looking at Qiu Yiran’s back.

Even bundled up so thickly, Qiu Yiran still looked very thin, like a rack of bones wrapped in thin skin.

“Thank me for what?” Li Wuhui asked.

“Whether it’s today’s matters,” Qiu Yiran seemed to realize she had turned around and shifted her left leg slightly, but stopped after realizing it was too much effort,

“or the things from before, I want to thank you for all of it.”

“Mm.”

Li Wuhui watched her left leg, which she tried to lift but couldn’t quite manage right away, and felt a lump in her throat,

“You should say that.”

Not “you’re welcome.” But accepting it frankly. Her response really wasn’t polite at all.

It even made Qiu Yiran, who had been a bit tense just moments ago, suddenly smile.

A relaxed smile, without hiding anything.

“But I don’t want you to thank me again.” At that moment, Li Wuhui said it directly,

“I don’t like hearing thanks from others, and I don’t like saying thanks to others.”

“You know that, right? Back in Paris when you helped me so much, I never said thanks once.”

As she spoke, she shifted her gaze away from Qiu Yiran’s left leg, counted on her fingers, and turned back around.

She lowered her eyes to the black door handle,

“If you’re really grateful, then on the rest of the trip, take a few more photos for me.”

Qiu Yiran fell silent.

“We came out here to travel, after all—” It was only now, after Qiu Yiran accepted her camera, that Li Wuhui dared to say something like this, “And we haven’t even taken that many photos.”

She said it that way, but she didn’t really expect any firm response from Qiu Yiran.

She just planned to keep saying it like this the whole way, at least so Qiu Yiran wouldn’t dodge the topic later when it came up.

But Qiu Yiran responded.

Just before she closed the room door, through the narrow, dim edge of the door—

Qiu Yiran turned around, dragging her leg a bit clumsily, and looked at her in the half-light.

After a long while, as if she had made up her mind, she said very solemnly,

“I understand.”

Li Wuhui was momentarily stunned instead, and only after a good while did she smile, “Get to bed early.”

Qiu Yiran agreed.

Li Wuhui closed the door.

But she didn’t leave right away, instead standing by the door.

Separated by one door, she confirmed the door across from hers opened with a “Bang!” and then closed again.

Only then did Li Wuhui lower her head and tap the ground lightly with the toe of her hiking shoe.

She walked away from the door.

She had changed into hotel slippers and saw the pair of shoes she had left in the room.

She looked at them quietly for a while.

In the end, she just put both pairs of shoes away.

This was the first night they weren’t sharing a room. Before, she had worried Qiu Yiran would get sick behind her back.

So all along the way,

she had used one stiff excuse after another to keep Qiu Yiran in her line of sight.

She had run out of excuses by today.

After washing up—

Li Wuhui came out, and for the first time in the past week, she didn’t see that small mound on the bed.

She paused for a moment.

She took the pillow down and placed it on the other side of the bed, then covered it with the blanket.

And so the small mound was back.

She stared at it for a while.

Then she carefully lifted the blanket and lay on her side next to the small mound, as if afraid of waking the pillow.

She lay there with her eyes open, staring at the ceiling.

After a good while, Li Wuhui took out her phone and sent a message:

【How’s the leg?】

The second she sent the message, she checked the time and decided that if Qiu Yiran didn’t reply within five minutes, she would go knock.

After that, she stared at the time in the upper left corner.

Motionless.

Li Wuhui was very good at not blinking for long periods.

But unfortunately, two minutes later, Qiu Yiran replied:

【Nothing serious, just a little chafed. I just applied some medicine; it’ll be fine after resting overnight.】

She wasn’t sure of the real situation.

Li Wuhui was a bit worried and originally wanted Qiu Yiran to send a photo, but then she thought better of it—Qiu Yiran didn’t want her to see her residual limb in the first place, so why would she send a photo?

Even when they were still together, she had been helpless about it, let alone now, in this relationship that was neither close nor distant.

After thinking it over, she could only type back:

【Don’t wear those shoes anymore.】

Qiu Yiran replied simply with a “Got it.”

There was no further response after that.

Li Wuhui waited two minutes.

She set the phone down, turned off the light, and lay on her side next to that small mound.

She squeezed her eyelids shut.

She barely moved, as if there really were still a person sleeping beside her.

She opened her eyes again.

The room was pitch black, like ink flooding into her lungs. She checked her phone and saw that two hours had passed since she set it down, and she hadn’t slept a single second in between.

She lay there quietly for a while.

Li Wuhui sat up from the bed without turning on the light, then rummaged through her suitcase like a pitch-black female ghost, pulling out the sleeping pills and the wine flask—

She had quit alcohol recently because she needed to drive Qiu Yiran back to Paris.

There weren’t many sleeping pills left.

Li Wuhui poured out all the white pills into her palm and counted them—only fourteen left.

She thought for a moment.

She separated out four pills, preparing to crush and swallow them directly. But just as she tilted her head back—

There was a sudden knock at the door.

Just one knock.

The sound was very soft, barely noticeable.

As if afraid of waking her.

Or perhaps it was entirely just Li Wuhui’s imagination.

She hesitated for a long time.

Li Wuhui lowered her head and looked at the four pills in her palm, then hid them back in the medicine box.

Then she went to open the door.

The moment the door opened, bright yellow light from the hallway poured in, and Li Wuhui blocked her face with her elbow like a vampire stung by the sun.

When she lowered her arm again.

She saw Qiu Yiran standing at the door—

Qiu Yiran clearly hadn’t expected her to open the door so late and was a bit startled, standing there dazed.

“What happened?”

Li Wuhui was equally surprised.

She instinctively thought Qiu Yiran was in pain somewhere and needed to go to the hospital, so she stepped forward, “Where do you feel unwell?”

“I’m fine.” Qiu Yiran denied it immediately.

Then she pursed her lips slightly, rubbing the lower half of her face against her scarf,

“I just couldn’t sleep, and then I scrolled through social media and saw a lot of people saying they’d seen the northern lights around here, that there might be an aurora outburst tonight. They even posted photos, and the spot isn’t far from our hotel. It’d be a shame to miss it, so I came to see if you were asleep…”

Only then did Li Wuhui notice—

Qiu Yiran was already fully dressed, with her scarf and hat on, before coming to knock on her door.

“If I were asleep, were you going to go by yourself?” Li Wuhui didn’t know what she was fixating on.

“No.” Qiu Yiran explained quickly,

“If you were asleep, I wouldn’t go either. We’d go together next time.”

“Then why are you already dressed?” Li Wuhui eyed her calmly for a moment.

“Huh?” Qiu Yiran seemed a bit confused.

Then she added, “I just thought, if you wanted to go, we wouldn’t waste time waiting for me to get ready.”

“Missing it tonight would already be a shame; I wanted to be as prepared as possible.”

Li Wuhui didn’t speak, quietly lowering her lashes,

Qiu Yiran saw she wasn’t responding.

She first poked her head out cautiously, trying to peek up at her expression from below. After looking for a bit, she ducked back, rubbing her chin against the scarf,

“So, are we going?”

Li Wuhui finally raised her eyes.

She met the gaze of Qiu Yiran standing at the door—

The other woman stood under the motion-sensor light in the corridor, her face wrapped in a thick fleece scarf, not all her features exposed, only a pair of eyes, clean and clear, laid bare before her.

Because of this, Li Wuhui reacted unusually slowly, as if there were light-years between them.

Until—

Qiu Yiran spoke again, calling her back from some distant galaxy, “Li Wuhui, so do you want to go see it?”

Li Wuhui snapped out of it abruptly.

Her eyes were still on Qiu Yiran’s eyes.

Then it hit her—oh, it was Hermit Crab Qiu Yiran inviting her to see the northern lights, her gaze so clear it easily created the illusion that time had turned back.

“Let’s go. Why wouldn’t we.”

Li Wuhui said it crisply.

Then she glanced at Qiu Yiran, who was already obediently dressed warmly with her scarf on,

“Go back and put on something even thicker.”

Qiu Yiran reacted slowly, looking down at her clothes, “This is already pretty thick.”

Li Wuhui turned on the light.

While rummaging for a sweater and jacket in the room and throwing them on haphazardly, she explained to Qiu Yiran still standing in the doorway, “The temperature drops even more at night.”

“Oh, okay.” Seeing her move faster, Qiu Yiran didn’t dawdle.

She obediently went back to her room.

When she came out again, she had taken off the thin hat and put on the Lei Feng hat instead, adding a fleece hoodie underneath.

By then, Li Wuhui was dressed too.

She saw Qiu Yiran standing obediently in front of her, wearing the Lei Feng hat she had bought her last time.

Dressed neatly from head to toe, like a child nervously waiting for an outing.

—Li Wuhui suddenly had that thought and couldn’t help but reach out.