Chapter 19 Part 3

Guan Xiangchen rushed over and slapped the table. “What scared you last night?!”

The tiny screws beside Qin Yue’s hand leaped up and fell back at the slam. She set down the tweezers and leaned back in her chair. “You told me to take the south gate. I ran into a drunk there.”

Guan Xiangchen struck a rooster’s pre-crowing pose and let out a short “Bwah?!”. “Just one?”

“One.”

“Then it’s fine, it’s fine.” Guan Xiangchen patted her chest in relief. Then she whipped her head around. “Wait, how could one guy scare you?!”

Qin Yue rested one arm on the table and countered, “I can’t lift a thing or carry a load. Out in the middle of the night, I run into a drunk twice my size. I’m not supposed to be startled? Not supposed to be scared?”

“No, you’re not,” Guan Xiangchen said.

Qin Yue: “…”

Guan Xiangchen hooked a chair over and flopped into it grandly, ready to review the record.

“Four years ago in spring, some creep followed me and nearly dragged me off into the wasteland. You stood way back and tossed a homemade smart electronic lock like a lasso right over that dog’s neck and locked him down remotely to save me. Were you scared?”

“Scared my ass!”

“You even asked if I wanted his hands and feet locked too so we could parade him through the streets!”

“Three years ago in winter, you had a terrible cold and nearly got robbed at knifepoint while walking around in a daze. You short-circuited your homemade hand warmer so it burst into flames and tossed it into the hood of his down jacket. Watching him jump into the river, were you scared?”

“Scared my ass!”

“When you said you hadn’t even gone over to warm your hands, I nearly called you a bodhisattva and bowed!”

“You work four months of mid shifts and four months of night shifts a year, that’s eight months, so in six years you’ve been out at night for forty-eight months. What freakish things haven’t you run into? And you tell me you were scared? I say you’re the one who scares people!” Guan Xiangchen grew more worked up as she went. “Always cobbling together those gadgets that cost a few bucks, never giving Taobao a chance. At first I thought you were too broke to buy anything and went out of my way to help you out, and it turns out they were all self-defense tools you built for yourself! Qin Yue, do you have any idea how badly you fooled me back when we first met? How deeply it wounded me?!”

“No idea,” Qin Yue said lightly.

Guan Xiangchen held it in for three seconds, then burst out. “Fuck me!”

“Last night it was one drunk. One! And a drunk at that! You got scared? Do I look like Old Ma the beggar at the village gate, easy for anyone to fool?!” Guan Xiangchen pouted.

Qin Yue tilted her head. “That’s not the attitude you had last night when you warned me over and over to take the south gate.”

“How is that the same?! What I saw was a whole group, and you’ve only got two hands. If you really ran into them and your tools weren’t finished being modified, they’d have pinned you down! With that body of yours, once you’re pinned you’d be a fish on the chopping block. How could I not worry?!”

Qin Yue raised a hand to rub the tip of her nose and said nothing, which gave Guan Xiangchen room to grumble on. “The second I saw that text I called you, and it wouldn’t connect. And her answers were all vague. Scared the soul right out of me!”

“I…”

“Tell me, what exactly happened out there?” Guan Xiangchen’s expression flipped like a page. “I want to enrich your material library of saving yourself and rescuing beauties with brains.”

Qin Yue wanted to rib her but held back and kept it short. “It could have been nothing. I saw someone behind me and instinctively stepped aside, but my foot caught the curb and I went down. For a few seconds I couldn’t react, and he grabbed at my neck and tore my collar.”

Guan Xiangchen’s puffed-up heart clenched instantly. “How bad is it?”

“Scraped the skin on my neck a bit. My T-shirt’s ruined. The one you bought me.”

“No big deal. Next time there’s a sale I’ll buy you another. And then?”

“I’d upgraded my phone’s flashlight to a high-power beam. I flashed it in his eyes, threw in a handful of lime for good measure, and he rolled off to the side, thrashing around on his own.”

“Beautiful!”

“While he was thrashing he knocked my phone out of my hand and cracked the screen, and he scratched up one of the guards’ faces too. Then the police came to take statements. I told it straight. He was taken away on the spot and the case will be filed for prosecution.”

Guan Xiangchen clapped away loudly. “You’ve done the public a service!”

Qin Yue smiled and said nothing, her gaze slowly sinking.

As for doing the public a service, she had never been that noble to begin with. But one thing the man said had gotten under her skin, which was why, when the police took her statement, she pushed her memory and logic to the very limit, saying everything she could and filling in every detail, leaving him not an inch of room.

He said: “I’m a loser! I can’t afford to raise three kids! I fathered them, so what’s wrong with giving one or two away? I did it so they could live better lives!”

Born but not raised. What were children to them, really? The product of passion? A crutch for old age?

Qin Yue couldn’t make sense of it. The clogged thoughts piled and fermented inside her and, before she knew it, dragged up a shadow she had kept buried deep for years: why she had been abandoned.

For as long as she could remember, the teachers at the institute had praised her as smart and pretty, sensible and obedient. She never did anything that would worry them, and she never voiced her wishes, afraid of being a burden. She felt she had never once let those praises down. She was a good child. So why had a good child been thrown away in the middle of a snowstorm, left so cold that her entire childhood was lived trembling? Why, grown up, did even climbing a hill to cheer up a heartbroken best friend cost her a week of injections before she recovered?

She wanted to know the reason. At twenty-five years old, she had never wanted to know anything so badly.

The shadow, sharp to her weakness, wrapped her up tight and turned her gloomy and low. So much so that when Shen Jianqing suddenly appeared before her, instinct drove her to turn that mood against her, planting a seed in Shen Jianqing’s mind: that she had been frightened.

And her? When she looked up and saw the tension and worry on Shen Jianqing’s face, every shadow around her was blown away. Two winters flashed swiftly through her mind: one when she was four, and one when she was eighteen. Those were the only two winters in her life that had held any sunlight. Those two winters made her, cold as she was, fall in love with winter, and gave her life a measure of warmth. Shen Jianqing had been part of both.

A person tangled up over why she had been abandoned, carrying a desperate, unwilling ache, looked out from that heavy shadow and suddenly saw the person who had once given her life its warmth, and saw worry and tension in her. What would she do? She wanted to try. To see whether that warmth could be hers again, right now, while the two of them were still nothing but friends.

So without hesitation, just as she had sent Shen Jianqing that WeChat message in advance and tricked her way into a kiss, she harbored another wicked thought toward her. She watered and fed that seed, played along with Shen Jianqing’s “aching heart,” and staged a scene of being “frightened” right in front of her. First, on the bus, she showed weakness unmistakably to soften her heart. Then the delayed little laugh in the bathroom nudged Shen Jianqing once more into believing she was putting on a brave face. And so Shen Jianqing believed it completely, treating her with the utmost care, even going so far as to use herself to comfort her, and not minding at all that the agreement had to be broken.

She was intoxicated by it, savored it, overjoyed. She had thought the scene won her every response she wanted, only to wake up and find everything exactly as before.

Blinded by the huge contrast of the shadow and the warmth, of the things she despised and the things she yearned for appearing at once, she had lost her head and unthinkingly overlooked a very serious problem: nothing that arrives out of the blue is love. Love is what has been long in the planning.

It was true Shen Jianqing didn’t pity her, had even begun to ache for her openly. But they had gone from bedmates to friends in only half a month. There was no way Shen Jianqing had suddenly fallen in love with her over one encounter at the welfare institute.

And as for her…

Qin Yue rested her head on the chair back and stared at the ceiling until her vision blurred into one wide field, then spoke again. “Xiangchen, I have a secret.”

Guan Xiangchen turned. “What secret?”

“Two years ago, when you told your third girlfriend on your own initiative that I already had a regular lover, just to stop her from setting me up with random guys, I wanted to tell you then: my lover is also the person I love.”

Guan Xiangchen was stunned. “You love her?!”

Qin Yue laughed softly. Undigested breakfast pushed up from her stomach, making her want to retch. “Yes. I love her.”

Guan Xiangchen lost it. “She’s an associate professor at Jiangping University, a blazing sun at the height of her career! And you’re a factory worker tightening screws, without a scrap of sky over your head all day long! Where do you get the nerve to love her?!”

Qin Yue smiled. “It isn’t nerve. It’s habit, instinct, the subconscious. It’s any physiological response to her you can name. Before I ever met her in that bar, those responses had been building in my body for twenty-one years.” Qin Yue said quietly.

Guan Xiangchen froze. “A-Yue, what are you talking about? Wasn’t the bar your first time meeting? Weren’t you the one who took a shine to her looks, followed her around for ages, until she caught you and you ended up as lovers? Where do twenty-one years come from? Where does habit come from?!”

Guan Xiangchen grew more agitated with every question, her face full of disbelief.

Pressed under that stare, Qin Yue only smiled and raised a hand, laying her forearm lightly over her eyes, and said calmly, “The bar wasn’t our first meeting. I met her at the institute when I was four. After that I thought of her constantly, right up until I began longing for her at eighteen, and then fell in love with her on my twenty-second birthday.”

“A-Yue!”

“Xiangchen, I’m only twenty-five this year, and I’ve already carried her in my heart for twenty-one years.”

Twenty-one years… A span of time so long it nearly matched the length of her life.