Chapter 43: “Long Time No See” Part 2

“Have you eaten yet, Kong Liyuan?”

Kong Liyuan paused for a long moment. Her weary, lazy voice scattered into the wind.

“I just came to pick up a few things. I’ll be heading out soon.”

“That rushed?” Fu Tingli blinked in surprise. “It’s New Year’s Eve. You can’t even sit down for a proper meal?”

Kong Liyuan eyed the still-slightly-wild strands of Fu Tingli’s hair whipping in the wind. Unable to resist, she reached out to smooth them before answering.

“There’s an event tomorrow night. Rushing back and forth like this, I can’t stay long. I’ll need to catch a connecting flight soon.”

“What’s so important?” Fu Tingli asked.

Yes—what could possibly be that important?

That was the exact question Rong Wu had put to Kong Liyuan earlier that day. Kong Liyuan hadn’t wanted to answer, but in the dry, dull Beijing winter, she had smiled and said:

Just something pretty important. If I didn’t check on it, the whole year would feel off.

Now Kong Liyuan stared into Fu Tingli’s lovely light-brown eyes. Fresh from the thrill of the ride, they brimmed with a fullness of emotion, vast and unrestrained.

Kong Liyuan had more than once wondered if this was the very mark of love—even if it only surfaced in moments like these, lost to control. It made her want to claim it for herself, time and again.

But those eyes were too beautiful. How could they hold love? Love was such an ugly, broken, selfish thing.

“Never mind, no matter how important it is.”

Before Kong Liyuan could reply, Fu Tingli rubbed her hands briskly together, huffed out a warm breath, and fished something from her pocket. She held it out with a loose, easy smile.

“Have some candy first. It’s from Saliha.”

The candy nestled quietly in the young woman’s palm, wrapped in blue with gilded lettering.

Kong Liyuan took it and discovered the candy was still warm—as if it carried some searing trace of body heat.

“Wonder if it’s melted.” After handing it over, Fu Tingli withdrew her hand just as neatly and shoved it back in her pocket.

“I stopped by Saliha’s at noon. Her eldest daughter’s back home. They made me milk tea and stuffed my pockets with candy. They asked where you were, and I said you were swamped with work.”

“But I didn’t steal your share. It got too hot while riding, so I forgot to give it to you—but luckily, it didn’t fall out.”

Hearing the word “steal,” Kong Liyuan finally burst out laughing. “Apa only gave me one?”

“Only one left by now.” Fu Tingli let out a slow, leisurely sigh. “Keeping it this long already shows I’ve got a heart. Doctor Mu treated me to tea earlier, and I didn’t give her any from my pocket. Then there was this little girl on the road—so cute, tugging at my pants leg—and I still didn’t give her this last one.”

All Kong Liyuan could do was laugh. It was as if she’d used up every laugh she had coming for the entire next year, right here.

Fu Tingli noticed the laughter and seemed to know exactly why. Finding it amusing herself, she joined in—her eyes narrowing to delighted slits beneath the brim of her felt hat, like a particularly charming little fox.

When the laughter faded, she pointed up at the hat on her head. “The hat blew right off… but the candy didn’t drop.”

“Lucky me.”

Kong Liyuan murmured her agreement and slipped the candy into her own pocket, as if echoing the words. “Lucky me.”

Fu Tingli turned to look at her.

Kong Liyuan arched her brows again and added, “Now the candy’s with me, isn’t it?”

Fu Tingli laughed anew. “Guess so. We’re both lucky.”

They walked a few steps, Fu Tingli leading the horse by its reins. Then she glanced up, a touch of confusion in her eyes.

“When are you leaving? Did you get what you needed? Do we need to head back?”

“Got it.” Kong Liyuan pulled out her phone and checked. “Catching a morning flight to Shanghai.”

“Xuedu Airport?”

“Diwopu. More flights out of there.”

Fu Tingli nodded. “Then we should hurry and return the horse to Apa. Head to Urumqi early.”

She led the horse back along the snowy path they’d come by.

She decided this New Year’s Eve wasn’t half bad. She’d arrived alone, but now she was heading back with company—a second person, plus a white horse that had appeared out of nowhere.

The sky had gone fully dark. Fu Tingli didn’t check the time, didn’t see if midnight had passed or if it was still New Year’s Eve.

She simply led the horse onward through the wind and snow. And Kong Liyuan walked beside her.

The night seemed to grow brighter the farther they went, distant homes aglow with lantern light. The wind carried the scent of burning incense now, mingled with the clamor of worldly celebrations.

“You still haven’t answered my question,” Kong Liyuan’s voice floated up from amid the muffled crunch of hooves in the snow.

Fu Tingli paused for a beat, caught off guard.

So Kong Liyuan repeated patiently, “Why didn’t you end up buying that pony?”

Oh—that.

Fu Tingli peered through the white horse’s flowing mane and the drifting snowflakes, toward Kong Liyuan on the other side.

“I had a good heart as a kid,” she said candidly. “I figured a little pony needed to gallop across wide-open lands like these to grow into a spirited horse like this one.”

She half-expected Kong Liyuan to tease her—no one went around calling themselves good-hearted, after all.

But Kong Liyuan only said, “Looks like you’ve always been that way.”

There was even a note of quiet certainty in her tone—one the roaring wind and snow couldn’t touch.

“Really?” Fu Tingli grinned. “A lot of my friends say I live too naively.”

In other words, plenty of people thought she had it too easy, assuming the world brimmed with truth, goodness, and beauty everywhere. Put more bluntly, she came off as a bit silly.

Sometimes Fu Tingli wondered if she’d spent her first twenty-odd years too naively, so heaven had decided to hit her with a rude awakening in her twenties.

After all, the world at large seemed to have no room for naivety.

Snowflakes drifted onto her eyelashes and slowly melted into dampness. Fu Tingli let out a sigh.

“Isn’t this kind of bad, Kong Liyuan?”

“This is just fine,” Kong Liyuan replied from the other side of the white horse. Her gaze, clear and unwavering as it met Fu Tingli’s, dispelled the fog of her self-doubt.

She gave her an unequivocally affirmative answer.

Fu Tingli blinked in a daze for a few seconds, then broke into a smile. “Yeah, I think it’s pretty good too.”

She added, “You’re pretty great yourself.”

Kong Liyuan didn’t reply, only smiling faintly.

Fu Tingli wanted to say more, but this wasn’t the sort of thing you could sort out in just a few words.

The two-hour ride on the white horse flew by—perhaps it hadn’t even registered as time at all. On a stretch of road like that, nobody would notice the hours slipping away.

They finally returned the white horse to Apa, who collected rent at the stable. Right there on the roadside, they ran into the car sent to pick up Kong Liyuan—the one she had rented to take her back.

Fu Tingli peered inside the vehicle. Rong Wu wasn’t there. It looked like another solo trip.

The tall, roomy off-road SUV held just one person up front: the driver. She appeared young, a Han Chinese woman with a cigarette dangling from her lips and a scar across her face that lent her a fierce air.

Kong Liyuan had already slipped on her face mask and pulled up her hood. The driver clearly hadn’t recognized her.

Before helping Kong Liyuan into the car, Fu Tingli locked eyes with the driver several times, wrinkling her nose.

She fished out her phone and snapped a bunch of photos circling the vehicle. While the driver wasn’t paying attention, she even captured a few close-ups of the door glass reflected against that scar.

Only then did she start to relax a little.

Next came the driver’s earnest grin, complete with a peace sign. “Hey, cutie, want a selfie together?”

She struck the pose without a hint of reluctance, wide open to Fu Tingli’s lens. Fu Tingli let out a full breath of relief. “Nah, I’m good,” she said, catching Kong Liyuan’s subtly arched, clear brows in return.

Her eyes flicked to the pitch-black shadow inside the car, and something clicked. “Can you hang on just a sec longer?”

“What’s up?” Kong Liyuan asked, then added, “We can wait about twenty minutes.”

Twenty minutes—that was plenty.

Fu Tingli nodded. “Cool, just wait here for me, then.”

She spun on her heel and bolted, leaving the car and everyone behind. The snow was picking up now, icy flecks landing on her nose tip, stinging her eyes, slipping into her slightly parted mouth as she breathed.

It made her cough even as she ran—across two intersections, into the chill, vast winds of the Northern Border, ducking into one half-open, brightly lit corner store after another.

When she hurried back, a plastic bag dangled from one hand and an old-fashioned thermos from the other—one of those oversized ones unique to the little local shops. She lugged it along.

She was still running, and Kong Liyuan hadn’t climbed into the car. Instead, she lounged lazily against it, gaze fixed motionlessly on the direction Fu Tingli was coming from, as if the snow might soon bury her.

Fu Tingli skidded to a halt in front of Kong Liyuan, gasping for air, her hair a wild mess.

She thrust the plastic bag and thermos into Kong Liyuan’s hands in a frantic shove. “Hasn’t been more than twenty minutes, has it?”

Kong Liyuan fixed her with a stare, her deep brows and eyes hazy amid the swirling flakes.

“Nope—you’re quick. Right on time.”

“Good.”

Fu Tingli caught her breath, plumes of warm vapor streaming from her mouth with each exhale. Without pausing to chat more with Kong Liyuan, she leaned into the passenger-side window, hanging half over the sill to address the startled driver.

“Sis, visibility’s crap in this snow—drive safe and get my friend there in one piece. Charge her extra if you have to; she’s loaded.”

The driver chuckled at that, eyes crinkling as she blew out a long trail of white smoke. She stubbed out her cigarette and nodded.

“You got it. Your friend’s safety is my priority. Don’t worry.”

Fu Tingli nodded back, pulling away from the window with a few coughs. She noticed Kong Liyuan was still lingering outside the car and blinked in surprise.

“Why haven’t you gotten in yet?”

Kong Liyuan stared at her, tiny snowflakes clinging to her downcast lashes like downy edges.

In her hands were the plastic bag and thermos Fu Tingli had just grabbed in a rush from the sparse local corner store—stuffed haphazardly with dried fruits, sausages, cookies, drinks. Mindful of the biting cold, she’d thrown in a few flavors of instant cup noodles too, plus the thermos filled with hot water borrowed from the shop owner.

“You ran off just now to get these for me?” Kong Liyuan asked, eyes on her.

“You’ve gotta celebrate the holiday right, yeah? Like you told me before.”

Fu Tingli explained, then wrinkled her nose with a follow-up. “It’s hours to Urumqi. Don’t starve.”

As the words left her, a boom ripped across the horizon, swallowing whatever Kong Liyuan might have said next. Her gaze lingered low on Fu Tingli, as if words were on the tip of her tongue.

It had to be midnight. The air erupted in chaos—crackling bursts like fireworks echoing from every direction, shaking the vast expanse around them.

A few families dashed out with bundled-up kids to gawk at the red flashes streaking the sky, unsure where they came from.

The driver poked her head out. “New Year’s here at last. Now that’s got some real festive spirit.”

Outside, snow sifted down steadily, blanketing the space between them amid the lively clamor from nearby homes.

Kong Liyuan stood there in the flurry, snow piling thicker on her shoulders. She glanced up at the sky, then right back at Fu Tingli, showing no sign of relenting.

After a long, wind-whipped silence, she called out.

“Fu Tingli.”

“Huh?” Fu Tingli half-missed it, ears filled with the relentless booms.

She turned her head and caught Kong Liyuan’s voice amid the din, faint but steady.

“What about you? Have a good holiday?”

“It’s going alright. Haven’t ridden a horse in ages—this has gotta be my happiest thing lately.”

Fu Tingli shoved her hands in her pockets, watching the snow veil spread between them like a swath of wind-tossed white silk.

The Northern Border’s relentless gale whipped through, carrying Kong Liyuan’s scent straight to her chest.

She reached out and caught a snowflake; light and shadow danced fleetingly as the wind tousled their hair.

Stray locks obscured half of Kong Liyuan’s face, blurring her features.

Fu Tingli figured her own must look the same—and she knew Kong Liyuan was watching her with that same inscrutable gaze she could never quite read.

“Get in the car. Time to head out.”

But in her mind, Fu Tingli thought this was the perfect moment for a New Year’s send-off. She wavered between “Happy New Year” and “Safe travels.”

Then it hit her—this could count as her resolution. Better make it a big one.

In the end, she flashed the brightest smile, utterly sincere.

“Safe travels all the way. Hope it’s smooth sailing in Shanghai too.”