Fleeing Love Brain

[Picky Sickly Floral Designer * Fierce-Soft Jealous Qipao Couturier]

Cui Qijin was a total germaphobe and a sickly sort. She had to chew her food slowly or risk throwing it all back up. If someone so much as coughed in her direction, she would quietly edge two meters away. Her bag bulged with neatly arranged alcohol wipes, ready to disinfect her phone at a moment’s notice, and her wardrobe stood in pristine rows of crisp white shirts.

Chi Buyu, on the other hand, was a silly little drama queen. She only ate shrimp if someone else peeled it for her, her voice was soft and her words sweet as honey, and she suffered from severe skin hunger. When drunk, she would nuzzle right into someone’s belly, her nose tip flushed red. Her closet brimmed with slinky camisoles and a lineup of custom qipaos.

Rumor had it these two women couldn’t stand each other.

Chi Buyu hated Cui Qijin’s perpetually frosty expression, claiming her skin was so pale she looked ready to cough up blood at any second—like some brooding specter.

Cui Qijin couldn’t abide Chi Buyu’s nonstop Cheshire grins, insisting the girl’s head was filled with nothing but water, like a perfect idiot egg.

That all changed one day after a class reunion.

Cui Qijin bolted awake from a nightmare of locking lips in a heated kiss with Chi Buyu, gasping for air she could barely draw. To her horror, the white shirt she had stripped off the night before was smeared with Chi Buyu’s lipstick stains, and one of Chi Buyu’s camisoles lay neatly draped across her face.

The still-drowsy Chi Buyu mumbled through her haze,
“You said you’d love me for a hundred centuries. You can’t fool me.”

From then on, before Cui Qijin ironed her own white shirts each day, she first had to press Chi Buyu’s row of custom qipaos.

Chi Buyu would slip alcohol wipes and a stack of Polaroids—each doodled with hearts—into Cui Qijin’s bag. With tears brimming in her eyes, she would ask, “When you get back from your business trip, will you still love me?”

At later reunions, a tipsy Chi Buyu would cling to Cui Qijin all night like a koala, murmuring, “Love me for a hundred centuries—every single day!”

An old classmate sighed in wonder.
“Didn’t they used to fight like cats and dogs the moment they laid eyes on each other? Flipping tables and everything?”

“Who said that? Don’t you know they danced ‘Trouble Maker’ together at the freshman orientation party in their first year of high school? When Chi Buyu took a bad fall in senior year, Cui Qijin was the one who gathered all her notes. During military training, when Cui Qijin fainted, Chi Buyu was the first to sprint over and call the ambulance. Every time Cui Qijin fell ill, Chi Buyu spotted it before she even coughed…”

“Even without knowing any of that, surely you’ve heard they were classmates all through high school, went to the same university, and now run their studios on the same street?”

The skeptic went slack-jawed. Was this really what “not getting along” looked like?

In every pivotal moment of their lives, the other had never once been absent.

A hundred centuries turned out to be so fleeting.

Every day, it turned out, they could love for a hundred centuries.