Chapter 53 p1
This small performance lasted for a total of two and a half hours, with a break of about twenty minutes in the middle.
After the performance, Jian Xin and her friends found another lounge bar and sat around drinking for a while.
Yan Lu had been following, watching, and listening the whole time.
They had their liveliness. She maintained a smile on her face, but she also became increasingly silent, unconsciously looking down at her phone again and again.
When she looked at her phone, she couldn’t help but let her thoughts wander.
Actually, she didn’t even know why she was looking at her phone.
She wasn’t like Jian Xin, who had so many friends. Whether on QQ or WeChat, her number of friends was very small.
The high school dorm group chat, which had been lively for a while, had been quiet for a long time. She didn’t get along well with her university roommates, and they hadn’t even created a group chat.
On QQ, besides her editor, there were only a few peers she had added at some point and had barely chatted with.
Usually, she looked at her phone only because Jian Xin would send her messages.
Now that Jian Xin was right beside her, laughing and talking, so happy, she really didn’t know what she was doing looking at her phone all the time.
It was nothing more than being bored, scrolling through her backstage, and looking at comments.
But she didn’t like to read comments either. Perhaps it was because of her personality. No matter what she wrote, the main character’s growth path was always not smooth. Although her grades were passable, the comment section was always a mess of arguments, and it was annoying to read.
But she always felt a tightness in her chest, as if something was stuck there, pressing on her breath, and no matter how she opened her mouth, she couldn’t get it out.
In the middle of it, she used the excuse of going to the bathroom and secretly slipped outside the bar to sit for a while.
The summer nights were hot, but for some reason, the tables and chairs outside were also filled with people drinking and chatting.
There was no air conditioning, only a large standing fan.
Yan Lu found an empty table and sat down. The fan was blowing on her, which did a lot to clear her head.
I must be unhappy, she thought.
When everyone was so happy, her unhappiness seemed very out of place.
But she was just unhappy. She inexplicably felt that everything was like it was back in her three years of high school, where she could only watch Jian Xin’s happiness from the side and get a small piece of it.
Actually, there was nothing wrong with that. Weren’t those three years spent like that?
Jian Xin was just that kind of person. No matter where she went, there were many people who liked and surrounded her. It was like that back then, and it was like that now. It had never changed.
This was the look she had once liked the most. She had thought in her heart many times that it would be enough to be the star that accompanied the moon.
Following a distant but never deviating trajectory, just silently circling around her.
But people, when they can’t have something, they always think that what they want is not much. It’s only when they really get it that they find that their ambition is actually much greater than they had imagined.
Yan Lu closed her eyes, felt the wind on her face, and took several deep breaths.
When she opened her eyes again, she had suppressed the emotions in her heart, got up, and returned to Jian Xin’s side, and sat down as if nothing had happened, playing the role that Jian Xin liked the most.
They left earlier than she had imagined. Everyone walked out of the bar and stood on the side of the road, chatting about the last topic while hailing passing empty taxis.
Perhaps to take care of the young couple, the first taxi that was hailed was given to Jian Xin.
Jian Xin pulled Yan Lu into the car, opened the window, and waved goodbye to her friends.
Yan Lu also did the same, and it wasn’t until the car drove away that she finally breathed a sigh of relief.
The moment the car window was closed, Jian Xin rested her head on her shoulder. Her head was warm, like a small stove.
The faint smell of alcohol entered her nose. It wasn’t heavy, but it wasn’t as annoying as in her memory.
Jian Xin got carsick easily, so no matter if she was sleepy or not, she would fall asleep as soon as she got in a car.
Yan Lu lowered her eyebrows and glanced at Jian Xin, the corners of her mouth unconsciously lifting slightly. She reached out and gently patted her head.
“Yan Lu, are you unhappy?”
“…No.”
“You’re unhappy, I can feel it.”
“…”
Jian Xin could feel that Yan Lu was a little unhappy, but she didn’t know what to do, so she could only nonchalantly suggest that they leave early today.
She was a little drunk and just leaned lightly on Yan Lu’s shoulder, muttering something.
She felt like she should be apologizing, but after thinking for a long time, she couldn’t figure out what she had done wrong.
Wasn’t it like this in the past? She thought Yan Lu would like this kind of liveliness, just like in the dorm at the beginning… She thought that Yan Lu wanted to be a part of this atmosphere.
Yan Lu was thoughtful, she knew that. She hoped that in this relationship, she could give Yan Lu more security, so at least she should confirm their relationship to the outside world.
But when she was in Nanjiang, she didn’t dare to tell anyone about her real relationship with Yan Lu, afraid that it would reach her family’s ears.
She didn’t know what her parents’ attitude would be towards their relationship, but she didn’t dare to take the risk.
Yan Lu had long since cut ties with her relatives. If she were to be kicked out of the house because of this, wouldn’t she be homeless in the future?
So in the Capital, she hoped to tell every friend without hiding anything—Yan Lu was her girlfriend.
Her hobbies, her dreams, and her friends, she wanted to share them all with Yan Lu.
But now it seemed that she was wrong.
She had made Yan Lu unhappy…
As the alcohol gradually took effect, Jian Xin thought in a daze that she should apologize properly to Yan Lu.
But why, the more she tried to organize her apology, the more she couldn’t help but feel a wave of grievance and sadness?
In her phone’s QQ private chat, there was a message from Xiang Yuanyuan from an hour ago.
Everyone was clearly communicating face to face, but Xiang Yuanyuan had silently sent her a private message.
—Yan Lu doesn’t seem very happy.
So bad, she actually needed someone to remind her to know that Yan Lu was not very happy.
Her originally good mood seemed to have been doused with a basin of cold water at that moment, and in the supposedly hot summer night, it gradually cooled down.
She couldn’t even figure out if she was unhappy because Yan Lu was unhappy, or if she was annoyed that she hadn’t even noticed that Yan Lu was unhappy.
She only knew that this unhappiness was like a stone dropped into water, and the ripples that were created at that moment spread silently in her heart.
In the past two years, she had always suppressed the displeasure in her heart very well, and had hidden it very strictly—many times she herself thought that she had really not cared about some things for a long time.
But on this night, they also came to her heart along with this moment of displeasure.
So when Yan Lu wasn’t looking, she had downed a very strong cocktail, and with the help of the alcohol, she had put on a still-happy appearance.
At this moment, the liveliness had dispersed. She had apologized for a long time without finding a direction, and finally, she couldn’t hold it in anymore. She opened her reddened eyes, looked at Yan Lu, and asked that sentence, “Did you find that you don’t actually need me that much anymore?”
Yan Lu was taken aback for a moment, and subconsciously opened her mouth to explain, but the words got stuck in her throat.
Next, it was Jian Xin’s battlefield. All she had to do was be defeated in a moment of silence, and she could smoothly give the victory to a person who was very competitive.
Jian Xin, as if in a dream, poured out the dissatisfaction in her heart.
Bit by bit, sentence by sentence, she picked up the dust hidden in every corner.
It wasn’t until her consciousness completely blurred that she reluctantly stopped pouring it out.
It was the first time Yan Lu knew that Jian Xin had so much dissatisfaction with her.
These dissatisfactions permeated every ordinary day and night. She seemed to have vaguely noticed a part of it, but she had never paid any attention to it.
She helped the swaying Jian Xin back to the homestay, washed a towel, took off her makeup, and wiped away her sweat.
Finally, she washed up in silence, turned off the lights, and went to bed.
The surroundings were silent, and Yan Lu began to regret coming here.
She held back her tears, but her breathing unconsciously became heavy and shaky.
In the dark, someone suddenly grabbed her wrist.
The owner of the hand pulled hard, and without any gentleness, pulled her into a hot and stuffy embrace.
The belated punishment, with a hint of alcohol, hit every part of her body.
An almost instinctive response, along with the resentment hidden deep in her heart, blended in the almost-stifling night.
They were too familiar with each other’s bodies and naturally knew how to make each other feel pleasure.
But after the pleasure, could they still pretend that nothing had happened?
She didn’t know, and just threw everything to the back of her mind.
Like a vine clinging, she indulged in her desires.
…
These days, Yan Lu would always hesitate to speak when she saw Jian Xin.
It wasn’t a hallucination. This person who was staying here temporarily probably really treated this place as her own home.
—Jian Xin was actually buying things for her house, and she had bought more than one thing.
What air fryer, oven, electric baking pan… and some other messy kitchen utensils, molds, ingredients, and semi-finished products.
And also some toys to tease the duck and dog.
Of course, this was not important.
What was important was that this person, who in her memory had always been waited on hand and foot, and who was even slower than her at peeling an apple, was actually studying how to cook in her house.
This made people suspect that Jian Xin had been possessed by something.
Anyway, Jian Xin could even transmigrate into a duck’s body. If there was really something that could transmigrate into Jian Xin’s body, Yan Lu wouldn’t feel particularly strange.
But suspicion was suspicion, and Yan Lu did not stop Jian Xin’s inexplicable enthusiasm.
Every time she made something new, she would come to her to try it.
Egg tarts, pizza, fries, grilled wings, cookies…
And some other small snacks that could be made with an air fryer and an electric baking pan, whose specific names she didn’t know.
Besides these, there were also some more formal meals.
What pineapple and shrimp fried rice, green bean and potato braised rice, and some stir-fried dishes that were not so difficult to make.
In less than a month, this person had tried everything.
The good news was that because she had followed the online tutorials step by step, even if the appearance often failed, the taste was still passable, and Yan Lu no longer had to think about what to eat every day.
The bad news was that this person would always make the kitchen very messy.
Although Jian Xin said that she would definitely clean it up, Yan Lu just couldn’t stand it and would always help to clean up for a long time after trying the food.
One was that she couldn’t stand her own kitchen being in a mess, and the other was that Jian Xin’s leg didn’t seem to be suitable for standing for a long time, but besides some special situations where she turned into a duck, she would insist on going downstairs to walk the duck and dog with her every day.
Xin Xin and Cauliflower were both very energetic, and the amount of exercise to walk them was not small. Every time Jian Xin came back from downstairs, her right leg would tremble badly, and after a short rest, she would have to go into the kitchen to continue to fuss.
Such a messy kitchen after a meal, if it was really left to this person to clean up alone, who knows how much it would hurt later.
