Chapter Ninety-Nine: Staying the Night at His House

As they drove on, the wind skimmed the body of the car with a rushing sound, and strangely enough, it only made them calmer.

Su Yishu leaned back against the seat, rubbing her hands together uneasily.

The heater was on, and the air inside the car had grown so stifling it felt almost suffocating.

Tang Chao floored the accelerator, both hands leaving the wheel to rest on his knees. Yishu watched from the side, terrified he might make one careless move and slam the car straight into a telephone pole by the roadside. Instinctively, she tugged at the seat belt crossing her chest and let out a silent breath of relief.

They drove on for a long while.

“Why are you both...” Tang Chao could not stand the heavy silence any longer.

The tires rolled over a fist-sized stone, jolting the car forward and shaking the exhaustion out of the other two.

His words seemed to echo, briefly replaying themselves in the air.

Yishu gave a wry smile and lifted her eyes to the rearview mirror, where Guo Yamei was wearing the same bitter smile. On this point, the two of them were unexpectedly in perfect accord.

There was nothing to say.

Whatever common ground Su Yishu and Guo Yamei had, it was probably reduced to the troubles and frustrations born of work. After the battering of Double Eleven, those words had become like sharp blades, cutting recklessly across tender skin. No one was foolish enough to go that far.

“We’re just too tired to talk,” Yishu said, propping open her drooping eyelids with her hands. So forcing yourself not to sleep was an immensely difficult thing.

“Tired is one thing,” Tang Chao said, glancing at Guo Yamei in the mirror from the corner of his eye. “But in my view, even if you two had all the energy in the world, you still wouldn’t have anything to say.”

Surprised, Yishu turned to look at him. The right corner of his mouth was lifted in the faintest curve.

Had he seen through everything?

Was he studying psychology? A sports major, and yet he had such keen powers of analysis and inference.

“You’ve misunderstood,” Guo Yamei said, straightening up at last. “Yishu and I...” She paused. “We do have things to talk about.”

“Yishu?” It was the first time Su Yishu had heard her call her that. The information received by the eardrums could not be processed in time by the brain. In her memory, apart from substitutes like “hey” or “excuse me,” the most friendly address had always been a name called out directly.

“Oh? Is that so?”

Those simple three words from Tang Chao pulled the atmosphere, just barely eased a moment ago, back down to freezing point.

“Is that so, Yishu?” He deliberately placed his hand over hers.

Yishu pushed his hand away, saying nothing, not even bothering to put on a perfunctory expression.

“What exactly do you want to say?” Guo Yamei’s face hardened, her brows twisting. “If you...” She swallowed the rest of the words.

“I wasn’t trying to say anything,” Tang Chao said innocently. “I just wanted to understand my girlfriend’s situation through your conversation.”

“What nonsense are you talking?” Yishu nearly jumped. She leaned toward Tang Chao, her expression fierce as she lowered her voice and asked, “Since when have you and I had that kind of relationship?”

“Always,” he said with complete confidence.

“Never,” she replied without the slightest deference.

“If I say it is, then it is,” he said domineeringly.

Yishu let out the anger that had been building in her belly all at once. After all, Guo Yamei was present; too much argument would only be self-defeating. The more one tried to prove innocence and clear one’s name, the more deeply one sank into the mire of misunderstanding.

Guo Yamei stared with her two black eyes no larger than red beans, listening carefully to the back-and-forth between them. She quickly reached an accurate conclusion.

Tang Chao was pursuing Su Yishu on his own.

In her eyes, purely in terms of appearance, Yishu and Tang Chao were a handsome man and a beautiful woman.

But she also knew that Yishu did not like him.

Guo Yamei’s skill at reading people had been honed through years of experience in online communication. Sometimes, with a client’s half-finished remark and the context around it, one could easily infer the meaning hidden beneath.

Another stretch of silence.

Yishu looked out at the night scenery racing backward beyond the window, as though a hypnotist were swinging a pocket watch before her eyes until she lost the power to resist sleep. In truth, even without hypnosis, falling asleep was effortless.

“I hope that from now on you can stop targeting Yishu,” Tang Chao said, once he had confirmed she was asleep, speaking to Guo Yamei in the back seat. “I don’t make things hard for women, but women who bully my girlfriend are an exception.”

“Me and her?” Guo Yamei said in disbelief. “Bullying? How could that be?” We’re all adults. How could I possibly bully her?

“That’s best,” Tang Chao said, understanding everything clearly. In an occasion like tonight, some things only needed to be touched on lightly; there was no need to expand them further. “Where do you live? I’ll take you home first.” He smoothly changed the subject. Women’s wars were not something a man should interfere with unless they had reached the point of life-and-death struggle.

Guo Yamei gave him her address in a low, subdued voice.

The heater in the car was obviously strong enough, yet there was the illusion that the air conditioning had been switched on instead. But perhaps it was no illusion; inside her body, several currents of cold were crossing and surging in every direction.

If time could turn back ten years, even five.

Perhaps the course of her life would have followed another narrow country road lined with only a few white birches. She had once thought it would be a sea of romantic blossoms; who could have known it was nothing but toxic poppies and angel’s trumpets.

Guo Yamei was envious of Yishu. But when envy curdled into pathological jealousy, her actions pushed beyond the control of reason, and long-suppressed bitterness became illness.

She thought of the man she had once loved, a stunning boy in no way inferior to Tang Chao. Youthful shallowness is always deceived by a beautiful face.

All the sweetness of the past had been transformed into the tears of today. As for the medium needed for that transformation, it was probably ignorance and foolishness.

Guo Yamei lived in an old village at the angle between Yundong and Yunbei. This place had been thoroughly forgotten by modern progress.

From afar it was scenic enough; up close, it was only a chronic ailment abandoned by the times.

Perhaps it was the common failing of old buildings: they can present themselves with breathtaking grace only in a painting. Once you stand inside them, all you see is desolation and ruin.

Tang Chao’s car could not go in, so he stopped on the main road at the entrance to the village.

By the time they arrived at Fragrant Garden, it was already past one in the morning. Yishu was asleep so soundly she was slumped against the car door.

What is this?

Tang Chao saw a thin trail of liquid hanging at the corner of her mouth.

She was drooling.

He searched the car and found no tissue, so he raised his wrist and simply wiped it clean with his sleeve.

He brought it to his nose and sniffed lightly.

He opened the right-side door and undid her seat belt.

Her breath lingered near his nose.

Looking at her from such close range, her brows, her lashes, her nose, her lips, her collarbones, every single thing about her was testing the limits of his restraint.

He lifted her limp body into his arms and closed the door without a sound. He was afraid that even the slightest harsh noise would disturb the sleeping beauty before him.

When the elevator reached the twentieth floor, Tang Chao lifted the cover of the password lock and only then suddenly remembered that he did not know the code to Xu Shixi’s home.

Yet he did not become frustrated. Instead, a smile rose in his eyes.

He turned and went to the apartment downstairs.

He laid Yishu on his own bed, pulled over the folded quilt, and covered her to just below the neck, pressing down the four bulging corners to keep the wind from creeping in.

After spending the entire day tidying the room, he realized now that his effort had not been wasted after all.

Tang Chao bent down, bringing his lips close to Yishu’s forehead. Just as he was about to kiss it, he hesitated. Would this count as taking advantage of her while she was vulnerable? It probably didn’t. It was only a kiss on the forehead; I haven’t kissed her lips yet.

He kept the bent posture for ten full minutes, spending all ten minutes in internal struggle.

A simple kiss had become a matter of life and death.

In her sleep, Yishu felt an invisible pressure. Bracing herself against the bed, she turned over.

The arc of that turn happened to bring her face into a brief, intimate brush with Tang Chao’s lips, which had been hovering above her.

His cheeks burned like red-hot iron; the blood within him surged wildly, and his heartbeat nearly exceeded the human body’s capacity to endure. Tang Chao fled the scene in embarrassment.

This was a crime! But he was willing to bear every charge and every consequence.

That night, Tang Chao lay on the sofa, beginning once more to think about the possibility between himself and Yishu. Only toward dawn did he finally slip into sleep.

It felt as though one had sunk into water, pressed breathless by the encroaching force from all directions. And yet it also felt like being cast into a desert, where rolling yellow sand evaporated every last drop of moisture within the body.