“Still looking?” The man’s voice sounded slightly hoarse, likely from just exiting the bathroom. “Had enough?”
His tone was quite stern.
Wei Zhi pouted, feeling a bit wrong. She mumbled, “You left the door wide open, and I knocked earlier.” Her peripheral vision caught sight of water still dripping from his body…
The hallway lacked heating, and gusts of cold air blew in from outside, nearly dispersing the warmth in the room.
While complaining, her actions contradicted her words as she picked up a short-sleeved shirt from the bed and handed it to him.
He paused briefly, glancing at her before taking the t-shirt. Casually wiping off the water, he put on the shirt… The fabric fell, covering the gruesome scar on the man’s back. When his gaze returned to her, Wei Zhi had already discreetly averted her eyes.
Her mind buzzed with too many thoughts, suddenly going blank.
“Entertain yourself for a while.”
Dropping these four words, Shan Chong ignored her. He opened a bottle of mineral water and drank half of it. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. A few drops of water trickled down his pale lips, which he casually wiped away with the back of his hand, leaving only a damp streak…
Wei Zhi, staring at him, nearly crushed the armchair’s backrest.
If not for how swiftly he zipped up his pants, she might have suspected he was doing it on purpose.
Completely unaware of the unhealthy storm brewing in the young woman’s mind nearby, he only felt two fiery gazes scanning him like x-rays…
Even Ultraman couldn’t withstand such intense visual radiation.
So Shan Chong had to put down the water bottle and ask, “Where’s Bei Ci?”
“Didn’t see him,” Wei Zhi blinked, pretending to shrug nonchalantly. “He wasn’t here when I came in.”
“Leaving without closing the door,” Shan Chong muttered emotionlessly, then nodded towards the coffee table under the TV. “The car keys should be next to the wallet. Look for them yourself.”
Wei Zhi responded with an “Oh” and turned towards the direction he indicated.
In truth, she didn’t dare look at him again—
The unexpected sight of a “handsome man emerging from the bath” was too much. After all, she was a healthy adult woman, and seeing such a thing without mental preparation made her weak in the knees…
She should eat something nutritious tomorrow to recover.
While pondering this, Wei Zhi reached the coffee table where the man had directed her. She found the table in disarray, with neither wallet nor car keys visible. Instead, a mountain of clothes lay there in a jumbled heap.
“…”
Wei Zhi looked back helplessly, only to find the man busy rummaging through drawers for a hair dryer, paying her no attention.
Dejectedly turning back, she picked up the topmost piece of clothing. All the clothes were dark, and she couldn’t tell if they belonged to Bei Ci or Shan Chong.
After a moment’s hesitation, she neatly folded it and placed it on the nearby chair…
Then came an outer jacket—thermal underwear—a pair of long johns—a sweater—underwear—
Underwear.
The diligently folding young woman froze, holding the piece of black fabric in her hands. She didn’t understand why such an item had brazenly appeared here, falling into the hands of an innocent maiden like herself.
Surprisingly, her first thought wasn’t “This is a man’s underwear,” but rather “I wonder if these have been washed, though they probably wouldn’t get moldy in this weather”…
Meanwhile.
Behind her, Shan Chong had finally found the hair dryer in the wardrobe. As he bent to retrieve it, he noticed the usually talkative person behind him had suddenly gone quiet as a mouse…
She wasn’t speaking.
Nor did he hear her searching for anything.
“Are you planning to dig a hole in the wall to find those car keys?” he said as he turned around. “The room isn’t that big—”
His voice abruptly cut off.
His gaze locked onto the young woman not far away, her back to him. At that moment, she stood by the coffee table, holding up a pair of underwear with both hands, raised high above her head, examining it…
That pose.
From his perspective, it looked just like the monkey in “The Lion King” holding up the newborn Simba.
Shan Chong: “…”
Wei Zhi maintained her pose, underwear held high. Hearing his voice, she awkwardly twisted her fluffy head around. Her bright eyes rolled in their sockets as she looked at him and asked, “Huh?”
Shan Chong: “…”
What did she mean by “Huh?”
Shan Chong: “If you’re looking for keys, just look for keys. What are you doing?”
Wei Zhi: “The keys are under the clothes.”
“…” Shan Chong paused for three seconds. “Can you put down Bei Ci’s underwear before speaking?”
Wei Zhi’s hand loosened, and the underwear fell onto the chair. She asked curiously, “How do you know they’re his?”
Shan Chong didn’t even bother to lift an eyelid, let alone answer her question—how could one mistake their underwear? One thing…
He heard her genuinely confused muttering from nearby: “They’re all black anyway.”
The man’s hand, holding the hair dryer, stiffened slightly.
After pondering for a while, he felt her behavior was inexplicably brazen… Suddenly feeling a bit competitive, he didn’t want to let her off the hook.
So, glancing at her, he said something shocking: “The size is different, a bit smaller. Didn’t you notice?”
“?”
Wei Zhi was stunned, unprepared for this person to catch her off guard. She had been maintaining a pure heart for academic research but was suddenly hit with a curveball that left her reeling.
She bit her lower lip, still trying to argue: “How could I notice? With my head?”
In her forced bravado, her dark eyes flickered slightly. The man displayed a faint, ambiguous smile, raising an eyebrow to counter: “Why not? Didn’t you see earlier?”
Otherwise, how would she know “they’re all black”?
Wei Zhi: “…”
Amid earth-shattering embarrassment.
She abruptly gathered all the remaining clothes and haphazardly tossed them onto Bei Ci’s bed. Wei Zhi snatched the keys from the coffee table, shoved them into her pocket, and stomped furiously to stand before him—
He didn’t even have time to react. Looking up, he saw her suddenly in front of him. As she rose on tiptoes to get closer, he caught a whiff of her familiar sweet scent, which even overpowered the hotel body wash smell wafting from the bathroom behind him…
Their breaths nearly intermingled.
The air became impure and turbid.
Amidst this subtle atmospheric tension, he leaned back slightly, creating a bit more distance between them… His long, thick eyelashes fluttered as he looked down at her expressionlessly.
“So what if I looked!” He heard her say through gritted teeth, like a bandit, “What, do I need to pay for it?”
She was truly riled up now.
A brief silence.
Looking down at the young woman who seemed about to pounce on him, the man’s eyelashes quivered. After a moment, the seriousness on his face suddenly relaxed…
The corners of his lips slowly curled up, this time with genuine hints of lazy amusement.
He chuckled—
That handsome face rarely showed any emotion beyond its usual silence and seriousness, but now it held a trace of playfulness.
“Sure,” he said slowly, staring into her bright eyes, “Alipay or WeChat?”
“…”
……
Five minutes after Wei Zhi left, Bei Ci returned.
By now, the room had mostly returned to its original orderly state, save for some neatly folded clothes on a few chairs—
The heating hummed steadily;
The places that were meant to be messy remained so;
The TV played a recording of the previous Olympic qualifying matches, with the commentator’s fluctuating voice inducing drowsiness;
The man sat on the bed, slowly wrapping a bandage around his ankle. Hearing someone enter, he barely glanced up…
Then, uninterested, he lowered his eyes and continued with the bandage.
Bei Ci was already accustomed to this.
“Little Junior Sister was here earlier?” he asked.
“Mm,” the man bandaging his ankle paused briefly, casually replying, “How did you know?”
“I went to Lao Yan’s room to get something earlier, since your bottle wasn’t enough, right?”
Bei Ci shook the Yunnan Baiyao spray in his hand and tossed it to Shan Chong. The latter caught it, gave it a shake, and then pulled up his jeans to spray it on his slightly reddened knee that he had accidentally injured today…
Watching his actions, Bei Ci continued, “Then while chatting in his room, we suddenly heard an earth-shattering door slam from our room. Wow! That noise could’ve shaken the plaster off the entire corridor’s walls—”
“Oh.” Shan Chong’s face remained impassive. “The kid has a temper.”
“…” Bei Ci paused, at a loss for words. “You teased her again?”
“No, why would I bother teasing her?” Shan Chong said, “Do I look that idle?”
Bei Ci looked at him, his expression rapidly switching between “believing” and “not believing,” until the man told him to move without even looking up—
“You’re blocking the light,” he said, “Don’t you have your bed? If you want to stand, go stand by your bed.”
Feeling dismissed, Bei Ci had no choice but to move away. He casually pushed aside the messy pile of clothes Wei Zhi had thrown onto his bed earlier and lay down to play with his phone.
Shan Chong finished wrapping his left foot and began meticulously wrapping the right one, layer upon layer, very carefully. After finishing, he held the bandage, considering whether to wrap his knee as well since he had accidentally injured it today…
Suddenly, the person on the adjacent bed perked up.
He looked over, a bit confused.
At this moment, Bei Ci’s long limbs stretched over from the neighboring bed.
Shan Chong raised an eyebrow, about to scold him, but Bei Ci had already moved closer. Before Shan Chong could react, a hand suddenly gripped his chin—
Shan Chong tried to dodge backward.
Bei Ci didn’t let go.
The two stumbled backward together until the man’s broad shoulders hit the wall behind him, leaving him nowhere to retreat.
One leg bent, the other straight, Bei Ci knelt on either side of Shan Chong’s extended leg. Though also tall, Bei Ci’s shadow completely enveloped him.
“Chong-god.”
Bei Ci’s hand held the man’s jaw firmly as his eyes fixed on that face—slightly paler than most men’s, with delicate features yet devoid of any feminine air… No matter how much time he spent outdoors during the snow season, it never tanned into a raccoon face, inspiring envy.
“I never noticed before—”
Bei Ci’s gaze traveled across Shan Chong’s face, finally settling on the mole on his nose bridge.
“That mole of yours is quite sensual.”
Shan Chong stared back at him expressionlessly.
The next second, before Bei Ci could react, the straightened leg beneath him suddenly bent, forcefully kneeing him in the groin!
As he fell backward, clutching his crotch and yelping, the man mercilessly followed up with a kick to his abdomen—
Sending him flying back to his bed.
“Why get so close?” the man said coldly. “You haven’t showered. You stink of sweat.”
It’s the dead of winter, where’s the sweat smell coming from?!
Bei Ci curled up like a shrimp on his bed, cursing a thousand “F*cks.” After rolling around a few times to catch his breath, he finally sat up cross-legged and said, “No, it’s just that the manga I’ve been reading had a breakthrough update today. A potential rival male character appeared… Wow, the moment he took off his mask, you could tell from his face that he’d get involved with the female lead. That guy had a mole just like yours!”
At least today, Shan Chong got a headache just hearing the word “manga.”
“Why are you still reading stuff for kids?”
At the mention of “kids,” Bei Ci reflexively thought of Wei Zhi’s face—clean and pure, with clear black and white eyes like a small animal…
Leaving aside whether she was good-looking or not.
At least she was pure to the core.
“Oh, kids don’t read this kind of manga,” he replied without thinking. “It’s the colored kind, where the author gets scolded if the female lead doesn’t strip within three pages.”
“…”
“Want to see?” Bei Ci asked. “The second male lead looks a lot like you, I swear.”
“Keep it away.”
The man heard his own particularly upright voice resound in the room—
“If you’re lonely, ask Lao Yan to spare you a girl to hold hands with and teach you the ropes. Don’t disgust people here.”
“Aw, I’m just complimenting your manga-like face, why are you so fierce!”
Bei Ci sat up straight, suddenly as if enlightened, looking Shan Chong up and down as if discovering a new continent. With a hint of incredulity in his voice, he said, “Chong-god, are you being shy or what?… No way, it’s just manga! How come I never noticed you were so pure before?”
The repeated mention of “manga” was burning his nerves.
His head throbbed.
This time, completely losing the desire to respond, Shan Chong directly threw the bandage in his hand at that annoying face.
……
Wei Zhi arrived at the airport around 1 o’clock. By then, Jiang Nanfeng had been cooling her heels in the terminal for a while, so she complained when she saw Wei Zhi.
She didn’t need to wait.
Who could have imagined that Wei Zhi going upstairs to get car keys could result in so many mishaps? The worst part was that after getting the keys and angrily rushing downstairs to the car, she moved the seat only to find she really couldn’t reach the gas pedal… She had to sheepishly go back for the turtle-shaped cushion, wasting even more time.
Now, just as Wei Zhi finished huffing and puffing while helping Jiang Nanfeng load her suitcase into the car, her phone rang.
She answered breathlessly with a “Hello,” and there was a pause on the other end before, “You’ve arrived?”
His voice was deep.
So cold it seemed to melt into the biting winter night wind.
But that didn’t prevent the young woman’s mind from crackling with electricity at the sound of his voice, her spine instinctively straightening up.
Glancing at Jiang Nanfeng in the passenger seat, she gripped her phone tightly and responded, “Yes, I’ve arrived.”
“Alright. I need to use the car tomorrow morning,” Shan Chong said. “When you’re done, remember to take your turtle cushion with you.”
…He called specifically just to say this?
Blinking and letting out a long sigh, Wei Zhi unconsciously stroked the turtle cushion’s fur with one hand while lying through her teeth: “Don’t waste your energy worrying about useless things. I didn’t even use that thing.”
Shan Chong didn’t argue with her. Having said what he needed to, he abruptly hung up.
The busy signal came from the other end of the line. Holding the phone, she was stunned for a good while.
“He could at least say ‘Be careful on the road,’ right? How did this person manage to live safely to almost thirty without following any basic rules of human society!” Wei Zhi grumbled as she started the car. “So rude!”
Sitting in the passenger seat, Jiang Nanfeng glanced at her upon hearing this. She didn’t even bother asking who was on the phone, just yawned sleepily and said, “What more ‘be careful on the road’ do you want? Isn’t that why he called?”
“No, it’s not,” Wei Zhi said as she drove out of the parking lot. “He called to emphasize that I should remember to take the cushion because he needs to use the car tomorrow.”
“So what if he needs the car tomorrow? Your cushion isn’t a timed bomb. Even if you forgot it in the car, couldn’t he just temporarily put it in the back seat?” Jiang Nanfeng turned to look at her, finding her face full of righteousness, and couldn’t understand how she could be so obtuse. “Wei Zhi, I’m starting to understand why your mom is so anxious… You’re over twenty, yet you’re as clueless about things between men and women as an elementary school student—”
“Enough, enough!”
Wei Zhi pressed harder on the gas pedal.
Saying it was for her sake that he called, the young woman’s hands tightened on the steering wheel, her face feeling a bit hot… Fortunately, it was pitch black, so Jiang Nanfeng couldn’t see the redness spreading across her face.
In reality, even her ears were burning hot enough to fall off.
“Jiang Nanfeng, did you take the wrong medicine or something!” Wei Zhi said. “Weren’t you strongly against me getting too close to Shan Chong before? Always reminding me that a teacher is just a teacher, forbidding wild thoughts, forbidding falling—”
Jiang Nanfeng propped her chin with one hand: “Back then, didn’t you still have Han Yiming?”
At the mention of this name, Wei Zhi’s stomach churned.
As if not noticing her silence, Jiang Nanfeng smiled and said, “Now Han Yiming is out of the picture, and you’ve finally met someone who makes you, this salted fish, want to flip over—”
“I regret coming to pick you up today,” Wei Zhi said. “When did I ever want to flip over for him?”
“Who was it that kept mentioning the ‘glasses cloth big shot’ every day?”
“That was just for fun, I didn’t know who he was then. If I had known he was my teacher—”
“You’re pretty righteous for someone who’s blind.”
Wei Zhi huffed and fell silent, still feeling wronged about the whole thing.
Was she blind?
Wasn’t it because all those videos online had been mysteriously censored? If those videos had been like the competition recording she saw in the hotel room tonight—
Suddenly reminded of this, her thoughts were immediately derailed. She no longer cared about the glasses cloth issue and couldn’t help sharing her new confusion with Jiang Nanfeng: she couldn’t understand why, among all the videos she had saved on her phone back then, not a single one mentioned Shan Chong’s name.
As she spoke, she felt an eerie sense of unease.
The car sped along the highway, Wei Zhi pressing the gas pedal, both hands on the steering wheel, eyes fixed ahead. Snow was falling from the sky, and she didn’t dare turn to see what expression the person beside her wore…
She only knew that after hearing her confusion, Jiang Nanfeng remained silent for a long time.
Just when Wei Zhi thought the woman might have fallen asleep, she heard her slowly say, “Shan Chong used to be on the national team and even competed in the Olympics. Though he’s not young now, it doesn’t seem like he should have had to retire… You know there are many famous athletes—including gymnasts—who are still competing for national glory in their forties, right?”
“Yes, I know. What about it?”
“So why did he suddenly retire when he was still in good shape and had no successor?”
Jiang Nanfeng’s words plunged the car into a brief silence.
“All the personal introduction parts of the videos were cut out. That’s probably because the editor needed to use his videos but, for reasons of dissatisfaction or disdain, didn’t want to mention this person,” Jiang Nanfeng said lightly. “Of course, I’m just guessing—”
“How is that possible?”
Wei Zhi interrupted Jiang Nanfeng’s speculation.
Although their time together wasn’t long, this was Shan Chong…
In her eyes, he had always, always been the center of attention, like the moon surrounded by stars.
Many people came to him for lessons out of admiration.
Many people regarded him as the benchmark for snowboard freestyle big air.
She’d heard from Bei Ci and others that in the current national and provincial teams, apart from parallel giant slalom, many events in both big air and halfpipe had people trained by Shan Chong…
Even recently, a provincial team had called him in as an external coach for training.
If not in the world, at least in the entire domestic snow sports circle, Shan Chong had his place.
Would anyone dare treat him like that?
“Even if he retired before winning an Olympic medal, they can’t try to erase his existence because of that, right? If it wasn’t for unavoidable reasons, like injury or illness… who would casually joke with their future and give up just like that?”
The more she spoke, the more anxious Wei Zhi became. “Just because he retired, they completely deny all his contributions? As far as I know, Chinese snowboarding has never had results in the Olympics. Who knows how long this road is— He’s just one of the thousands who dropped out along the way, so they make him bear all the blame for the past and future?”
Based on what?
She couldn’t bear even thinking about such an assumption.
It was like watching someone who was still surrounded by brilliant light, only to have someone tell you one day, “Wake up, he fell from grace long ago.”
She couldn’t accept it.
As Wei Zhi spoke anxiously, she unconsciously pressed the gas pedal to 120 km/h. Her eyes were a bit bloodshot, but she didn’t cry. She just felt awful inside, full of incomprehension—
Like a believer standing at the edge of Ragnarök, stubbornly refusing to believe that the gods had fallen.
At this moment.
A brief, deathly silence fell in the car, broken only by the muffled sound of tires crushing snow and the roar of the engine…
Jiang Nanfeng had wanted to wake Wei Zhi up, to tell her that the sports world had always been realistic and cruel. But after glancing at her, she swallowed many of her words…
People may sing your praises when you’re victorious, but that doesn’t prevent them from abandoning you or even kicking you when you’re down.
It was never an easy path.
Jiang Nanfeng sighed, deciding not to mention these depressing assumptions anymore.
She just laughed lightly and said to the young woman beside her, “Look at you, getting all worked up after just three sentences, ready to draw swords for him—”
“…”
“And you still dare say you don’t like him?”
“Jiang Nanfeng!”
“Wei Zhi, liking someone isn’t something to be ashamed of. You’re both single, why are you acting like you’re doing something wrong?”