Li Xun went to find Old Teacher Lin, and Zhu Yun spent the entire afternoon in a state of barely contained excitement. She got back to the dormitory early, showered, and changed into a fresh set of clothes.

She stood in front of the wardrobe mirror and looked at herself.

Ren Di was with her band. Fang Shumiao was busy with student council matters. The room was Zhu Yun’s alone, and she had all the time in the world to let her mind wander.

Maybe love really did have a kind of magic to it — the sort that got into you like a poison and kept you trapped. On the first day of this semester, Zhu Yun had slipped away without telling anyone and signed up for a membership at a beauty salon in the city center. She went twice a week whenever she could manage it, for skincare treatments.

The salon was far from campus — the round trip alone took an hour and a half — and yet she found it entirely effortless.

Zhu Yun thought of the story from the Bible: Adam and Eve, once living without a care, were tempted by the serpent to eat the forbidden fruit. With that, they came to understand the difference between good and evil, between beauty and ugliness, and developed desires of their own. God, in his anger, cast them out of Eden and condemned them to suffering for all their days.

Since meeting Li Xun, Zhu Yun had come to feel that eating the apple was worth it.

Zhu Yun found a hotel a considerable distance from campus, one of reasonable quality. Li Xun finished up his business at school, asked Zhu Yun for the address, and arrived just after eight.

He walked in complaining: “Why did you pick somewhere this far out of the way?”

“There are fewer people here.”

“Look at you, barely any nerve at all.” Li Xun went into the bathroom to shower.

He had left his T-shirt outside. Zhu Yun picked it up — it felt slightly damp. He had been sweating all day.

Did the shirt need washing?

She lifted it and gave it a sniff——

At precisely the moment her nose made contact with the fabric, the bathroom door opened. Li Xun emerged with his long, lean frame wrapped in nothing but a towel around his waist.

Zhu Yun: “!?”

Li Xun looked at Zhu Yun — who was standing there sniffing his shirt — with a completely flat expression. He toweled his hair with one hand, while more or less deliberately presenting himself with the other, and said: “No need to sniff it. Here’s the fresh version.”

You finished showering impossibly fast!

Li Xun gave a short, amused sound and sat down on the edge of the bed. Zhu Yun offered no explanation, and quietly made her way to the other side, settling in behind him to stare.

This hotel was different from the last one — the room was spacious, the furnishings comfortable. Li Xun’s skin under the warm amber lighting had an almost luminous quality, deeply appealing. As he toweled his hair, the lines of muscle across his back shifted with each movement, and Zhu Yun felt something in her chest pulling unbearably.

She couldn’t take it anymore. She’d already sniffed the man’s shirt — what was there left to be restrained about. She scrambled across the bed and wrapped her arms around him from behind. He hadn’t fully dried off yet; tiny drops of water clung to her arms, cool against the skin.

Li Xun abandoned the towel — tossed it aside — and turned around, pressing Zhu Yun down.

Perhaps owing to the higher quality of the hotel, Zhu Yun had the distinct impression that even Li Xun had somehow come into sharper resolution. She noticed, for the first time, a small faint mole on his chin, right where stubble tends to grow on men. She had never spotted it before.

Li Xun asked: “Did you miss me?”

Zhu Yun asked back: “Did you miss me?”

Not the most substantive of opening exchanges — but Zhu Yun knew Li Xun had no patience for drawn-out, circular conversations, which meant he would answer first.

“Yes.” Clean and direct. He lifted the hem of her sleep clothes, dipped his head to her stomach, and breathed in slowly.

Zhu Yun ran her fingers through his still-damp hair and felt his palm moving along her lower back, absently pressing into the skin.

It tickled. She shifted.

Li Xun propped himself up on one arm and, with the other, gave Zhu Yun a firm push — the mattress had good spring to it, and she bounced a little. When she looked up again, Li Xun had already untied the towel and dropped it.

Zhu Yun was distracted for a few seconds, then remembered something and quickly climbed out of bed to pull the curtains shut. When she turned back, the young master was lying on his side across the large bed, posing, completely unclothed and entirely unbothered about it — like a young model out of an art textbook.

Li Xun patted the bed. Zhu Yun climbed back over. He immediately pressed her down, and his hands went back to her waist and stomach — pressing, squeezing, kneading.

Zhu Yun truly couldn’t stand it. “What are you doing?” What kind of fixation was this.

Li Xun’s breathing had grown heavier. A low, rough sound.

“God, I’ve been going out of my mind missing the feel of this……”

Hearing that tone from him, she found the ticklish sensation from before had shifted into something else entirely — a different kind of sensitivity. Li Xun was running warmer now, and the way he looked at her had changed. He worked his way along her neck with his mouth, a combination of biting and pressing his lips to her skin, and got a little carried away — his own breathing coming uneven.

Zhu Yun was warm too, but catching the slightly roughened look in his eyes, she asked: “Were you exhausted from traveling today?”

Li Xun looked up at her. “Feeling sorry for me?”

Zhu Yun said: “If you’re tired, we can just rest.”

Li Xun leaned forward, one hand pressing into the sheets beside her, and said quietly near her ear: “After all that’s already happened to the sheets, and you’re still this considerate.”

“……”

Honestly, how did he just say things like that so effortlessly.

Li Xun pressed himself closer.

“If you don’t want to, we don’t have to.”

Zhu Yun thought to herself: I never said I didn’t want to — I’m just saying you look tired……

Li Xun read that silent internal dialogue with no difficulty at all, and gave her a light pinch.

“If you do want to, then let’s not waste the good moment.”

Zhu Yun registered that the arrangement this time was somehow different from before, and looked up to find Li Xun grinning down at her with thoroughly questionable intentions.

“Your Highness — tonight I’ll show you something new. Close your eyes.”

Zhu Yun closed them obediently.

She gave herself over to him completely.

He wasn’t one for talking during. Zhu Yun was too composed to make much sound either. In the quiet darkness, the weight of him and the scent of him were amplified without limit, flooding through her until every part of her had memorized it——

— If there was anything in this stretch of unconstrained youth that Zhu Yun had never once regretted, it was this: that when they were together, not a single moment was wasted. They always looked toward the same horizon, poured out their effort and their sweat, and did every joyful thing they could think to do.

In the long road of a life, moments as purely whole and freely felt as these were not to be found again.

*

It was still early. Li Xun, for once, wasn’t so exhausted that he dropped straight off to sleep when they were done. Zhu Yun lay in the warmth of his arms, gazing up at the ceiling light in a pleasant daze.

In her head, she quietly gave a name to the newly unlocked position: The Roller Coaster.

Li Xun finished a cigarette. Zhu Yun spoke up: “You really hate volleyball class, don’t you.”

Li Xun said quietly: “It’s tolerable.”

Zhu Yun: “That Jiang Xingchi——”

He made a contemptuous sound — practically had the words beneath my notice written across his face. “That kind of muscle-bound idiot with nothing going on upstairs — they produce them by the dozen on construction sites.”

“……”

Zhu Yun felt this was somewhat unfair, but didn’t dare voice it. After everything that had happened during the competition, she had developed a deep appreciation for just how many layers Li Xun operated on, and how formidable he could be when provoked. She was afraid that one wrong word might escalate things and bring down unnecessary trouble.

Li Xun said: “You don’t need to worry. I have far too many things on my plate to spend any of it on him.”

That was what he said at the time.

But as events afterward would make clear — Li Xun’s composed rationality had not, in the end, prevailed over his considerably more volatile emotional side.

He, who had never paid any attention to physical education in his life, showed up to every single class without exception, and approached the material with unusual seriousness. He and Jiang Xingchi had taken an instant mutual disliking to each other, and every class session became a silent, ongoing confrontation between the two of them. More than once Zhu Yun watched with her palms sweating, convinced that if Coach Tang hadn’t been present, those two would have come to blows.

She voiced this concern to Li Xun. Li Xun rewarded her with an expression of profound contempt.

“Coming to blows with him — do you really think that little of me.”

This conversation took place at the base. When it was over, Li Xun went back to writing code, and didn’t look up again until a particular function was complete — at which point he turned and asked Zhu Yun: “What did you mean by that, anyway? That you were worried?”

Zhu Yun had already forgotten the context.

Li Xun’s expression was not pleasant. “You think I couldn’t take him?”

“……”

“Of course not.” Zhu Yun immediately pledged her allegiance. “He’s absolutely no match for you. And if you two ever did fight, I’d obviously be right there backing you up.”

Two against one — there was no losing that.

Li Xun gave her a look reserved for people who had said something deeply unhinged.

But for all that Li Xun appeared to be perpetually in a state of readiness for conflict, he confined himself in practice to the coursework, with the occasional verbal jab at Jiang Xingchi — nothing beyond the pale.

Even so, Zhu Yun spent the semester in a low-grade state of anxiety — because as the classes accumulated, she came to discover that this absurdly sharp-tongued, gold-haired top student was genuinely, fundamentally, completely devoid of athletic ability.

All one could say was that God was fair: for every window opened, a door was closed.

Who could have imagined that someone with the lean, angular build of a print model and an intellect that would make most people feel inadequate would have this particular gift — of being entirely useless at sports. It wasn’t that his coordination was off; everything about him looked perfectly normal. The ball simply refused to cooperate. His serves didn’t travel in straight lines. His receives scattered in all directions.

This was perhaps the first time in his academic life that Li Xun had encountered a subject he genuinely could not master. Zhu Yun regretted it more and more. He was a man of such pride — why had she put him through this, and in front of her of all people.

She thought the indignity of it must have been quietly eating him alive.

And the worst of it was still yet to come — Coach Tang, for reasons known only to himself, specifically assigned Li Xun and Jiang Xingchi to practice together. The two of them exchanged zero goodwill every time they were in proximity, and there was one particular instance where, after a failed serve from Li Xun, Jiang Xingchi on the opposite side of the net made a show of tossing the ball and executing a jump serve — and nearly put it directly into Li Xun.

Jiang Xingchi’s jump serve carried serious force. If it had actually landed, it would not have been a laughing matter.

Zhu Yun happened to catch that moment and was furious — she was already starting toward Jiang Xingchi when Li Xun looked at her once, and she was stayed.

When class ended that day, Zhu Yun was miserable, convinced she had been far too clever for her own good and had accomplished nothing useful whatsoever.

She began trying every variety of excuse to tempt Li Xun into skipping class. She succeeded not once. He kept going, kept practicing, kept being put through his paces.

By the time more than half the semester had passed, Li Xun’s receives had only managed to improve to a barely passable ten in a row. Coach Tang had announced from the very beginning that the final exam would be a receive test — scored across three thresholds: fifteen counted as passing, twenty-five as good, over forty as excellent.

The exam didn’t require fixed groupings, so nearly the entire class made straight for Jiang Xingchi. Only Zhu Yun refused to move and insisted on being in a group with Li Xun.

Li Xun told her there was no point, and to go find Jiang Xingchi. Zhu Yun refused, absolutely and completely.

When you were with someone, you shared the hardships!

That evening, after dinner, the two of them went for a walk around campus and ended up on the sports field. The subject of the volleyball class came up, and Li Xun told her again to go to Jiang Xingchi.

Zhu Yun refused: “I already said I don’t need to. I’ve been practicing fine — I promise we’ll both pass.”

They sat on the bleachers beside the field. The evening wind moved gently around them.

Li Xun: “Is passing enough for you.”

Zhu Yun glanced at him. Li Xun looked down and lit a cigarette. “You don’t need your cumulative grade this semester?”

Zhu Yun hesitated. She did need her cumulative grade — not just this semester, but every semester.

“Go find the dark chimpanzee.”

“……”

Li Xun smiled slightly, with a teasing edge. “I can’t exactly cheat for you in this particular class.”

Something in Zhu Yun gave a small, quiet ache. She had picked the wrong class on a whim, had put him through a full semester of this — never missed a single session, approached it all seriously and earnestly — and the result was that he could barely scrape a passing grade.

Li Xun, who hated failure as much as he did……

“I’m sorry.” Zhu Yun said it first.

The night wind was pleasant. Here and there across the field, a few people were out doing their own exercises.

In the quiet, he spoke softly.

“I didn’t go to those classes because I wanted to beat him.”

Zhu Yun looked at him. Li Xun was looking out toward the football pitch further away. “Your internet didn’t lag, did it. That’s not why you picked this class.”

Zhu Yun went still. Li Xun said: “You wanted me to get more exercise.”

She had always thought she’d hidden it rather well. Being called out without warning, she blinked in genuine surprise. “How did you know?”

Li Xun turned his head. His arm came around her shoulders, drawing her close, and he said, with a quiet, amused warmth: “Is there any thought of yours that can hide from me?”

The night was gentle around them. Both of them, in their own way, felt held.

Li Xun pressed his fingers lightly against the back of her neck, and said: “That’s why I went. So you don’t need to worry about anything else — whatever score you can get on the final, just get it.”

Zhu Yun made a small sound of agreement.

The mood had softened considerably. Zhu Yun decided to tease him a little. “How are you so terrible at sports.”

It was a fact, and Li Xun made no effort to dispute it.

“Always have been.”

“But you look like you’d be good at it.”

“Heaven’s gift.”

Insufferable as ever.

Zhu Yun had so rarely found a subject where Li Xun was willing to admit any kind of defeat — she couldn’t help pressing further. “When did you first figure out you weren’t good at sports? I remember in primary school, all the boys played football, and then in middle and high school everyone moved on to basketball.”

Li Xun said, lazily: “I’ve never been interested in any ball sport.” He paused, as though something occurred to him. “Though there is one sport I’m actually decent at.”

Zhu Yun looked at him with deep skepticism. “……Is it a real sport?”

Li Xun knew exactly where her mind had gone. He smiled with easy wickedness.

“Counting that one — two sports.”

Zhu Yun asked: “What is it that you’re actually good at?”

Li Xun pressed out his cigarette and exhaled the last mouthful of smoke into the night.

“Latin dance.”

……

Zhu Yun: “Excuse me?”

Li Xun repeated it. “Latin dance.”

Zhu Yun felt she needed at least one more confirmation.

“You mean the kind of Latin dance where they wear those tight fitted trousers?”

“Mm.”

Zhu Yun was too stunned to speak. Li Xun smiled. “Circumstances of life. You absorb what’s around you. Come on — let’s go back.”

Zhu Yun regarded this claim with considerable doubt.

— Right up until she met the extraordinary Fu Yizhuo, she continued to assume Li Xun had been making it up.