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The young man’s first kiss had no sense of measure — like an unintimidated little creature, he lowered his head and caught her slightly parted lips, and yet he was terribly clumsy, pressing against that softness in a daze for a long while without daring to move at all, even his breathing forcibly held in check. His mind went blank again and again, and when he realized what he was doing, his body began to tremble slightly too.
He had never imagined her lips would be so light and soft — like kissing a cloud full of water. Strange — wasn’t her mouth supposed to be quite unyielding?
It was only when he realized she was just as inexperienced and uncertain as he was that he slowly let his breath go, and following something close to instinct, he gently drew on her upper lip — just once. The single touch was enough to leave him shaken and at a total loss, and he released her. Pulling back just a little from her lips, he couldn’t help himself and leaned in once more, tilting his head and pressing against her again — still without any technique to speak of. But this time he discovered a small, rounded fullness to her lower lip, and he took to tormenting that spot in particular — touching, grazing, drawing on it — until finally he couldn’t restrain himself and closed his teeth around it in a gentle bite.
It was a very light bite, but Li Kuiyi gave a low sound and pushed against his body with her hand.
At that, He Youyuan didn’t dare continue. He slowly drew away from her lips, and yet his breathing was still in disarray, the heart in his chest pounding without stopping. Neither of them dared look at the other for a moment, standing in silence in the night, letting their cheeks and ears burn scalding hot. It was only then that they noticed the alley was actually quite noisy — the outdoor air conditioning unit roared and rumbled, the street on the other side carried a constant flow of traffic, and from the second floor came the clattering of dishes being washed.
Li Kuiyi stood stiffly, her fingers curled into her palms, at a loss for what to say or do. In all the romance novels she and Fang Zhixiao had read together, a kiss was always described in the most lavish terms — like jelly, like cotton candy, like fireworks bursting inside one’s head. But what the novels didn’t mention was that after the kiss ended, it could feel this awkward.
Surely she and He Youyuan weren’t going to stand here all night?
Without thinking, she clutched the flowers more tightly to her chest. The cellophane wrapping crinkled softly with the sound, and they both looked down at the same moment to find that several of the buds had been crushed during the kiss and were drooping dejectedly. Both faces turned red again at once.
She felt a little bad for the flowers. Li Kuiyi reached out to touch them. He Youyuan finally seized the chance to glance at her — and found her face flushed rose-red, her lower lip reddened by his kiss, a faint sheen of moisture still visible on it. Something stirred deep in his chest, and the urge to kiss her again rose up at once — but he knew she didn’t want to be kissed any further, so he forced it down. He cleared his throat to break the silence, reached up to squeeze the back of his neck, and with a studied appearance of composure asked: “Are you hungry? Do you want to go eat something?”
Right after the exam had ended, Li Kuiyi had indeed been quite hungry — but so much time had passed that the hunger had faded, and she also thought that if they went to eat together, the awkwardness would certainly continue.
“I want to go home,” she said quietly.
He Youyuan was caught off guard and gave an “oh,” then scratched at his hair and said, “Alright — I’ll walk you back.”
Coming out of that narrow little alley, the outside world seemed especially vast and open. Both of them looked around, slightly dazed, and took quite a while to get their bearings and find the right direction home. Li Kuiyi walked ahead; He Youyuan followed behind — not too close, not too far. Passing a dessert kiosk, He Youyuan ducked inside and bought two soft-serve cones, handing one to Li Kuiyi, and from that point on walked side by side with her.
Both of them ate the ice cream very slowly, because the cold, cool sensation kept calling to mind the embarrassing lips that had just touched.
At the entrance to the residential complex, one ice cream cone had been just barely finished. Li Kuiyi stopped, put the last bit of crispy cone into her mouth, and finally summoned the courage to look He Youyuan in the eyes. With due solemnity, she said, “I’m going up.”
Eating while talking somehow made things less awkward — it made one seem natural.
But she still didn’t quite manage to be natural. The moment she finished speaking, she turned and started to make her escape — only to feel He Youyuan’s hand close around hers. She couldn’t get away. She turned back in surprise, and saw He Youyuan with his eyes lowered, his thumb moving over the back of her hand, palm growing damp with a slow sweat — like there was something he wanted to say but felt shy about. After a long pause, he asked quietly: “Did I just now… kiss you in a way that made you uncomfortable?”
Hearing the question, Li Kuiyi’s hand also began to burn: “No.”
“Really no?”
She hesitated for a fraction of a second, then said with certainty: “Really no.”
“Oh.” The expression on He Youyuan’s face visibly relaxed. “Then do you want to go see a movie tomorrow? We can wait until it cools down a bit — evening okay?”
She thought about it — nothing planned for tomorrow — and gave a small nod: “Sure.”
But He Youyuan still hadn’t let go of her hand. He held on a little longer, his lips working slightly, as if there was still something left to say. Then suddenly, he bent his head forward, pressing his forehead against hers. Li Kuiyi thought he was about to kiss her again, but instead she heard him say in a muffled, subdued voice: “I’m your… boyfriend now. You need to spend more time with me from now on — you can’t do what you did today, where you kiss me and then immediately go home.”
Li Kuiyi was in a relationship for the first time too, and hearing him say this, she felt a small guilty flutter: “Oh.”
And then she took her hand out of his, gave it a small wave, and said, “Then I’m going up.”
He Youyuan: “……”
He had said all of that, and she still just went up?
He knew what he had said was “from now on, you can’t do what you did today” — but most people hearing that would have understood he wanted to spend more time with her today as well. How was her reading comprehension so poor if she could score top in the province?
Kissed him and ran. How brazen of her.
He Youyuan sat down on the front step of the building entrance in wounded indignation, and sulked by himself for a bit.
As he sulked, he thought again of the way she had stood there, face red, quietly letting herself be kissed — and despite himself, a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. What was to be done? He already rather felt like forgiving her.
He Youyuan couldn’t help tilting his head back to look up toward the third floor. The light was still on in her family’s window.
Hmph. Li Kuiyi. There are plenty of days ahead.
Up above, Li Kuiyi was kneeling on the edge of her bedroom windowsill, hoping to catch a glimpse of He Youyuan walking away. But she waited a long time and saw nothing — she assumed she had come upstairs too slowly and missed him. She was just about to draw back when she saw him stroll into view, unhurried and at ease below her window, apparently in good spirits, tossing his phone in his hand as he walked. His white T-shirt billowed out with the wind, making him look bright and full of life.
She flopped back onto the bed and stared at the window frame, thinking again about what had happened in that alley.
How strange it all was. When he had kissed her, she had been so tense that it seemed like every sense had shut down — but now, looking back, every sensation that should have been there appeared in her memory all at once, complete and undiminished: softness, urgency, hesitation, embarrassment, sweetness.
She buried her face into her pillow — but this breathless sensation felt very similar to the breathless feeling of being kissed. They hadn’t really kissed with much intensity; it was just that neither of them knew what they were doing, and after one attempt, they’d both been left gasping.
While she was lost in these thoughts that made her face feel hot, her phone on the bed beside her suddenly lit up, and she startled as if she’d been caught in the act. She picked it up — it was Fang Zhixiao calling.
She cleared her throat, arranged her expression into something composed, and answered in a properly dignified manner.
The moment the call connected, a sound of Fang Zhixiao sobbing came through the other end. Li Kuiyi was immediately alarmed, assuming Fang Zhixiao must have done poorly on the exams. But then, in a voice broken up with crying, Fang Zhixiao said: “Li Kui, I just got out of a relationship.”
“……”
Li Kuiyi was thoroughly baffled.
“What happened?”
“Well — after the exams, I… I went to karaoke with Zhou Ce and some other classmates…” Fang Zhixiao was crying so hard her words kept breaking apart. “After the singing, we played a game — truth or dare… Zhou Ce lost, and the dare was to describe the first girl he ever liked. And it wasn’t me… wuwuwu……”
Li Kuiyi’s eye twitched: “Your first boyfriend wasn’t him either — you’ve already forgotten about Su Jianlin? And before Su Jianlin there was that other guy……”
“That’s different! Do you know who his first crush was?”
“Does that mean I know her too?” Li Kuiyi thought about it. “Er… Xia Leyi?”
Fang Zhixiao gave a teary, emphatic nod: “Yes!”
Hard to believe that even with Xia Leyi having gone abroad and the college exams now over, gossip like this could still surface. Li Kuiyi couldn’t help a moment of silent commentary, and then tried to offer comfort: “But that’s in the past — it doesn’t matter now.”
“It can’t just be in the past!” Fang Zhixiao’s teeth were grinding with fury, and her words came out considerably more coherent. “After the gathering ended, we came out of the karaoke place, and I asked him — how come you stopped liking Xia Leyi? Do you know what he said? He said he felt he wasn’t good enough for her. Do you understand what that means, Li Kuiyi? He felt he wasn’t good enough for her — but he ended up with me. That means he thinks he is good enough for me. Which means in his eyes, I’m beneath Xia Leyi!”
Two more sobs, and she continued: “I know I’m not as pretty as Xia Leyi, and my grades aren’t as good, and in most other ways I fall short too — I’m not going to deny any of that. But he’s my boyfriend — shouldn’t I be the best in his eyes?”
After hearing it put this way, Li Kuiyi found Zhou Ce’s behavior quite unacceptable.
“So you broke up with him?”
“Yes. Would you have broken up with him if you were me?”
“Absolutely — no question!” Li Kuiyi said with clenched teeth, to show her solidarity with Fang Zhixiao. Honestly, hearing that Fang Zhixiao was breaking up with him, she felt a small degree of relief — probably because of what had happened before, which had left her with a slight undercurrent of resentment toward Zhou Ce.
“So now I’ve been through a breakup…” Fang Zhixiao dissolved into crying and wailing again, and Li Kuiyi could only try to console her, pointing out that at least she had broken up with him after the college entrance exams — she might have lost love, but her score remained.
Fang Zhixiao seemed to find this a reasonable point of view, and gradually quieted her crying to a series of intermittent sniffles. Then, suddenly, she sniffed and asked: “Are you and He Youyuan together now?”
“Yes.” Li Kuiyi kept her answer brief, not wanting to upset someone who had just gone through a breakup.
She hadn’t expected Fang Zhixiao to immediately press further: “Did you two kiss?”
“……Yes.”
Fang Zhixiao, hearing this, immediately lit up with renewed energy. The sniffling stopped entirely: “French kiss?”
Li Kuiyi: “……”
It was at this moment that she realized her best friend and her boyfriend were the same type of person — both had the gift of making her feel like any attempt to support or comfort them was completely superfluous.
After hanging up, Li Kuiyi’s thoughts wandered for a little while longer. A French kiss — was that what one was supposed to achieve on a first kiss? Because certain memories were surfacing unbidden — she remembered that when He Youyuan had bitten her lip, she had felt a slight dampness at the tip of his tongue.
This small, strange, alien trace of wetness left by another person made her feel embarrassed and flustered, which was why she had pushed him away.
The flush that had just faded from Li Kuiyi’s face came creeping back. She pulled the blanket over her head. Now she was starting to feel thankful too — thankful that she had waited until after the college entrance exams to get together with He Youyuan. Love may not have arrived, but the score was secured.
The next morning at five o’clock, driven by the biological clock she had built up as a third-year senior, Li Kuiyi woke precisely on time. But she looked at the sliver of daylight filtering in through the curtains for a while, and then sank back into a deep sleep. It was as though this one sleep had to make up for every hour she had ever lost — it was nearly eleven in the morning before she finally woke.
During this period of waiting for scores, she had no particular plans. She just wanted to read more, catching up on everything else the third year had crowded out.
That evening, she went out with He Youyuan to see a movie. A movie theater was a place that could go either way — entirely respectable, or entirely loaded with suggestion, depending entirely on what one did with the lights out. She didn’t know what He Youyuan intended to do, but he had bought the back-row couple’s seats, which rather strongly suggested to her that he was up to no good.
But once again she had misjudged him. Through all one hundred and twenty-eight minutes of the film, He Youyuan behaved with complete propriety. Coming out of the theater afterward, he said brightly that the back-row couple’s seating really did have the best view — he hadn’t believed it before when Zhang Chuang told him.
Li Kuiyi: “……”
Out of the movie theater, it was lightly raining outside — hair-fine and wispy. Neither of them had an umbrella, so they walked into the rain. The rain fell onto their hair, catching the light in small crystalline beads, refracting the warm amber glow of the streetlamps. There were few people or cars along this stretch; the trees on the roadside were lush and full. He Youyuan was walking along and then stopped without warning, looking around in all four directions. Li Kuiyi couldn’t understand why, and looked around too — and saw nothing. She was just about to ask what he was looking for, when he brought his face right up close to hers and said: “No one around.”
Li Kuiyi still hadn’t caught on: “Huh?”
“Kiss.” He said.
In just one day, how had his skin grown this thick? Li Kuiyi still hadn’t adjusted, and stammered: “We kissed yesterday.”
“We haven’t today.”
With that, He Youyuan bent down and kissed her on the mouth.
A brief, grazing kiss — rather like a dragonfly touching the surface of water. That much she could manage. Li Kuiyi recovered quickly from the brief flutter in her heart. And then she heard He Youyuan ask: “Do you want to go to the area by Donghu Lake tomorrow?”
Were they really going to spend every single day together?
Li Kuiyi couldn’t decide whether she wanted to go or not, and asked in return: “What is there to do at Donghu Lake?”
He Youyuan thought for a moment: “We can take a rowboat on the lake first, then go eat, then sit by the water for a while… and then kiss for a bit, and go home.”
Li Kuiyi: “……”
Was that sort of thing worth scheduling into the itinerary?
And then, while she was still wrestling with her misgivings, she heard He Youyuan give a satisfied little hum and add, with great self-satisfaction: “Tomorrow it’s your turn to kiss me.”