Lin Tao felt like she could barely breathe — nearly choked on her own air. Her fingers flew across the screen, tapping away furiously. “Self-defense?! Are you sure it wasn’t the other person defending themselves against you??”

Based on the way Jiang Yan hit people, she figured Tang Yushi probably hadn’t even gotten close before he had already pinned her to the ground.

Jiang Yan took half a minute to reply: “It wasn’t me, I didn’t do it, stop talking nonsense.”

“……”

Whether things had really happened that way, or whether Jiang Yan simply didn’t want to talk about it, Lin Tao couldn’t tell. No matter how she asked, he kept insisting it was self-defense.

The two of them chatted aimlessly for a while. When Lin Tao went out to pour herself some water, she glanced at the clock on the wall — it was almost eleven.

Mindful that Old Yu’s math class was first thing in the morning, she spent the entire short walk from the living room back to her bedroom trying to think of a reasonable way to gracefully end the conversation with the great one.

But when she sat back down at her computer, Jiang Yan’s QQ profile picture had already gone dark. In the chat window there was one message he had sent a minute ago.

“Sleeping. See you tomorrow, classmate Lin.”

Lin Tao cradled her water cup, glanced at his grayed-out profile picture, let out a soft click of her tongue, and was just about to go offline when a small icon blinked in the bottom-right corner of her screen.

A message from Meng Xin.

Pretty Girl Xinxin: Oh my god!! Do you know?! Jiang Yan beat up Tang Yushi!! Right there at our school’s basketball court — tons of people saw it!

Lin Tao immediately sent over her chat log with Jiang Yan.

Meng Xin had just finished catching up on the gossip from her class. Seeing Lin Tao’s firsthand account, then glancing at their class group chat going absolutely wild, she replied with some hesitation: “No way… is Tang Yushi really that tough?”

Honestly, Lin Tao didn’t really buy Jiang Yan’s story either. Right now the situation was chaotic — the accounts were all over the place. Class 18 alone had already spawned several different versions of events, let alone all the secondhand rumors spreading through other classes.

Lin Tao yawned, rested her fingers on the keyboard, and typed: “Honestly, at this point I’m half-convinced Jiang Yan beat Tang Yushi into a vegetative state…”

Meng Xin: “……”

Early Monday morning, Lin Tao didn’t have time to eat breakfast at home. She rushed out in a hurry, hailed a cab at the entrance to her neighborhood, and sped toward school.

About ten minutes later, the taxi stopped at the front gate of No. 10 High. Lin Tao pushed the door open and stepped out — then remembered she hadn’t paid yet. She ducked back in, patted the driver’s seat. “Sir, how much?”

The driver glanced at the meter and said with a smile, “Eleven yuan thirty, but eleven is fine.”

Lin Tao dug through the corner of her bag and pulled out a ten-yuan bill and two fifty-cent coins, handing them over together. “Thank you, sir!”

She was already sprinting away before the words had fully left her mouth.

Lin Tao charged into the classroom in one breath. Jiang Yan’s seat was still empty — and so were all the seats behind his.

She didn’t think much of it. She set her bag down and tapped the shoulder of Xu Huanhuan, sitting in front of her. “Huanhuan, that thing in the class group chat about Jiang Yan hitting Tang Yushi — is it true?”

Xu Huanhuan had clearly been sitting on a stomach full of gossip. Her eyes lit up the moment Lin Tao asked. “Of course it’s true! One of my friends was there on the spot and watched Tang Yushi get beaten until her face was covered in blood!”

“……”

Lin Tao felt like she was about to have a heart attack.

Xu Huanhuan’s whole body animated as she talked, her words tumbling out at speed: “You have no idea how serious it was — they even called an ambulance.”

“……”

Xu Huanhuan kept talking. Lin Tao couldn’t take it anymore. A breath lodged itself in her chest, stuck halfway, refusing to go up or down. She reached out and pressed down on Xu Huanhuan’s arm, then knocked her forehead against the desk. “Wait, wait, let me catch my breath — I’m not going to make it.”

The two girls were mid-conversation when Jiang Yan walked in through the front of the classroom carrying his breakfast, just catching Lin Tao’s last few words. He asked offhandedly, “Who’s not going to make it?”

At the sound of Jiang Yan’s voice, the smile on Xu Huanhuan’s face froze. Even though her whole body went a little stiff, she whipped back around at maximum speed.

“……” Jiang Yan didn’t pay attention to her. His gaze fell on his seatmate, and he asked in a measured tone, “What’s wrong with you?”

Lin Tao raised her head and met Jiang Yan’s questioning gaze. She took a deep breath, her tone deadly serious. “Jiang Yan.”

“Hm?”

He replied, casually set a cup of soy milk on her desk, and had just walked over to sit down when he heard his seatmate open her mouth with solemn gravity.

“You should turn yourself in.”

Jiang Yan: “……”

“You beat Tang Yushi so badly, and her family has money and connections. If you turn yourself in now, you might still be able to get lenient treatment.” Lin Tao sighed. “I know you did it to avenge me. I’ll have my dad find you a lawyer who’ll put in a few good words before the judge.”

Jiang Yan said nothing. Lin Tao kept going: “I truly had no idea that the brief deskmate bond we’ve built in such a short time meant this much to you.”

“Classmate Jiang, I’m sorry. If I had known you cared this much — ah!” The rest of Lin Tao’s sentence got cut off as her forehead suddenly received a sharp flick.

Jiang Yan had put some force into it. The spot he flicked turned red almost instantly. Lin Tao instinctively rubbed it. “What are you hitting me for?”

“Because you left your brain at home today.” Jiang Yan pulled back his hand, unwrapped a straw, and stabbed it into the soy milk cup. He patiently explained, “Didn’t I already tell you I didn’t hit her?”

“Do you think your word carries much credibility?” Lin Tao glanced at him and recounted for him the scenes that Meng Xin had described last night and Xu Huanhuan had described that morning.

Jiang Yan chewed on the straw as he listened to her, lips slightly pursed. He drew up a sip: the milky-white liquid climbed up through the transparent straw and disappeared between his lips.

He swallowed. When he released the straw, tiny traces of soy milk remained on his flushed lips. As he talked to her with downcast eyes, those traces moved with the slight shift of his lips — gradually absorbed, catching the faintest glimmer of moisture.

Sensual, with a hint of careless, effortless allure.

Lin Tao froze, staring at his lips, unable to speak.

By the time she snapped back to her senses, the taut nerve inside her head had gone snap — the frozen adrenaline suddenly surged, her restless blood rushing from head to toe. It was as if she’d been put through a steamer: heat flooded through her in waves.

Jiang Yan stared at her for a few seconds. Something seemed to occur to him. He reached out and rapped his knuckle lightly on her head, his expression somewhere between a smile and not. “Classmate Lin, what are you thinking about?”

The pad of his finger was soft and warm, his nail blunt and short, so the tap on her head didn’t feel like much — yet Lin Tao felt like the spot he’d touched was burning even hotter.

“……” Lin Tao came back to herself, leaned back a little, shook her head, and began to murmur: “Gao Zi said: food, drink, and desire are all part of human nature; elegant gentlemen are pursued by virtuous maidens…”

She recited a few lines, felt something wasn’t quite right, and switched to the Heart Sutra: “The Buddha says: when the mind stirs, all things stir; when the mind is still, all things are still. The Buddha says: people are not made of wood or stone — who can be without feeling…”

Jiang Yan: “……”

Lin Tao learned what had actually happened from Hu Hanghang after morning reading.

It turned out that Sunday evening — the day before — the four of them had been playing basketball at the school courts. Somehow Tang Yushi found out they were there and showed up with her group of friends, buying water and waiting on the sidelines.

When they were wrapping up, Tang Yushi grabbed a bottle of water and walked up to Jiang Yan, trying to explain that she hadn’t meant to throw the ball at Lin Tao, and hoping he wouldn’t hold it against her.

By then it was nearly dusk, the sky a heavy, dark gray. The court, on a weekend, had only one big light on — dim and shadowy.

Jiang Yan stood head and shoulders above Tang Yushi, his expression detached. “You threw the ball at me?”

Tang Yushi startled, instinctively shook her head. “……No.”

“Then does it make any sense for you to apologize to me?” Jiang Yan looked down at her, moved past her, picked up his jacket from the bench, and fished out his phone from the pocket.

Tang Yushi hesitated for a few seconds, then turned and stepped to his side, her voice taking on a teary edge. “I really didn’t mean it.”

That soft, plaintive, delicate tone in a girl’s voice would melt most people on the spot. But Jiang Yan wasn’t most people.

He was the school tyrant. He had seen more girls like this than Tang Yushi had cried tears.

Jiang Yan tucked his phone away and looked at Tang Yushi with a blank face. “You didn’t mean it?”

He raised his head and gave a mocking little smile. “You didn’t mean it — what, did the ball have eyes? There were that many people on the court, and it manages to hit my seatmate of all people?”

Tang Yushi was frightened into tears by his tone.

Jiang Yan watched her cry, a trace of impatience crossing his face. “Don’t stand here crying in front of me. My seatmate got hurt way worse than that and didn’t cry. What are you crying for?”

He bent down and grabbed his bag from the ground. “Apologizing to me about this is useless.”

“……” Tang Yushi had just opened her mouth to speak when a basketball flew in from out of nowhere and landed right at her feet.

She let out a startled shriek and stumbled, about to fall forward into him. Jiang Yan didn’t react in time — on pure reflex he shoved her sideways into the pile of clothes beside them.

Tang Yushi’s friends only saw Jiang Yan push her. They marched straight up to him and demanded boldly, “Jiang Yan, how dare you hit a girl?!”

There were plenty of people on the court — quite a few had even brought their girlfriends along.

That one sentence, passed from mouth to mouth and embellished with each retelling, had become a dozen different versions by the time it reached various classrooms.

Hu Hanghang told it all with quite a bit of pride. “That’s the whole story. Our Brother Yan, for the sake of his own good name, refused to let that Tang Yushi touch so much as a square centimeter of his skin.”

Lin Tao pressed her lips together. “Mm… her name is Tang Yushi, not Tang Shiyu.”

Resting nearby, Song Yuan, who had been listening to the whole story, looked up with a face full of confusion. “Isn’t she called Song Ciyu?”

Lin Tao: “……”

During the first class of the morning, Lin Tao sat deep in thought after hearing the story. Taking advantage of a moment while Old Yu was writing on the board, she bumped her cast against Jiang Yan’s arm and leaned in close, lowering her voice. “Jiang Yan.”

“Hm?” Jiang Yan was watching a drama again, eyes not moving an inch.

Lin Tao hesitated for a long time, not knowing how to start. After quite a while, Jiang Yan noticed she hadn’t said anything and turned to look at her. “What is it?”

“It’s just that…” Lin Tao looked up at him, then dropped her gaze again, and said quietly, “At the beginning, when I heard them say you’d hurt Tang Yushi, I was genuinely worried about you.”

She paused, pressed her lips together, thought it over, then spoke again. “But anyway — thank you. How about I treat you to lunch?”

Lin Tao was very close to him. There was a faint fruity scent on her, light and delicate — a bit like watermelon. You could only catch it when you were this near.

Sunlight drifted in through the window. A breeze came through, carrying that familiar smell.

Jiang Yan turned his head and looked at her. For a moment, he couldn’t think of what to say.

Lin Tao nudged his arm again. “What are you thinking? I’m saying — lunch, I’ll treat you—”

Before she could finish, another voice rang out across the classroom: “The two of you in the first row, leaning in that close — what are you whispering about?”

The moment Old Yu spoke, every head in the classroom swiveled to stare at the two of them with the shamelessly curious eyes of gossip enthusiasts.

Lin Tao: “……”

Jiang Yan: “……”

Old Yu stood at the lectern, a half-piece of chalk still pinched in his hand. “Lin Tao, you tell me — what were you and Jiang Yan just saying?”

Lin Tao suppressed every urge to curse under her breath. She rose slowly to her feet, tapped her finger against the corner of the desk, made a silent decision, looked up at Old Yu, cleared her throat, and spoke in a clear, ringing voice.

“Classmate Jiang Yan was playing on his phone during class. I was just reminding him that class time should be focused on studying, and that we shouldn’t waste such precious time.”

Jiang Yan: “……?”

Whatever warmth had been quietly stirring in his heart vanished without a trace.

Author’s Note: Jiang Yan: “Didn’t I say I didn’t hit her?” — A man who takes responsibility for his actions 🙂