The weather at the shore was capricious and unpredictable. The sky, which had just been brilliant with stars and moonlight, showed signs of imminent wind and rain almost without warning.

The plan the seven of them had made to camp on the beach and watch the sunrise was forced to be cancelled. They rushed back to the villa before the downpour arrived.

Lin Tao had something on her mind and, once home, didn’t bother lingering to chat with the boys — she grabbed Meng Xin and retreated straight to their room.

She felt like a walking explosive device right now; she never knew when she might go off. She needed to pour out what was bottled up inside her.

Pour it all out, leave nothing.

Only one bedside lamp was on in the room. Outside the window the sky was a thick, heavy black; the wind howled, lightning flashed and thunder rolled — a storm announced its arrival.

Lin Tao pulled Meng Xin down onto the sofa, her expression serious. “I need to ask you something.”

Meng Xin caught her gravity and sat up straight in turn, looking entirely earnest. “I’ve loved, and I don’t regret it.”

“……”

The little impulse to confide, which had just barely begun forming in Lin Tao’s chest, was utterly obliterated by those four words.

She thought to herself: she must be a complete fool, wanting to discuss her feelings with someone who was, like herself, a person who had been single since birth.

Seeing her continue to say nothing, Meng Xin burst out laughing. “Alright, alright — I’m not being serious. What did you want to ask me?”

“I forgot.” Lin Tao stood up from the sofa. “Your interruption made me forget.”

This sort of thing had happened to Meng Xin too, so she didn’t question it. “Alright then — tell me when you remember.”

“Mm.”

Lin Tao, having lost her only current outlet for her feelings, found herself unable to let it all spill out. She lay down on the bed, somewhat at a loss.

She actually liked Jiang Yan.

This was truly beyond extraordinary.

To be honest, the time she and Jiang Yan had known each other wasn’t particularly long. Had they not become seatmates by some stroke of fate, she might have gone all the way to high school graduation — or even much further down the road — without ever knowing that someone named Jiang Yan had existed anywhere in her high school years.

In Lin Tao’s mind, Jiang Yan’s first impression had been of an arrogant, self-absorbed fool — everything he said and did was ridiculous, and he was nothing like her idea of a school delinquent.

Especially after they became seatmates; Lin Tao had come to feel more and more that he wasn’t like a school troublemaker, wasn’t the volatile and insufferable figure everyone made him out to be.

He spoke politely to teachers. He didn’t randomly smash things or upend desks. He turned in his homework, and his accuracy rate was essentially one hundred percent.

He liked to watch dramatic, melodramatic TV dramas. He played girlish palace intrigue games.

He didn’t fight, didn’t cause trouble, and never bullied the weak.

Apart from that one time in PE class at the start of the school year, Lin Tao had never once seen him engage in any activity that could actually be called “school delinquent behavior.”

……

But now?

Lin Tao turned over on the bed, staring at the pouring rain outside the window.

Now, in her eyes, Jiang Yan was already different from how he used to be. He was still arrogant and self-absorbed and ridiculous in his usual way — but Lin Tao had come to see that he had many sides to him that no one else knew.

He had a lot of small secrets. He could be vulnerable. He needed comforting. He protected the people around him. He took care of people. His temper was actually not bad at all — and he laughed a lot.

When he laughed, his right cheek would show a small dimple — just like the moles at his eye corners: if you didn’t look carefully, you would never notice.

He was also very clever. At his place, Lin Tao had found quite a few certificates for physics competitions; there was always a physics exam paper spread open on his desk.

A different one each time.

When he worked through exam papers, he preferred the multiple choice questions — no elaborate writing required. In class, when the teacher covered problems beyond the curriculum, he would listen for a moment, catch the answer, and then go back to whatever he had been doing.

……

The more Lin Tao thought about it, the fuller her heart became, her mind filling with scene after scene involving Jiang Yan — now in the classroom, now at his place, now jumping back to tonight at the bar.

It moved faster than a film reel.

She couldn’t take it anymore. She kicked off her covers and sat up, let out a long breath, then said clearly: “Meng Xin. I remember now.”

Meng Xin, who had been playing a game, glanced over at her voice. “Remember what?”

“What I was going to say just now.” Lin Tao pushed the blanket all the way aside and stood up. Her pale bare feet touched the floor as she walked over. “Meng Xin.”

“Mm?” Meng Xin was in a ranked match right now, at a critical moment — she and her teammates were contesting the dragon, her hands flying.

“I like my seatmate.”

“……”

Meng Xin, playing jungle, hand-stalled for a second. The champion in the game stood motionless in the dragon pit. The enemy team took the dragon.

Meng Xin’s entire team tonight was made up of strangers; they were all typing messages calling her out, and one had even turned on the voice chat and was telling her off: “Useless jungler — if you can’t play jungle, don’t take it, you piece of garbage!”

Meng Xin came back to herself, typed a quick reply, and exited the game entirely, tossing her phone aside and looking up at Lin Tao. “Your seatmate?”

“Which seatmate?”

“Middle school? Elementary school? Or kindergarten?”

Lin Tao moistened the corner of her mouth, a little embarrassed. “……High school.”

“……”

Three seconds of silence.

Meng Xin spoke in the tone of someone imparting hard-won wisdom: “I think that’s completely normal — your seatmate’s that good-looking, and he’s not bad as a person either. Developing feelings is natural.”

Lin Tao thought she had finally said something that made sense.

Then, in the very next sentence, she reverted entirely.

“But — don’t you think that at our age, the most important thing we should be doing is studying hard? Why get involved with romance? What a waste of time.”

“……” Lin Tao said, “Right now I’m starting to think this — sitting here talking this over with you — is the actual waste of time.”

Meng Xin looked at her completely deadpan expression and couldn’t hold back a laugh. “Okay, okay, I was teasing you. So — tell me, what do you like about him?”

That question actually stumped Lin Tao. She lowered her gaze, fingers picking at the sofa cushion, a look of genuine blankness on her face.

Seeing her like that, Meng Xin dug deep and reframed: “Let me rephrase the question — now that you know you like him, what do you plan to do about it?”

“……What do you mean, what do I plan?”

In the realm of feelings, Lin Tao was a completely blank slate. She had never liked anyone before and had no idea what you were supposed to do when you liked someone.

“I mean — you like him. Don’t you want to be with him?”

Lin Tao gave a slow sound of acknowledgment. “But I don’t know if he likes me back……”

“So what you’re saying is, right now you’re just unrequitedly crushing on your own seatmate?”

“It’s not purely one-sided though.”

Lin Tao thought about recent events, and a small, tentative thought surfaced inside her. She scratched her head and said softly, “I feel like… maybe he likes me a little too.”

Meng Xin clicked her tongue and rubbed her chin, thinking — looking for all the world like someone with vast romantic experience. She said with great gravity: “Then the most important thing for us right now is — figuring out whether your seatmate actually likes you or not.”

Lin Tao looked at her eagerly, very willing to learn. “How do we figure that out?”

A long pause.

Meng Xin stroked her chin, completely serious. “How about — just go ask him yourself.”

“……” Lin Tao felt that their friendship surviving to this day was honestly something of a miracle. “Never mind, let me think about it more —”

The words hadn’t finished leaving her mouth when a crack of thunder split the sky outside; a bolt of lightning struck the distance, lighting up that whole stretch of sky.

The thunder hadn’t faded when, in the next second, the villa’s lights quietly went out. The room plunged into complete darkness.

“……”

Jiang Yan had come over to knock on the door just as Lin Tao and Meng Xin were heading out to see what was going on. As soon as the door was pulled open, there was a dark shape standing right outside it.

Lin Tao’s heart skipped a beat. On instinct she yelped and stumbled back one step. Then, the figure in the doorway quietly spoke.

“It’s me.” The young man’s voice was low and unhurried, carrying a remarkable power to soothe. “The power just went out. Don’t be scared.”

Don’t be scared.

The moment she heard those two words, Lin Tao felt her just-recently-calmed heart go crashing down all over again, her face beginning to heat without her permission.

Ever since she’d recognized her feelings for Jiang Yan earlier that evening, she’d felt a strange, inexplicable guilt every time she saw him — as though she’d done something forbidden behind his back.

At least the room around them was completely dark right now; he couldn’t see the expression on her face.

“I wasn’t scared — you just popped up suddenly and startled me.” Lin Tao spoke while steadying herself, casually deflecting to another subject. “Did the breaker trip?”

Jiang Yan glanced at the lightning outside the window. “Probably.”

The others had all come out of their rooms too; the unexpected outage had robbed everyone of their sleepiness. Guan Che suggested: “Come on, let’s go downstairs to the living room and play some games.”

They all made their way downstairs one after another. Meng Xin, showing admirable tact, left Lin Tao behind and hurried after the others, even urging them to walk faster.

“……”

That left only the two of them in the corridor.

Lin Tao quietly gave herself a pep talk: It’s fine. He doesn’t know you like him. As long as you act normal, no one will know.

It seemed to work — she felt considerably calmer. She stepped forward, closed the door, and said, “Let’s go. We’ll head downstairs too.”

Jiang Yan looked at her and made a sound of assent.

The corridor was pitch black. Lin Tao and Jiang Yan walked side by side; perhaps because of the darkness, they had drifted somewhat closer together than they realized.

As their sleeves brushed, Lin Tao caught a faint, clean fragrance from him — he must have showered again; every trace of the earlier smoke scent was gone.

At the thought of showering, Lin Tao’s mind flew back to his room earlier.

That indescribable image surfaced in her mind again, and her face began to heat uncontrollably.

She didn’t dare let herself think any further. On instinct she sped up — but the darkness made it impossible to see anything clearly, and she wasn’t paying attention; she knocked her foot into a flower pot sitting to the side.

She lurched forward, her whole body pitching ahead — but Jiang Yan caught her from behind in time, and she didn’t fall.

The moment she steadied herself, Jiang Yan’s sharp voice came at her: “Are you an idiot? It’s this dark and you can’t even see — why are you running?”

His breath was right in front of her, tangled with hers. Lin Tao felt somewhat suffocated and wanted to create some distance. She grabbed at the first excuse she could find. “I just……feel kind of hot.”

Jiang Yan looked down at her. Something from earlier that evening suddenly returned to him — the song on the stage at the bar, never finished because of the weather shift, still without any response from her.

He turned his face slightly to the side. His throat moved. He said her name. “Lin Tao.”

“Mm?” She looked up, trying to make him out in the darkness.

In the pitch black, the young man’s voice was unusually clear.

“Was that song good?”

Lin Tao’s breath caught. Her lips parted slightly; she said nothing.

Was it good?

Of course it was.

If it hadn’t been good, she wouldn’t have realized what she felt for him — she might still be debating whether to see a neurologist or a cardiologist.

But she didn’t know why — the praise that came so easily when she said it to Hu Hanghang wouldn’t form on her tongue now, not a single word.

Outside, the sound of wind wove through the rolling thunder.

Lin Tao pressed her lips together. A battle raged in her head. A long while passed before she could bring herself to speak at last, reluctantly, quietly: “……It was alright, I suppose.”

In the darkness they couldn’t see each other’s expressions, but every tiny sound was magnified. The young man seemed to laugh quietly — a sound very faint, quickly gone.

And at that exact moment, a flash of lightning came through the window outside. Brilliant light swept in for one fleeting instant, and in that sliver of time, Lin Tao caught a glimpse of the expression on his face.

That half-smile, neither definite nor uncertain — it felt all the more unreadable, all the more full of implication. Lin Tao felt herself growing even hotter; she wanted nothing more than to escape, and she raised her hand and waved it vaguely near her own face, almost in a panic: “Let’s go — it really is hot up here.”

Before she’d taken two steps, someone grabbed her arm from behind. A warmth carrying his presence pressed in; the hand that was cool against her arm didn’t withdraw once it made contact — instead, it moved downward and hooked around her finger.

Lin Tao’s whole body went rigid. She felt as though every drop of blood in her body had rushed to that single point.

“Didn’t you say you couldn’t see? Then let me lead you.” Jiang Yan pressed no further than that — just one finger, hooked around her little finger.

There was barely any contact at all, and yet Lin Tao felt entirely in his control, her mind a complete blank.

A crack of thunder boomed. She came back to herself, tried to pull her hand away — and the grip tightened.

The young man locked another knuckle around hers, holding firm. She had no chance to slip free at all.

There was no escaping. She could only follow.

Lin Tao had absolutely no idea how she made it through those dozen or so steps down the stairs. Every single bit of her attention was fixed on the hands hooked together.

She looked at the young man’s silhouette in the dark, and for one instant she very badly wanted to listen to Meng Xin’s advice and just ask him — whether or not he liked her.

But she didn’t dare.

Her emotional world was a blank page: clean, with nothing written on it — until one day, someone pushed the door open and walked in.

With his every word and action he had spread color across her empty inner world. But color, given time, would fade and disappear.

Lin Tao didn’t dare wager on that outcome.

At sixteen, feelings were something simple and direct — you liked someone, you liked them; you didn’t, you didn’t. No elaborate knots or winding logic.

She was direct about feelings — and also slow to pick up on them. Now that she understood her own heart, she became very cautious.

She thought: perhaps she could find her answer in a different way.

Author’s note: — Now entering the phase of mutual probing, also known as the phase of two chickens pecking at each other — Went back to school for the graduation ceremony yesterday! The promised red packets will be sent when I get back!