Deng Zhe had not lost it. Even with Xu Linda wailing and tormenting him late into the night, he was perfectly fine.

It was Lu Rangchen who, after hearing everything, didn’t sleep for an entire night.

Deep in the heart of winter, utterly indifferent to the fact that he had a training session the next day, he stood alone on the balcony smoking.

Milky white smoke, slightly stinging, drifted and scattered on the cold wind.

Lu Rangchen leaned forward, staring out at the vast, glittering night skyline of the capital, and suddenly found himself thinking about the very first time he had seen Yunque.

For him, their first meeting was not the time she had helped him with something.

Nor was it when Yunque had turned around during morning calisthenics and been caught looking at him, with the teacher making a pointed remark and both classes breaking into laughter.

It was at the Number 65 bus stop.

At that time, the parents of Lu Dingzhong — the people who were, in the truest sense, Lu Rangchen’s paternal grandparents — lived near Yanliuxiang Lane.

Lu Rangchen had gone to stay with them for a few days for lack of anything better to do. One day, the family’s driver was temporarily called away on other duties, so he went to the bus stop for the first time.

The stop was busy in the early morning.

Most of the people there were bleary-faced workers with no expression, or elderly people up early with nothing to do.

Against them all, Yunque — wearing the blue-and-white school uniform of Third High School — stood out as distinctly fresh and striking.

Her hair wasn’t long then. She wore it in a low ponytail, just a small wisp of it, with thin, straight-cut bangs hanging soft over her silver-framed glasses. Two strands had slipped down and rested against the frames. She looked drowsy and heavy-eyed, yet was stubbornly propping herself up with half an oil pastry she was still eating.

He couldn’t tell if it was the oil pastry that caught his eye.

Or the scene as a whole.

Lu Rangchen’s finger, idly scrolling through his phone, stilled. He glanced up at her.

The girl had delicate, fine-boned features. Her profile was sculpted and clear, her skin that kind of translucent, luminous white.

She had a bookish quality to her looks.

Quiet and still, with a sense of story to her that was rarely found in someone her age.

Until his gaze fell on the slender tips of her fingers, where faint oil stains from the pastry wrapper clung.

Lu Rangchen looked for two seconds. The corner of his mouth lifted, almost without his noticing.

Later Yunque actually fell asleep.

Lu Rangchen, extending a degree of goodwill as a fellow student, called out to her when the stop came.

He hadn’t expected they would meet again.

Later, when the two of them exchanged WeChat contacts in the pavilion, on the way back Zhou Chuang had joked that wasn’t that the girl who’d been caught sneaking looks at him during morning calisthenics — the teacher had singled her out with a comment and both classes had laughed along.

Zhou Chuang clicked his tongue twice and slung an arm over Lu Rangchen’s shoulders. “I reckon she’s got a thing for you.”

Lu Rangchen recalled laughing it off at the time.

He hadn’t really taken it seriously.

After all, he had been chased by so many people from such a young age that he had long since grown too lazy to read into what someone’s feelings toward him might mean. He simply found Yunque a little unusual.

She always had a quality about her that made one want to break through it.

She was hard to figure out, impossible not to notice.

Only the more he noticed, the more the feeling changed — and Lu Rangchen couldn’t put a name to what it meant, except that he always felt oddly passive around her.

No matter how he tried to draw closer.

Yunque only ever left him a distance of just enough and no more.

Never made a move.

And yet when she looked at him, her eyes held something different.

But for whatever reason, they could only ever remain like that.

That faint, persistent sense of unease had started from the day he returned to the capital to care for the Cheng family matriarch, and it had never stopped.

He had been in the capital for over a month.

Yunque hadn’t sent him a single message, and barely participated in the group chat either.

As if she didn’t care about him at all.

Lu Rangchen was stubborn in those days too.

If she didn’t speak, he didn’t speak — there was nothing urgent about it, after all.

Besides, any little development on her end, Xu Linda would relay as conversation fodder in their gaming sessions anyway.

Except somehow the topic turned to Zhao Qijia.

His initial impression of this person was that the guy was fairly tall, decent at basketball — and then eventually he became Yunque’s deskmate.

Xu Linda had mentioned he was a good person.

Very attentive toward Yunque.

Yunque had found sitting beside him as a deskmate quite comfortable.

That was probably when Zhao Qijia’s name lodged itself firmly in Lu Rangchen’s mind — became a snag he couldn’t get past.

Lu Rangchen had felt fairly certain that Yunque would develop feelings for him.

Perhaps not deeply intense ones, but he was probably the type most suited to her.

On the night before he left, Lu Rangchen read Yunque’s high-minded send-off message — “safe travels, smooth sailing, and top scores on your exams” — and gave a short, hollow laugh.

Whether he could let it go or not, he forced himself to let it go.

That was about as far as it went.

That was what Lu Rangchen thought then: he and Yunque had reached as far as they were going to go.

And yet who could have imagined that one day in the future, a drunk Xu Linda would let slip the deepest secret Yunque had kept.

It turned out Yunque’s feelings were for him.

Only for him.

—

The dinner arrangement that evening had left Yunque quietly on edge since morning.

She barely listened in class, even sneaking out her phone to scroll through makeup tutorials from beauty bloggers — but one look at her inability to draw a proper eyeliner and she quietly closed the app.

Back in the dorm at noon, she found herself drifting in front of her wardrobe without quite meaning to.

But looking through everything she had, she realized her clothes were all more or less the same kind of style.

Inoffensive, not dazzling, not unflattering.

Quiet and somewhat bookish — unmistakably the look of a well-behaved girl.

Even Yunque herself found it dull looking at it, but she didn’t have the ability to change it.

In the end she gave up on the idea of changing entirely. That afternoon she headed to class in the same white dress.

She had considered telling Xu Linda, but one look at the time difference between their locations and she abandoned the idea.

More importantly, she didn’t want to dwell on it.

What if it was just another coincidence, another misreading… she’d be the one embarrassed, not Xu Linda.

Weighing it all up, Yunque had no choice but to process everything on her own.

By the time the last class of the day rolled around.

Just as she was hesitating over whether to message Lu Rangchen in advance, he messaged her first.

Lu Rangchen: 【I’m back at school.】

Lu Rangchen: 【Which building?】

Yunque’s fingers, wrapped around her pen, tightened slightly. A sudden feeling washed over her, like time slipping backward.

She wrote a few words in her notes, then replied: 【Sixue Building, north side of the Literature College.】

Lu Rangchen: 【Okay.】

Lu Rangchen: 【No rush, I’ve got somewhere to wait.】

“……”

The patience of it left Yunque at a loss for words.

She glanced involuntarily toward the classroom window.

She noticed a small basketball court diagonally across from the Sixue Building, and found herself wondering if that was where he had gone.

Like this, thoroughly distracted, she made it through the last class.

The moment the bell rang, Yunque was already packing up to leave. Han Xiao called for her to come to the cafeteria together. She turned her down flat.

Han Xiao gave a knowing smile. “Oh ho, off on a date?”

Liang Tian’s eyes lit up immediately. “Is it with that extremely handsome man from earlier???”

Li Yuqing, in the middle of applying her cushion foundation, looked up at Yunque with curious interest.

Yunque shook her head.

She slung her bag crosswise over her shoulder, gathered her books, and said, “It’s not a date.”

She hurried down the stairs, and as soon as she stepped into the lobby, she spotted Lu Rangchen waiting inside.

Two cups of coffee sat on the white table before him.

He was his usual languid, unhurried self, settled into one of the empty seats, long legs stretched out loosely, elbow propped on the armrest, gaze fixed on the LED screen a short distance ahead that was playing the college’s promotional video.

His outfit had changed, too.

He’d been wearing a simple black T-shirt and jeans that morning; now he had on a shirt in a structured, design-conscious patchwork style, and his hair appeared to have been styled as well.

Polished and strikingly handsome, that particular quality of his had drawn the attention of a few foreign female exchange students at the next table, who were peering at him and murmuring something to one another.

……He really did draw attention wherever he went.

Yunque drew a quiet breath and deliberately slowed her pace until she had reached him, then called his name.

Lu Rangchen heard and looked straight at her.

The girl was wearing a loose white dress, her neck long and slender, her legs fine and delicate. Soft hair fell against her shoulders, and her fringe was of the same style as before — but it looked livelier now than it had in the past.

The glasses were indeed gone.

Lu Rangchen remembered Cheng Liru mentioning that after Yunque’s college entrance exams, Feng Yanlai had taken her to have her vision corrected.

He was still lost in thought when he rose automatically and nudged his chin toward the coffees on the table. “Take whichever one you want.”

Yunque looked down and chose the one with cream.

Lu Rangchen picked up the other.

The two walked toward the exit together. He asked, in an offhand way, “You like sweet things?”

Yunque said it was all right, then looked at him.

Lu Rangchen said, “What are you looking at?”

Yunque’s palms felt slightly damp. She wasn’t sure if it was from the cold coffee cup.

She pressed her lips together and said softly, “Not used to you being like this.”

Lu Rangchen raised an eyebrow with great deliberateness. “Like how?”

Yunque: “……”

She lowered her gaze and took a sip of coffee through the straw. When she spoke again, her voice was slightly husky. “Where would you like to start?”

By then they were standing just outside the Sixue Building.

The last light of the setting sun stretched their shadows close and long beside each other.

She swept her gaze around with genuine guide-like attentiveness. “I know the Literature College well, but that’s not much use to you. I can show you the cafeteria, the campus store, the gym, that sort of thing——”

Before she could finish the sentence.

She saw Lu Rangchen, in his careless way, heavy-lidded and unhurried, reach over and take the thick stack of textbooks she had been holding against her chest.

Her arms suddenly empty.

Every word she had meant to say vanished from her mind.

She stared at Lu Rangchen, stunned.

He raised an eyebrow at her with that easygoing, devil-may-care air of his. “What do you mean not useful?”

He held her gaze steadily, his voice as rich as the sound of a cello playing from a fine vinyl record. “You want me to get lost out here every time I come looking for you?”

“……”

Yunque needed several seconds to untangle the logic of that remark.

By the time she understood, her face had grown warm without her realizing it.

She attributed it to the sun.

Quickly pulling her gaze away, she said, “I have a lot of classes. I don’t usually have time to wander around.”

Lu Rangchen neatly parried with a curve of his mouth. “That’s fine. I do.”

His tone wasn’t joking.

And then he stood there, perfectly composed, watching for her reaction.

The warmth in Yunque’s cheeks climbed higher and higher. With something of the air of conceding defeat, she said, “Then let’s start from the Literature College side.”

Get it done, wrap it up.

She lifted her foot to start walking.

But Lu Rangchen suddenly changed his mind. He lazily took one broad step forward and blocked her path entirely.

His tone was deliberate and slow, as if he were dragging something out on purpose. “But I’m hungry.”

For some reason, the way he said it carried a barely perceptible wheedling quality.

Yunque’s heart gave an involuntary little lurch.

Her look was helpless.

Lu Rangchen’s lips curved into a clear and mischievous smile, as though he had long since seen straight through her calculations.

“Here’s what we’ll do.”

His mood appeared to be good. “I’ll take you out for dinner first.”

As he spoke, he leaned in slightly, bringing his face very close to Yunque’s, and said, slowly and deliberately, word by word, “Then we can take our time looking around when we come back.”