Lu Rangchen’s gaze was aggressively invasive.

Even though the two of them were somewhat more familiar than before, Yunque still found it impossible to hold her ground against him.

This wasn’t the first time he’d told her she was “stealing glances.”

Yunque was instantly thrown into a panic and denied it out of pure instinct: “……I wasn’t stealing glances at you.”

Lu Rangchen’s eyes held an inscrutable meaning.

Yunque didn’t dare look into what lay beneath them, and turned her head to look out the car window as she defended herself stubbornly. “And even if it counts as stealing glances — you were also stealing glances at me.”

Her voice seemed to carry little conviction, but it had a certain logic to it.

Lu Rangchen was silent for two seconds, and let out a thoughtful, amused exhale for reasons unknown.

“……”

Yunque felt inexplicably guilty.

Fortunately, Lu Rangchen had already moved on, leaning against the seat at ease, idly scrolling through his phone like a carefree young master with nothing but time on his hands.

Yunque carefully darted a glance over and found he was in a conversation.

She had no idea with whom.

Not that it mattered who it was — anyway, it wasn’t her.

Someone like him was destined to have all kinds of pretty girls surrounding him, lining up to chat with him.

Yunque withdrew her gaze and looked down in silence.

She thought — she wasn’t in any position to… nor did she have any right to care.

The ride back wasn’t long.

In fewer than fifteen minutes, the driver dropped the two of them at the apartment complex.

Yunque and Lu Rangchen had just stepped off the elevator when they found the woman from the unit below standing squarely at the door.

Seeing the two of them return, the woman immediately launched into a barrage of local dialect, her words dripping with resentment, her tone as unpleasant as it could get.

Yunque was startled; her first impulse was to say sorry.

But the woman wasn’t interested in hearing it and kept going, consumed entirely by her own emotions.

Lu Rangchen frowned, then simply grabbed Yunque by the wrist and pulled her behind him.

The boy’s tall, upright frame shielded her completely.

Yunque’s entire being seemed to freeze.

In the next instant, she heard Lu Rangchen calmly compose his expression into something polite. “Auntie, please don’t get worked up — aren’t we back now?”

He tilted his chin toward the apartment door, his voice unhurried. “Besides, you’re blocking the way like this — we can’t very well resolve it for you, can we?”

That usual languid Beijing drawl, yet carrying an undeniable, forceful pressure.

The woman had been fuming all the way, but hearing that, she finally closed her mouth.

Though the resentment was still there, thick as ever.

She kept right on following the two of them, unwilling to let it go. “I want to see for myself what your place did to flood my ceiling like that!”

Lu Rangchen tugged up the corner of his mouth. “No rush.”

He pulled Yunque along to the front door, then raised an eyebrow at the woman. “It’s not as though we won’t compensate you.”

The boy was completely unbothered.

Calm and composed — yet with just that little edge of someone not to be trifled with.

The woman kept her sour expression and said nothing.

Yunque, meanwhile, could no longer tell whether her racing pulse came from the woman’s aggressive advance, or from Lu Rangchen having just grabbed her by the wrist.

Her wrist still carried the faint lingering warmth of his palm.

Yunque pressed her lips together, took out her key — with the little bear charm dangling from it — and unlocked the door.

Once inside, they found the culprit: a faucet in the bathroom that hadn’t been turned off all the way. The trickle of water had been flowing for hours, spreading across the entire living room floor.

The woman now had even more reason to shout.

She pointed at Yunque and raged in a vicious tone — snarling about what kind of people they were, demanding to know how much her newly renovated unit had cost, saying that having neighbors like this was sheer bad luck.

This time Lu Rangchen had no more patience.

He directly pushed aside the woman’s pointing arm, smiling without any warmth. “Auntie, the problem’s been found, and we’ll settle it for you — but there’s no point in yelling at people.”

The boy’s eyes held a cold glint, level and detached. “If you keep causing trouble, I genuinely can’t promise when I’ll be done cleaning up.”

The woman bristled. “Are you threatening me?”

Lu Rangchen smiled. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

He held up his phone in an unhelpful manner. “Or would you like me to call the police for you? We could wait for the officers to come and wrap it up, then I’ll clean.”

The woman was rendered speechless.

Her eyes moved furiously back and forth between the two of them.

Likely aware that Lu Rangchen was not someone to be easily pushed around, and thinking it over, she could only huff with disgust and turn on her heel to leave.

The moment she left, Yunque’s shoulders finally relaxed.

Lu Rangchen composed his expression, then turned to look at her.

The girl’s face was white with a flush of pink, softly rosy — for once, with a slightly dazed look.

The two of them looked at each other for a few seconds.

Lu Rangchen let out a quiet laugh. “Scared senseless?”

Yunque: “……”

She shook her head silently.

With him here, she hadn’t been frightened at all.

—

As it turned out, with Lu Rangchen around, things were resolved quickly.

He first compensated the woman downstairs with five hundred yuan on Yunque’s behalf, and then bought her two boxes of fruit and had them brought over.

Yunque wasn’t involved in any of that.

Lu Rangchen had her stay home and mop the floor in peace.

Yunque had felt a little awkward about it, but seeing how badly the apartment had been flooded, she had no choice but to get to work first.

Before she was entirely done cleaning up, though.

Lu Rangchen came back.

Before him was the mess of wet, soggy chaos spread across the floor — and Yunque, diligently mopping and wringing out the mop.

The girl was wiping the floor clean.

Her trouser hems were damp where she’d rolled them up, and a few strands of fringe had come loose.

She was a sorry sight, and rather pitifully endearing for it.

Lu Rangchen let out a quiet, spontaneous laugh — no clear reason for it — and without another word, rolled up his sleeves and set to cleaning up alongside her.

Yunque froze for a moment, and tried to stop him. “Don’t——”

Lu Rangchen glanced at her lazily, his tone unreadable. “At the rate you’re going, you’ll probably owe her more compensation money before you’re done.”

“Besides,” he said unhurriedly, “this is still my family’s property.”

He meant that he had every reason to take responsibility.

Yunque, however, didn’t catch the deeper meaning in his words. She blinked. “The floor wasn’t damaged.”

Lu Rangchen was so exasperated he almost laughed.

He tossed out a “whatever, suit yourself,” then rolled up his sleeves and started wiping down the pooled water on the floor.

Yunque: “……”

Finally she grasped what he’d meant beneath his words.

Yet she still didn’t know what to say.

But since he was willing to take on this thankless task, she had no grounds to stop him anymore.

And so for the next twenty minutes, the two of them busied themselves in companionable silence — like a pair of perfectly in-sync duty students.

That thought brought an irrepressible flicker of amusement into Yunque’s eyes.

Only — the flooding had been rather extensive.

By the time everything was completely tidied up, Lu Rangchen’s trouser hems had gotten wet too.

Yunque took a bottle of cold water from the fridge and handed it to him.

Lu Rangchen leaned against the kitchen island counter, took it, and drank down half the bottle in one long pull.

Yunque looked at his damp trouser hems, turning over in her mind whether there was any way to help him sort it out.

But before she could think of anything, Lu Rangchen set down the water bottle, and suddenly raised an eyebrow at her. “I’m going to go change my trousers — do you want to come along and have a look?”

Yunque thought she’d misheard.

She even stumbled over her words. “……Look at what?”

He caught what she was thinking.

Lu Rangchen narrowed his eyes in amusement, teasing her on purpose. “Look at what, you said? Look at me change my trousers?”

Yunque choked.

Lu Rangchen gave an unkind little laugh. “Dream on.”

……

Of course Lu Rangchen wasn’t taking Yunque to watch him change.

He was taking her to see his family’s other apartment — the single-bedroom unit directly across the hallway from Yunque’s.

If Lu Rangchen hadn’t told her, Yunque would never have imagined in her wildest dreams that the unit across the hall also belonged to the Lu family.

The door had a keypad lock.

Lu Rangchen keyed in the code and brought her inside. From the entryway cabinet he took out a pair of clean men’s slippers and handed them to her. “This place was mine for a while — when I first came to Nancheng, I liked living alone. It was quieter.”

Yunque stepped into the slippers and walked into the living room to take a brief look around. “You don’t live here anymore?”

“Sometimes I still come back.”

Lu Rangchen answered without much thought, and seemed to spot something, because his lips curved upward without warning.

Yunque looked at him. “What are you laughing at?”

Lu Rangchen stared quite deliberately at her trouser hems. “Laughing at you in my slippers.”

Yunque’s feet were slender and narrow, and being on the smaller side, combined with the fact that she was wearing Lu Rangchen’s size 44-plus slippers, gave the whole thing a distinct sense of a small child sneaking around in grown-up shoes.

Yunque stood there for two seconds, then it dawned on her.

Suddenly she felt as though the clean, clear gaze he was resting on her had turned scorching and full of suggestion.

She gripped her key fob and lowered her gaze to look at her own feet, now in freshly changed clean socks. “My feet aren’t small — your slippers are just too big.”

Lu Rangchen’s interest rose visibly; he asked an almost absurd question. “Not small — so how big are they?”

Yunque paused, then said, “Size 37 and a half.”

Lu Rangchen raised an eyebrow, like he was taking down census information. “And how tall?”

“……166.”

By Nancheng standards, or even in the capital, that height was absolutely not considered short among girls her age.

Yunque said it with a certain confidence.

But Lu Rangchen simply refused to compliment her, and deliberately teased her by slanting his eyebrow. “Not bad, I suppose — you still only come up to my shoulder.”

Yunque: “……”

She bit back the smile forming at the corner of her mouth and quietly remarked that he was boring.

Lu Rangchen, in seemingly good spirits, curved his lips and pulled a glass-bottled juice from the fridge — and just like last time, without any warning, pressed it against her face.

Still up to his mischief, apparently.

Yunque recoiled with the cold against her cheek, and a shallow, honeyed warmth filtered through her eyes.

Taking it, she realized that what Lu Rangchen had given her this time was mulberry juice — part of the same series as the last bottle he’d given her.

Lu Rangchen raised his eyebrows lightly. “Look around as you like. I’m going in to change.”

Yunque said okay.

Lu Rangchen turned and went into the bedroom.

The modest-sized living room fell quiet all at once, the air drifting with the clean, pleasant scent of him, dreamlike and disorienting.

Yunque curled her fingers, walked to the floor-to-ceiling window, and tilted her head slightly — and found herself looking straight at her own bedroom balcony.

So it turned out… the two of them could be this close.

Close enough to be separated by nothing more than a single pane of glass.

—

That day, Yunque didn’t linger long at Lu Rangchen’s place before she left.

It wasn’t that he was rushing her out — it was that Cheng Liru called Lu Rangchen to ask why he still hadn’t come home.

She said the weather was bad.

Nancheng was about to get heavy rain, with even the possibility of a typhoon.

Lu Rangchen was just as Xu Linda had described — he placed great weight on his mother. Even with that languid, weary air of his, in the end he still picked up his jacket and prepared to leave.

Yunque walked out with him.

Watching the elevator come, Yunque couldn’t help but say, “Let me get you an umbrella — it looks like it’s about to rain.”

Lu Rangchen paused, then said, “It’s fine. I have a driver downstairs.”

Yunque looked puzzled. “A driver?”

Lu Rangchen made a sound of confirmation. “My mother’s.”

He didn’t go into detail, just gave her a “see you” glance, and stepped into the elevator.

Just before the elevator doors closed, the two of them exchanged one brief look.

Yunque stood at the elevator door, watching it descend rapidly, and something inexplicable and hollow surged up in her chest.

Back in the now-immaculate apartment.

Yunque placed the bottle of mulberry juice Lu Rangchen had given her on her desk — alongside the empty bottle from the last time, which she’d already finished — and set them side by side.

She propped her chin on the desk and stared blankly for a while, lost in her own thoughts.

Before long, Feng Yanlai came home.

Yunque heard the sound and came out of her bedroom.

Feng Yanlai was standing in the entryway on a phone call, her smile carrying a modest, ingratiating warmth. “I really have to thank little Rangchen — if it weren’t for him, Yunque would never have handled it on her own. She’s such a timid little thing.”

“Yes, yes. The lady downstairs told me herself — she asked whether Rangchen was my child. I told her I could only wish.”

“No, no, please do take the money — it’s our responsibility. It was the faucet that was left on, not a problem with the building.”

“Oh, we go back so far — just take it. We’ll have dinner together sometime.”

“Oh, something was left behind? What was it?”

As the conversation reached that point, Yunque’s eyes met Feng Yanlai’s.

Something on the other end was apparently said, and Feng Yanlai made a few sounds of acknowledgment, then motioned for Yunque to come over.

Yunque’s pulse fluttered slightly.

Feng Yanlai handed the phone to her and said quietly, “Cheng Auntie is asking you to find something.”

Yunque’s lashes trembled lightly. She obediently took the phone and pressed it to her ear.

And then, she heard Lu Rangchen’s low, magnetic voice resonate against her ear. “It’s me.”

Yunque: “……”

Like a drowning person drawing their first breath upon reaching land.

Yunque’s heartbeat surged beyond all control.

She instinctively turned away from Feng Yanlai to hide her expression. “You’re home.”

Lu Rangchen’s voice was low and husky as he gave a sound of assent. “Just got back.”

Thinking that Cheng Liru was perhaps right there beside Lu Rangchen, Yunque felt herself go somewhat reserved. “What do you need me to find?”

“A bracelet.”

Lu Rangchen was concise. “Help me check if it got left at your place.”

Yunque thought back — when Lu Rangchen had been helping her clean up the flood, she hadn’t noticed a bracelet on his wrist at any point. She looked straight over toward the kitchen.

And sure enough, there it was: the black obsidian bracelet, resting quietly on the kitchen island counter.

Yunque picked it up. It was heavy, settling into her palm with a satisfying weight. “Found it.”

Lu Rangchen’s tone seemed to lighten slightly, and he murmured a casual reply — saying that was good, that was all he needed.

From beside him came the sound of Cheng Liru’s warm, concerned voice. “Found it? Good, that’s a relief.”

Not using her own phone, and reluctant to linger, Yunque said nothing more, and turned to hand the phone back to Feng Yanlai. Feng Yanlai glanced at the bracelet in Yunque’s hand and didn’t remark on it, and exchanged a few more pleasantries with Cheng Liru before hanging up.

After the call ended, she came to Yunque’s room to find out what on earth had happened that day.

Yunque knew she had been in the wrong, and didn’t dare give a vague answer. She told the full truth — the faucet hadn’t been turned off, and she’d happened to run into Lu Rangchen at school when she’d gone to pick up a few things, which was how they’d ended up together.

After all, Yunque was her own daughter.

Feng Yanlai was upset, but there was nothing she could really do — she just warned her to be careful next time, and asked whether she’d eaten lunch.

For some inexplicable reason, Yunque’s mind flashed back to the lunch she and Lu Rangchen hadn’t ended up finishing.

……Who knew whether there would be another chance like that.

Yunque shook her head gently. “I barely ate anything.”

Feng Yanlai assumed she was in low spirits from the events of the day and softened her voice a little. “Alright, let me go make something — I haven’t eaten either.”

Just as she was about to leave, she suddenly remembered something. “Oh — don’t forget to return that bracelet to Lu Rangchen tomorrow. His mother says it’s rather important to him.”

With that, she closed the door and left.

Yunque opened her palm, and looked once more at the black obsidian bracelet lying in her hand. She couldn’t help wondering — very important, how important exactly?

Or — was it something very important to him because a very important person had given it to him?

Her mind strayed into unbounded, unruly territory. She picked up her phone and — almost against her own will — snapped a photo of the bracelet and sent it to Lu Rangchen.

A thoroughly clumsy way of “starting a conversation.”

Lu Rangchen would probably only reply with a single “mm.”

But even a single “mm.”

She’d be glad.

Yet Lu Rangchen always managed to surprise her.

No more than a few seconds after that photo was sent, he replied with two WeChat messages.

Two little chimes, one after the other——

Lu Rangchen: 【Why were you talking in such a small voice just now?】

Lu Rangchen: 【Afraid I’d eat you alive through the phone?】