Lin Tao truly, truly, truly, truly, truly, truly had not expected that one casual grab would turn her into a harasser.

The delicate sensation in her palm was crystal clear.

She looked up and met Jiang Yan’s mocking, playful gaze. For a moment she had no idea what to say or do — she even forgot to pull her hand back.

She stayed frozen in that awkward position.

The silence was complete and deeply uncomfortable.

It wasn’t until the warmth in her palm grew more and more burning that Lin Tao finally realized something was wrong. She carefully withdrew her hand, touched her ear with some embarrassment, and stuttered in a barely audible voice: “S-s-s-s-sorry, I wasn’t doing it on purpose — I just wanted to sort of grab at you…”

She had no idea it would end up so very un-casual.

Jiang Yan watched her flustered, struggling-to-play-it-cool expression, seized the moment with relish, and spoke in an unhurried tone: “Whether it was on purpose or not, I don’t really care. But I’ve grown up this far and nobody has ever touched my thigh—”

Lin Tao snapped her head up to look at him.

Jiang Yan rested his elbow on the desk, propped his cheek on his hand, and tilted his head to look at her, picking up right where he had left off: “So you need to take responsibility for me.”

“?” Has this person had his head kicked by a donkey?

“I’m a clean, upstanding young man, and I’ve been violated in a most inhumane manner. I’m having a bit of a hard time accepting this.” Jiang Yan added another line.

“……”

Hearing what he said, Lin Tao truly felt her last decade-plus of existence had been wasted.

She had never in her entire life met someone as outrageously shameless as him.

“I don’t think your name should be Jiang Yan,” she said.

This was the last class of the day, with five or six minutes left to go. The English teacher had stopped lecturing and was sitting at the front desk scrolling through her phone, not really managing the students below.

Lin Tao looked squarely at Jiang Yan, one word at a time: “Your name should be Jiang Sao-sao — the extra-shameless kind of shameless.”

“……” Jiang Yan rested his cheek on his hand and looked at her. He looked like he hadn’t slept well last night — the corners of his eyes were still a little red. Sunlight poured through the window, light and shadow rippling.

He stared at Lin Tao for five seconds, then suddenly burst out laughing. “Changing my name is serious business. I’d have to ask my family first.”

“Besides, that’s not the point right now. The point is, you touched me, and you need to take responsibility.”

“……” Lin Tao was about to say something colorful. The next second: “Oh damn — when did I touch you? I barely brushed you by accident.”

“And who knew you’d be so shameless as to wear ripped jeans.”

Jiang Yan loosened his arm, looked down at his ripped jeans. “How do ripped jeans make me shameless?”

Lin Tao didn’t bother to explain. She had two words: “Shameless.”

She looked absolutely unwavering about it.

“Fine.” Jiang Yan didn’t push for an explanation. He grabbed his phone from the desk, pressed his thumb to the unlock button.

He looked down, both hands moving at once, fingers flying over the keyboard.

In less than a minute — before Lin Tao had even processed what was happening — he held up the phone, screen facing her.

Lin Tao looked at it.

“……”

Oh damn.

Jiang Yan’s phone was the latest model from that fruit company — a massive, ultra-crisp screen. Right now it was showing the chat box for Class 28 of Year Two.

Sitting in the message input field was one sentence:

[I, Jiang Yan, have lived my entire life without ever being touched on the thigh during class by my own seatmate. Truly the greatest humiliation I have ever suffered.]

Lin Tao wasn’t sure why, but what was actually a completely accidental situation, the way he laid it out, suddenly sounded extremely charged.

“Classmate Jiang, I think you need to calm down and be rational.”

If she weren’t afraid of him accidentally sending it with a trembling finger, Lin Tao would have already lunged for the phone — but she didn’t dare risk it right now.

She still cared about her reputation, even if he didn’t care about his.

Touched the great one’s thigh during class?

If that got out, could she still exist in No. 10 High? Given the school tyrant’s standing at this school, she might not make it out of Class 18’s door, let alone the school itself.

Seeing Jiang Yan stay silent, Lin Tao ventured another question: “How about we negotiate — what would taking responsibility look like?”

Jiang Yan rubbed his temple, feeling his dignity shoot up about ten levels. He nodded. “Sure, you tell me.”

“……”

I have absolutely no idea.

Lin Tao frowned and thought, but genuinely couldn’t figure out how to take responsibility for Jiang Yan. And besides — she really, truly, just accidentally brushed him.

How does this guy manage to push so relentlessly?

Looking at Lin Tao’s expression of profound suffering, Jiang Yan stopped teasing her and was just about to say something when the dismissal bell rang.

The English teacher grabbed her textbook, said “class dismissed,” and left.

The classroom erupted into noise, students pairing off to head out for lunch.

Jiang Yan was picking up his phone and about to delete what he’d typed in the input field when Xu Yichuan suddenly charged over from the back of the classroom at full volume. “Let’s go! Eating out!”

He was startled. His hand slipped. The message went out.

“……”

Damn.

There were people everywhere. Jiang Yan snuck a glance at his little seatmate, and while she wasn’t looking, shifted his gaze away without a flicker and held down the message with his finger.

Then, quietly, he recalled it.

The class group chat remained calm. Nobody seemed to have noticed that their class’s never-posts-anything big shot had just sent the gossip of the century at lunchtime.

With the message safely recalled, Jiang Yan calmly pocketed his phone, patted Lin Tao on the shoulder, and spoke in a tone with just a barely-detectable trace of guilt: “Come on, let’s eat.”

Lin Tao was still fixated on the matter of taking responsibility. “I can’t eat, I don’t feel like it. I can’t figure out how to take responsibility for you.”

“Ah… right, that.” Jiang Yan made a show of mulling it over with great difficulty. “Then just do my homework for a week.”

“That’s all?” Lin Tao was a little incredulous. For just that, he’d been carrying on like he’d lost his honor?

“That’s all.” Jiang Yan tapped her lightly on the head with his phone. “Otherwise what — fall for me early?”

“That’s impossible. I’ve said it before.”

“I will absolutely never fall for someone early.”

Lin Tao: “……I’ll fall for your mom.”

The five of them wandered around outside the school for a bit and ended up at Chen’s Small Restaurant again. While waiting for the food, Lin Tao went to the bathroom.

Jiang Yan sat to the side, scrolling on his phone.

The moment Lin Tao was out the door, Hu Hanghang got up to block the exit. Xu Yichuan and Song Yuan each grabbed a chair and sat down on Jiang Yan’s left and right.

Jiang Yan looked up a beat late. “……? What’s going on?”

Xu Yichuan spun his chair backward, draped his arms over the back, and tipped the rear legs off the floor. He glanced at Song Yuan. “Old Song, read out what you saw.”

Song Yuan nodded, pulled out his phone, and read it in a measured voice: “I, Jiang Yan, have lived my entire life without ever — hey, damn!”

A hand flashed before Song Yuan’s eyes. His phone was gone.

In the next instant, it was in Jiang Yan’s hand.

Jiang Yan checked: it was a screenshot, not a group message. His heart unclenched.

Thank god. He’d been afraid for a second that he’d accidentally deleted instead of recalled it.

He pushed the thought aside, lowered his gaze, and with his long, knuckled fingers tapped the screen a few times.

He deleted the image.

Then Jiang Yan looked up at the three gossipy faces in the room and said with perfect casualness: “You three saw nothing today.”

“No way.” Xu Yichuan was the first to refuse. This was a bombshell of a story — if it got out, all of No. 10 High would explode. “You’re not getting off without explaining this to us.”

Song Yuan was the least afraid of Jiang Yan out of the three. He reached out and nudged Jiang Yan’s shin with his foot. “What kind of little game were you and our little sister Lin playing in class? My eyes nearly fell out.”

He and Hu Hanghang were sitting right behind Jiang Yan and Lin Tao.

Close enough that all they had to do was look up to see exactly what those two were doing.

Song Yuan had watched, with his own eyes, as Lin Tao put her hand on Jiang Yan’s thigh.

The movement, the angle — too smooth.

“Bro, we’re not even adults yet. At least be mindful of appearances during class.” Xu Yichuan leaned back, the legs of his chair scraping the floor. “If that message hadn’t been recalled in time, you and little sister Tao would be the number one headline at our school right now.”

“The title would be: #Ice-Cold School Tyrant and His Soft Little Seatmate’s Secret In-Class Indiscretions#“

Jiang Yan: “……”

Oh damn.

Hu Hanghang glanced out the door — no sign of Lin Tao in the corridor. He leaned in closer. “Bro, be honest with us — do you like little sister Lin?”

Jiang Yan leaned back in his chair, long legs stretched out in front of him, one foot flat on the floor with the knee slightly bent. At Hu Hanghang’s question, he seriously turned it over in his mind.

Truthfully, he wasn’t sure whether he liked her or not.

The first time he’d crossed paths with the girl was at the small convenience store inside school. Back then, Jiang Yan had watched her pick fights with the sky, the earth, and the empty air, and he’d only thought: this girl is kind of interesting.

The second time was at the exam venue — completely unexpected.

The exam had just ended. He saw the girl walking in front of him, and she lost her footing and started to fall backward. On pure reflex he reached out to catch her, and the teasing remark about staging a collision fell out of his mouth before he could think.

With so many people around at the time, she probably hadn’t been able to fully deploy her pick-a-fight-with-anything skills. She’d just walked away.

It wasn’t until they showed up at the same restaurant outside school that Jiang Yan felt they were genuinely fated.

Then came the new semester of Year Two — class reassignments. The two of them ended up in the same class, then, of all things, right next to each other as seatmates.

Every day they spent squabbling away at nothing and everything in particular, life remarkably lively.

It had made Jiang Yan wonder, more than once, whether they must have had some unresolved debt from a past life.

He and Lin Tao hadn’t known each other for very long. If it were a matter of liking her — Jiang Yan honestly… damn it, he couldn’t say. He had grown up in a world very different from most people’s.

The word like — for him, it had always felt impossibly distant.

But he couldn’t deny that Lin Tao had already become something quite particular to him.

Jiang Yan surfaced from his thoughts. His gaze drifted, then settled on the vase sitting on the table. He didn’t know quite what he was thinking of. His voice floated out, detached.

“Like her? As if.”

Author’s Note: Much later — Jiang Yan: “I don’t like ghosts, I like you.” Lin Tao: “Get lost.” —Brother Yan’s life is littered with flags he’ll be made to eat later 🙂