Qi Xi looked at Gu Yan.

Gu Yan looked at Qi Xi.

The two of them ended up almost staring each other down, and in that silence Qi Xi’s face slowly turned red. She didn’t know what to do with herself, her hands and feet felt suddenly useless, unsure where to put themselves, and she had no idea what to say next—as if this quiet itself were a rare, precious balance. She blinked, and now and then found herself staring unblinkingly at Gu Yan.

In the end, it was Gu Yan who found his voice first. He looked at Qi Xi, his tone carrying a trace of hesitant bashfulness and gentle coaxing, so tender it almost didn’t feel real: “Qi Xi, what you just said—can you say it again?”

Qi Xi glared at him. “Didn’t you already know all this last night? Why do you need me to say it again—I already lost all my dignity last night.”

Gu Yan looked a little embarrassed. He glanced at her, then lowered his eyes, his face faintly flushed: “Honestly, I still can’t help but wonder if last night was a dream—that I was the drunk one, not you—because even now it doesn’t feel real. I can’t believe you actually said something like that to me.”

Something like what! The way he put it made it sound like she’d sexually harassed him!

Qi Xi glared at him, putting on a show of bravado though her confidence was shaky underneath: “What did I even say? It’s not like I said anything unfit for children or illegal.”

Gu Yan gave a low cough and looked away, as if he didn’t dare meet her eyes directly: “What you said had roughly the same effect on me as something illegal. I completely lost the ability to resist. You could have done anything you wanted with me, like a dream—I felt like I’d do anything for you.”

Even as Gu Yan said this, Qi Xi felt she was the one without any grip on reality. Her heart was a tangle of embarrassment, shyness, and disbelief, as if she’d been invited to a wedding, only to discover upon entering that she wasn’t there as a guest at all, but as the bride herself—and the groom was the very man she’d secretly liked for years. She felt as though she’d been struck by the greatest stroke of luck, as if she were the luckiest person in the entire world right now.

But she couldn’t let Gu Yan see how thrilled she was. Qi Xi suppressed the urge to spin around in delight and instead put on a wronged expression: “The way you talk, you make it sound like you like me so much—but if you really liked me first, according to first come first served, shouldn’t you have been the one to lose control and confess to me first, after all that time spent together and all those growing feelings?”

And yet it had dragged on until Qi Xi, unable to hold it in any longer, finally blurted out her true feelings while drunk.

Put on the spot like this, Gu Yan looked unusually flustered. He fumbled through an explanation: “Actually, last night, when I came looking for you, I was planning to confess again. But I never expected—”

Qi Xi felt a pang of bitterness. She couldn’t help muttering, “What do you mean, again? You make it sound like you already confessed once before…”

Gu Yan lowered his head, his voice dropping: “That time at graduation, I didn’t even get the chance to say it before you already turned me down. In my own heart, I’d already confessed, and already gotten your answer.”

How could that possibly count the same!

“If you’d actually written a heartfelt letter confessing, handed it to me in person, told me to my face how much you liked me, begged me to date you—I, I wouldn’t have reacted the way I did back then.”

Qi Xi thought back to her impassioned speech at that graduation ceremony, and her cheeks burned. She cleared her throat and tried to act composed. “I am, after all, a rare and exceptionally kind person in this city. If you really can’t live without me, if you really think I’m essential to your life, then I suppose I could still do a good deed for the day.”

By now Qi Xi was completely sober, and the fuzzy details from last night’s drunkenness had mostly fallen back into place. Recalling her behavior the night before, she wanted nothing more than to dig a hole and disappear. Thinking about how she’d caused a bit of a scene at the bar, she wouldn’t be surprised if someone had filmed it and posted it online.

So embarrassing!

Qi Xi wanted to cover her face just to avoid confronting her past self. All she could remember was clinging desperately to Gu Yan, refusing to let go, and, in a tearful, whiny voice, declaring “I want this one.”

“Even if—even if I said those things at graduation, that was a misunderstanding. I sought you out afterward and apologized for it. And after that we worked together on the same team at Jingge for so long—wasn’t the goodwill I showed you enough? So why didn’t you confess in all that time afterward?”

Thinking about this, Qi Xi couldn’t help but feel a little wronged again: “I went to that joint mixer with the courts and prosecutor’s office that Zhao Yiran organized, and plenty of guys who’d only met me once confessed to me boldly through Zhao Yiran afterward. And you, supposedly first in line, what were you even doing…”

All that time, all that needless suffering Qi Xi had gone through, all that needless waiting.

“I envy those people too—the ones who can confess after meeting you just once.” Perhaps hearing that so many people had confessed to her, Gu Yan’s voice sounded a little heavy. He looked away. “But I can’t do that.”

Then he raised his head again, looking straight into Qi Xi’s eyes: “Because I like you more than any of them do.”

His voice was low, carrying an almost hypnotic pull: “I wish we’d only met once too—that it was just some superficial impulse from a single encounter, so I could confess on a whim, with nothing much to lose if it failed, but something to gain if it succeeded. That way I could casually tell you I liked you, ask you to date me, without a second thought.”

“Because without much invested emotionally, that kind of confession wouldn’t feel like such a huge blow even if rejected.”

Gu Yan lowered his eyes. “But I couldn’t bear being rejected by you a second time.”

“Qi Xi, to me, you’re something beyond just liking—more than liking.”

Gu Yan gave a self-deprecating laugh. “So maybe what I really felt was restraint. After that incident at graduation, no matter how much goodwill you showed me afterward, I could only tell myself it was your way of making up for it. Until I had absolute certainty, I never dared try confessing again.”

Gu Yan looked into her eyes: “Qi Xi, I’m not as brave as you think. I’m just an ordinary person too, afraid of disappointment. So I taught myself restraint—like a poor kid who wants candy but doesn’t dare reach out and ask for it. In the end you don’t get the candy either way, but at least it looks a little better than reaching out and still not getting it—less pitiful, less pathetic. At least you can still stand up straight when you can’t have the candy you love, and pretend you never had any inappropriate thoughts about it.”

Gu Yan seemed to suddenly recall something: “And besides, you were the one who said you wanted to focus on your career for now, no time for romance, that men would only slow down your progress. Yet you turned right around and went to mixers, went to bars—looks like I was the only fool who actually believed you.”

Gu Yan’s logic was airtight, and there was now something relentless and unyielding in his eyes, like a wronged wife come to demand justice after being abandoned. Qi Xi’s heart suddenly started racing, her mind a mess. She didn’t quite dare meet his accusing gaze, her eyes darting away as she said quietly: “That was about other people—focusing on my career really is the right call.”

Qi Xi struggled for a moment, but in the end, she bit her lip and threw caution to the wind: “But if I’d known it was you, then maybe it wouldn’t have been out of the question.”

Gu Yan froze.

Qi Xi went all in: “If it’s you who wants candy, I’ll definitely give it to you.”

She felt a little embarrassed, a little unlike herself—even though she was the one saying it, she said it in a deliberately quiet voice, as if she didn’t want Gu Yan to actually hear: “Helping you out, letting me cook for you, being your girlfriend—whatever it is, if you ask, I really can’t refuse you.”

The slight aggression in Gu Yan’s eyes softened. He covered his eyes with his hand, as though he didn’t want Qi Xi to see through to his emotions in that moment.

A moment later, Gu Yan lowered his hand, though a trace of helpless affection still lingered in his eyes. He didn’t say anything else, just called her name a little awkwardly, then tentatively reached to take her hand.

The mood was genuinely good, but…

Qi Xi suddenly remembered there was still a crucial question she hadn’t asked. She pulled her hand back, frowning slightly, and struck a defensive pose: “You’ve finished questioning me, but I haven’t finished questioning you. What about the hotel room? I saw you and your female neighbor going to a hotel. If you want to be my boyfriend, forget all the rest—explain that first.”

Qi Xi pointed at her own eyes. “I’m not falsely accusing you. I saw it with my own eyes!”

“I don’t have a girlfriend. She’s not my girlfriend.” Gu Yan looked into her eyes, looking rather at a loss, his tone earnest. “The only person I want as my girlfriend is one person.”

“Qi Xi, from beginning to end, the only person I’ve ever wanted as my girlfriend is you.” There was something unnatural in Gu Yan’s tone, a hint of embarrassment, but he pressed on anyway. “You’ve told me before to give up, but I couldn’t. As long as you’re not married, I always thought I still had a chance.”

Qi Xi remembered how she’d read through the entire “Complete Guide to Gu Yan” and smugly believed she’d cracked the code to staying on his good side. Now she felt both ashamed and furious.

She realized once again that the woman Gu Yan had always described as treating him so badly had been her all along.

She was the heartless woman, apparently.

Qi Xi’s face burned. “I treated you so badly back then, and you still liked me?”

“I did.” Gu Yan pressed his lips together. “What reason does liking someone need? Even knowing rationally that you don’t like me, that I should stop, the heart isn’t so easy to control.”

“That neighbor you mentioned, her name is Lin Lin. The reason I took her to a hotel that day was because her ex-boyfriend was stalking and harassing her. He knew where she lived and said he’d come to her door, and he was worked up, even had a knife, threatening that if she didn’t get back together with him, they’d die together.”

Gu Yan’s expression was serious: “She knew I was a lawyer, so she came to me for help. That day, to keep her safe from her ex-boyfriend showing up at her door, since he’d already harassed her at her door once before, and had even ambushed her at the subway entrance another time—she’d asked for help in the residents’ group chat, and I happened to just be coming out of the subway, and we live in the same building, so I walked her home along the way.”

“So the elevator that day, when she thanked you for walking her home before?”

Gu Yan nodded. “I’d glimpsed her ex-boyfriend from a distance once, and he looked genuinely menacing. She showed me the threatening messages he’d sent her. I thought he was too worked up, that he might do something extreme, so that night I suggested she not go home and stay at a hotel instead. She was afraid he’d be lying in wait near the complex, and it was already quite late, so I went with her to the hotel—but once she’d gotten her room card, I left. I didn’t even walk her to her room.”

So Gu Yan hadn’t actually been fast at all… or maybe he wasn’t so hopeless after all…

Now that the little fox Qi Xi had suddenly been handed a pass into the vineyard, she instantly abandoned all her earlier talk of sour grapes.

Since these grapes now belonged to her, whatever belonged to her was automatically the best—if she said they were sweet, they were sweet. Qi Xi decided, right then and there, to officially declare that Gu Yan was capable after all.

Gu Yan had no idea what convoluted thoughts were spinning through Qi Xi’s head. “And if you’d paid attention to the time I dropped her at the hotel versus the time I got home, you’d realize there simply wasn’t enough time for me to have also gotten a room with her—the timing doesn’t add up at all.”

Qi Xi couldn’t help muttering, “I did pay attention to the time…”

Gu Yan blinked, then looked down, a little embarrassed. “Then you might not fully understand—in that short a window, there’s simply nothing that could’ve happened.” He tried to explain further. “There’s really nothing between me and her. You’re a girl, you might not be familiar with this kind of… practical knowledge that guys have.”

“It’s not like I never go online…” Qi Xi said, a little unconvinced, muttering under her breath. “Short amounts of time can still accomplish plenty—otherwise why would there be so many ads for men’s health clinics on public transportation? Clearly there’s a market for it. Plenty of guys look strong on the outside, in great shape and everything, but just can’t perform…”

“…”

The happy, tender air that had been settling around Gu Yan instantly thinned out. The man looked faintly like he was gritting his teeth, and he clarified, word by word: “Not everyone is like that. I’m not.”

Fine, fine.

Whatever you say. In any case, it turned out there was nothing going on between Gu Yan and his neighbor, and Qi Xi was already so overjoyed by this fact that she’d lost all sense of direction.

Yet Gu Yan seemed unable to let this particular point go. He called her name again, pulling her out of her overwhelming happiness and daze—

The man solemnly reiterated once more: “Qi Xi, I’m not like that, do you understand?”

Under Gu Yan’s intense stare, Qi Xi had no choice but to nod repeatedly. “Got it, got it.”

Gu Yan clearly couldn’t discuss this topic with total composure either, but his desire to clear his name overrode everything else. Flushed with indignation, he tried to maintain his composure as he emphasized once more: “In any case, the facts don’t change just because of some rumor.”

Qi Xi nodded again and again. “Right, right, right—the truth speaks louder than any argument!”

Gu Yan glanced at her, seeming to want to say something else, but in the end held back.

Perhaps because Qi Xi’s attitude had improved, Gu Yan finally seemed to relax a bit. He looked at her once more, cleared his throat, and, in a rather solemn tone, steered the conversation back on track: “Actually, thinking back on the whole Lin Lin situation, I probably should have been more thorough and walked her all the way to her door. But that day I had a selfish motive—the reason I could get back so quickly was that I only walked her to the hotel lobby, watched her get her room card and get into the elevator, and then I left. Thinking back on it, I do feel a bit guilty.”

Qi Xi blinked. “What selfish motive?”

“You.” Gu Yan looked into her eyes, but quickly looked away again, a bit embarrassed, staring at the ground as though flowers might bloom from it, trying to keep his tone calm. “You had a shift at the legal aid center the next day, and I was in a hurry to get home and finish up my work so I could write out some notes for you.”

Qi Xi couldn’t help muttering, “That doesn’t seem like something to feel guilty about—you at least handled Lin Lin’s situation first, and only after that did you go home to write my notes for the bar association shift. So why did I end up thinking Lin Lin was your dream girl? I told you that afternoon I had a shift at the bar association, and you completely ignored me!”

Bringing this up, even now, Qi Xi still felt a little wronged. She remembered eagerly wanting to pick Gu Yan’s brain for advice, only for him to completely ignore her.

“Because her situation, I could resolve quickly and efficiently in the shortest amount of time. But your situation, I couldn’t.”

Qi Xi wasn’t buying this. “My situation wasn’t even that complicated back then. You could’ve given me a few pointers on the spot and been done with it. What was there to spend so much time on?”

Gu Yan didn’t look at Qi Xi, as if only that way could he get the words out smoothly. “But with your situation, even something as small as a bar association shift, I couldn’t bring myself to handle it briefly. It’s like—whenever it involves you, I want to list out everything I know, every problem you might possibly run into, as if I could predict every risk and setback you might face, just to help you avoid them all.”

“Because I didn’t want to deal with your matters in just a couple of sentences, I wanted to set aside an entire block of time for you—because it’s you, and treating you with fragmented, scattered moments felt disrespectful.”

“Actually, that night, while I was writing out those notes for you, I felt pretty down.” Gu Yan lowered his eyes. “Even though there was no formal representation agreement, morally speaking, Lin Lin was still sort of half my client. Her situation was clearly more urgent, but my incorrigible mind kept thinking about you instead. You always came first. While she was crying to me about how her ex, during their relationship, had learned her phone password and used it to hack into and copy all her social media messages, finding comments she’d made complaining about her current boss and colleagues, and was using that to threaten her and control her emotionally—I was thinking about you.”

Qi Xi had always assumed the hardest thing to withstand would be an elaborately worded declaration of love. But faced with the real thing, she realized the hardest thing to resist was always the plainest, most straightforward truth.

There was no embellishment in Gu Yan’s words at all. He even sounded a little dejected as he spoke, and it felt less like a confession and more like self-examination and reflection. But Qi Xi felt that nothing could be more moving than this.

Her eyelashes trembled slightly as she asked softly, “What were you thinking about me?”

“Thinking that if you were my girlfriend, I’d never let you get hurt in any way.” Having said this, Gu Yan looked a little embarrassed, but the man still tried to appear composed and natural. “After that I didn’t think about anything else—I just suddenly wanted to see you very badly.”

The one who’d caused all this hadn’t even noticed, but Qi Xi felt her whole face heating up just listening to it.

In her mind, Gu Yan had always been someone high above her, an unreachable first place, someone who could handle any situation calmly. Qi Xi never would have imagined that beneath this seemingly flawless exterior, there was this much intensity and warmth.

She felt a mix of nervousness and a bittersweet sweetness: “So is that why you started secretly taking Lin Lin’s calls afterward—to help her deal with her ex-boyfriend situation?”

“Yes.” Gu Yan looked at her. “Her ex-boyfriend was very careful—all the threats and stalking were hard to gather evidence for—so during that time I gave Lin Lin some guidance on how to preserve evidence, so she could sue him. But she wasn’t a legal professional, so a lot of the practical steps were easy to get wrong, which is why she’d often call me to ask what to do next. Sometimes, if it was on her way, she’d come by Jingge and show me the evidence she’d secretly recorded of her ex-boyfriend’s threats, so I could check if it would hold up.”

So that was it!

Qi Xi felt a pang of regret. “Then why didn’t you just tell me! I completely misunderstood…”

“I thought you didn’t care about me at all.” Gu Yan’s voice was low. “I thought you wouldn’t want to know about any of this, wouldn’t be curious about what I was doing, so I never told you.”

“Also, because this situation was quite embarrassing for Lin Lin, and she had a boyfriend at the time, she didn’t want to draw her current boyfriend’s attention and risk ruining that relationship, so she didn’t want it made public, and asked me to keep it confidential.”

If only you’d said something earlier! Qi Xi thought—she wouldn’t only have found out how Gu Yan really felt about her so late. Maybe they could have gotten together long ago! Even if he couldn’t reveal the specifics of Lin Lin’s situation, if he’d just mentioned it was simply a favor for her, Qi Xi wouldn’t have misunderstood so badly.

Though Qi Xi said nothing, her expression had already given away her feelings. Gu Yan paused, then continued: “Honestly, I did want to share everything in my life with you, lay out all my emotions for you to see, report every little detail to you without holding back. But if I really did that, what if it scared you off?”

He looked down at the floor. “Being unliked by you, being publicly called out as someone you’d never be able to catch up to—I already thought I was the most miserable person in the world at that moment. But if you clearly didn’t like me, and I still handed over everything, my entire heart, without holding anything back, wouldn’t that be even more pathetic and humiliating?”

Gu Yan looked up at Qi Xi, his tone reserved with a hint of restraint: “Qi Xi, like I said, I’m a normal person too. I’m afraid of disappointment, especially after being disappointed again and again.”

Gu Yan’s features leaned toward the cold and refined, and his exceptional looks gave him a certain unapproachable quality, yet at this moment his tone was gentle and harmless. Even though Qi Xi had unintentionally hurt him once before, he clearly held no grudge against her at all.

Qi Xi suddenly understood everything now—why, after she’d unwittingly wounded him so badly at graduation, Gu Yan hadn’t taken any action. He hadn’t filed a complaint, hadn’t blamed her, just silently and painfully accepted it all. The only thing he’d done was give up on studying abroad, hoping to put distance between himself and Qi Xi, to sever this hopeless love.

It wasn’t as though Qi Xi had never regretted or felt guilty about her impulsiveness at graduation, but she’d never felt this kind of heartache and distress before, not like this.

So Gu Yan really had planned to confess to her that day.

Being so publicly and mercilessly rejected by someone you loved—what must that have felt like for him.

For the first time, with a kind of youthful but resolute determination, Qi Xi cupped Gu Yan’s face in her hands and looked earnestly into his eyes, determined to properly apologize: “Gu Yan, I’m sorry. I’m truly sorry.”

Gu Yan blinked, his face slightly flushed where Qi Xi’s hands touched it, and then he smiled, his voice gentle: “It’s fine. Qi Xi, no matter what you do, it will always be fine.”

Gu Yan hadn’t said anything strange, but Qi Xi felt strange all over—her heart felt as though it had been soaked in sour plum juice, tinged with that sour, puckering taste, her whole chest wrinkled with an odd kind of ache, part discomfort, part relief, part embarrassment, her face burning.

What on earth had she even done!

She’d thought she’d mastered the “Complete Guide to Gu Yan,” but it turned out to be more like the “Complete Guide to Tormenting Gu Yan.”

She’d thought she was catering to his tastes, but it turned out she’d been dancing through his minefield the entire time.

And it was only because Gu Yan was so gentle that he’d never once lost his temper, quietly enduring it all instead.

Gu Yan said nothing, but Qi Xi was dying of guilt inside: “I’m sorry, Gu Yan. That durian I bought you back then—I don’t even like it either. I thought I was making a noble sacrifice for the sake of friendship, but it turns out we were just torturing each other…”

“And the food I made with cilantro in it—I don’t actually like cilantro either…”

…

Qi Xi went on listing her wrongdoings one by one, but Gu Yan remained just as gentle. He even seemed to give it some thought: “Have you really done that many things that go against my preferences?”

Then he cut her off: “No need to keep thinking, no need to keep listing them, because I don’t remember any of it.” The man looked away, his tone growing a bit unnatural. “It’s strange—whenever you do something not so great to me, I seem to forget it the moment I turn around. But when you’re good to me, I remember it for a very, very long time. Because of those small kindnesses, I could keep shamelessly hanging around you.”

Qi Xi had to explain to Gu Yan the origins of the “Complete Guide to Gu Yan,” then looked at him pitifully: “When judging whether someone’s committed a crime, don’t you also look at intent? Look, I never had any subjective intention of treating you badly—how can you accuse me of treating you so poorly!”

Qi Xi felt genuinely wronged about this too: “I studied the ‘Complete Guide to Gu Yan’ really thoroughly, even printed out a copy specifically, and flipped through it constantly until it was practically worn out—how was I supposed to know your fans were so mean…”

Gu Yan held it in for a moment, but in the end couldn’t hold back: “Everything else is fine, but you said you wanted to be friends with me.”

“And you hoped our friendship would be as solid as stainless steel.”

“You handed me the friend-zone card. I was willing to go along with anything just to date you, and you said you wanted to be friends.”

“You got along so well with the blind date your dad set you up with, and you even hoped I wouldn’t interrupt and call you away halfway through.”

“When a junior asked for your WeChat, you just gave it to him, without even considering that I was standing right there, not dead yet.”

“You went with Zhao Yiran to that mixer with the courts and prosecutor’s office, and within a short while you’d already hit it off with some judge—we were classmates for four years and are still colleagues now, why don’t you ever come find me to chat?”

“You said you’d quit if Jingge didn’t have employee benefits, and I felt like in your heart, I wasn’t even as important as some random nut gift box from a benefits program.”

“But if you really thought the benefits mattered more, I had no choice but to accept it. In the end, for your sake, to convince my sister, I personally paid out of pocket to sponsor the whole firm’s benefits event this time, and shamelessly rigged it so I’d draw the coupon that let me go to the movies and dinner with you—but because I didn’t do enough research beforehand, it turned into such an awkward movie experience, and in the end I gained nothing and you didn’t like me any more than before.”

“You misunderstood that I was dating my neighbor and didn’t even think to ask me about it—you just ran off to a bar. Do you have any idea how dangerous that was?”

Sure enough, even the gentlest man has a temper. Once Gu Yan got going, he practically had the makings of a list of ten grievous offenses against Qi Xi.

What had originally been Qi Xi holding the upper hand, interrogating Gu Yan about his neighbor, had somehow turned into Gu Yan putting Qi Xi on trial instead.

Qi Xi had no choice but to scramble to explain herself—

“There’s nothing wrong with being friends—isn’t a girlfriend also a type of friend?”

“That stainless steel thing, I’ll reorder and have it custom-made today, changed to ‘a love as solid as stainless steel, always by your side.'”

“I’ll delete that junior’s WeChat right now!”

“I’ll announce it to the whole world on my social media, give you an official title right away!”

…

Qi Xi rattled off explanation after explanation, her mouth dry, feeling nervous and a bit incoherent. And while she talked, Gu Yan just watched her so gently, his eyes carrying a warm intensity, tender as sunlight—wrapping around her, sometimes impossible to pinpoint exactly where it came from, but present everywhere all the same.

Qi Xi suddenly didn’t want to talk anymore.

She thought back on her hazy memories from the night before while drunk, then walked toward Gu Yan a little clumsily, a little awkwardly, and wrapped her arms around him, resting her head against his chest, listening to his heartbeat, looking utterly dependent on him, as though she couldn’t do without him.

“I’m sorry, Gu Yan, but from now on none of this will happen again. From now on I’ll be so, so, so good to you.”

Qi Xi buried her face further into his chest, feeling a mix of awkwardness and nervousness, overwhelmed with a sense of not knowing what to do with herself, doing something like this for the very first time: “So, will you be my boyfriend?”

Even though the two of them worked together at Jingge and saw each other nearly every day, familiar with one another in that sense, they were still strangers in many ways—especially now that they needed to shift into this new kind of relationship. Qi Xi felt awkward and nervous, and Gu Yan wasn’t doing much better. This man, always so composed and collected when handling cases, now found himself bashful and at a loss for what to do next.

But that tension only lasted a brief, fleeting moment before Gu Yan suddenly relaxed.

He didn’t do anything deliberate—he simply seemed to follow his own heart. Qi Xi felt his hand gently touch the top of her head, and then came his voice, tender and tinged with helplessness—

“You know I can’t say no to you.”