Lin Qi walked back in after washing his face, shaking his hands dry. He looked at the two of them staring each other down and said, “What’s going on with you two?”

Lin Luxiao: “……”

Nan Chu: “……”

Going on. As if.

Lin Luxiao was the first to stand and walk out. Nan Chu’s expression returned to its usual cool composure, and she followed after him at a relaxed, unhurried pace.

The three of them got in the car.

Lin Qi — sweet and simple as ever — immediately climbed into the front passenger seat. Nan Chu glanced over at Lin Luxiao, and by coincidence, he happened to glance at her too. He was tall, looking down at her from that height with a casually dismissive expression, chin tipping toward the car door. Nan Chu rolled her eyes at him and pulled open the back door to get in.

Lin Luxiao lowered his head and laughed to himself, then followed her in.

The two of them didn’t talk for the entire ride. Nan Chu kept her gaze on the window, as though completely captivated by the neon-lit nightscape outside, while Lin Luxiao chatted in a half-hearted, off-and-on sort of way with Lin Qi. Lin Qi was like a chattering little sparrow — he seemed to carry a certain dependence on Lin Luxiao.

Nan Chu rolled the window down. Wind rushed in, filling the car. The trees along the road swayed vigorously in the breeze. She turned her head, and happened to catch Lin Luxiao looking at her — too many unreadable things in that gaze, more than she had time to decipher.

She looked away, and a memory surfaced without warning — five years ago, when she had moved into his apartment.

The year Nan Chu turned sixteen, she had lived in Lin Luxiao’s home for a month. He had come back two or three times during that stretch, each stay lasting a day and a half at most, while all remaining time was spent at the base. By that measure, the two of them could hardly be called close.

At the time, the apartment was a bachelor flat Lin Luxiao had rented — three bedrooms and a living room. Besides one actual bedroom, the other two had been converted into a study and a storage room, filled in a haphazard pile with all manner of training and exercise equipment.

Nan Chu couldn’t cook, so she ordered takeout every day. One time, when she went downstairs to collect a delivery, she ran into him coming back. While she waited for the delivery rider to make change, Nan Chu shoved the food hastily under her coat and rushed to trail after him up the stairs.

Once they were upstairs, Lin Luxiao was changing his shoes. Nan Chu stood there holding a container of curry rice, feeling slightly awkward. She thought it over, then held it out toward him: “I didn’t know you’d be back today. Why don’t you eat this first, and I’ll order another one.”

Lin Luxiao tossed his keys onto the cabinet. Without turning around, he walked in and said: “I already ate at the base.”

“Oh.”

Nan Chu sat down at the dining table to eat.

Lin Luxiao went to change out of his uniform, his eyes wandering idly around the apartment as he did so. Even though this girl’s culinary abilities were nonexistent, the place was fairly clean — she hadn’t made too much of a mess. At the time he was still a young man who wasn’t particularly skilled at looking after others, so the rest he could take or leave. But the moment he glanced at the bed, his eyes sharpened considerably.

He had something of an obsessive streak — no matter what, the blanket absolutely had to be folded into a perfect cube.

The kind that was just left there in a crumpled heap without any attempt at folding — that was the kind of sight that made him want to grab someone and deliver a swift beating on the spot.

The room was heated.

Lin Luxiao changed into a loose gray cable-knit sweater and black trousers and walked out of the bedroom. He picked the young woman up from the dining table mid-meal, set her down on the chair by the edge of the bed, and said: “Watch.”

Nan Chu still had a few grains of rice on her lip.

Then Lin Luxiao smoothed the blanket flat. While he worked, he asked: “Didn’t your mother teach you how to fold a blanket?”

“……”

Lin Luxiao’s build back then wasn’t as well-developed as it was now — the lean, upright frame of a young man, his features not yet as sharply defined, softer and more classically handsome, his skin a shade fairer. His eyes tilted upward at the outer corners, giving him a slightly roguish look; his temperament had been less calm and restrained than it was today, more willful and brash.

But his tone of voice, at least, was even.

He bent over the bed, bowing his back, with an unusual degree of patience: “First, flatten the blanket out. Leave a third of the surface and fold it over.”

He walked her through it in an orderly manner.

“Same as before — fold the other side over, about a third of the width, and then use your fingers to pinch out a section roughly ten centimeters wide.”

His hair was a little longer back then, if she remembered right — soft and loosely falling in the lamplight, making you want to reach out and touch it.

He deliberately slowed his movements, pointing to the corner of the blanket. “Here — fold it into a right angle.”

His voice, too, had the clear, warm quality unique to youth — none of the cool, guarded restraint of his present self.

When he bent forward, the collar of the sweater fell open just slightly. Beneath the faintly prominent collarbone were the pleasing lines of his chest — not over-defined, but shaped to exactly the right degree. Below his flat stomach, the faint suggestion of a V-line was barely visible.

Nan Chu’s heart was pounding, picking up speed.

She had always been more mature than children her age. She knew what that feeling was — knew what that kind of physiological reaction meant.

She didn’t find it strange at all, even though she was only sixteen at the time.

A man’s voice in the quiet of the night had a particular smoothness, richly alluring.

“This side — same method, fold the inner edge into a right angle.”

As he spoke, Lin Luxiao looked up slightly and caught Nan Chu’s gaze — the young woman was staring at him, unmoving. A moment later, she swallowed, clearly having missed everything he’d said.

He frowned. He straightened up, hands on his hips. “Am I that good-looking?”

“……”

Nod. Nod.

A corner of his mouth lifted. “Do you know how to fold it?”

“……”

Shake. Shake.

“If you can’t fold it, no dinner tonight.”

He said it simply, looking right at her.

“……”

Faced with a choice between eating and folding the blanket.

Nan Chu chose Lin Luxiao without a moment’s hesitation.

Perhaps once Nan Yueru came back, she might not even get another chance to see him. Thinking of it that way, that particular evening seemed like a gift from heaven, given to “Nan Chu at sixteen, with her first stirrings of feeling.”

That night.

Lin Luxiao leaned against the window, smoking.

Nan Chu stood by the bed with her heart full of unspoken thoughts, folding and refolding the so-called “tofu-block” blanket over and over again.

The young woman learned quickly — each attempt better than the last. When she got it right, she was pleased with herself, turning her head around to look at him with an expression that plainly asked for praise.

Lin Luxiao lounged against the wall, flicked some ash off the cigarette, and glanced over. “Crooked.”

The young woman’s face fell. She turned back to adjust, and kept going until the blanket was folded into a perfectly squared, regulation-standard cube.

Only then did Lin Luxiao give a satisfied nod. He pinched out the cigarette and walked away.

The curry rice on the table had gone cold and inedible. Nan Chu wasn’t particularly hungry anyway, so she tipped the rice into the bin, settled onto the couch, and took out her script to study — the screenplay for the first film she was set to appear in.

She was about halfway through when something appeared on the coffee table.

A white plastic bag.

Nan Chu looked up.

A takeout order, still steaming.

On instinct she turned her head. Lin Luxiao dropped his keys on the coffee table and plonked himself down on the couch beside her.

“What is this?” Nan Chu asked.

Lin Luxiao: “Didn’t you not eat enough?”

“You went out specifically to buy this?”

He raised an eyebrow and leaned back against the couch, lazily drawling: “How else — did it fall out of the sky?”

“Thank you,” Nan Chu said.

Without much expression, he gestured for her to eat quickly, picked up the remote and started flipping through channels. Nan Chu moved the noodles onto the coffee table and sat on the floor to eat.

Lin Luxiao glanced at her, grabbed one of the cushions from the couch and tossed it to her. “Don’t just sit on the bare floor like that.”

Nan Chu: “……”

She was still wearing her trousers.

He always spoke directly, without any pretense of chivalry. To Nan Chu’s ears, it was actually quite refreshing.

The TV screen kept cycling. Lin Luxiao couldn’t find anything he wanted to watch, so he casually asked Nan Chu: “What do you want to watch?”

Nan Chu looked up. The screen had happened to stop on a foreign literary film — “The Decameron.” She slurped up a mouthful of noodles and said: “This, I guess. I’ve never seen it.”

Lin Luxiao raised a brow. “Are you sure?”

Nan Chu slurped another mouthful of noodles, the ends hanging from her lips. She hadn’t bitten through yet. She nodded. “Have you seen it?”

Lin Luxiao shook his head, lit a cigarette, and used his chin to point at the screen. “No. Go ahead.”

The film was a Hong Kong remake. Many of the more explicit scenes had been cut, and what remained was nothing that couldn’t be watched. But the entire film revolved around the world of sex workers, and certain scenes still made the cheeks flush and the pulse quicken.

Nan Chu pretended to keep her head down over her noodles, all the while sneaking glances at Lin Luxiao from the corner of her eye.

He was sprawled lazily on the couch, elbow braced on the armrest, fingertips holding a cigarette, his long legs comfortably spread. Smoke drifted in the air. When he smoked, his eyes went half-lidded, and then he’d part his lips slightly and blow out a ring of smoke.

That really was what it looked like to be young and unrestrained.

There was a genuine difference between a man and a boy.

Nan Chu thought about the boys in her class sometimes exchanging certain kinds of content with that characteristic air of grubby sneakiness.

Lin Luxiao had none of that.

He was still somewhere between youth and maturity at the time — with the unguarded willfulness of a young man, yet the settled composure of an adult.

In the end, they never finished the film.

About halfway through, Lin Luxiao pinched out his cigarette, stood up, and walked away.

Nan Chu sat on the floor hugging her bowl, her eyes clear and still fixed on the screen, which happened to have paused on a famous line: “Though I drink wine, I do not drown in it. Though I give myself to desire, I know when to stop.”

……

The car pulled up outside a residential complex. Nan Chu’s thoughts came back to the present. Lin Luxiao pushed the car door open and stepped out. She glanced around in mild surprise — this was near the neighborhood where she was currently filming the campus drama.

No wonder Lin Qi had asked him to drop off the tickets that day.

Nan Chu rolled the window down and watched Lin Luxiao’s upright retreating figure. She said to Lin Qi: “Hold on, I’m going to smoke.” Lin Qi turned to look at her, and though he looked ready to say something, he took in Nan Chu’s blank expression and held his tongue.

One cigarette passed.

Nan Chu watched as Lin Luxiao entered one of the apartment buildings, then a few minutes later, a window on the fourth floor lit up.

She casually ground out the cigarette and told Lin Qi: “Let’s go.”

A month later, the campus drama finally wrapped.

There had been a few crying scenes left to shoot, but the director waved his hand magnanimously: “Kill it, kill it.”

He simply didn’t have the confidence to keep going. The wailing and howling those female leads produced during the crying scenes was enough to give him a nervous breakdown if it went on any longer.

The original plan had been to give Nan Chu a full month off.

As luck would have it, Shen Guanzong suddenly booked her for a fashion advertisement — a major Italian luxury brand that had specifically requested Nan Chu — and the scheduling was rushed. She had to fly out the very next evening.

Nan Chu counted the days. Tomorrow would be exactly the ninth.

Xi Gu was in the middle of packing her luggage. Nan Chu hung up the phone and started doing her makeup, rummaged through the wardrobe, and after half an hour of deliberation, put on a black low-cut spaghetti-strap dress that fell to her ankles. She stood in front of the mirror applying lipstick. It was only then that Xi Gu sensed something was off and asked: “Are you going out?”

Nan Chu pressed her lips together. “Mm.”

“Shen Guanzong told me to keep an eye on you. You can’t just run off.”

Without turning around, Nan Chu spoke to the mirror as she applied mascara: “If he told you to jump off a cliff, would you do it?”

“……”

Nan Chu finished her makeup. The low-cut black dress was flattering on her figure, and the woman in the mirror looked bright-eyed and vivid. She realized it had been quite a while since she’d last seen herself looking like this.

Before she left, she cupped Xi Gu’s face between her hands. “Be good while I’m gone. Don’t cause me any trouble. Understood?”

Xi Gu called after her retreating back: “Where exactly are you going?!”

“To settle a score.”

Nan Chu gave her small handbag a light swing as she walked away.