“Why did you give me this?” Situ Jie asked, turning her wrist over to examine it.

“Because it’s all I had,” Yao Qiyun said, scanning around for the bus stop sign to catch their ride home. He’d been walking for a while before he realized she was no longer beside him, and turned back in alarm — she’d been so absorbed in admiring the bracelet on her wrist that she’d unconsciously slowed her steps and fallen behind.

Yao Qiyun waited, a little exasperated, for her to catch up, then reached over and pulled down the hand she’d kept half-raised, still turning the bracelet this way and that. “Stop staring at it and watch where you’re going. What good is a bracelet going to do you if we lose you?”

“You gave it to me, so it’s mine now. I’ll look at it as much as I want,” Situ Jie shot back, unwilling to back down.

Yao Qiyun laughed. “Did I give it to you? Seems more like someone forced it onto her own wrist without asking.”

“I already sold myself to you, and this is what I got in exchange. I’d say we’re even now.”

Situ Jie said it lightly, cheerfully, as if she’d genuinely just struck the fairest bargain imaginable. Yao Qiyun said nothing more in response, only closing his hand gently around hers.

Under the brand-new bus stop sign, the two of them stood alone. The streetlights, just now flickering on, stretched their shadows long and thin behind them — a lonely kind of warmth, like two people leaning on each other in some forgotten corner of the world, with no one else, nothing else, irreplaceable.

It was a feeling Situ Jie had never experienced before.

In the past, she’d always let her impulses carry her wherever they pleased — if she liked being with Yao Qiyun, then she’d simply be with him; today’s happiness belonged to today, and the future was as distant and abstract as some next life. Just as she’d stubbornly pushed for a promise from him, what she’d really wanted was only the gesture of his willingness to give it — the actual meaning behind the promise had never mattered much to her. And yet now, something as unremarkable as this cheap little bracelet had given her, for the first time, a feeling of something being entrusted to her — as if he’d handed her a piece of himself, and in turn, she’d tied something of her own onto him as well. Nothing had changed, and yet somehow everything felt different. It struck young Situ Jie, quite suddenly, that if she looked up right now and found the Yao Qiyun holding her hand transformed into some strange old man with graying temples and deep laugh lines, still wearing his shirt buttoned up just as meticulously as ever — even that, she thought, would still be a rather happy thing.

Several buses rushed past in clouds of dust, none of them heading the way they needed to go. After waiting a while longer, Situ Jie’s patience ran out, and she suggested that rather than standing around, they might as well walk to the lively square up ahead, where plenty of buses ran straight past their neighborhood.

Yao Qiyun glanced down at her shoes and warned, “That’s several stops’ worth of walking. Don’t expect me to carry you halfway there.”

“Do I look like the type?” Situ Jie said. Before Yao Qiyun could give the inevitable answer, she rose up on her toes and covered his eyes with her hands, signaling him to close them.

“Now it’s your turn to be the blind one. I’ll lead the way.”

She solemnly looped her arm through his and started walking, reassuring the still-resistant Yao Qiyun as she went. “I’ll guide you, don’t worry.”

At first, Situ Jie dutifully led him along the sidewalk at a slow, steady pace, but after a while she started straying from the beaten path — speeding up, slowing down, and at times deliberately looping them around in circles. In the total darkness before him, all Yao Qiyun could sense was her hand — and the involuntary feeling of being lost stirred up an instinctive flicker of confusion and helplessness.

He told himself it was fine. Surely he could trust Situ Jie, of all people? She loved to cause mischief, sure, but she always knew where to draw the line.

But as they entered a relatively quiet stretch of street, the ground began to grow uneven — first a puddle of dirty water to dodge, then a few loose stones underfoot, and the roar of a passing motorbike that seemed to whip past close enough to graze his ear.

He’d walked this stretch of road a few times before, and he vaguely recalled a construction zone somewhere around here that made the ground uneven… and if his memory served, there was also a short but steep set of steps somewhere along this path.

“Maybe we should stop playing this game,” he said to Situ Jie.

“Why? This part’s almost over, it gets easier up ahead,” Situ Jie insisted. “And I’m warning you, no peeking.”

Not long after, a right turn confirmed the suspicion of Yao Qiyun, whose sense of direction had always been reliable — he was now almost certain that set of steps lay just ahead, not far off at all. Situ Jie’s pace, meanwhile, kept quickening. He thought of that restless streak that seemed woven into her very nature, that stubborn refusal to ever follow the rules, and his sense of unease began to grow. Finally, with less than a meter left before the steps, Situ Jie showed no sign of slowing down at all — and Yao Qiyun pulled his hand free from hers.

“A’Jue, have you lost your mind? This is dangerous!” He stopped in his tracks, opening his eyes — a little disoriented from the sudden light — and scolded her.

Situ Jie stopped right at the edge of the steps, blinking in surprise. “Didn’t you say you’d trust me?”

“You were about to walk straight off the edge, and you’re still asking how I’m supposed to trust you?”

“But if you really trusted me, if you truly hadn’t peeked at all, how would you have known there were steps coming up right ahead?”

Yao Qiyun fell silent. He had, in fact, cracked his eyes open slightly the moment unease turned into genuine suspicion — otherwise, no matter how good his sense of direction was, there was no way he could have stopped exactly one step short of the edge. It had simply been instinct, a reflex to avoid danger.

But he also understood, given Situ Jie’s temperament, that pressing the issue further would be unwise.

“All right, better safe than sorry. Come on, let’s go get something to drink up ahead.” He softened his tone, smiling as he reached out to smooth her hair.

Situ Jie turned away, avoiding his hand, and strode quickly down the steps by herself.

Yao Qiyun followed after her, exasperated. “Do we really have to fight over something this small?”

“Yao Qiyun, deep down you never really believed I’d stop myself somewhere dangerous. Have you forgotten? When you used to lead me around with my eyes closed, did I ever once doubt you?”

She had a point, admittedly. Whenever Situ Jie closed her eyes and let Yao Qiyun lead her, he too had played tricks on her more than once — letting out an “oh no” for no reason at all, or deliberately lying and saying, “Situ Jie, there’s a step coming up,” just to watch her foolishly lift her foot and stomp down flat onto level ground, sending her into a pout as she pinched his hand hard in retaliation.

But no matter how annoyed she got, as long as he was still holding her hand, as long as he hadn’t stopped walking, whatever lay ahead, she’d always take the next step anyway. It had never occurred to Yao Qiyun before — reckless as she seemed, had she truly never once felt uneasy? Hadn’t she ever hesitated in those moments of doubt? And if she really had felt that same hesitation, then what gave her the stubborn conviction to keep trusting the person leading her regardless? Was it because she’d never once fallen? Because she never believed that person would ever let her fall? Or was it simply that she’d never learned the lesson that the only person you could truly rely on, standing at life’s most uncertain crossroads, was always yourself? Yao Qiyun had to admit — for all her cleverness, Situ Jie could sometimes be a stubborn, single-minded fool.

And yet, standing in front of that particular fool, he felt not a shred of superiority. If anything, he found himself inexplicably resenting his own inability to be as fearless as she was.

Standing at the bottom of the steps, Yao Qiyun spoke to her retreating back. “A’Jue, let’s start over.”

Situ Jie kept walking forward without a word.

He reached out to take her hand, and she shook him off, her face still set. Left with no other option, he steeled himself and closed his eyes, standing right where he was. That familiar darkness closed in around him again; he could hear footsteps passing by, hushed murmurs of conversation, maybe even a stranger’s puzzled glance — none of it mattered to him now. If he knew there was no chance of catching up to her, then at least he could wait for her to turn back on her own.

The darkness seemed to seal him off entirely from the world, and time lost its usual rhythm. He had no idea how long he waited — it might have been only a moment, though it felt like a lifetime. Then, at last, he felt those familiar warm hands find their way back to his own — pinching him hard enough, without any apology, to make him wince — and still, the corner of his mouth curved upward anyway.

Situ Jie’s voice was full of mock resentment. “Don’t get too pleased with yourself. There’s still a long way to go.”

She pulled him back toward the main road, walking briskly at first, then breaking into a light jog. Neon lights near and far traded shades of color back and forth across the street. What could be more heartening than the thought of a long road still stretching out ahead?

Eventually they came to a stop at the center of a lively, bustling square, the lamps just lighting up for the evening as dozens of middle-aged and elderly dance enthusiasts spun and swayed to the music, the loud, cheerfully clichéd tune filling the air around them with a warm, comfortable fullness.

Situ Jie seemed to lead Yao Qiyun over to a mobile stall selling cold drinks. As the stall owner, a woman with an unmistakably out-of-town accent, counted out Situ Jie’s change, she sighed with real sympathy. “Such a good-looking young man — but those eyes, oh dear…”

“Born that way, nothing to be done about it,” Situ Jie replied smoothly, without missing a beat, then dutifully led the “disabled young man” off to one side.

“What do you want to drink?” he heard her ask, still a little out of breath.

“What are the options?” He realized he really was rather thirsty.

Situ Jie brought the mouth of a bottle up to Yao Qiyun’s lips. He took a sip — ice-cold cola.

“How’s that?”

“Better have a second option ready.”

The second sip left his brow furrowed slightly — some kind of milk tea, the sort of thing only girls tended to like. He didn’t usually drink things like that; plain water was more his style.

Situ Jie, seeming to have already anticipated his pickiness, asked with a hint of a smile, “Want to try another one?”

Eyes still closed, Yao Qiyun nodded happily. “Sure, why not.”

He waited for the next sweet offering to reach his lips, but what pressed against them instead, without warning, was her mouth, still carrying the faint taste of milk tea, brushing lightly and fleetingly against his — sickeningly, wonderfully sweet.

He thought that even with people around, surely they’d forgive a blind young man an occasional lapse in composure.

Situ Jie chose that exact moment to spoil the mood entirely, pulling her arm free and asking again, “Want more? Don’t you want to try another one?”

Yao Qiyun had no idea how many more tries it would take before he got the plain bottled water he actually wanted, but he answered with easy contentment, “Thanks, but the third option was more than enough.”

Amid the bustling crowd, no one paid them any mind — it was the long, resonant chime of a clock somewhere in the square that finally jolted the two of them out of their little world. The sound was so close it startled them both, the echo trembling not just in their ears but somewhere deep in their chests. Yao Qiyun opened his eyes and realized they were standing right beneath a massive clock at the far end of the square — an unmistakable clock tower rising several stories high, its hands pointing to eight in the evening.

Although they’d already called home to say they’d be browsing the book market and wouldn’t make it back for dinner, it was only now, seeing the time, that Yao Qiyun and Situ Jie finally remembered they still needed to feed themselves. They were about to find somewhere nearby to sit down and treat their stomachs properly when, rounding a corner behind the clock tower into a narrow alley, they spotted a small restaurant with a cool blue sign. The name was rather clever — perhaps because it sat directly behind the clock tower, it was called “The Back of Time.”

Yao Qiyun led Situ Jie inside, and to their surprise, the unassuming little entrance opened up into a fairly spacious interior. There weren’t many diners at this hour — mostly small groups chatting over drinks.

A server led them to a quiet table, and they began curiously taking in their surroundings. The lighting inside was dim, every light source carrying that same cool blue tone as the sign outside. Honestly, the lighting took some getting used to visually, and combined with the unusual absence of any background music, the only sounds were the clinking of tableware and murmured conversations — spend too long in an atmosphere like that, and it was easy to slip into a faintly unreal, disorienting sense of displacement.

Having just spent a long stretch with his eyes closed, Yao Qiyun was the first to find the lighting hard on his eyes. He asked Situ Jie quietly, “Maybe we should find somewhere else?”

Situ Jie was about to agree, when the text printed on the table card caught her attention. It wasn’t a list of house specialties, nor a drinks menu — just a simple question.

It asked whether one believed time could flow backward, and what one would do if given the chance to return to the past.

She tried picking up the card to read it more closely, only to find it was fixed firmly to the table, its base an odd little square box, opaque, made of some kind of metal she couldn’t quite place, sealed tightly on every side except for a narrow slit at the top, just wide enough to slip a couple of coins through — like a piggy bank of sorts. Situ Jie craned her neck to check the neighboring table, but aside from the table number, everything else looked identical.

Just then, a server with a long, narrow face arrived with the menus, and while they were ordering, Situ Jie asked specifically about the printed question and the mysterious “piggy bank.” The long-faced server clearly wasn’t fielding this question for the first time. He pointed at the box. “Isn’t it written right there? It’s really just a matter of whether you believe or not.” Then he mimed folding a piece of paper and dropping it in, with a mischievous grin. “You can tell your answer to this box. Who knows — maybe you’ll really find a door through time, and get your wish.”

Situ Jie finally caught his drift — for all the elaborate mystery, it really just amounted to inviting the kind of dreamers who believed people could freely travel through time to jot down their wishes and drop them into the box.

She’d long heard the restaurant industry was cutthroat these days — seemed like it was hard to get by without some kind of gimmick. Situ Jie laughed. “What I’m actually curious about is what you do with the notes people write. What happens once the box fills up? Do you just throw them out? Those are people’s little ‘dreams of traveling through time,’ after all.”

The server pointed casually over his shoulder without hesitation. “Right there — we keep them all.”

Situ Jie followed where he was pointing but didn’t see anything particularly special at first, until it dawned on her that the row of dark, square objects she’d assumed were some kind of decorative space divider were actually a series of oversized versions of the same “piggy bank.”

“Now that’s interesting,” she said, genuinely intrigued.

Once they’d finished ordering, the server left them a pen before walking off, adding casually, “If you’re interested, miss, feel free to go take a look over there. A lot of people end up going back to search for their own dreams…”

Situ Jie couldn’t sit still after that, dragging Yao Qiyun along to examine the row of boxes up close. Each one was identical in size, marked only with a different carved year, and the slit at the top had been replaced with a round hole wide enough to fit a whole hand through.

The box closest to them was labeled “1999.”

Without a second thought, Situ Jie reached her hand into the box, and before Yao Qiyun could even try to stop her, she’d already pulled out a small handful of folded slips of paper.

The first was, of all things, a paper napkin, scrawled with the words: “I want to go back to 1980 and buy two thousand yuan worth of Year of the Monkey stamps — sweetheart, then I could buy you a big house.”

The second was torn from what looked like a notebook, the elegant, careful handwriting unmistakably a young woman’s: “1996. Dad, if I’d known you’d be gone that night, I would have come straight home after evening study instead of staying late.”

The last was written, of all things, on an expired one-way plane ticket: “Tell Fu Jingru, at any moment before today, that whatever you can never have was never truly yours to demand.”

“Whatever you can never have was never truly yours to demand,” Situ Jie repeated quietly, half to herself, echoing the words on that last note. Just then, Yao Qiyun gently took all the slips of paper from her hand and returned them to the box. “Let’s go sit back down. The food’s coming.”

Situ Jie went back to her seat with some reluctance, took a sip of the hot soup the server had just brought over, then paused and asked Yao Qiyun, “If you could go back in time, where would you want to go?”

The thought of the past brought Yao Qiyun involuntarily back to the hardships of his childhood — his father’s sallow, sickly face, his mother’s resolute back as she walked out on the family for good, the despair he’d felt burying his own relatives — and something in him went cold at the memory. “That would first require me to actually believe in it,” he said, “and honestly, I think the whole premise is kind of pointless.”

“It’s not that it’s pointless — you’re just no fun!” Situ Jie pouted. “It wouldn’t kill you to indulge in a little fantasy.”

Shouldn’t every successful person learn to keep looking forward? he thought, though he didn’t say it aloud. If people really could travel through time, he wouldn’t want to go back to any point in the past at all — he’d rather leap forward, past the long stretch of waiting still ahead, straight into the future. There, with her leaning against him, he’d never again feel like some kind of thief stealing what wasn’t his — only a quiet, rightful happiness.

Situ Jie, meanwhile, had no attention left to spare for him — her mind was entirely occupied with one question: if she really could go back in time, what would she most want to do? Too many thoughts crowded in at once, too many competing wishes, leaving her strangely unable to settle on just one.

Should she go back to seventh grade and take back the stamp album she’d given to Wu Jiang? Or to that first time she’d met Yao Qiyun out in the countryside, and make sure to look at him a little longer? No, that wasn’t right either — if she only had one chance, she should go back to the very first day Yao Qiyun formally arrived at her house and tell him, right then and there, that sooner or later he’d belong to her, so he might as well start treating her well from the very beginning…

And so Situ Jie sat gripping her pen, lost in thought, barely tasting her food. By the time Yao Qiyun called the server over for the check, she still hadn’t come to any conclusion.

It was the same long-faced server as before. Taking the money from Yao Qiyun’s hand, he couldn’t resist adding, with a smile at Situ Jie, “Miss, are you really sure there’s no moment in the past you’d want to go back to, to do something you’ve always wanted to do?”

Situ Jie set down her pen, defeated — and in the very instant she let it go, felt an unexpected wave of relief wash over her.

Across the table, Yao Qiyun was watching her, smiling.

She thought, perhaps, that the moment she most wanted to return to was simply right now.