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Your face is turning red —
Those four words were truly mortifying. Li Kuiyi had thought she was doing a pretty good job of hiding her nervousness and bashfulness, only to find that he had seen right through her long ago. Fine, so he had seen through her — but did he really have to expose it so brazenly? They were face to face, the distance between them so close, she had nowhere to escape. The moment she suddenly opened her eyes, she found herself colliding straight into his deep, intent gaze, and the burning sensation on her face surged even more fiercely. There was nothing she could do about it, so she simply turned her head away and, in a small act of revenge, quietly gave his shoe a light kick with her foot.
She couldn’t help but grumble: “If you keep saying things like that, I won’t go out and have fun with you anymore.”
He Youyuan stared at her, and hearing this, he suddenly laughed. He lowered his head slightly and dipped his brush into the palette in an unhurried way: “Alright, I’ll stop.”
Under normal circumstances, he would certainly have kept teasing her about the blushing, squeezing out another couple of jabs. But right now, he felt a twinge of guilt. Only he knew what kind of thoughts had crossed his mind just moments ago when she had closed her eyes and faced him.
It was a genuine kind of torment for him. He knew he liked her, and he knew she liked him. If they were already adults, he would have long since held her hand, gathered her into his arms, and leaned down to kiss her. It wasn’t as if there was any law forbidding teenagers from doing these things — but Li Kuiyi had made her own rules for him:
“Three Articles of Agreement,” Article Seven: No physical contact unless necessary. (Illustrative example: when I’m riding on the back of your bicycle and I grab your shirt for balance — that is necessary physical contact. Everything else is unnecessary.)
What did “everything else is unnecessary” even mean? Kisses, hugs, and other forms of physical contact were obviously very necessary for deepening feelings between two people… The more He Youyuan thought about it, the more bewildered he felt. Since Li Kuiyi also liked him, how could she possibly hold herself back from getting closer to him? He was a living, breathing, devastatingly handsome guy standing right in front of her — didn’t she have any thoughts at all?
After much deliberation, he arrived at only one conclusion: top students really did have terrifyingly strong self-control.
He Youyuan let out a small sigh and dug out a hefty chunk of white paint from the paint box, placing it on the palette and mixing it vigorously together with the other colors. As he stirred with force, he thought: Li Kuiyi, just you wait. My self-control is nowhere near as strong as yours. The day the college entrance exam ends, I’m going to hold your hand, and I won’t give you a single second to ease into it. By then, you certainly won’t have any reason to refuse, right? Anyway, I want to hold it whenever I want, however I want — hold it while walking, hold it while watching a movie, hold it wherever we go…
God, what a wonderful day that would be!
As he daydreamed, He Youyuan couldn’t help letting out a muffled laugh.
The sound was extremely brief, vanishing in an instant, and he quickly became aware of what he had been fantasizing about, hurriedly reining in the corners of his mouth. But Li Kuiyi had still heard it. Thinking he was laughing at her blushing, she turned around indignantly and glared at him — only to discover that his face, all the way to the roots of his ears, had gone red.
She had no idea what he was blushing about, but… that made them even.
The two of them looked away from each other and each spent a moment settling down, before, as if nothing had happened at all, they forced themselves to calm down and met each other’s gaze once more. But for some reason, even though they were both doing their utmost to keep straight faces and press their lips together to hold back, the moment their eyes met, smiles couldn’t help but rise to their cheeks.
He Youyuan was trembling from the effort of suppressing his laughter. He steadied his arm, dipped just a little paint onto the brush, and gently traced a few tiger whiskers on Li Kuiyi’s face.
“Done.” He cleared his throat with deliberate seriousness.
“Finally.” Li Kuiyi immediately stood up from the folding stool, pursed her lips, and said, “I don’t have to keep staring at you anymore. My eyes were starting to hurt.”
He Youyuan mischievously wanted to ask her whether it was her eyes that hurt from looking or her cheeks that hurt from smiling so hard, but before the words could leave his mouth, a couple arrived at the little painting stall — a husband and wife with a small girl in tow, clearly a family of three. The little girl spotted the tiger face painting on Li Kuiyi’s face and immediately started clamouring for one exactly the same.
“Sure.” The little girl’s mother smiled warmly. “It’s just right — our baby was born in the Year of the Tiger.”
He Youyuan had the little girl step in front of him, and smiled, playing along: “What a coincidence — so were we.”
“Oh!” The little girl’s mother was surprised. “No wonder you two look so young — you must still be students then?”
“Yes, high school students.”
At these words, a flicker of sympathy crossed the little girl’s mother’s face. She thought for a moment, then appeared to make up her mind: “In that case — all three of us will each get one.” She looked over at the child’s father beside her: “Is that alright, Dad?”
The father had a kind and easy-going expression. He said, “Sure.”
The little girl jumped for joy: “Yay! Mummy and Daddy are getting painted with me!”
He Youyuan painted tiger designs on all three of them. The tigers on the mother’s and father’s faces were majestic and fierce; the little tiger cub on the small girl’s face was adorably round and endearing. The family was thoroughly delighted. The girl’s mother immediately took out her phone, handed it to Li Kuiyi, and asked her to help take a family photo in front of the zoo entrance.
Li Kuiyi took the phone and, through the screen, saw that every one of them was smiling with a bright, clear joy. Her finger paused for just a moment, then pressed the shutter, fixing the scene in place.
After paying, the little girl’s mother said many grateful words and repeatedly encouraged the two of them to study hard. When she was done, she and the girl’s father each took one of the little girl’s hands and walked briskly into the zoo.
Li Kuiyi turned to watch them go. She saw the little girl fidgeting playfully from side to side, her mother carrying her small flowery bag, her father with the girl’s cute little water bottle strapped to his back. Such an utterly ordinary scene — why did it look so rare?
She stared fixedly for a long while, until the silhouettes of the family of three had disappeared inside the zoo. Only then did Li Kuiyi suddenly realize she had been staring, and quickly turned back, afraid that He Youyuan might notice something. But the moment she turned around, she saw that He Youyuan was also gazing sideways at where they had gone, his expression touched.
After a moment, he lowered his eyes and placed his brush into the rinse jar. Vibrant colors bled from the tip of the brush, spreading and blooming; the water turned murky almost at once. Sensing her looking at him, he raised his head. His ink-dark eyes fixed straight on her. After a brief silence, he suddenly smiled at her: “I don’t think I’ve ever told you — my parents are divorced.”
Li Kuiyi hadn’t expected him to tell her something like this so directly. Her heart gave an involuntary lurch; she blinked rapidly in her nervousness, doing her best not to let any shock show on her face. For a moment she had no idea what to say, afraid that one careless word might hurt him.
“So… you’re living with your mum now?” She thought carefully for a moment, choosing her words with care.
“Yes, with my mum.” He Youyuan said. “But my mum works in the provincial capital, so I live with my maternal grandparents and my youngest aunt.”
“I see…” Li Kuiyi gave a slow nod. She really didn’t know what to say now. Should she try to comfort him? But being from a single-parent family wasn’t something to be looked down upon — if she went out of her way to comfort him, wouldn’t that have the opposite effect? But if she said nothing at all, wouldn’t that make her seem cold-hearted? What if he thought she didn’t like him…
He Youyuan watched a succession of conflicted, troubled expressions flicker across her face and found it deeply amusing. Sure enough, offering comfort was still far too difficult a task for Li Kuiyi.
He didn’t feel that he needed comforting. Telling her about this was simply something he felt she had a right to know.
Even though his family was different from most people’s, he didn’t think there was anything he lacked. Simply put, with love and with money, everything he had received from his family was already enough to put him above ninety percent of the people in the world.
The long-term absence of a father figure in his family had actually made him realize something: love is love, and as long as it is abundant, it doesn’t matter who gives it. What’s more, from his observations, in those so-called “complete families,” the role of the father didn’t seem to make much difference to the children’s upbringing anyway.
But strangely enough, even though he didn’t envy the family of three he had just seen, something inside him had still been moved by them — perhaps because his own father had caused him real, genuine hurt.
His mother, his maternal grandparents, and his youngest aunt had never once said a single bad word about his father in front of him. They had also allowed his father to come and visit him. When he was small, he would see his father every few months, spend a whole day together, then go and eat his favourite McDonald’s. But then, one day, he accidentally overheard it from the neighbours’ gossip: his parents had divorced because his father had had an affair — while he himself was still a nursing infant.
He was twelve years old then, old enough to have a basic understanding of what “an affair” meant. From that point on, he refused to see his father again. His image of his father had collapsed entirely in an instant, shattered beyond recovery — no amount of pocket money and no number of McDonald’s meals could ever repair it.
It was also for this reason that he couldn’t understand why Zhang Chuang, Zhou Ce, and the others were all so eager to be his father figure. What was there worth emulating about a dirty man who cheated?
He seemed carefree and indifferent on the surface, as though nothing in the world mattered to him. But his inner world was one of sharp, clear-cut love and hate. When he didn’t forgive, he didn’t forgive — he still refused to see his father to this day, and couldn’t even be bothered to answer his calls. He felt that giving that man so much as a single glance would be a betrayal of both his mother and himself.
“He Youyuan…” Li Kuiyi hesitated for a long while, then finally spoke up. She asked, “Were you born at dusk?”
What a sudden change of subject. He had thought she had finally figured out how to comfort him.
He Youyuan asked with great interest: “Why do you ask? Because of my name?”
Li Kuiyi nodded: “Yes, it makes me think of that poem.”
He Youyuan immediately recalled how, back in primary school, when the teacher had taught the poem “Ascending Le You Plain,” the mischievous students in class would deliberately recite it as “Ascending He You Plain,” sending the whole class into peals of laughter.
“It does have something to do with that poem, though I wasn’t born at dusk. Strictly speaking — when I was born, the hospital needed to issue the birth certificate, but my parents hadn’t yet decided on a name. The hospital was pressing for it urgently, and my mum was flustered and spinning in circles. She turned her head, looked at the sunset outside the window, had a flash of inspiration, and decided to name me He Youyuan on the spot.”
Li Kuiyi couldn’t hold it in, and let out a laugh: “Very casual, but it sounds really nice.”
She paused, then asked tentatively, “So your mum’s surname is Wang?”
He Youyuan couldn’t follow her train of thought: “My mum’s surname is He.”
“Oh, you have your mum’s surname.” She thought it over. “Then your dad’s surname is Wang?”
Can’t let go of the surname ‘Wang’, can you?
He Youyuan’s eyes and brows were suffused with amusement, and there was a lazy drawl in his voice: “Why would my dad’s surname be Wang?”
Li Kuiyi looked over at him blankly: “Isn’t it? Then why is your nickname ‘Prince’?”
He Youyuan: “…”
His smile took on a shade of helpless resignation. He leaned back against his chair, raised a hand to wipe his face, and let out a long, lamenting sigh: “Li Kuiyi, I have lived seventeen years, and this is the first time I have ever learned that ‘Prince’ has the surname ‘Wang’.”
That was… a fair point.
Li Kuiyi felt that her logic had been a little off. She pursed her lips and said nothing, then after a long while, opened them again: “Even if your parents are divorced, they’re still your parents, and they both love you the same.”
That was quite a rapid change of topic, wasn’t it?
But He Youyuan finally understood why she had taken such a long detour asking about his name. So she really had been trying to comfort him all along, and had been attempting to produce evidence: Look at your two names — one follows your mother’s surname, one follows your father’s surname, so both of them love you very much.
Li Kuiyi, very well done with the comfort. Please never do it again.
“I know.”
He Youyuan suppressed his laughter with great effort and steered the topic toward familiar ground for her: “Hey, did you notice just now — that little girl’s mother kept encouraging us to study hard right before she left. Do you think she took us for students who were working to support their studies?”
Li Kuiyi hadn’t yet emerged from her previous emotional state, but she dredged her memory and gave a definite nod: “It seems like it. After you told her we were still high school students, she decided to get two more face paintings — probably wanting to give us a bit of a hand.”
See, He Youyuan thought with a knowing expression, she’s much better suited to making judgments based on solid evidence.
As noon approached, a large crowd of visitors began streaming out of the zoo — mostly parents with children, and young women. Spotting the little stall, they swarmed over. He Youyuan’s hands didn’t stop for a single moment; in one go, he painted nearly twenty animal face paintings. Li Kuiyi sat beside him collecting the money, and when she counted it in the end, there was actually two hundred and twenty yuan.
He Youyuan knew when to stop. He rubbed his aching wrist and took the money, declaring grandly that he would pay her wages.
He split the money in two halves. Li Kuiyi assumed it would be half for her and half for him — but he placed one half in her hand and said: “You helped me collect money today, you’ve worked hard. This is your wages.”
Then he placed the other half into her hand as well, adding: “And you served as a living advertisement for me today — this is the advertising fee.”
Li Kuiyi couldn’t help laughing, but tilted her chin up and pretended to squint at him: “How are you running a business at a loss like this?”
“Exactly — I haven’t got a single cent left now, so you’re buying me lunch.” He Youyuan said, bending down to pack up his little stall, folding everything that could be folded, and returning all the art supplies to their case. “Help me carry the art supplies — my aunt’s car is parked in the nearby car park. I’ll put all this stuff in her boot.”
Li Kuiyi immediately felt a little uneasy: “Ah? So will we run into your aunt?”
“She dropped me off and went shopping. She gave me a spare key.”
“Oh.”
Li Kuiyi put her mind at ease, helped him move all the stall supplies over to his aunt’s car, then took the wet wipes he handed her and wiped the paint off her hands. She looked at him and said, “You said you wanted me to treat you to lunch, didn’t you? Then I’ll treat you to McDonald’s.”
“Being this nice to me?” He glanced at her sideways, a smile in his eyes.
Li Kuiyi couldn’t be bothered with his self-flattery: “You don’t have to come if you don’t want to.”
“I’m coming, of course I’m coming.”
At a nearby McDonald’s, Li Kuiyi had just been about to ask He Youyuan what he wanted to eat when she heard him say to the counter staff: “One of everything currently on the menu.”
Li Kuiyi: “…”
Even the counter staff seemed a little dazed: “Every single item? How many people are eating?”
“Two people.”
“For two people, I wouldn’t recommend ordering that much.”
He Youyuan shook his head: “Nothing will go to waste — I’ll pack up whatever we can’t finish.”
This wasn’t just a matter of waste — Li Kuiyi hastily tugged at his sleeve and whispered: “We only have about two hundred yuan.”
He turned his face toward her, looking down at her with lowered eyes: “What, worried I’ll make you eat and run?”
“But… but didn’t you say you wanted me to treat you?”
“That’s right, you’re treating me.” He said matter-of-factly. “You helped me carry the art supplies just now — I haven’t paid you your wages yet, have I? I’m just using your wages to buy McDonald’s.”
Li Kuiyi: “…”
Fine. He’d lost his mind.
That day, Li Kuiyi ate two burgers, one portion of fries, one pair of spicy wings, and half a cup of cola at the McDonald’s, then headed home carrying a countless number of burgers and fried chicken — only half of them, with the other half taken away by He Youyuan.
She explained to her parents that a classmate’s family had a McDonald’s franchise, and had given her lots of exchange vouchers that were about to expire.
She didn’t know whether Xu Manhua and Li Jianye had believed her. All she knew was that for the next few days, she had dreams every night of being pressed down in her sleep by burger ghosts. A week later, sporting two dark circles under her eyes, she finally began to reflect: did she really want to be with this lunatic who would order every single item on McDonald’s menu?