Perhaps because National Day was approaching, Sanlitun Taikoo Li was exceptionally lively that evening.

They had even spent quite some time circling before finding a parking spot.

Yunque had gotten a bit carsick on the way. Her color was visibly off.

Lu Rangchen parked the car and glanced sideways at her strained expression. He frowned slightly. “Feel like throwing up?”

Yunque’s look held something hard to name — somewhere between reproach and quiet suffering — as she looked at him without a word.

That look actually made Lu Rangchen laugh.

“……”

Yunque had no words for him. “What are you laughing at?”

Lu Rangchen pulled the corner of his mouth up, lowered his gaze, and took several dark-green-wrapped dried plums out of the center console. “It’s just rare to see you annoyed.”

He glanced at her unhurriedly. “Kind of novel, actually.”

As he spoke, the plums had already been placed into Yunque’s hand.

His fingertips brushed the warm smoothness of her palm as they passed.

Yunque’s heartbeat skipped one beat in a peculiar way.

“Eat some plums — they’ll settle your stomach.”

The clear depth of Lu Rangchen’s eyes gained a few degrees of seriousness. He reached over and ruffled her hair. “We’ll get you some medicine when we’re outside.”

Yunque: “……”

She held the plum in her mouth and gave a small nod.

Only after getting out of the car did she notice he was driving the newest model Range Rover — over a million yuan — the kind he had picked for himself when he didn’t want to make a fuss.

And that same July, Feng Yanlai had also bought a car of the same brand.

A used one. Cost her twenty thousand on arrival.

And even a little scratch was enough to make Feng Yanlai ache for days.

Yunque stared at the pristine white body of the car, and a thought surfaced in her — a feeling quite unlike anything she had known before.

Maybe growing up simply meant becoming more and more pragmatic.

Before, she had only ever cared about the gap between herself and Lu Rangchen in terms of grades, appearance, ability, or distance. But from that moment on, there were material realities she could no longer ignore.

……

The dinner that evening was at a French restaurant with a per-person bill in the hundreds.

The courses had all been decided in advance.

Yunque had no idea what the dishes cost. She only thought the restaurant was “all style and no substance, flavors ordinary.”

Lu Rangchen raised an eyebrow when he heard that. “All right then, you pick next time.”

On the surface it sounded like a dig, but thinking it through carefully, one could tell he wasn’t joking.

Gazing at his eyes in the warm amber light — dark and unfathomable, carrying a hint of a smile that wasn’t quite a smile.

Yunque’s composure slipped for a moment.

She looked down at yet another dish the server had set before her and, after a long silence, said, “Then I can only take you out for spicy hot pot.”

Lu Rangchen was relaxed about it. “Spicy hot pot works too — at least you get eight dishes and a soup.”

The corner of Yunque’s mouth twitched despite herself. She kept her expression straight and looked at him.

Lu Rangchen’s tone had a smile in it. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

Yunque shook her head, then said, “Just feel like this suits you well — your family’s here, you can come back whenever you want. Things that other people would consider a real privilege are everyday life for you.”

Lu Rangchen lifted an eyebrow slightly, looking genuinely surprised she would say something like that.

He paused for a few seconds, then gave a low chuckle. “I suppose so.”

Lu Rangchen’s gaze drifted lightly to the steak in front of him. “Mainly — being able to see the person I want to see, whenever I want.”

“……”

Yunque’s hand holding the spoon went still.

The instant she looked up, she collided with the deep, intent gaze Lu Rangchen had fixed on her — from some point she hadn’t noticed.

The boy she had adored at seventeen was still the same: high-browed, deep-eyed, clear-featured, and proud.

What was different: in this moment, his eyes held only her. He was looking only at her.

—

Something unspoken and undeclared seemed to be quietly fermenting between the two of them.

The result was that Yunque ate that entire meal without tasting a thing, her heartbeat so irregular it felt like some kind of cardiac condition.

Noticing she wasn’t eating much, Lu Rangchen soon suggested going to walk around the shopping center.

Yunque wasn’t familiar with Taikoo Li and found herself almost entirely led along by Lu Rangchen.

After getting her the medicine for motion sickness, he brought her to a counter selling gold jewelry and jade.

Yunque had assumed he was there to buy gold. Instead, it turned out he simply wanted to find somewhere to have the cord on his pendant re-braided.

—It was that ink-green leisure pendant of his.

Yunque watched him take it from around his neck, and felt a faint flash of surprise. “Why re-braid it?”

“It’s worn down.”

Lu Rangchen took it off and showed her. “The braid is about to snap.”

Then, all of a sudden, he was very close.

He was so much taller that Yunque had the disorienting sense of being half-encircled by him, though he wasn’t touching her at all.

Yunque swallowed softly, with nowhere to retreat.

She could only lower her long lashes and look for herself, in a manner of great seriousness.

He wasn’t exaggerating. The cord at the base of the pendant was indeed so worn it had thinned to a fragile thread.

Yunque’s first thought was: how long has this man been wearing this jade pressed against his skin.

As if he had caught something in her expression, Lu Rangchen gave a barely perceptible curve of his lips and passed the jade pendant to the counter attendant without any fuss.

The attendant was an old acquaintance of Lu Rangchen’s and was fairly unfiltered in conversation.

She examined the pendant and blinked. “Honestly, this thing doesn’t look like it’s worth much — and you’ve been wearing it this long?”

She wasn’t being snobbish.

It was just that everything on Lu Rangchen was priced in the thousands at minimum, while this piece of jade looked like it might be worth a few hundred, so she genuinely didn’t understand.

But not everyone knew Lu Rangchen the way she did, or understood jade.

A flicker of discomfort passed through Yunque’s eyes.

Then she heard Lu Rangchen’s meaningful reply. “Whether something’s worth much or not depends on who gave it.”

He turned and looked directly at Yunque, his gaze carrying a carefully deliberate, lingering intimacy. “Don’t you think?”

“……”

Yunque’s breathing was a little unsteady.

She looked away from Lu Rangchen’s eyes, lips pressed tightly together.

For a split second, she wanted to come out with it — to tell him he didn’t need to speak in allusions, because that jade was the one she had given him.

But somehow, no matter how the words formed themselves, she couldn’t make them come out.

And of all moments, Lu Rangchen curved his lips up.

He lowered his gaze to the jade in the counter attendant’s hands, posture unhurried, his long, clean fingers tapping idly against the glass display case.

Yunque couldn’t stop herself from cutting him a sideways glance.

As if the corner of his vision caught her looking, Lu Rangchen’s smile deepened — unguarded and entirely deserving of a good swat.

The attendant saw through them both and joined in with a laugh of her own. While cutting away the old cord she amended herself: “Right, of course. If it was given to you by someone you care about, even plastic would be worth more than gold.”

To that, Lu Rangchen said nothing.

He only raised an eyebrow at Yunque. “Want some ice cream?”

His tone had a quality of undisguised fondness, coaxing, as if humoring a child — voice slightly husky, the end of the sentence light and bitten-off.

Yunque blinked, momentarily at a loss.

She nodded, and was just about to get up and go with Lu Rangchen when he pressed his hand to her shoulder and pushed her back into her seat.

“Just stay here.”

He patted the back of her head lightly, tucked his hands in his pockets, and walked straight over to the dessert shop diagonally across the way.

The counter attendant watched her and couldn’t help laughing. “That Lu Rangchen — he’s really not the kind of person most people can handle.”

Yunque silently watched the tall, lean figure in the distance and said nothing in return.

It took a long while before the wild fluttering in her heart gradually stilled.

And so that evening, Yunque ate a thirty-five yuan matcha soft-serve cone.

The towering ice cream was garnished on top with a thin, delicate sheet of gold foil.

Lu Rangchen didn’t like sweet things, so he had only bought one for her.

It was a very generous portion — almost comically large in her hands.

By the time the counter attendant finished re-braiding the cord, Yunque had just about finished the ice cream.

As it turned out, some things really were better left to professionals. Even though Yunque’s original braiding had been quite well done, it still fell short of what the attendant produced. For the sake of the pendant, the attendant had used several different knot styles and wound gold thread through as well, so that the jade — not particularly valuable on its own — was suddenly transformed into something refined and elevated.

When Lu Rangchen went to pay, the attendant waved him off. She had an obvious flair for business. “Next time you need any jewelry or gold, come find me — just count this as helping me hit my KPI.”

Lu Rangchen put the leisure pendant back around his neck and said with a light smile that he would.

Yunque had just returned from throwing away her cone when she heard that exchange.

Then in the very next second, Lu Rangchen glanced at her with an air of quiet implication and curled his mouth. “I’ll have to find another occasion.”

Yunque: “……”

The two left the counter.

Lu Rangchen asked if there was anywhere else she wanted to go.

With tomorrow’s classes in mind, Yunque shook her head. “I want to head back.”

Lu Rangchen gave a slight nod. Either way, going back meant walking around the campus — same thing.

So they headed straight downstairs. But just as they reached the ground floor, a young girl stopped them.

She couldn’t have been very old, and her eyes lit up at the sight of the tall, handsome Lu Rangchen. She asked him to scan a code to follow a public account.

Not for nothing, of course.

Scan once, get one claw machine attempt.

Lu Rangchen glanced up at the long row of claw machines behind her, then turned to Yunque. “Want to try?”

The sudden question caught Yunque slightly off guard.

It felt as if he were perfectly content to follow her lead in whatever she wanted to do.

For just a second, Yunque drifted.

The girl, seizing the opportunity, coaxed her enthusiastically. “Just try one — you two both scan once and you get two turns!”

She was so eager that Yunque found herself pulling out her phone on impulse and scanning the code without really thinking about it.

Seeing her scan, Lu Rangchen took out his phone and scanned as well.

The girl happily gave them each a token and sent them to try their luck.

Lu Rangchen simply passed both tokens to Yunque and told her to go ahead.

Yunque had played once or twice before but had no skill for it and had never won anything.

Lu Rangchen tilted his gaze up slightly. “If you want to play, I can just buy you a thousand tokens.”

Yunque quietly fed in the second token. “Even if you bought me ten thousand, I still wouldn’t be able to win anything.”

As she spoke, she worked the controls at random, not giving it much thought at all, and pressed the drop button.

Then the surprise came as suddenly as surprises do — this one attempt grabbed two at once, and even more absurdly, both of them made it out successfully.

As two large pink donkey plushies tumbled out of the prize chute, Yunque stood there dazed — before she could even react, a nearby child was already bouncing up and down. “She got one! She got them!”

Yunque looked at the child, then looked at Lu Rangchen.

Her stunned, blank expression was a little bit adorable.

“Not bad.”

Lu Rangchen picked up the two little plush toys, eyes glinting with reckless amusement, and raised an eyebrow with just the right amount of ceremony. “Seems I really should get you those thousand tokens.”

His gaze, lightly scorching, grazed Yunque without warning.

Her eyes shimmered and shifted away. Without noticing, she let the corner of her mouth ease upward.

It was the first time that evening Lu Rangchen had seen that expression on her face — something so unguarded.

Like moonlight through a thin frost: cool and clear, and impossible to stop staring at.

The light in his eyes brightened. Lu Rangchen pulled the corner of his mouth up and quietly thought that all the coaxing and conniving of this evening had been well worth it.

—

The two identical pink donkey plushies were eventually divided — one for each of them.

Yunque held hers the whole way. Lu Rangchen’s stayed in the car.

The motion sickness medicine had helped, and on the way back Yunque felt much better. Without quite realizing it, she and Lu Rangchen found themselves talking more.

They listened to music, chatting in a free and easy way — about small things from school, about the people and events they had shared from high school.

It was through him that Yunque found out Deng Zhe had gone to university in Tianjin and seemed to be doing well enough there.

As for Zhou Chuang, he had stayed behind to retake the entrance exams.

Lu Rangchen tilted his head slightly toward her. “When Deng Zhe comes to see me in a little while, let’s all go out for a meal.”

His tone wasn’t a question — it was a directive.

Just like his old bossy self.

The corner of Yunque’s mouth twitched. She suddenly had the urge to say the opposite of whatever he wanted.

She held the little pink donkey by the legs, gazed at the glittering cascade of lights outside the car window, and said with studied indifference, “We’ll see.”

“……”

Lu Rangchen cut her a sideways look and gave a short, wry laugh.

Hard to say what exactly he found funny.

They returned to campus.

Lu Rangchen parked outside the gates and walked back into the school with Yunque.

It was nominally a tour, but in truth it was simply a walk.

The night had fallen thick, and the streetlamps weren’t bright enough to make out many of the buildings and landmarks clearly.

Yunque could only try her best to point things out.

Lu Rangchen listened with only half his attention — he was simply content to have this time alone with her.

The night was hushed and quietly evocative. They drifted through the campus together, breathing in the faint gardenia fragrance that clung to her with every step.

After some indeterminate stretch of time, Yunque finally felt she had covered all the places she knew.

Lu Rangchen didn’t push for more.

Or rather, he had settled in very naturally without creating any sense of pressure. He simply suggested walking her back to the dorm.

Yunque hesitated for a moment.

After all, at their age, having someone walk you back to your dorm carried its own unmistakable implications.

But she found herself unable to resist the pull of it.

In the end, Lu Rangchen walked her to the base of Building Nine.

In the moonlight, the young man who could now rightly be called a man stood as clean-lined and upright as ever, his unyielding, independent spirit just as unchanged.

With his habitual hands-in-pockets ease, he gave a slight curl of his lips. “Go on.”

Yunque nodded, turned, and walked into the dorm building.

Just like that, composed and unhurried, she climbed the stairs step by step.

To the second floor — and her feet stopped without warning. She turned and looked out through the window.

The night breeze was cool, the moonlight dense.

Lu Rangchen’s figure was in that moment merging with the boundless dark, slowly disappearing.

Watching this.

Yunque slowly curved the corners of her lips upward.

It was a feeling she had never known before — brimming and full, like a surging tide — flooding her chest all at once, in a single instant.