Lin Zhexia managed to get up early the next day with amazing willpower, entering the classroom just as the bell rang.

As it turned out, the professor for the specialized class was late that day, and the other classmates were discussing whether the yellow bike had unfortunately gotten a flat tire again on the way.

She sat in the tiered classroom, waiting for the teacher to arrive while sending messages to Chi Yao—

Can you believe it—

I didn’t arrive late—

I, Young Miss Lin, am just that amazing—

The way I walked into class right on time must have looked super cool.

Chi Yao’s focus wasn’t on this.

Boyfriend: Did you eat breakfast

Lin Zhexia typed: I took a bag of bread from your refrigerator when I left.

This time, Chi Yao only replied with one word: Good.

Lin Zhexia automatically pictured Chi Yao’s face, his voice, and precisely because this word seemed so out of character for him, it had a strange appeal.

She replied with an emoji, then put away her phone to focus on the lecture.

After class, she followed the stream of students heading out and immediately spotted the person waiting early at the stairwell.

Chi Yao was leaning against the wall, looking down at his phone. The weather had become slightly warmer recently, but he seemed impervious to the cold, still wearing less than others, with only a black jacket thrown over his shoulders and a pair of thin jeans, making him look tall and slender.

Having seen him last night, seeing him again during the day made Lin Zhexia feel even more embarrassed.

“Why are you here?” She hugged her books as she approached him.

Chi Yao put away his phone and looked up: “To find you for lunch.”

Lin Zhexia had only taken a bag of bread slices when she left, and the morning classes had been two long sessions back-to-back, so she was indeed very hungry now.

She secretly rubbed her stomach that had growled a couple of times during class, feeling like Chi Yao was like a worm inside her stomach, knowing her thoughts.

Chi Yao reached out to her: “Give me the books.”

Lin Zhexia was about to say, “I’ll carry them myself,” but Chi Yao had already reached out and taken the books from her hands.

At the same time, unexpectedly, a lollipop was placed in her now-free hand.

A familiar light yellow packaging, lemon flavor, just like before.

“Afraid you might have low blood sugar,” Chi Yao said casually.

Lin Zhexia unwrapped the candy: “I’m not that fragile.”

“Normally you wouldn’t be,” Chi Yao carried the stack of books, walking toward the stairway exit, “…but someone was ‘exercising’ until midnight last night, so it’s hard to say.”

“…”

Lin Zhexia almost bit the candy she had just put in her mouth into pieces.

At the cafeteria, she was responsible for finding seats while Chi Yao went to get food.

Eating with him was very carefree; she didn’t have to choose what to eat every day. Anyway, he knew better than she did what she would and wouldn’t eat.

Lin Zhexia was sucking on the candy when she ran into Lan Xiaoxue and the others who had come to eat together: “Have you made up with your brother?”

Lin Zhexia nodded: “We’ve made up, but it wasn’t a fight.”

Lan Xiaoxue pulled Qin Lei to find seats: “That’s good, we’ll head upstairs first, then.”

After she and Chi Yao finished eating, she remembered that neither of them had classes in the afternoon.

Lin Zhexia asked him: “Are you going back to the apartment?”

Chi Yao: “No.”

“Then… to the classroom?”

“No.”

“So what are you planning to do this afternoon?”

“Planning to take my girlfriend out on a date.”

Lin Zhexia swung his hand: “Where are we going on this date? Have you already found a place?”

Chi Yao didn’t say much, only: “You’ll know when we get there.”

On the way, the topic of conversation between them shifted from small dogs on the street to “secret crushes.”

Chi Yao belatedly started being narcissistic.

He held her hand and said with seeming casualness: “It’s very normal that you liked me back then. It shows that although many things went wrong during your growth process, at least your taste wasn’t a problem.”

Lin Zhexia: “…”

Faced with Chi Yao’s sudden attack, she refused to back down: “You liked me earlier, though, right? When I was in middle school and only wanted to flatten your head, you had already started training your abs for me.”

Chi Yao glanced at her, his tone pausing slightly: “Thinking carefully, those partner criteria you had in middle school—seemed like they were deliberately stated opposite to my characteristics.”

“…”

He was jealous about this before.

Now his whole person was excessively confident.

“I wasn’t using you as a standard,” she explained sullenly, “and then deliberately saying the opposite.”

Chi Yao made an “oh” sound: “Are you sure?”

“Sure about what?”

“Sure that in middle school, you weren’t unconsciously attracted to me.”

“…”

She could see now.

He just wanted to make her the one who fell in love first.

Lin Zhexia wouldn’t easily give up her advantageous position: “No, don’t overthink it. You were the one who liked me first.”

Chi Yao seemed a bit disappointed, but he quickly adjusted his approach and asked her: “Then tell me more specifically, how did you come to like me?”

She didn’t want to engage with this person anymore.

So annoying.

Annoying as it was, she thought for a moment and realized there were indeed things she hadn’t shown him.

So as they walked halfway, Lin Zhexia suddenly stopped by the roadside.

She lowered her head and flipped through her phone, opening her Moments, scrolling down for quite a while until she found a photo she had secretly taken of him from high school, when she was below the stage.

“Here.”

Chi Yao took it after a moment’s delay and discovered it was a “visible to self only” Moments post. The person in the photo was him. That day, he had rarely agreed to perform on stage, carrying a guitar and sitting in the center of the stage. The photo was quite blurry because the light from above was too harsh, shining on him, making half his face blurry.

Besides the reason for the lighting, there was also the nervous mood of the photographer.

“It’s a bit blurry,” Lin Zhexia explained. “That’s because I was too nervous then, afraid to take photos. Although everyone was taking pictures of you, and no one would notice me.”

But she still didn’t dare.

When secretly doing something “guilty,” it always felt like the whole world was watching.

She didn’t dare to openly take his photo, could only gather her courage to take out her phone, and then press the shutter randomly.

Chi Yao didn’t say anything, glancing at the text above the photo.

The caption for this Moments post was: The wind of midsummer night.

It was lyrics from the song he had chosen.

His self-perceived subtle way of confessing, at that time, had received a response.

Lin Zhexia moved closer and operated the phone screen a few more times, showing him another photo. That photo of the three of them holding Valentine’s Day movie ticket stubs.

Although she had already confessed to Chi Yao last night.

Showing him these things that only she had known about still made her feel a bit embarrassed.

Chi Yao broke her embarrassment with one sentence: “Why didn’t you crop out He Yang’s hand?”

“…”

That private feeling of revealing her secrets instantly vanished.

Rationally, she should have said “how could we do that to him, He Yang is their mutual good friend after all, and they were able to watch a movie together on Valentine’s Day thanks to him.”

But emotionally, she followed Chi Yao’s train of thought and then nodded quite approvingly: “Indeed.”

“I should have cropped him out back then.”

…

Half an hour later, the two arrived at their date location.

The place Chi Yao took her to was a commercial street. Although she had never been there before, she knew it was a lively place. Lan Xiaoxue and Qin Lei had visited it before.

However, with the commercial street’s wide range of businesses and the dazzling array of shops, she couldn’t guess what exactly Chi Yao intended to do with her.

The harsh winter had passed, and the trees along the road no longer looked as desolate as during the New Year period.

The entire style of Lianyun City was more or less similar; this street resembled many places she had visited in Cheng’an District.

There were bluestone brick pavements. There was water. There were bridges.

The willow trees by the bridge were gradually sprouting new branches, with people coming and going all around, a scene of bustling activity.

She followed Chi Yao deep into the commercial street, and then pushed open the door of a certain shop and walked in.

Before entering, she hadn’t noticed the name of the shop. After going in, she saw many photos hanging on the wall, forming a complete photo wall. Most of the photos featured pairs of people, posing intimately, very close to each other.

Even without knowing the shop name, five familiar characters floated into Lin Zhexia’s mind, retrieved from her memory.

She hesitantly asked: “…A couple’s photo studio?”

As Lin Zhexia inquired, the store owner at the front desk smiled and introduced: “That’s right, we’re a self-service photo studio for couples. After scanning the code to pay, you can go into the small room and adjust the machine in front of the camera to take beautiful couple photos yourselves.”

Chi Yao scanned the code and paid, then the two went in to take photos.

Self-service meant it was similar to those “purikura” machines on the street that you could operate yourself.

The room was small, separated by glass doors and curtains.

Inside were two round stools. Lin Zhexia sat on one, curiously fidgeting with the machine screen: “What made you think of bringing me here to take photos?”

On the machine screen, there were stickers to choose from. As long as both their faces appeared in the frame together, the stickers would automatically track onto their faces.

Chi Yao stood beside her and tapped the screen, casually selecting a pair of rabbit ears.

The next second.

Those rabbit ears appeared on her head.

Lin Zhexia deliberately swayed left and right in front of the camera, and the rabbit ears swayed with her.

“Because when we took photos before,” Chi Yao lowered his hand and said, “…we weren’t a couple yet.”

Their last “couple photo” was taken under pretenses.

Thinking carefully, since being together, they hadn’t properly taken a true couple photo in the real sense.

Lin Zhexia put aside her playful mood and sat up straight before formally starting to take photos: “Then… you sit down too, I’ll move closer to you.”

And then?

She didn’t know.

After all, she had never had experience before.

She had a quirk—the more serious she was about doing something, the more rigid she appeared. Like now, she really wanted to make the couple photos with Chi Yao look nicer, but her eyes uncontrollably began to become stiff.

Chi Yao was more at ease than her. After he sat down, he was a head taller than her, so they appeared as one tall and one short in the frame.

Then he said, “What are you nervous about?”

Lin Zhexia stubbornly denied: “I’m not nervous. It’s just taking a photo, what’s there to be nervous about? I just don’t take photos often… I’m just not used to it.”

Chi Yao adjusted the machine for a while longer. Lin Zhexia felt like she was sitting on pins and needles. Just as she was about to reach maximum stiffness, Chi Yao reminded her—

“Look at the lens.”

Lin Zhexia tried hard to focus her scattered gaze. Before Chi Yao pressed the shutter, she thought that based on her performance, they might need to retake this photo today.

But at the moment, he pressed it.

Chi Yao turned his head and, with perfect timing, kissed her on the cheek.

Lin Zhexia’s eyes widened slightly.

All the constraints and uneasiness were broken by his sudden move. In that second of being kissed, she forgot about the camera and also forgot that they were taking photos.

“Click.”

The machine screen displayed this captured moment.

The image was frozen.

They took several more photos afterward. In one of the other photos, she was reaching out to pull Chi Yao’s face; in another, Chi Yao’s hand was pressing on top of her head, trying to hold her down. Like playing around in childhood.

After finishing the photo session, Lin Zhexia held the printed photos and asked him, “Should we post one on Moments together?”

Perhaps it was because on the way here, she had shown Chi Yao those two “visible to self only” posts from back then.

So she wanted to post something on Moments with him.

However, she had heard from Lan Xiaoxue and the others that guys didn’t seem very enthusiastic about posting these things.

She was just about to say “forget it if you don’t want to,” when Chi Yao said: “Next time you don’t need to ask me.”

Lin Zhexia didn’t understand what this meant.

“Girlfriend,” he stood up and pulled down the black jacket hanging on the side, looking down at her from head to toe with that willful yet cold demeanor. However, because the person he was addressing was her, the most humble words came out of his mouth: “You have the right to command me.”