Bone-Attached Disaster - Chapter 4:
Chapter 4: Discharge
“What made you finally decide? Not soaking in the hospital anymore?” Jiang Yan asked. His hands weren’t idle; he was rummaging through the small cabinet next to the hospital bed for important lab reports, contracts, and Lu Jie’s laptop—all things that needed to be taken first so Lu Jie could get back to work.
Lu Jie was long accustomed to Jiang Yan’s capitalist-beast demeanor. “Rested too long, and I feel like my memory is declining. Is it not okay to go back to the lab to train my brain?”
“As long as you’re willing to go back, anything is okay.”
Lu Jie sat on the edge of the bed, sipping his first iced Americano of the morning, when he suddenly spotted what looked like two small petals on the back of Jiang Yan’s head. Jiang Yan naturally had a playboy look, and with the noticeable pear blossoms, he looked even more like he was “flirting with nature.” Lu Jie closed his eyes, out of sight, out of mind.
“Oh right, I just ran into Jia’an.”
“Who??”
“Jia’an, Fu Jia’an, did you really forget?”
Hearing Jiang Yan familiarly omit the person’s surname, Lu Jie felt a massive headache. “You ran into him, and then what?”
“And then I asked for his contact info, of course. Old classmates are connections,” Jiang Yan said. “You know how valuable his papers are in the academic world. He also has extensive clinical experience now. Who knows, maybe we’ll have a chance to collaborate later.”
Lu Jie didn’t agree with businessmen’s habit of collecting contact information for any reason but respected it. He didn’t want to dwell on the topic, so he stood up and said, “Shall we go?”
“Yeah,” Jiang Yan carried a bag in each hand. The President of Jiang’s Pharmaceutical happily acted as Lu Jie’s errand boy. As he walked out of the ward, he said, “Hey, tell me, you haven’t seen Fu Jia’an in years, right?”
Lu Jie supported himself with his crutches, but before he could answer, Jiang Yan continued, “He’s really changed a lot. He grew much taller and surprisingly got quite handsome. He looked pretty ordinary when he was little. I really didn’t see that coming.”
As they spoke, they reached the elevator, and Jiang Yan was still chattering away.
Lu Jie seemed to be listening, but his gaze was fixed on those two irritating petals at the back of Jiang Yan’s head. The petals swayed, hovering but not falling, involuntarily reminding him of yesterday afternoon’s kiss.
“But then again, Fu Jia’an was 16 when he graduated high school; he was just a kid. He’s really grown into himself now… Ah! Why did you hit me!” Jiang Yan raised his hand to cover the back of his head but realized his hands were full, gritting his teeth in pain.
Lu Jie retracted the hand that had just slapped Jiang Yan. He put his weight back on the crutch, finally feeling relieved. “You had two petals on the back of your head. I was just brushing them off for you.”
Just as Jiang Yan was about to curse back, the elevator door opened. Several patients, family members, and nurses walked out, leaving one person in a white coat who showed no intention of exiting.
Lu Jie: “Fu…”
“Jia’an!” Jiang Yan walked into the elevator first. “You wouldn’t believe it, Lu Jie just hit me.”
Lu Jie never imagined Jiang Yan would be so shameless as to complain to Fu Jia’an. He desperately wanted to pretend he didn’t know this guy, so he kept his head down, gripping his crutches with both hands, gingerly stepping into the elevator.
The elevator door closed in front of the three of them. Fu Jia’an smiled and said, “I won’t intervene in your grievances.”
The funny thing was, this scene was a complete departure from their dynamic in high school. Back then, they were like fire and ice. Lu Jie and Fu Jia’an had been rivals, competitors, had fought and had truces, but until the very end, neither would shed their youthful pride, and they never once shared a joke.
Don’t let Jiang Yan’s current respectable appearance fool you. Back then, whenever Lu Jie was sparring with Fu Jia’an and started to lose, Jiang Yan would be the one adding fuel to the fire, loving nothing more than a chaotic scene.
Lu Jie finally understood why he had felt so awkward earlier. It turned out that both Jiang Yan and Fu Jia’an felt that the past 12 years could be turned a page on, and they could bury the hatchet with a laugh.
It wasn’t a taboo anymore; the only person holding on was himself.
Ding-dong—
The elevator went down two floors and suddenly became crowded. The last person who squeezed in looked like an experienced head nurse. She pushed a wheelchair in, loudly calling for everyone to move further inside the elevator.
Hospital elevators were spacious enough to fit beds and stretchers, but when Lu Jie came to his senses, he found that Jiang Yan had been squeezed to an unknown corner. He craned his neck to look around, only to realize that the person right behind him was Fu Jia’an, and they were cornered together.
“Watch your leg,” Fu Jia’an’s voice came from near his ear. “Want to move over a bit? There’s still some space behind.”
“Oh…” Lu Jie didn’t want to become further disabled. He turned around and shuffled half a step back. Unexpectedly, the elevator door opened at that moment, and a third wave of people surged in. Lu Jie stopped with his face ten centimeters from Fu Jia’an’s, making it impossible to even turn around.
He was stiff as an iron board. He felt that at this moment, he’d rather be disabled than touch Fu Jia’an. To prevent this from actually happening, Lu Jie quickly raised a hand and braced it against the mirrored elevator wall.
However, this positioning made it look like he was protecting Fu Jia’an… The scene was truly bizarre. If this had happened when Lu Jie was 18, he would sooner believe in ghosts than believe he’d do this with his arch-nemesis.
Lu Jie broke out in goosebumps. He was too close to Fu Jia’an. To ease the awkwardness, he proactively asked his old classmate: “Which floor are you getting off? Do you want to switch places?”
He had to look down to speak. Lu Jie once again felt his height advantage, a small sense of superiority rising in his heart. Little kid, even if you grew up, you’re still half a head shorter than me, aren’t you? At 28, you won’t get another growth spurt. This round, your Brother Lu still wins steadily.
Lu Jie’s direct line of sight happened to fall on Fu Jia’an’s lowered eyelashes, which seemed longer than he remembered. Unchanged was the small mole on the side of his nose.
—He really got a lot handsomer.
Jiang Yan’s useless words barged into his mind again.
Damn it! Why say something like that? It was utterly sappy for one man to judge another man’s handsomeness.
“Me? The first floor, same as you.”
Fu Jia’an lifted his head and looked directly into Lu Jie’s eyes.
The elevator was clearly heading down. It had stopped at Lu Jie’s ward floor, but Fu Jia’an hadn’t gotten out; instead, he was continuing down with them. Furthermore, Fu Jia’an’s Neurosurgery department wasn’t even in this building. What was he doing here? Riding the elevator for fun?
These questions quickly formed a logical chain in Lu Jie’s mind. “Did you come looking for me?”
Fu Jia’an seemed to think for a moment, then said flatly, “You messaged me saying you were leaving. Didn’t you mean for me to come see you off?”
He said it so seriously that Lu Jie started to wonder for a second if his message had genuinely caused this misunderstanding.
“I’m being discharged tomorrow.”
It clearly meant that the hospital wasn’t big enough for both of them—it was meant as a challenge, a provocation. Lu Jie had even worried that the message would make him look petty, but he never expected this interpretation.
After getting into the car, Lu Jie saw Fu Jia’an standing on the hospital steps, his hands tucked into the pockets of his white coat, his eyes looking calmly in Lu Jie’s direction. This made Lu Jie feel like he was completing a task of seeing him off.
Lu Jie thought, Let it end here. Whatever lingering grudges he had should be let go. Fu Jia’an had left school hastily back then, disappearing without saying goodbye. Not every abrupt farewell gets a chance for closure many years later. So, the story should be finished now. This wasn’t a drill; it was a real goodbye.
Jiang Yan, as the CEO, sat in the passenger seat next to the driver. Lu Jie sat horizontally in the back seat, his casted leg propped up on the leather seat of the CEO’s eight-million-dollar luxury car. His legs were long, and he barely had enough room to stretch out.
As the car drove away, Jiang Yan’s voice suddenly came from the front. “I wish I could live a life like Fu Jia’an’s once.”
“What?” Lu Jie mocked him. “Isn’t this past the time when you found him unpleasant in high school?”
“How narrow-minded were we back then?” Jiang Yan adopted an old man’s tone, rubbing his chin like his father. “The older I get, the more I envy a genius. Only a genius’s life is free of troubles.”
Lu Jie was full of questions. “So, a rich second generation’s life has many troubles?”
Jiang Yan: “Of course it does. You have no idea how much I’ve been worrying since you’ve been out of the company for this month…”
Lu Jie leaned his back against the car door, automatically tuning out Jiang Yan’s rambling as usual, using his dual-core processor brain to recall some past events. He couldn’t judge whether a genius’s life was troubled, but a genius certainly caused a lot of trouble for the people around him.
For example, when Lu Jie first met Fu Jia’an, Lu Jie was 18, and Fu Jia’an was 16. Fearing that the transfer student hadn’t learned a certain formula or grammar, Lu Jie enthusiastically tutored him. Later, after the monthly exam results were posted, Lu Jie felt like an absolute idiot.
The second-ranked student tutoring the first-ranked student—unheard of.
Moreover, initially, the gap was only between first and second. Fu Jia’an’s and Lu Jie’s names were next to each other on the list for more than half a year. Later, as time went on and the scope widened, they were ranked against others in the district, the city, and the country. More names squeezed in, and they grew further and further apart.
Eventually, the long river of life became too crowded and forked too many times. Lu Jie drifted aimlessly for many years, and they could no longer be said to be related.
An excellent ordinary person and a genius were never meant to be opponents; they were almost from two different worlds. They had just happened to appear in each other’s timeline—in the same country, the same city, the same district, the same school, and the same classroom as deskmates.
At this moment, Jiang Yan suddenly asked him, “Hey, are you interested in that girl across from your hospital bed?”
“Huh?” The question caught Lu Jie completely off guard. “You mean Du Zhenzhen? I like her?”
Jiang Yan’s face read, “Oh, you even know her name, how can you not be interested in the girl?” He then smugly announced his reasoning: “You asked me to bring you two dumbbells after you were admitted, practically turning the hospital into a gym. Was there no one you were thinking about? Why else would you unlock your screen? Du Zhenzhen… so that’s her name. She is quite pretty.”
“She’s only 19. Be a decent person,” Lu Jie said.
“That’s not right. I saw her eyes were reluctant when you were discharged.”
She was probably sad that she wouldn’t see any complicated gay drama in the ward anymore…
Seeing Lu Jie not speak, Jiang Yan’s gossip fire burned brightly. He couldn’t wait and turned his head from the front seat, smirking suggestively: “Lu Jie, how old are you to still have a secret crush? That’s quite romantic.”
Lu Jie retorted, “Do I need to have a secret crush?”
Jiang Yan scanned the person from left to right, then from right to left, his gaze lingering on Lu Jie’s face for a moment, and finally, he turned back, deflated. “Fair enough.”
Jiang Yan gossiped for a bit and was starting to get tired. He yawned, drowsy, muttering, “Then who could it be? Someone in the hospital… a nurse? A doctor?”
Lu Jie couldn’t take it anymore: “President Jiang.”
“Huh?”
“Shhh—”
“Oh.”
Jiang Yan shut his mouth, looking wronged.