Chapter 14: A Blinding Secret Crush part 2

Lin Yuran still remembered what Su Yirou said then: “We’re both girls. I know what it looks like when a girl has a crush on someone. I can see it in your eyes.”

Lin Yuran had been stunned. That faint feeling she herself hadn’t fully understood had been seen through so clearly.

Maybe out of her own regrets, Lin Yuran couldn’t bear seeing two people who liked each other end up apart. So before graduation, without Lin Yiqun’s permission, she told Su Yirou everything on why he never confessed.

She’d hoped Su Yirou might take the initiative. But Su Yirou had a steadier mind than hers. She said she had always known. That’s why she never confessed either because even if she had, he wouldn’t have responded.

“I can wait.”

Wait for the day he had enough courage to tell her. And she made Lin Yuran promise never to tell him she was waiting. She didn’t want to pressure him.

Before leaving the country, Su Yirou asked Lin Yuran to keep an eye on him to make sure no one else stole him away before she could come back.

After completing his training, Lin Yiqun’s reputation as a protégé of a master brought him many patients. He lived up to the trust, earning praise and recognition. At a time when Southern Medical Third Hospital was undergoing reform and urgently needed skilled TCM practitioners, Lin Yiqun was recruited at a high salary.

Over the past two years, he paid off his debts and saved a bit. With that burden gone, his self-esteem gradually recovered. He reconnected with Su Yirou, though he still hadn’t confessed.  They just chatted now and then like good friends, sharing tidbits of their lives. He was waiting for her to return after grad school.

And she was quietly giving him time to gather courage.

When Lin Yuran got off the elevator, she sent the two photos she took of him to Su Yirou. Their relationship was still at that delicate stage and asking him directly for a photo would be too obvious. So Lin Yuran played messenger, snapping a picture when she visited and sending it along.

[Went to Tibet, tanned a bit, more manly now.]

[A little nurse is chasing after him, but don’t worry, he’s totally indifferent.]

Su Yirou quickly replied with a ‘thanks’ sticker and a blowing-kiss emoji.

When she got to Yao A-Ping’s hospital room, Lin Yuran gave Aunt Chen a four-hour break.

Aunt Chen had already taken good care of Yao A-Ping, so there wasn’t much left for Lin Yuran to do. She gave her mother a full-body acupressure massage. Unknowingly, the golden sunset light began to stretch across the window frame.

Qin Lang was the first to finish his treatment. After being cooped up inside for so long, he was craving a smoke, so he told Ji Mo he’d wait by the car in the parking lot. As he walked toward the lot, he saw someone leaning against a car from afar, smoke curling in the air.

It was Chi Ye.

Qin Lang approached. “Chi Ye? Thought you left?”

Chi Ye didn’t respond. It was as if he hadn’t heard. His eyes were half-lidded, gaze fixed on something in the distance, unmoving. The cigarette between his fingers had a long trail of ash. A breeze blew, and the ash scattered into nothingness.

Even though the summer night breeze was still thick with heat, the scene felt oddly somber. Qin Lang felt a strange sense of déjà vu. He knew he’d seen something like this before.

Just then, Chi Ye’s cigarette burned down to the filter. The heat touched his fingers, and he finally moved, snuffing it out and tossing it into the nearby trash bin. After a pause, Chi Ye suddenly spoke. 

“A girl plays video games with you. Even sketches characters from your game for you. Why do you think… she later called gaming a waste of time?”

Another pause.

“Do you think it’s because… she actually liked someone else?”

His words triggered Qin Lang’s memory.

His words jolted Qin Lang’s memory suddenly, a scene he hadn’t been able to recall no matter how hard he tried surfaced in his mind.

It was the second semester of their first year in high school. Not long after Chi Ye transferred to Jinxi No. 3 High, on a sudden whim, he dropped a hefty sum to take over an internet café next to the school. Naturally, that café became the go-to hangout spot for their childhood circle.

Qin Lang remembered a weekend in their third year, just before the college entrance exams. He’d gone to the café to find Chi Ye. Usually, he’d be in the private room they’d claimed as their own. But that day, after searching around and not seeing a trace of him, Qin Lang hesitated for a moment, then pushed open the door to the VIP room, Chi Ye’s private space that he never let any of them enter.

Inside, he saw Chi Ye alone on the sofa, holding a white dragon-shaped plush pillow in his arms, a cigarette between his fingers, completely motionless. The computer hadn’t even been turned on.

His eyelids hung low, gaze empty, almost lifeless, staring at nothing. The cigarette ash, long neglected, had built up and broken off under its own weight, scattered across the floor.

“What are you doing in here by yourself?” Qin Lang had asked.

Chi Ye didn’t respond. It was like he hadn’t even heard him.

Back then, Qin Lang hadn’t realized anything was wrong. He walked over, gave him a shove, and laughed. “What’s with the act? You trying to look all deep and mysterious?”

Only then did Chi Ye seem to come back to himself. He flicked the ash from his cigarette, brought it to his lips and took a long drag. The white smoke filled his lungs, and he coughed violently, the haze scattering in front of him. That was when he had just started smoking.

Chi Ye might’ve been wild, but he had his own set of rules. He never touched things that were pointless or bad for him. So even then, Qin Lang had thought that something must’ve been eating him up inside, to drive him to start smoking.

After the cigarette had burned down to the filter, Chi Ye finally spoke.

He asked the exact same thing he did just now. 

“A girl plays video games with you. Even sketches characters from your game for you. Why do you think… she later called gaming a waste of time?”

There had been the same pause.

“Do you think it’s because… she actually liked someone else?”

At first glance, those two questions didn’t even seem related.

Back then, Qin Lang was studying at an international high school, and Chi Ye had transferred to Jinxi No. 3. They didn’t see each other much, and Qin Lang didn’t really know what had been going on in Chi Ye’s life at school. He didn’t know how to respond.

Then he heard Chi Ye speak again, his voice barely more than a whisper, sunk so low it scraped bottom.

“I can’t think of any other explanation.”

There had been so much sorrow and loneliness in that voice it made Qin Lang feel, just for a moment, like he didn’t even recognize him.

Chi Ye, the only heir to Tiancheng Group, born with everything, the golden boy blessed by the stars. Anything he wanted growing up, he got.

Like that internet café he bought it on a whim just because he felt like it. The previous owner had been a big shot himself, and the café was thriving. But the moment Chi Ye said he wanted it, the man had no choice but to sell.

Carefree, bold, always acting like nothing in the world could bother him – that was the Chi Ye everyone knew. That kind of dejection, that hollow look in his eyes didn’t belong to him.

And now, that same broken voice, “I can’t think of any other explanation,” echoed in Qin Lang’s ears, pulling him back to the present.

Six years had passed. But Chi Ye was still stuck in the same place.

……

T/N: Chi Ye 🤝me

Look here at my heart, it has been stuck in the same place for the last ten years 😩