To Covet (GL) - Chapter 7

It seemed to take some time to digest the visual feast. The forbidden cloak was bluntly stripped away, and my desire to continue exploring her privacy plummeted for a few days, like the dust on a woolen coat, torn off with the sticky tape and thrown into the trash.

However, my fantasies about Yu Zhouwan never stopped. In the darkness, her flawless body and the moonlight merged into a dark current, filling the hidden gullies of my imagination.

Like an addict hooked on cigarettes and alcohol, I constantly condemned myself while sober, yet couldn’t resist trying again and again.

“Hey, Xiao Yu?”

“Yu Keyi?”

Seeing me constantly distracted, Xu Lanlan leaned over, tapping my arm under the table with her pen cap.

It was the last self-study class before school ended on Friday. I lay listlessly on the spread-out test paper, my thumb clicking the end of the ballpoint pen.

“Stop daydreaming, did you finish it?” Xu Lanlan shrugged, glanced at the teacher on the podium, then slowly turned her head to look at the dark corridor. Only then did she confidently stick her head out to copy the answers, “You got the first question wrong, Old Gao will kill you…” She squeezed her eyes hard, made a horizontal gesture across her neck with her hand, then anxiously shrank back and checked the process word by word on the draft paper, finally nodding with certainty.

I sighed silently, roughly crossing out the answers.

“Why are you so absent-minded today?” Xu Lanlan couldn’t help but mutter, covering her mouth, “We’re almost done with a test paper, but you haven’t even finished a few multiple-choice questions. I was counting on you to let me copy some.”

I propped my chin up and forced a smile at her. The teacher sitting on the podium noticed my smiling gesture, glared at me, and I immediately buried myself in the pile of books and continued to write, but my hand randomly drew illogical lines on the draft paper.

Ten minutes before school ended, the sky suddenly darkened, and a torrential downpour fell instantly. The dampness of the rain seeped through the corridor and into the classroom through the cracks in the windows, hot and humid.

Water stains slid down the glass one after another, and the classroom, which was originally secretly looking forward to the end of school, suddenly fell into a frozen silence.

“Did you bring an umbrella?” The sound of the rain cleverly covered up a whispered curse, “Alas, it’s raining so hard, even an umbrella won’t help.”

The No. 7 Middle School’s academic affairs office temporarily issued a broadcast notice that due to the bad weather, students could contact their parents through their teachers’ mobile phones to pick them up from school. The remaining self-study class passed in the noisy movements of students entering and leaving the classroom.

The rain didn’t seem to lessen after the students dispersed, as if deliberately trying to shatter the anticipation before the weekend arrived.

The school bell rang again ten minutes later. By this time, there was no one else in the classroom except me.

I weighed it in my mind through the rain curtain in the corridor, took off my school uniform jacket, and rushed out, only to be grabbed by the arm by someone passing by with an umbrella, almost slipping and falling face down.

At the moment I stopped, an umbrella covered my head.

I instinctively shook off Yu Zhouwan’s hand. By the time my mind caught up with my body’s reaction, we had already created a distance between us.

The water droplets on Yu Zhouwan’s hair tips soaked the front of her clothes one by one, and scattered mud stains spread to her white sneakers and ankles.

She took a step forward, stepping into the water with a click, and tilted the umbrella slightly forward.

“Dad is waiting outside the school gate. He drove to pick us up.” She didn’t approach me again, but stared straight into my eyes. Half of her shoulder and back were in the rain curtain, and the water droplets on the tip of the umbrella made her sleeves pile up heavily on her elbows, “Let’s go.”

I took her arm and stepped into the puddle. The reflection shattered instantly, just like the surging fantasies, creating a strange sense of separation from the real Yu Zhouwan.

The rain outside became dense again. The newly opened towel smelled of chemical fragrance when wiping my hair, making me feel drowsy.

Yu Zhouwan took off her coat and leaned on the pillow, brushing her phone, her whole person exuding a quiet and beautiful aura, incompatible with the muddy rain outside and my repeated depictions of her.

“Did you get wet in the rain?” she grabbed my wet and discolored cuffs, “Go change your clothes quickly.”

“Sister,” I tidied the broken hair that was hanging over my eyes, “you still haven’t told me what you took leave to do that day.”

Her finger paused on the screen, “To see someone,” she said, “I guess we won’t see each other again in the future, so I wanted to see them.”

“No longer see each other? What kind of enemy is it?” I deliberately said in the opposite direction.

“What are you talking about, they’re not enemies,” she smiled and propped her face, raising her hand to help me wipe my hair, “If I have to say, it’s probably because we have different values.”

I hurriedly backed away to avoid her.

Every word made me confused. I determined that she and that person named Feng Jia were same-s3x lovers. I thought she would use “friend” or something to prevaricate. Looking at the way they were making out in the classroom, could it be a break-up kiss?

The hot water mist filled the air. I wiped the mirror, revealing a pair of familiar eyes, and then the whole face.

Yang Chun didn’t care about me, so I watched all kinds of things online, and had some knowledge of various perspectives on sexuality, including homosexuality. I had seen many posts about family pressure before and after lesbians came out. If Yu Zhouwan stumbled on a man, I would think she deserved it. Now I actually feel a little sorry for her.

I wonder what Shi Yunya and Yu Hanyang think. Shi Yunya went to school abroad, so her thinking must be more open than some people in China, but she always looked anxious about some small things, as if she wasn’t open enough to accept homosexuality calmly.

When I was twelve years old, Yang Chun hadn’t found out about her illness yet. One day, I asked to spend the night at my neighbor’s sister’s house, and she suddenly hugged me and said with a smile, “Don’t go to other people’s houses to cause trouble. Aren’t you afraid they’re lesbians and will take advantage of you while you’re sleeping…”

“What are you talking about?” I slid off her lap onto the floor, asking inexplicably but confidently, “She’s not a man with a d1ck who goes into heat everywhere, she can’t rape me, can she?”

Saying this was purely borrowing a straightforward comment from a netizen. Yang Chun’s face stiffened, but she wasn’t angry. She smiled and flicked my forehead: “Little girl, you can’t speak so rudely! What do you know?”

Later, she started to be hospitalized. When I went back and forth between the hospital and home, I did see the neighbor’s sister—I couldn’t remember her full name—going in and out with a girl with a ponytail. The girl with the ponytail would shyly say hello when she saw me.

After taking a hot bath, I only saw a reference book spread out in the living room. I tiptoed to the door of the room and found that the door was ajar.

“Keyi, what do you want to eat tonight?”

Yu Zhouwan was lying on the bed, swiping her phone screen to order takeout. I walked over slowly and sat on the edge of the bed.

“I want to eat rice noodles,” I touched my dry and fluffy hair, “I feel a little uncomfortable after getting wet in the rain. I want to eat something hot.”

I slowly collapsed on the bed, lying side by side with Yu Zhouwan like the hour and minute hands of a clock, head to head. I could feel the heat coming from her hair, which had a comfortable and refreshing scent.

“You can choose whatever you want.” She raised her head, turned her face, and didn’t talk to me much.

I moved my body with difficulty like a worm, but accidentally used too much force and bumped into her shoulder, so I simply lay down and leaned against her back.

I looked at the phone screen absent-mindedly, catching a glimpse of her delicate and smooth neck. A drop of water dripped from the hair on her ear tip, tracing a curve along the back of her ear, and stopped at the bumps of her collarbone.

She pushed me hard, seeming to dislike me putting my weight on her body.

I propped myself up with my arms, but instead of being considerate and leaving immediately, I sat closer.

She turned her back to me, and I lay less than an inch away from her, silently gazing, quietly waiting for her to slowly close her eyes and fall into a nap, my palm inadvertently resting on her soft waist.

Yu Zhouwan was wrapped in a low-saturation blue-green pajamas. I inadvertently remembered a short sentence I saw on a tree that said “her shoulders are stiff peaks when she sleeps, and her slender waist is a valley,” and the narrow clear stream flowing over the valley is not a mountain spring but fair skin. When I swept my fingertips across the water, the water rippled, and then the ripples spread throughout her body. She hummed softly, curled her legs, her body sinking into the soft sheets, her drowsy eyes opening and closing, like raindrops falling from the eaves into a puddle.

Yu Zhouwan’s phone suddenly vibrated. She reflexively sat up and got out of bed, running barefoot to the entrance.

“What are you doing here?”

I had already woken up when I heard the knocking and opening of the door. I smoothed my tangled hair, thinking the takeout had arrived, but what I heard was Yu Zhouwan’s displeased voice.

I pricked up my ears and leaned against the door, opening a crack in the bedroom door to see what was going on, but the entrance was just out of sight, so I had to retreat disappointedly.

“It’s raining outside.”

“Get out.” Yu Zhouwan said each word sharply, “Did I let you in?”

I pushed open the door and stepped out. Feng Jia suddenly let go of Yu Zhouwan’s hand as if electrocuted, and looked at me warily.

I pretended not to see the hint of mockery in Yu Zhouwan’s eyes, rubbed my eyes, and my gaze wandered between the two of them, as if asking Yu Zhouwan, “Who is she?”

“Keyi, this is Feng Jia, my… former teacher.” Yu Zhouwan tried her best to hide her true feelings, but I still caught a trace of unnaturalness in her words.

It’s a pity, I thought, I should have waited before rushing out to spoil the show.

But Yu Zhouwan knew I was home, so she wouldn’t do anything as outrageous as that night. Disappointed, I glanced at Feng Jia, finding her looking at me with a shady gaze, her clothes soaked with rain, dripping onto the floor and forming a puddle.

“This is my sister, Yu Keyi.”

I stood half a step in front of Yu Zhouwan, just separating the two of them.

The scene seemed a little strange. I shifted my feet, shortening the distance between myself and Yu Zhouwan a little more.