Between Us : Chapter 20: Sweetheart

The physics problem solving process filled the entire blackboard. Xu Jue twirled his pen, sitting in the last row of the classroom and staring at the complex force diagrams while his mind wandered.

That morning he had blurted out everything he should and shouldn’t have said in one go. Only after acting on impulse did he realize he had no proof, and he had no idea what Chen Qian would think of him.

When he left for school, Chen Qian’s bedroom door was still shut tight. Not a sound came through the crack. This state had lasted for hours. The person inside was probably still lying on his back in bed.

The teacher rapped the blackboard hard with a set square to wake up the drowsy students. Xu Jue lifted his eyelids, tore off a sticky note, jotted down some notes, and stuck it to his textbook. After setting down his pen, he continued staring blankly at the sticky note.

Before leaving, he had warmed up lunch for Chen Qian. He usually left a note, but he thought for a long time and couldn’t figure out what to write. Apologizing for his reckless confession would seem like closing the barn door after the horse had bolted. Telling the other not to feel bad over someone unworthy would be overstepping his bounds. In the end, he wrote, “No evening self study tonight. Let’s go eat grilled meat together after school,” hoping that when he got home, Chen Qian would still be waiting for him in the living room.

Xu Jue let out a soft sigh. He didn’t expect the classroom to be so quiet that this sigh fell into others’ ears and sounded especially heavy.

The physics teacher immediately looked over, just looking for a way to wake everyone up. “Xu Jue, what are you sighing about?”

Xu Jue was also looking for something to distract himself, so he got up from his seat, walked to the front of the classroom, broke off a piece of chalk and tossed it in his hand, and said flatly, “I just suddenly thought of another way to solve the problem.”

He finished solving the problem and returned to his seat just as class ended. No one did eye exercises. The classroom, which had been dead silent moments ago, immediately became lively. Qiu Yuanfei had been holding it in for the whole class period. He pushed the back of Xu Jue’s chair. “Not bad, you really know how to keep a low profile.”

Xu Jue had talked himself dry explaining the problem for the teacher. He now gulped down half a bottle of water and said, “You know this solving method too. You even took notes during that trial off campus training class last time.”

Wei Xiaoduo, who had skipped going to the restroom with her girlfriends, also turned around to join the discussion. “Is this really the time to be studying physics?”

Qiu Yuanfei quickly agreed. “Yeah, aren’t you tired after listening for forty minutes?”

Wei Xiaoduo slapped shut the physics textbook spread on Xu Jue’s desk and set it aside. “Let’s talk about something else to wake up.”

Qiu Yuanfei went straight to the point, his finger poking at the pink sticky note stuck in the middle of Xu Jue’s desk. “Jue, this is where you’re in the wrong. You ask me to bring you breakfast every day, but then you turn around and buy it for someone else. So I’m just doing all the work for nothing, right?”

Wei Xiaoduo was more perceptive. “What does ‘failure to complete homework independently results in one deduction from the opportunity to buy breakfast for CQ’ mean? From the tone, it sounds like a reward system?”

Qiu Yuanfei corrected her. “It’s a punishment system.”

Wei Xiaoduo asked, “Who is CQ?”

Qiu Yuanfei said, “We don’t have anyone with a C surname in our class, do we?”

Wei Xiaoduo said, “From another class? Science or humanities track?”

Qiu Yuanfei went even further. “If you wrote QC, I might have a fifty percent chance of suspecting myself.”

Xu Jue couldn’t take it anymore. “Get lost.”

Wei Xiaoduo got extremely excited. “Listen to that. You can’t stand CQ being badmouthed even a little bit. Do you really like that person?”

Fortunately Qiu Yuanfei had a good temper. “Wei Xiaoduo, since when did I become the symbol of being badmouthed?”

Those two started bickering, and Xu Jue, gripping his water bottle, was thrown off by the word “like.”

When he faked illness to skip class in elementary school. When he finished the three thousand meter run at the high school sports meet. When he changed Chen Qian’s clothes last night. His heart had never beaten as fast as it did now, like a basketball bouncing nonstop, hitting his chest with such force that he suspected he was sick.

The classroom was too noisy. Xu Jue worried he was getting ringing in his ears. He got up to go fill his water bottle, but Qiu Yuanfei pulled him back. “You can’t leave!”

It was practically the same as what he had said to Chen Qian, “You can’t go.” He fell back into his seat and said helplessly, “I can’t even go get water?”

Qiu Yuanfei said, “English class is next. Isn’t Madam White’s spit enough to drown you?”

The two who had just been bickering were now united again. Wei Xiaoduo continued the topic. “Xu Jue, just tell us. Do you really like CQ?”

Xu Jue rested an elbow on the back of his chair. “I’m not even sure if it’s like. How did we fast forward to really liking?”

Qiu Yuanfei was shocked. “You’re not even sure if you like the person, yet you buy them breakfast every single day. Aren’t you being a simp…”

“It’s sweetheart!” Wei Xiaoduo cut in. “Xu Jue, action without strategic partners is hard to succeed. Look, your sticky note is all curled at the edges. It’s been stuck there a long time, right? After all this time you’re still stuck at the breakfast buying stage. Your progress is too slow. Reflect on whether you’re missing someone to give you advice.”

Qiu Yuanfei corrected again. “Two someones.”

Xu Jue thought about it. Although they had progressed beyond just buying breakfast, the three point agreement was indeed still stuck at the first chapter. Whether the second chapter established that morning would hold was another matter.

He twirled his pen and said, “What kind of advice? He’s different from other people.”

Wei Xiaoduo asked, “How so?”

Xu Jue thought he might as well have gone to get water. “If I knew, would I need to find strategic partners?”

A weight landed on his shoulder. Qiu Yuanfei draped his arm over it. “Jue, just tell us what class she’s in.”

Xu Jue said, “Off campus.”

His heart itched a little, but he still didn’t say the words “you’ve met him too.”

Wei Xiaoduo had a general direction now. “Off campus. A classmate from art studio? Or a neighbor? Or childhood sweethearts?”

Xu Jue couldn’t bear to say the fact that they lived together and hurt his strategic partners’ fragile hearts, so he said, “Sort of a neighbor. A new neighbor.”

Qiu Yuanfei got excited. “That’s great then. The moon near the water gets the light first. Which school?”

Xu Jue rolled the sticky note between his fingers. “Already working.”

Wei Xiaoduo let out an “ah,” surprised. “It’s actually an older sister!”

Xu Jue didn’t respond. He savored the word “older sister,” and couldn’t help picturing in his mind Chen Qian with his legs crossed, head lowered, lighting a cigarette. Before he knew it, his throat felt a little parched, so he unscrewed the bottle cap and drank the remaining half cup of water.

Friday afternoon classes were always especially hard to get through. Or maybe he was just eager to get home. Xu Jue couldn’t sit still for a moment. The pen in his fingers spun fast enough to rival a helicopter’s rotor blades.

When the dismissal bell finally rang, he slung his backpack over one shoulder and rushed out. He scanned a shared bike, took a shortcut to Changnian Road, and at the entrance of Alley Six, he even bought a box of lotus seed paste pastries to bring back for Chen Qian to tide him over.

From the ground floor to the fifth floor, there were sixty two steps total. The whole way, Xu Jue was thinking about where to take Chen Qian for grilled meat, what to say at the dinner table to ease the atmosphere, and which topics were off limits taboos.

These questions had been rehearsed repeatedly during class. Sixty two steps weren’t enough to review them all. Standing before the door of Unit 504, Xu Jue also knew what he was truly worried about was seeing Chen Qian in a state of disarray.

He inserted the key into the lock and turned it. Xu Jue paused slightly, then without further hesitation, quickly twisted the door open and rushed inside.

The interior looked no different from when he had left that afternoon, except the bedroom door was half open. Xu Jue casually dropped his backpack on the floor and rushed over to push the door open. There wasn’t half a person in sight!

Underwear and condoms were scattered everywhere at the foot of the bed. The suitcase contents hadn’t been touched at all. Xu Jue backed out of the bedroom and went into the kitchen. He lifted the pot lid. The lunch he had warmed at noon was a little cold now. Steam had moistened the sticky note and blurred the ink.

Xu Jue dialed the number. It didn’t go through. He tried again. The prompt said the other party had powered off.

He turned to go out. At the entryway, he stopped short. The coat rack was bare. That black striped tie was already nowhere to be found.

As the nightclub hours approached, the Elk club was bustling with visitors. The parking lot barrier arm rose and fell, and parking spaces gradually filled up.

On the steps at the side of the club, Chen Qian sat high on one end of the guardrail, a grape flavored cigarette dangling from his lips, his back ramrod straight, holding a box in his hands.

There wasn’t much inside. A cleaned and pressed suit jacket. A tie. A bottle of spicy scented perfume.

After asking Zhao Chuan for leave, and sending Jiang Linsheng a text saying he didn’t need to work tonight, Chen Qian powered off his phone and stuffed it into his pocket.

He let his legs dangle as he thought about things for a while. He thought back to when he had first come to Elk as a host, when he couldn’t hold his liquor and ran outside for air, dizzy and bumping into Jiang Linsheng who had just finished a business deal.

Later, Jiang Linsheng frequently visited Elk. He didn’t go to the tea room or shooting range upstairs, but came to Elk to get Chen Qian to drink with him, and even had the server mix fresh squeezed grapefruit juice into his alcohol, saying this way he wouldn’t get drunk so easily.

On his nineteenth birthday, Jiang Linsheng took him home. They had sex. In a daze, he felt an accessory being pushed onto his wrist. Jiang Linsheng pressed against his ear and said, the day he willingly quit, he would get him a ring with diamonds.

His ring finger base was circled by someone.

The night settled in. A light gold Mulsanne arrived in the parking lot. Chen Qian pinched out his cigarette, took off the bracelet from his right wrist, and placed it in the box.

After the Mulsanne’s engine died, it didn’t move. Through the tinted windshield, the situation inside the car couldn’t be seen clearly. Chen Qian walked over, circled around from the rear of the car to the driver’s side, and rapped his knuckles on the window.

The door only opened a crack before slamming shut again. Chen Qian was standing in a clever position. The parking spaces were packed tightly together. As long as he didn’t step back half a step, the door couldn’t open.

The window was rolled down. Jiang Linsheng sat in the driver’s seat looking at him, his tie loosened, his overcoat draped over Yuan Shuang in the passenger seat.

The urge to vomit kept rising to his throat. Before seeing Jiang Linsheng’s infidelity with his own eyes, Chen Qian had anxiously clung to a sliver of hope. Now, on the contrary, his heart was calm as still water, because he had thought through the good and the bad over and over again before leaving home.

It was just that the cheating partner was Yuan Shuang, which made Chen Qian feel physically ill.

Without waiting for Jiang Linsheng to speak, Chen Qian handed the box in and set it on his lap. “I had originally packed my luggage for tomorrow’s departure, but I think you probably need someone else to accompany you more.”

“Over the past five years you’ve given me quite a few gifts. I never unwrapped anything worth over three figures. It was inconvenient to bring them, so I packed them up and sent them to your place by same city delivery. They should arrive tomorrow. Have your assistant help sign for them.”

“There doesn’t seem to be much else to say. Stay safe, and don’t forget to use protection when you get excited.”

Chen Qian turned to leave. Jiang Linsheng suddenly reached out and grabbed him, right on the spot where the bracelet had originally been worn. “Wait.”

There was no ripple in Chen Qian’s eyes. “I’ve waited quite a while. I finished clearing out all our photos over there before your car arrived.”

Jiang Linsheng’s heart tightened. He wanted Chen Qian to step back so he could get out of the car first, but he was afraid that the moment he let go, Chen Qian would run. He held on very tight. In his daze, he sensed something was wrong. “The bracelet, you took it off?”

“It’s in the box,” Chen Jian said.

“Right,” he met Jiang Linsheng’s hopeful eyes. This man had everything, yet for the first time, Chen Qian saw this expression in the other’s eyes. “Give me back my house key. It doesn’t matter if you don’t. By the time you get back from your business trip, the lock has probably already been changed.”

That bit of hope vanished from Jiang Linsheng’s eyes. He circled Chen Qian’s wrist and said, “Tomorrow would have been our sixth year together. There was one more thing about taking you to France…”

“There is no sixth year,” Chen Qian interrupted. “The one in your passenger seat, even working at it would find it loose, yet you’re still rushing to treasure it. Maybe my body really doesn’t suit you.”

Hearing himself mentioned, Yuan Shuang in the passenger seat jerked his head up. Before he could say anything, Chen Qian’s gaze swept across his face and returned to his own grabbed wrist.

“Mr. Jiang, let go.”