CS - 78

Lin Zhexia managed to wake up early the next day with remarkable determination and entered the classroom just as the bell rang.

As it turned out, their professor was late that day. The other students in the class were discussing whether Xiao Huang’s bike had another unfortunate flat tire 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 even get late.

• I’m so amazing, this Lin girl.

• My timing when I walked into the classroom must have looked really cool.

Chi Yao’s attention wasn’t on this.

Boyfriend: Have you eaten breakfast?

Lin Zhexia typed: I took a bag of bread from your fridge before leaving.

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

Lin Zhexia automatically imagined Chi Yao’s face and voice. Because this word seemed so out of place for him, it had an unusual attraction.

She replied with an emoji, then put away her phone and focused on the lecture.

After class, she followed the crowd of students leaving. She spotted someone waiting at the stairwell ahead.

Chi Yao leaned against the wall, looking down at his phone. The weather had slightly warmed up recently, but he still dressed as if he wasn’t afraid of the cold, wearing less than others. He only wore a black coat outside and a pair of thin jeans, making him look taller and slimmer.

After seeing him last night and now during the day, Lin Zhexia felt even more embarrassed.

“How did you come?” She walked over to him with her books.

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

When she left, she only took a bag of bread slices. After two big classes in the morning, she was indeed very hungry.

She secretly rubbed her stomach, which had growled twice in class. She felt like Chi Yao could read her like a book.

Chi Yao reached out his hand: “Give me the books.”

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

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

The familiar light yellow packaging, lemon-flavored, just like before.

“In case you have low blood sugar,” Chi Yao casually said.

Lin Zhexia peeled off the candy wrapper: “Am I that weak?”

“Not usually,” Chi Yao carried the stack of books and walked toward the exit of the stairs, “...but considering someone ‘exercised’ until midnight last night, who knows.”

“...”

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

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

Eating with this person was worry-free; she didn’t need to choose what to eat every day because he knew better than her what she liked to eat and what she didn’t.

Lin Zhexia bit on her candy. Midway through, she encountered Lan Xiaoxue and the others coming over to eat together: “Are you and your boyfriend back together?”

Lin Zhexia nodded: “We’re good. It wasn’t really a fight though.”

Lan Xiaoxue pulled Qin Lei to find a seat: “That’s good. We’ll go upstairs first.”

After they finished eating, she remembered that neither of them had afternoon classes.

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

Chi Yao: “No.”

“Then... to the classroom?”

“No.”

“What do you plan to do this afternoon?”

“I plan to take my girlfriend out on a date.”

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

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

On the way, their conversation shifted from stray dogs on the road to “unrequited love.”

Chi Yao belatedly started to feel self-important.

He held her hand and casually said: “It’s normal for you to have liked me back then. It shows that although there were some issues during your growth process, your taste hasn’t been affected.”

Lin Zhexia: “...”

Facing Chi Yao’s sudden attack, she was not about to yield: “But you liked me earlier. In middle school, I only wanted to flatten your head, and you were already working on your abs for me.”

Chi Yao glanced at her, pausing slightly: “Thinking carefully, those dating criteria you mentioned in middle school—seem to be deliberately stated in reverse of my qualities.”

“...”

He had been jealous about this before.

Now he was overly confident.

“I didn’t base it on you,” she explained sullenly, “it was deliberate to say the opposite.”

Chi Yao “oh”ed: “Are you sure?”

“Sure about what?”

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

“...”

She finally realized.

He just wanted her to admit she was the one who fell for him first.

Lin Zhexia wouldn’t easily give up her advantageous position: “No, don’t think too much. You liked me first anyway.”

Chi Yao seemed a little disappointed, but quickly adjusted his thinking and asked her: “Then tell me more specifically how you liked me.”

She didn’t want to deal with this person.

So annoying.

Annoying as it was, she thought about it and realized there were some things she hadn’t shown him.

So halfway, Lin Zhexia suddenly stopped by the roadside.

She lowered her head and scrolled through her phone, opened her social media, and scrolled all the way back to high school. She found a photo she had secretly taken of him from the audience.

“Here.”

Chi Yao slowly took it, discovering that this was a “visible only to me” post. The person in the photo was him. On that rare occasion, he agreed to perform on stage, holding a guitar and sitting in the center of the stage. The photo was quite blurry because the spotlight above was too bright, casting half of his face in shadow.

Besides the lighting issue, there was also the photographer’s nervousness.

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

But she still didn’t dare.

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

She didn’t dare to take a picture openly. She mustered the courage to pull out her phone and randomly pressed the shutter.

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

The caption of this post was: The wind on a midsummer night.

It was a lyric from the song he chose.

His supposedly veiled confession, unbeknownst to him, had received a response back then.

Lin Zhexia leaned closer, operating the screen a few more times, showing him another photo—the one where the three of them held Valentine’s Day movie ticket stubs.

Although she had confessed to Chi Yao last night.

Showing these things that only she knew still made her feel a bit shy.

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

“...”

Lin Zhexia’s intimate feeling of revealing secrets instantly vanished.

Rationally, she should have said, “How can you treat him like that? He Yang is our mutual friend after all, and we owe it to him that we got to watch a movie together on Valentine’s Day.”

But emotionally, she thought along with Chi Yao’s words and quite agreeably nodded: “True.”

“I should have cropped him out back then.”

...

Half an hour later, the two arrived at the dating location.

The place Chi Yao took her to was a commercial street. Though she hadn’t been here before, she knew it was lively. Lan Xiaoxue and Qin Lei had been here shopping before.

However, the business on the commercial street was diverse, with shops everywhere. She couldn’t guess what Chi Yao planned to do.

Winter had passed, and the trees on the road no longer looked as desolate as they had during the New Year.

The style of the entire Lianyun city was pretty similar. This street resembled many places she had visited in Cheng’an district.

There were stone bricks. There was water. There were bridges.

The willow trees by the bridge gradually sprouted new branches. People came and went around them, creating a bustling scene.

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

She hadn’t noticed the name of the shop before walking in. Once inside, she saw many photos hanging on the walls, forming a full photo wall. Most of the photos featured two people, posing intimately, standing close together.

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

She hesitated and asked, “…a couple’s photo studio?”

At the same time Lin Zhexia asked, the receptionist smiled and introduced: “Yes, this is a self-service couple photo studio. After scanning the code to pay, you can go into a small room and adjust the machine yourself to take beautiful couple photos.”

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

Though called “self-service,” it was similar to those “photo booth” machines on the roadside 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 playing with the machine screen: “How did you think of bringing me here to take pictures?”

On the machine screen, there were sticker options. As long as both faces appeared in the frame, the stickers would automatically track their faces.

Chi Yao stood beside her, raised his hand, and clicked on the screen, casually selecting bunny ears.

The next second.

The bunny ears appeared on her head.

Lin Zhexia intentionally swayed left and right in front of the lens, and the bunny ears swayed with her.

“Because last time we took pictures,” Chi Yao lowered his hand, “…we weren’t officially a couple yet.”

Their previous “couple photo” was a misnomer.

Carefully counting, they hadn’t properly taken a real couple photo since getting together.

Lin Zhexia set aside her playful thoughts and sat up straight before starting the shoot: “Then... sit down too, let’s get closer.”

And then?

She didn’t know.

After all, she had never done this before.

She had a habit of becoming stiff whenever she tried to be serious. For instance, now, she really wanted to make their couple photo look better, but her eyes involuntarily started to become vacant.

Chi Yao was more relaxed. After sitting down, he towered over her. In the viewfinder, one was tall, and the other short.

Then he said: “Why are you nervous?”

Lin Zhexia stubbornly replied: “I’m not nervous. It’s just taking a picture. What’s there to be nervous about? I just don’t take pictures often... I’m not used to it.”

Chi Yao fiddled with the machine for a while. Lin Zhexia sat like she was on pins and needles. Just as she was about to reach her limit of stiffness, Chi Yao reminded her—

“Look at the camera.”

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

But at the moment he pressed it.

Chi Yao turned his head, precisely kissing her cheek.

Lin Zhexia’s eyes widened slightly.

All her constraints and unease were broken by this unexpected move. In the moment she was kissed, she forgot about the camera and that they were taking photos.

“Click.”

The captured moment appeared on the machine screen.

The image froze.

They took several more photos afterward. In one of the other photos, she retaliated by tugging at Chi Yao’s face. In another, Chi Yao pressed his hand on top of her head, trying to hold her down. It was like their childhood playfulness.

After finishing the photoshoot, Lin Zhexia held the printed photos and asked him: “Should we post this on social media together?”

Perhaps it was because on the way here, she had shown Chi Yao those two posts visible only to herself.

So she really wanted to post something together with him on social media.

However, according to Lan Xiaoxue and the others, boys aren’t usually keen on posting such things.

Just as she was about to say, “If you don’t want to, it’s fine,” Chi Yao said: “Next time, you don’t need to ask me.”

Lin Zhexia didn’t understand what he meant.

“Girlfriend,” as he stood up, he pulled down the black coat hanging nearby. Looking down at her from head to toe, he still had that carefree and aloof demeanor. But because it was her he was addressing, he spoke the humblest words: “You have the right to command me.”