Chapter 111 #2
While walking across the square outside the station, Gu Miao suddenly stopped in her tracks.
“What is it?” Gu Fei stopped too.
Gu Miao looked back at the station, then turned in a circle as she looked all around her.
“You’ve come here before.” Gu Fei crouched down. “This is the train station.”
Gu Miao set her skateboard on the ground, stepped onto it, and with a couple of kicks, she slowly glided forward and away. Gu Fei followed behind her.
“She’s not gonna start yelling, right?” Li Yan watched her worriedly. “She’s been here by herself before.”
“Yeah.” Gu Fei glanced back at the station too. “This is where she first ran into Jiang Cheng.”
“Oh, right.” Li Yan stared at Gu Miao’s back and sighed.
Liu Fan’s car was idling a few yards in front of the bus stop. When Gu Miao got there, she stopped again and spaced out for another few seconds before opening the door and getting in.
It was right here. Gu Fei looked at the stone post by the bus stop sign. The first time he saw Jiang Cheng, he’d been sitting there with his back to him.
At the time, Gu Fei could never have imagined that this boy waiting for him on a stone post after finding his sister would end up sharing so many memories with him, and he hadn’t paid much attention to Jiang Cheng’s appearance.
Still, he vividly remembered the lost and somewhat irritated expression on Jiang Cheng’s face when he’d turned around.
That boy was now on a university campus, hours away by train, back in a bustling metropolis where he belonged.
And as intensely as he grieved their parting, what distressed him the most was that the intensity of that pain didn’t matter—he knew he didn’t have the right to reach out and hold on to Jiang Cheng.
He climbed into Liu Fan’s crappy little car and sat with Gu Miao in the back seat.
Gu Miao leaned against him as she spaced out, watching the view outside the window.
This was what she usually did in cars. She’d stare out the window the whole time—not out of curiosity, but to make sure that she was still within the borders of her world.
Gu Fei sometimes felt like the little munchkin had a superpower, a radar of some kind that could accurately intuit her distance from the center of her world at any time.
Maybe it was out of fear.
When he had been younger, he could always sense his father’s presence. Even without hearing or seeing a thing, he’d always descend into a state of terror whenever his father was downstairs. Perhaps it was like that for Gu Miao.
That was also a kind of superpower.
***
Attendance was good at their get-together today; everyone arrived ahead of time to the private room at the restaurant. By the time Gu Fei got there, they had already finished ordering the food.
“Da-Fei, when are you enrolling?” asked Luo Yu, pouring him a drink.
“Tomorrow,” said Gu Fei. “I think.”
Luo Yu glanced at him. “Would you pay a little more attention to your own affairs? You did manage to get into a school.”
“Yeah,” Gu Fei replied.
“Ha, why so amenable today?” Chen Jie chuckled.
“He’s still out of it, I bet,” said Liu Fan. “Just came back from a send-off. I reckon he’ll be dazed for the next couple days.”
“Shut up,” said Gu Fei.
“All right, let’s eat!” Li Yan picked up his cup and knocked it a few times against the table. “A toast! To this group finally producing one—no, two university students. Bottoms up!”
Gu Fei knocked his cup against theirs and downed his liquor.
He might not have been the most talkative when he hung out with these guys in the past, but his thoughts had never wandered like this. These were old friends of his; he was always able to unwind around them.
But not today. These guys hadn’t changed, and neither had the atmosphere, but he couldn’t bring himself to fully relax the whole night.
Because of Jiang Cheng.
It was a strange feeling not having Jiang Cheng by his side, sitting where he could readily see him whenever he turned his head.
Gu Fei didn’t regret beginning their relationship, even if he’d known from the start that he’d have to face this situation—that he would fall into this pit of agonizing longing. He had no regrets.
But it didn’t make it any less difficult to bear.
And when he felt a distinct something else mixed in with the longing, the torment went from unbearable to excruciating.
Every so often, Jiang Cheng would report on his journey around the campus: ate a meal; went to the store; met all his roommates, none of whom were annoying; dragged for a walk around outside the campus by his roommates and didn’t get lost…
Gu Fei took Gu Miao home, and, after watching her draw for a while, went out by himself to Jiang Cheng’s apartment.
He had to be home to eat dinner with Gu Miao in the evening, but before that, he planned to stay here for a while by himself.
Perhaps it was different for different people, but for Gu Fei, the only way to ease the longing of missing his boyfriend was to see things that reminded him of Jiang Cheng.
Only when he was immersed in the space that contained Jiang Cheng’s presence, looking at all the traces Jiang Cheng had left behind, could he be calm again.
Everything in the apartment looked the same as before. It was as if Jiang Cheng had been trying to prove a point: All he’d taken with him were some clothes and his keys. Standing in the living room now, Gu Fei felt like he might walk into the bedroom and see Jiang Cheng there.
He took a shower, then went into the bedroom and lay down on the bed. He had just closed his eyes when his phone chimed with a message from Jiang Cheng.
- i’m back in the dorm, where are you?
- Lying in your bed
Jiang Cheng’s call came immediately. “You went to the apartment?”
“Yeah.” Gu Fei smiled.
“I thought you were going to hang out with Er-Miao?” asked Jiang Cheng.
“I’m going home to eat dinner with her later,” said Gu Fei. “I’ll come back here once she falls asleep.”
“Are you going to move in?” Jiang Cheng sniffed.
“I don’t know. I’ll probably just come over here whenever I miss you.” Gu Fei could hear a change in Jiang Cheng’s voice. “Hey, Cheng-ge, you’re a total pussy now, huh? How many times have you cried in the past couple of days?”
“Oh, fuck off , ” said Jiang Cheng. “You’re not a pussy, you’re a dick.” Gu Fei cracked up at that, and Jiang Cheng laughed along too. Eventually he stopped long enough to add, “I’m outside my dorm right now. I wanted to talk to you about something.”
“Is it about you coming out to Zhao Ke today?” asked Gu Fei.
“Yeah, it was a bit of bad luck. He wanted to add me, so I took my phone out,” Jiang Cheng said. “But then your giant face was plastered all over it… Good thing it wasn’t your nudes, or Zhao Ke might’ve fainted.”
“How’d he take it?” Gu Fei asked, laughing.
“Calm enough. He said he wasn’t really cool with it, but that it’s none of his business, and he didn’t bring it up again. I think the guy’s okay.”
“That’s good.” Gu Fei paused for a second before adding, “Maybe you should change out the photos of me. At least on your lock screen and home screen…”
“No,” Jiang Cheng replied decisively. “It’s my phone, so I can do whatever I want. It’s not like I’m putting photos of my boyfriend all over other people’s phones.”
“Okay, you’re right.” Gu Fei didn’t press the issue. Jiang Cheng had always been stubborn.
“You’re enrolling tomorrow, right?” Jiang Cheng asked.
“Yeah,” said Gu Fei. “It’ll probably be pretty quick, and then the military boot camp is right after that. Liu Fan has a buddy who used to go here, apparently their boot camp only lasts three days… We had a whole week of it in our first year at Fourth High.”
“Ours won’t be until our second year.” Jiang Cheng smiled. “Don’t forget to take pictures.”
“Of what?” Gu Fei asked.
“You, of course,” said Jiang Cheng. “Selfies. I need to stock up and savor them slowly over time.”
“I thought you were gonna use them to jack off slowly over time.”
“That part is implied—I am a young man in my prime, after all. But I probably won’t be in the mood in the near future. And besides, this is an unfamiliar environment…”
“All right, so who’s shameless now?” Gu Fei laughed.
“Me.” Jiang Cheng readily admitted to it this time.
“See, couldn’t you have owned up to it sooner?” said Gu Fei. “Are you eating dinner in the cafeteria too? How’s the food?”
“Not bad. We’ll go again for dinner. The guys in my room are all food lovers. They’ve already memorized all the best and featured dishes in every cafeteria. They’ve even made a plan to go through them one by one in the next few days.”
“After months of suffering through my cooking, you finally get to be free,” said Gu Fei. “Careful that you don’t gain too much weight.”
“If I had a choice, I’d rather eat your cooking all day every day,” Jiang Cheng sighed. “Because that means you’d be with me.”
Gu Fei’s heart clenched. He was just about to change the subject when he heard someone calling for Jiang Cheng on the other end: “Jiang Cheng, we’re going to the library!”
“Again?” Jiang Cheng called back. “Didn’t we already go today?”
The guy said something else that Gu Fei couldn’t make out, but Jiang Cheng sounded reluctant. “You guys go ahead. I’m on the phone…”
“You should go, Cheng-ge,” said Gu Fei.
“I don’t really wanna,” Jiang Cheng said quietly. “But they said they’re going straight to dinner after studying.”
“Go,” Gu Fei urged him. “You’ve only just met. It’s good to do things as a group. You can head off on your own later when you’ve become more acquainted—that way they won’t think you’re a loner.”
“…Okay.”
Gu Fei didn’t want to hang up, but he did it anyway.
He spent a while lying there on the bed before he managed to surface from the depths of missing Jiang Cheng. He got out of bed and walked to the window, where he stood with a lit cigarette between his lips.
That’d probably been Zhao Ke calling for Jiang Cheng. The two of them had gone to the library this morning. Jiang Cheng had reported it to him.
This dorm room full of overachievers had set the library as the location of their first group outing on their second day there. Gu Fei smiled to himself. This was the “something else” that he couldn’t quite bring himself to face head-on.
From now on, everyone who appeared by Jiang Cheng’s side would be an overachiever like him, every one of them just as exceptional.
That was the crowd he belonged with. Those people, who belonged to a different world from the people of the Steelworks, were his kind.
Gu Fei had felt it when he first saw Zhao Ke.
The guy didn’t even need to say anything in particular.
Just standing there and greeting them had been enough to clearly demonstrate the contrast between him and the unique local products of the Steelworks.
Gu Fei had felt the same thing when he’d first laid eyes on Jiang Cheng.
Even if he hadn’t initially connected Jiang Cheng to the term “overachiever,” even if Jiang Cheng wasn’t a good student in the conventional sense, he could still tell with a single glance that Jiang Cheng came from an entirely different world.
He might be “the one and only Gu Fei,” whom Jiang Cheng had picked out from a place like this, but how much appeal would this uniqueness hold in that world—the world where Jiang Cheng actually belonged? And for how much longer…?
Have you considered…getting a boyfriend?
The sense of unease and bewilderment he had felt when Jiang Cheng first asked him this question had returned.