Starlight Descends - 73
Midsummer
"..."
Still silence.
Yu Jiashu didn't speak for a moment. The two of them stayed frozen in that position.
The car was so quiet you could hear someone in the distance parking their car and humming a tune.
It was one of those ridiculously catchy pop songs, I'm the Queen.
Badly out of tune, too.
Only after what felt like forever did Yu Jiashu slowly sit back up. His fingers rubbed lightly over her wrist twice before he settled into the driver's seat again, one elbow propped against the open window.
"You didn't even unlock it. That's a false accusation."
His face gave nothing away. Within seconds, he'd already returned to his usual calm, unshakable composure.
"You're slandering me," he added.
"..."
Still trying to deny it.
Qi Yao handed his phone back and tugged at the corner of her lips. "Stop pretending."
"No normal person goes around posting in super topics with a default username, and then has a repost history that's entirely about me."
After a two-second pause, she added, "And fanfiction about the two of us."
"..."
Yu Jiashu fell silent for a while, seeming reluctantly admitting she had a point.
There was no pretending anymore. He twirled the car key once around his index finger, then offered a carefully worded confession.
"I never read them. I just reposted them without looking."
"..."
That somehow sounded even guiltier.
Deciding to spare his dignity, Qi Yao looked out the window and let out a slow, drawn-out, "Mm."
They lapsed into silence again.
After another long pause, they both cautiously turned their heads, stealing a glance at each other. Their eyes met. Two seconds later, they silently reached for their doors in perfect sync, stepped out of the car, and headed toward the elevator.
Awkward as it was, the familiar habits of being a couple came naturally. Yu Jiashu slipped an arm around her waist, guiding her forward. Qi Yao didn't even bother watching where she was going. Hidden beneath the brim of her cap, her lowered lashes framed eyes fixed absentmindedly on the white parking lines beneath their feet.
His arm rested around her waist with casual confidence. Even through the fabric of their clothes, she could feel the faint tension in the muscles of his forearm. It was steady, reassuring, and impossibly safe.
She lifted her lashes ever so slightly to look at him.
His profile was still as handsome as ever. A straight nose, defined brow bone, and a sharp jawline.
Exactly the same as it had been all those years ago.
...
What kind of tragic ship was this? The real deal was standing right in front of everyone, and nobody dared believe it.
Back then, she and Gu Heng hadn't had anything between them, yet fans had managed to spin an entire romance out of thin air.
They'd analyzed matching outfits, Photoshopped pictures together, turning the simplest Weibo interactions into hundreds of pieces of "proof." But now that the relationship was real, the couple themselves practically had to spoon-feed everyone the evidence.
The more she thought about it, the more pitiful it seemed.
Qi Yao let out a quiet breath and pressed her lips together.
Just before stepping into the elevator, she took out her phone and tapped the screen a couple of times with her slender fingers.
Looking at the "Settings updated successfully" confirmation, she paused for two seconds, then exited the settings page and slipped the phone back into her pocket.
She'd already made up her mind. Whether the truth slipped out sooner or later hardly mattered anymore.
Every move a public figure made lived under the public eye. When there was a hot topic, media outlets piled on endless promotional articles. When there wasn't any, they'd manufacture one. Qi Yao was at the height of her popularity now, commanding staggering traffic online. Even her private account was no exception. It wasn't long after she changed the settings before people noticed.
[Holy shit! wifey opened the permissions! Everything on her private account is visible now?!?!]
[OH MY GOD WHAT DAY IS TODAY??? IT'S NEW YEAR'S, I'M GOING TO LIKE EVERY SINGLE POST.]
[Was it even fully visible when she debuted? She loved posting back then. It always felt like she genuinely enjoyed sharing little pieces of her life.]
[Yeah... so what's happening now...?]
[There are only over two hundred-something posts. I scrolled all the way down. The earliest one's from 2014. Seriously, nobody's seen these before. I'm the first like.]
[I'm going to dig through the archives!!!]
[They're mostly little emotional snapshots. Quotes from books, beautiful sunsets, tiny thoughts scribbled down now and then.]
[But they're so relatable... Somehow every single one hits me right in the heart... Our Yao-mei is seriously the best.]
Ye Qingman was just getting ready for her lunch break when she saw the news while browsing online. Curious, she tapped into Qi Yao's private account.
Fans had already discovered it. Likes and comments were climbing by the minute as she scrolled all the way to the bottom.
The first post dated back to May 2014.
"Recording the beautiful moments in life."
"For me, though, eighty percent of them are you."
Her heart suddenly skipped a beat.
The subject of that sentence was so pointed, so unmistakable. Ye Qingman's fingertip hovered above the screen, her thoughts instinctively raced backward through the years.
Qi Yao was in the same graduating class as her. Back in May 2014, she would have been in her second year of high school.
Then again, even if she couldn't place the exact timeline, it didn't really matter.
Because over all those years, Qi Yao had probably only ever loved one person.
June 2014: "Even knowing he's not looking at me. Still, my heart races at every accidental glance we share, like I'm drowning."
August 2014: "At seventeen, I learned for the first time that a school uniform could hold the wind. An entire summer's worth of wind."
December 2014: "Happy birthday. May you always be safe and all your wishes come true."
January 2015: "I think I dreamed about you. You didn't even have to do anything. Just standing in the hallway looking at me somehow gave me the courage to keep facing everything."
March 2015: " There were two hundred and thirty-seven names between ours on the honor board."
June 2015: "I'm a coward."
July 2015: "Happy graduation. May your future be brilliant."
September 2015: "If I'd ever gotten to know you, I probably would've asked why you liked Beijing so much. The wind is so strong here, and even the clear skies look different from C City. Everything feels unfamiliar."
"It's a shame our paths no longer cross."
December 2015: "Happy New Year. Another year of only daring to wish you happiness here, where you'll never see it."
March 2016: "Heard the girls at the coffee shop talking about your name. It seems you really are someone who shines everywhere you go."
"..."
After that, the diary-like fragments stopped for almost an entire year.
That timeline coincide exactly when Ye Qingman first met her.
That was when Qi Yao was filming Midsummer in Beijing. She had thrown herself completely into the role, pouring those same emotions into the character instead. There was no longer any need to leave behind little diary entries from a young girl's secret heart.
Until June 2017, when Midsummer premiered.
Eight o'clock that evening, the exact time the drama officially went online.
She wrote: "This is for you."
"For the long, sunless, secret crush of my youth. The one who showed me that these feeling, too, deserve to be poetry."
Later on, the owner of this account gradually transformed from an ordinary girl into a public figure. Every slightly sensitive topic had to be weighed over and over before posting. The account became visible only to the past six months. Those scattered emotional fragments were no longer something she dared share.
The final unseen post was dated September 2017.
She wrote: "May I be the stars, and may you be the moon, shining upon one another through every night."
The accompanying photo was of the moon above Beijing.
A perfect Mid-Autumn moon from five years ago. Its pale, luminous glow seemed to travel across the years, falling upon her once again.
For the first time in her life, even someone as indifferent to poetry as Ye Qingman found herself recalling a verse about the moon.
"Those today see not the moon of old, yet this moon once shone on those of old."
The moon always becomes full again after it wanes.
Moonlight always finds its way back to brilliance.
A hard-earned happy ending.
She stared at those words for a very long time. For once, she had no interest in the surging discussions or the soaring online traffic.
All she felt was the overwhelming fulfillment of watching a dream, separated by years, finally come true. Emotion rose within her like the tide, impossible to suppress.
Qi Yao had been unbelievably brave.
Brave enough to lay bare her past self bare for others to see.
Brave enough to let the world see the sincere heart hidden beneath that beautiful exterior.
***
That evening, Yu Jiashu habitually clicked into the super topic, still not holding out much hope for any real activity.
Even a starving camel was still bigger than a horse. Her super topic with that cheating bastard still had ten times the daily check-ins theirs did.
Annoying.
Incredibly annoying.
Clicking his tongue, he lounged against the sofa, lazily tapping the screen. But as his gaze drifted across it, he suddenly froze.
"..."
It was... way too lively, it looked wrong.
After staring for a few seconds, expressionless and perfectly composed, he swiped out of the app and then clicked back in.
Must've opened the wrong one, he thought.
But after entering a second time, the page looked exactly the same.
Looking closer, it was the same super topic. And yet it wasn't.
The words "Yao Qian Shu" still blazed across the top.
Only now, the follower count had exploded tenfold. New sections had been added, edits and fan content flooded in nonstop, and the whole place buzzed with the energy of a holiday celebration.
Yu Jiashu: "...?"
He raised an eyebrow and continued scrolling.
Videos. Photos. Posters. Compilations of every hidden clue fans had painstakingly unearthed.
This time, nobody was doubting anymore.
Even a blogger who'd stopped updating a few days ago had returned to continue their serial, and the comment section below was a chorus of cheers.
Yu Jiashu quietly gave it a like too.
Qi Yao came out after her shower to find him sitting there, completely absorbed in his phone.
"I've noticed you've become kind of addicted to the internet lately. You never used to touch social media before."
Yu Jiashu lifted his eyes lazily. "That's because it wasn't interesting before."
As he spoke, his long fingers moved, loosely gripping the edge of the phone to turn off the screen and put it down. He stood up, plugged in the hair dryer, flipped the switch, then tested the distance and temperature against the back of his hand.
Qi Yao sat down in front of him with her legs drawn up, instructing him. "Remember to dry it from the roots upward."
Yu Jiashu looked down at her and hummed an acknowledgment, his tone lazy and drawn out. His voice was crisp and clean, with an air of careless arrogance, but the words that came out were anything but serious.
"As her highness commands."
Qi Yao paused for two seconds, pursed her lips, and said nothing else. She simply sat quietly and let him dry her hair.
Nearly ten minutes passed. Lulled drowsy by the warm air, with the loud roar of the dryer making conversation impossible, Qi Yao shifted slightly and grabbed her phone, planning to check how the public opinion situation was developing.
Their phones were identical.
The fingerprint scanner was so responsive that the screen unlocked before the lock-screen wallpaper even had time to appear.
What greeted her eyes was an image. White background, black text. It seemed to be a long screenshot that could be scrolled.
What was this?
Qi Yao frowned. She didn't remember opening any long image before taking her shower.
Leaning back bonelessly against the person behind her, she focused on reading it.
"..."
Silence.
Her fingers tightened around the edge of the phone.
A moment later, she quietly locked the screen again and carefully placed it back exactly where she'd found it.
The man behind her had his own thoughts occupying his mind. His gaze stayed lowered, and he noticed nothing.
It wasn't until Yu Jiashu cupped the back of her head, switched off the hair dryer, and set it on the table that he finally looked up and caught sight of her expression.
It was...
Difficult to describe.
A complex mix of speechlessness and the urge of wanting to say something but deciding against it.
Qi Yao glanced at him, hesitated for two seconds, then quickly looked away. She hugged the small bear plushie from the living room and scurried into the bedroom as though fleeing the scene.
Yu Jiashu: "..."
"?"
Before he could even process what had happened, he bent slightly to pick up his phone.
Just then, Qi Yao poked her head back out of the bedroom door, her eyes wandering anywhere but toward him as she spoke in a tiny voice.
"...Um."
She paused for several seconds, the rims of her ears flushing red, and finally forced herself to continue.
"I... don't like bondage."
Her voice was so soft it was almost inaudible.
"..."
After a brief pause, realization struck Yu Jiashu all at once.
So that was what the image he'd just painstakingly rotated and mirrored had been.
He slowly lowered his eyes and skimmed through the white-background-black-text on the screen.
"..."
This time, he really was innocent.
---
Comments
Post a Comment