The Scorching Sun - 60
Fang Zhuo turned around and sat down with her back against the cold door.
The motion-sensor lights in the hallway dimmed, only the last traces of sunlight filtering in through the window.
Fang Zhuo took out her phone and called Yan Lie.
The familiar ringing went on for a long while before the call finally returned a busy signal.
She switched to another number and called Wei Xi.
Wei Xi didn't pick up either.
Then she called Shen Musi.
She had no idea what the others were busy with. In the end, every attempt to reach them dissolved into a string of unanswered calls.
Fang Zhuo sighed. Looking down at her phone, which had only twenty percent battery left, she felt strangely dazed.
She thought she'd made a mistake. Not by coming to C City, but by getting on the wrong bus, miscalculating the time, misjudging how things would unfold, and turning the whole situation into a complete mess.
She simply wasn't built for unexpected turns. Although, she had come to the same conclusion after her last impulsive decision.
Sitting on the floor, Fang Zhuo picked up the cake box and examined it from side to side. She straightened the ribbon, then carefully set it back down.
Every so often, the elevator rose or descended, followed by the sound of doors opening somewhere above or below.
Fang Zhuo simply sat there, stiff and listless, waiting until the time reached nine-thirty. When she checked again, her phone had dropped to fifteen percent. If she didn't head back soon, she might not even have enough battery left to navigate her way back to A City. The steadily dwindling battery made her deeply uneasy.
Fang Zhuo stood up with the cake in her hands and finally sent Yan Lie one last text.
Fang Zhuo: I ordered you a cake from a local same-day delivery service. You can eat it with Zhao Jiayou and the others. I couldn't get through to you, so I had them leave it with the security guard.
Fang Zhuo: You still have to eat cake on your birthday, right?
She'd hardly ever celebrated her birthday. As far as she knew, cake was the one thing that carried any real meaning as a symbol of the occasion.
The KTV's multicolored lights made everything swim before Yan Lie's eyes. Everything within sight seemed to have acquired a hazy halo.
His phone had been buzzing with messages all day and was nearly out of battery. After sending Fang Zhuo his final message, he switched off his mobile data and slipped the phone into his pocket. He'd originally planned to go home and charge it, but under everyone's persistent urging, he'd come here for another round.
Wei Xi was battling it out with her roommates over the microphone, belting out folk songs at the top of her lungs, while Zhao Jiayou and the others had dragged Yan Lie over to a corner table for a game of cards.
Shen Musi grimaced. "This is unbearable. Can you turn up the original singer a little?"
"Then you'll lose your ears. Three twos!" Zhao Jiayou said.
"When did it become your turn to play? Take it back!" Shen Mnsi snapped. "No one's even taken my three kings from just now!"
Zhao Jiayou played dumb. "What did you say? I can't hear you!"
Shen Musi covered her ears and shouted, "Wei Xi, change the song! This one is seriously awful!"
And yet, somehow, Wei Xi's caterwauling sounded like she'd just won one of the top three spots in the KTV's hourly karaoke competition. Before long, a complimentary fruit platter arrived, prompting Shen Musi to lament that there was truly no hope left for the world.
Wei Xi laughed smugly. "You straight guys just don't know how to appreciate art!"
Zhao Jiayou muttered under his breath, "If someone can sound that awful while actually staying on key, then she's genuinely awful."
"You never should've invited them." Shen Musi slumped over. "If I spend too much time around girls like them, I feel like I'll never date anyone in my entire life."
Zhao Jiayou took advantage of the distraction to play another card, still finding time to run his mouth. "Yan Lie hasn't said anything. What are you worried about?"
"He has a girlfriend. Of course he doesn't have to worry."
Yan Lie had been listening absentmindedly, his mind somewhere far away. At those words, his eyelid twitched. He lifted his eyes and looked at the person across from him.
Zhao Jiayou perked up instantly. His gaze darted between the two of them twice before he asked, "Who?"
"Fang Zhuo." Shen Musi stared at him in disbelief. "Your dad, remember? Did you forget your own roots?"
Zhao Jiayou lunged at him and shoved him down onto the sofa, laughing as he cursed, "Damn you!"
After the two of them wrestled around for a while, Zhao Jiayou climbed back up and asked, "Lie Lie, are you really together with Fang Zhuo? Then why didn't she come for your birthday? Since when? You didn't even tell me!"
He finished by punching Yan Lie lightly on the shoulder. When he noticed Yan Lie's strange reaction, he sensed something was off and studied him more closely.
When it came to figuring out what their brothers were thinking, guys seemed to possess a peculiar and remarkably sharp intuition of their own. Much like the sixth sense girls were said to have, two supposedly unrelated straight lines always found a way to intersect.
He remembered how Yan Lie had always been perfunctory and low-key about his birthdays. This was the first time he'd actually taken the initiative to arrange an outing with them. He'd even organized their accommodation and meals in advance and deliberately invited female friends, practically covering all their expenses.
It had been his own itinerary, yet he'd spent the entire time staring at his phone, looking uninterested.
"No." Sure enough, Yan Lie lowered his head. "We're not."
That unmistakable little look of disappointment and regret instantly filled Zhao Jiayou with sympathy. He grabbed Yan Lie and said, "Don't be sad. I bet it's because you're too straight and too subtle. Fang Zhuo just hasn't caught on."
Yan Lie: "??"
Zhao Jiayou said, "Dad'll order you a drink. Get some liquid courage and call her. Just tell her, 'I've fallen for you. I'm really upset that you didn't come. I planned this whole birthday trip for you.' And whatever you do, don't be like Lei Feng when you're dating. You can do a hundred good things, but if you never say anything, how's she supposed to know? You don't exactly have a little notebook you can casually hand her and let her discover everything you've done."
Yan Lie shoved him away. This guy was absolutely a stumbling block on his journey through life. He grabbed Shen Musi and said, "See? Spend too much time with him and you really might never date anyone in your life."
"Exactly! You guys are all way too repressed! Wait for me!"
Love guru Zhao Jiayou got impatient with how long the ordering was taking and ran straight out to ask the server for two bottles of beer.
Yan Lie remembered the rice wine he'd drunk at Fang Zhuo's house during the New Year. It had been the first time he'd discovered that alcohol could carry such a beguiling fragrance, its sweetness mingling with the sting of liquor as it coursed through his stomach, leaving him with the strange sensation that the blood in his entire body was about to evaporate.
So when Zhao Jiayou poured him a drink and declared that it was meant to give him courage, he didn't refuse.
Wei Xi glanced over and laughed derisively into the microphone. "This beer is only eight percent. You'd need a whole case to get drunk. And you think it's going to give him courage? Want to mix it with some Sprite too?"
Zhao Jiayou immediately seized on the suggestion. "Exactly. I heard mixing drinks gets you drunk faster. Come on, Lie Lie. Have some cake too?"
Everyone else was having a great time, but Yan Lie found it all utterly tasteless. Watching them laugh and carry on, he found himself imagining the quiet sight of Fang Zhuo bent over her desk.
He thought the greatest use of alcohol was that it let people hypnotize themselves without restraint. But there was nothing he needed to hypnotize himself into believing.
He simply wasn't satisfied. He wanted too much, hoped he might once again be lucky enough to be favored by fate, yet didn't have the courage to accept another disappointment.
Look at him. He was perfectly lucid, yet he kept lingering in that ambiguous space between them.
Yan Lie set down his glass. "I'm heading back first. You've still got more than an hour left on the room. Take your time."
The laughter and conversation around him gradually fell silent. One after another, they looked up at him. Yan Lie tugged at the corner of his mouth, then walked past them without another word and left the room.
Zhao Jiayou smacked his lips and sighed. "Ah. This is the suffering of love."
The KTV was fairly close to the house Yan Lie had borrowed. He walked beneath the streetlights for a while as the windblown sand caught in his eye.
He raised a hand and rubbed it. When he opened his eyes again, through the misty blur of his vision, he caught sight of a vaguely familiar figure from behind.
Yan Lie stared at the figure ahead. He watched her hitch her shoulder strap, slip her hand into her pocket, tilt her head up to glance at the moon, then continue strolling along the sidewalk as casually as though she had nowhere in particular to be.
Her clothes, her movements, the way she walked, even the backpack on her back. Despite being unable to see her clearly beneath the streetlights, every detail looked exactly like Fang Zhuo.
The world around Yan Lie suddenly fell quiet, so quiet that the entire street seemed to contain nothing but that silent, unhurried figure. Then, all at once, countless strange images burst into his mind, accompanied by the sound of someone reading aloud. They exploded one after another like firecrackers, noisy and chaotic, leaving little sparks scattered through his thoughts.
Yan Lie pulled his phone from his pocket.
The battery had fallen below five percent. At the top of the screen were missed calls and unread messages from Fang Zhuo.
He swiped his finger across the screen and called her number back.
The pedestrian ahead lowered her head to check her phone. As she raised it to her ear, a familiar "Hello" came through his speaker at exactly the same moment.
At 9:41 p.m., Yan Lie's sense of time officially began counting down again.
An uncontrollable smile spread across his face. Even the wind behind him seemed to be pushing him forward.
"Where are you right now?"
Fang Zhuo asked, a little slow on the uptake, "Where do you think I should be?"
Before she could add, "Obviously, at home," Yan Lie answered first.
"I think you should be thinking about me."
The figure beneath the streetlight stopped. Then, in a completely even and serious voice, she asked, "Is something wrong with your brain?"
Yan Lie's voice carried clearly through the stillness of the night, threaded with a faint smile. "Is thinking too much considered an illness?"
Fang Zhuo answered slowly, "What do you even have to think so much about? Aren't you on vacation?"
"You." Yan Lie said, "You take up too much space. The moment I start thinking about you, my whole system crashes."
Fang Zhuo fell silent. Two seconds later, she said, "Then clear it."
"No!" Yan Lie lowered his voice. Through the phone, it sounded almost as though he were speaking directly beside her ear. "You're the startup program I can't get around."
Fang Zhuo pulled the phone away and wondered if this was some new kind of scam. But the number and the voice were both unmistakably his.
The person on the other end continued.
"Do you know why I came to the seaside for my birthday? It was to invite you."
"I was really sad when you didn't come. It felt like the new year of my life had begun on a day that meant nothing."
Fang Zhuo heard him, but had no idea how to respond. Watching the call timer continue ticking upward, the only thought that came to her was the wildly inappropriate phrase, "Silence is golden."
She said, "...It costs twenty cents a minute to make a call."
The line immediately went dead.
Fang Zhuo opened her QQ app, intending to send him a reply about how her phone was almost out of battery. Then she heard a flurry of footsteps behind her, light and quick, accompanied by short breaths, drawing closer and closer.
The moment Fang Zhuo turned around, she was swept into a warm embrace.
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