January 25th, morning.

Swish!

The curtains of the apartment bedroom were yanked open in one swift motion, and the mid-morning sunlight tumbled in impatiently. Shi Linchuan stood with his back to the person kneeling on the bed, hearing him ask, “How are you feeling now? Do your eyes still hurt?”

Shi Linchuan: “…”

Dead memories were attacking him.

Last night had probably been his worst moment over these past few days. The long-lasting high fever had made him break out in a cold sweat all over. Not only was he dizzy and feverish, but his muscles were also sore—especially his eyes, where the burning sensation was exceptionally pronounced, as if they were going to catch fire the next second.

At that time, Xie Jinghe was wiping down his body for him.

The air conditioner was running in the bedroom, making it very warm.

The damp clothes on Shi Linchuan had been stripped completely bare by that man. Wrapped only in a quilt, he leaned against the headboard, allowing Xie Jinghe to wipe his back with a hot towel. When told to raise his arms, he raised them, and he even took the opportunity to wrap his arms around the man’s waist, burying his face in the crook of Xie Jinghe’s neck, complaining:

“My eyes hurt like crazy.”

Unexplainably, the tone of his speech had caught a bit of Xie Jinghe’s flavor.

Unbearably clingy.

Xie Jinghe hugged him back, pulling up the bedding piled around his waist. As he wiped him down, he responded, “Mm, then let’s go see a doctor, alright?”

Catching a certain word, Shi Linchuan subconsciously frowned. Feeling somewhat displeased, he opened his mouth and bit down on the side of the neck of the person in his arms, instantly leaving behind several teeth marks.

“No.”

“Hiss… be gentler…”

Now, probably all Shi Linchuan had to do was turn around to see the marks on that man’s slender neck on the bed, which would summon even more memories. Therefore, standing cleanly and dryly in front of the window, he silently gazed at the street view below.

The city was awake, operating in an orderly fashion.

The blue-tinted window glass was very clear, faintly reflecting Shi Linchuan’s face, as well as Xie Jinghe burrowing into the quilt behind him. His movements were very sluggish; lying face down on the pillow, the quilt was pulled up very high, exposing only his head.

Right at that moment.

He heard Xie Jinghe’s sleepy voice again, nagging incessantly, “Fortunately, when I took your temperature at dawn, the reading had already dropped… You really almost scared me to death. Clearly Dodan is much colder than Tongcity, so how could you get so terribly sick?”

“You were completely out of it.”

Shi Linchuan had the same question.

He considered himself to have a strong constitution; minor ailments like colds and fevers rarely came knocking. Even if he occasionally caught something, taking some medicine and having a good night’s sleep at most was all it took for him to fully recover the next day, hardly affecting his upcoming schedule.

Right on cue, his gaze swept past the corner of the balcony outside the window.

Day and night had alternated back and forth. After several days, multiple cigarette butts were still piled up there, not yet swept away. Shi Linchuan replied offhandedly, “Maybe because…”

“Smoking is bad for health.”

When he turned his head back, he saw that the man’s eyelids seemed to weigh a thousand pounds. After blinking a few times with great difficulty, they closed for a long time, shadows hiding in his deep eye sockets as he slipped into a sweet dream together.

Xie Jinghe had fallen asleep.

Shi Linchuan watched him for a long while before walking over.

Under the other’s overnight care, his fever had successfully broken. At this moment, his eyes and throat were no longer in serious trouble, though his body was still somewhat sore and weak, and his nasal passages felt uncomfortable.

He wanted to sneeze.

However, Shi Linchuan forcibly suppressed this itch that erupted from who knows whether his nasal cavity or chest cavity. He casually hiked up his trouser legs and slowly squatted down by the bed, his gaze involuntarily landing on that rather obvious shade of lavender-purple beneath Xie Jinghe’s eyes.

Right at this moment.

A cell phone ringtone suddenly rang in the room.

It was Xie Jinghe’s default incoming call ringtone.

The owner of the phone had just fallen asleep not long ago, and the noise instantly threw his breathing out of rhythm. The corners of his brows twitched uncomfortably a few times, looking as if he were about to wake up. Fortunately, Shi Linchuan was quick-eyed and agile, immediately snatching the phone vibrating and ringing by the pillow.

The screen displayed the caller’s name.

Le Yan.

Shi Linchuan’s thumb slid across the green button.

The call connected.

He stood up and walked toward the bathroom, lowering his voice as he answered,

“Hello?”

Le Yan on the other end of the line was stunned for only a second before quickly reacting, “Brother Shi? I heard from Brother Xie last night that you were sick. He left in a huge hurry, saying he was going to find you…”

“Mm,” Shi Linchuan stood by the bathroom door, turning his head to glance back, “He’s right here with me now.”

“Because he didn’t reply to my WeChat all night, I thought he ran into some kind of accident,” Le Yan let out an obvious sigh of relief. “Could you let Brother Xie answer the phone?”

Shi Linchuan replied, “He just fell asleep. It’s not very convenient.”

Just as the words left his mouth.

The other end of the line fell into a abrupt silence.

Le Yan uttered a meek “oh.”

Over the past three years, due to having Xie Jinghe as an intermediary bridge, Le Yan had met Shi Linchuan quite a few times. However, their relationship was neither warm nor cold—especially when she had stumbled upon the surveillance software on Brother Xie’s phone by accident…

Afterward, Xie Jinghe chose to gloss over the peace.

Le Yan didn’t approve of this, yet she had no standing to object. It was just that her impression of the man dropped to rock bottom. She always felt his refined elegance was merely a surface disguise, and who knew how cold and hard the heart hidden inside truly was—he didn’t seem like a good person at all.

Yet Xie Jinghe was deeply mired in the net of love, his filter comparable to a city wall.

Boundlessly thick.

Previously, Le Yan really thought that way.

Until the two began filming the divorce variety show. Only then did Le Yan deeply appreciate the weight of that sentence her Brother Xie often kept on his lips: “You have no idea how good he is to me.” She couldn’t help but feel embarrassed by her earlier thoughts of persuading them to separate.

Now that the two were truly divorced, the internet had exploded as well.

Xie Jinghe’s own performance made people worry even more.

Considering this point, Le Yan suddenly remembered her original intention for calling. Thinking it was the same to ask the person on the other end of the line, she spoke up:

“Um, Brother Shi, have you looked at the trending searches? Someone bought water armies overnight to throw mud at Brother Xie, pretending to be an acquaintance blowing the whistle, saying it was because he was caught cheating by you that you firmly insisted on divorcing him…”

“It sounds like a real story, and public opinion is fermenting very fast.”

Shi Linchuan hadn’t touched his phone last night, so naturally, he didn’t know about this.

“Have you contacted Pei Yue?”

Le Yan answered repeatedly, “As soon as the news broke, I called President Pei.”

Shi Linchuan hummed in response.

“It’s no big deal, she’ll handle it properly.”

After a pause of two seconds.

Le Yan couldn’t resist asking softly, “Brother Shi, then what are you and Brother Xie right now?”

After those words, Xie Jinghe’s phone happened to flash a low battery warning, leaving only a thin sliver of life. Listening to the system pop-up beep sounds, Shi Linchuan replied casually,

“Nothing at all.”

In the next second.

The call was hung up as the phone screen went dark.

Le Yan leaned against the doorframe, his thumb casually sliding a pattern on the screen. The phone unlocked accordingly, and the home screen popped up—it was a photo set as the wallpaper.

There was no human face in the photo.

The night was dim, and two black shadows standing side by side on the ground were stretched long by the lights, with only their heads touching together. One could vaguely see that they were kissing passionately, the atmosphere exceptionally ambiguous. In the background bushes, a pair of glowing animal eyes flashed.

A stray cat was looking over.

A very ambiguous, casually taken photograph.

Because after that, he and Xie Jinghe returned home and went straight to messing around until the east turned faintly bright. That person’s cat-like sounds rang in Shi Linchuan’s ears for half the night until the morning star fell from the horizon. Embracing Xie Jinghe from behind, he kissed the man’s hot, sweat-covered rear shoulder.

The two had fallen together with the morning star.

The window happened to face the courtyard downstairs.

The courtyard full of flowers was still asleep.

The calico stray cat crouched on the wall, still looking over.

Xie Jinghe’s forehead pressed against the window pane. His breathing was rapid, hot breath puffing onto the glass bit by bit, frozen into a small patch of faint white mist by the cold morning air, its covered area expanding and contracting with his breathing.

He himself was the same.

Shi Linchuan closed his eyes to enjoy the lingering tail notes, like a slow jazz tune.

When he opened his eyes, he saw Xie Jinghe holding the forearm Shi Linchuan had clamped across his chest with one hand, while raising his other hand to draw a crooked heart on that thin mist with his index finger. Afterwards, when he turned his head to smile at him, a patch of red showed on the center of his forehead.

So, Shi Linchuan thought countless times:

No wonder.

No wonder people kept jumping into the deep pit named ‘love’ one after another, refusing to give up even if they battered themselves until they were dripping with blood. Because this thing called love…

It really was addictive.

Xie Jinghe had gotten him addicted to love—how truly detestable.

“…”

Shi Linchuan retracted his thoughts that had gone all tangled up because of a single phone wallpaper photo, discovering that his thumb seemed to have a mind of its own. It directly opened the WeChat interface and tapped the pinned avatar that looked very familiar.

It was his own WeChat avatar.

The latest message was a dialog box beside his avatar, showing a call duration inside—nearly an hour and a half. But Shi Linchuan no longer had the composure to pay attention to that point; his gaze was firmly locked onto Xie Jinghe’s text input box.

Lying inside the box was an unsent message.

My leg hurts.

Can you come back to see me?

A few breaths later, the phone battery ran completely dry and suddenly went black.

It powered off.

The screen reflected Shi Linchuan’s face.

The man lowered his eyes, his cold, aloof facial features very defined, like a 3D model. His eyes were narrow and long, and the half-lidded expression made him look quite detached from desires, as if nothing in the world could enter his eyes, his heart as calm as a deep, still pond.

After a long while.

Shi Linchuan silently tilted his neck back, the back of his head resting against the doorframe, a faint sigh dissipating softly into the air. Meanwhile, a few meters away on the bed, Xie Jinghe was sleeping deeply. Perhaps due to the excessive fatigue over recent days, he even let out soft little snores…

Intermittent and restless, making it hard for one’s heart to settle.

What was going on?

Xie Jinghe sat dazedly on the bed, not knowing why the sky outside had gone dark the moment he opened and closed his eyes. He was the only one left in the room.

The setting sun streaming through the window painted him entirely red.

Before that round sun was completely hidden by the distant skyscrapers, Xie Jinghe abruptly yanked off the quilt and ran barefoot into the living room, as if afraid the night beasts would bite off his feet.

The bedroom door was unlocked and swung open with a light pull.

Unlike the dim tones inside the bedroom, the living room connected to the kitchen, where the lights were exceptionally bright, driving every crouching shadow beast into the far corners. The man was standing in the kitchen, sleeves pushed up to his elbows, holding a ladle in his hand.

The rice porridge had boiled until smooth and creamy, a warm, rich fragrance wafting everywhere.

Unable to wait a second longer, Xie Jinghe hurried over, gently wrapping his arms around the man’s waist while pressing his face against the other’s rear shoulder, subconsciously letting out a breath.

Shi Linchuan had heard the movement long ago and wasn’t startled by the pair of hands surging from behind. He set down the ladle, and as he lowered his eyes, his peripheral vision caught the bare feet of the person behind him, “Xie Jinghe, the floor hasn’t been swept in a long time. Aren’t you disgusted by how dirty it is?”

“It’s fine, I don’t mind the dirt.”

Shi Linchuan couldn’t help letting out a soft huff,

“I mind.”