The air recirculated in the cabin felt almost toxic, as if designed to send passengers into an automatic slumber.

Xie Lan fell asleep shortly after takeoff, his head resting on the tray table. He slept deeply and fitfully, never once opening his eyes when the flight attendants distributed breakfast. The constant, massive roar of the engines filled his ears, dragging his dreams down into a heavy swirl. At one point, in a state between sleep and wakefulness, he genuinely felt like he was on the plane heading back to London.

In his dream, he immediately became unhappy, instinctively clutching the backpack tucked under his forehead. He began mentally plotting how he would escape Xie Jingming’s clutches next time.

It wasn’t until the massive jolt of the plane landing snapped him awake. He lifted his head sharply, hearing a chorus of notification pings from phones all around him. He sat in a daze for a few seconds, yanking himself out of the dream, and reached for the phone in his pocket.

The moment signal returned, a string of messages from Dou Sheng crashed in, all of them voice notes. Xie Lan hurriedly put on his earphones and listened through them in order.

“I overslept, I’m so sorry, so sorry. There were several emergencies in the ward next door in the middle of the night, and my mom and I both had insomnia. We didn’t fall asleep until past three.”

“You’ve probably taken off by now. Sleep well on the plane, little Xie Lan.”

“We’re about to start breakfast. My mom needs an intramuscular injection later, and then they’ll check her blood counts. If there are no major issues, we plan to head home for quiet recovery. Otherwise, forget her liver, even her blood pressure won’t stabilize… Oh, I shouldn’t say it like that. When the doctor suggested it yesterday, the comprehensive chemistry panel wasn’t out yet. Other underlying conditions haven’t been ruled out.”

“My mom and I talked some more in the middle of the night, and… cough, my mom’s calling me. Talk soon; you’ll probably be off the plane by then.”

Then there was a gap of several hours, until a message from forty minutes ago. Dou Sheng’s tone this time was very unpleasant.

“Xie Lan, what’s the situation? Why is the violin in my room? And you took Auntie Xiao’s diary? What do you mean by this?”

“I just came clean with my mom, and she agreed to let me accompany you for the exam. You just wait for me.”

The tone was full of implied threat.

Xie Lan froze. The people around him began to stand up and line up to disembark. He sat in his seat, dazed for a long time, before sending a voice note back.

“What do you mean? What is Auntie Zhao’s attitude?”

A few seconds after the message sent, Dou Sheng replied.

“I’m almost at the high-speed rail station. We’ll talk tonight.”

“My mom doesn’t have much of an ‘attitude,’ but you are dead meat, Student Xie Lan.”

“?”

Xie Lan sent another voice note: “What do you mean dead meat? What did I do?”

He clutched his phone and seized an opening to join the line, following the crowd off the plane, through the jet bridge, and into the spacious airport. Just as he was following the throng toward the arrivals hall, Dou Sheng called.

“Damn it, what the hell did you mean by putting your violin at the head of my bed? Your mom’s diary is gone too. What were you trying to do? Go to the exam and never come back? A silent departure? I couldn’t tell, Young Hero; usually you act all cool and detached, but at the critical moment you start acting out a ‘Kǔqíngxì,’ don’t you? My mom hadn’t even given a final word yet, and you were already planning to run for it?”

A barrage of “your mom’s” (curses) flew through the phone.

Xie Lan felt a wave of disorientation, unsure if the familiar airport was causing a sense of time-space distortion or if Dou Sheng was just talking too fast. Regardless, he had that long-lost feeling of being unable to keep up with Dou Sheng’s speech.

He frowned, processing for a long time before catching an unfamiliar term. “What is a Kǔqíngxì?”

“Is there any point in asking that? You were going to run away!” Dou Sheng’s voice suppressed a fire. He had never been truly angry with Xie Lan before. He was gnashing his teeth while simultaneously, helplessly, holding back his temper amid the noisy crowd. “I’ve entered the station. Just you wait!”

Xie Lan was baffled.

“Run away?” He countered Dou Sheng’s frantic anger with a tone of utter innocence. “What would I be running from? I’m here for an exam; didn’t you know that?”

As the words left his mouth, before Dou Sheng could even answer, his brain finally connected to the other keywords in that long tirade.

Xie Lan stood there, jaw dropped and speechless. After a long while, he glanced at the nearby passersby and lowered his voice. “I left my violin to stay with you… I was afraid Auntie Zhao would be furious. Since I wasn’t home, you’d have to face the ‘heaven-shattering… heaven-shattering tsunami’ alone. Anyway… oh, also, I actually put Wutong in your room too. Did he run away?”

The other end of the line went silent instantly.

Xie Lan sighed, and after sighing, he suddenly found it a bit funny.

The capital city also had blue skies and white clouds, and the wind was gentler than in H-City. He followed the crowd to line up for a taxi. “So what did Auntie Zhao say? Why did she suddenly agree to let you come?”

“It wasn’t exactly ‘suddenly,’ sigh.” Dou Sheng breathed a sigh of relief, muttering, “Let me catch my breath first. When I got home and saw that violin, my blood pressure spiked. I almost died right there. Let me recover first.”

“Okay.” Xie Lan pulled his heavy backpack higher on his shoulder and couldn’t help but add, “But you should use your brain. The violin… well… if I were going back to London, whether I was coming back or not, I would never leave it for you. I can’t be without it.”

Dou Sheng: “…Thanks. I feel so comforted.”

Xie Lan followed with a blunt silence. A moment later, he suddenly heard a low chuckle from Dou Sheng on the other end of the line.

When Dou Sheng laughed, he laughed too, without knowing why. Even though he still didn’t know Auntie Zhao’s reaction, perhaps it was just hearing his boyfriend’s voice, or perhaps the weather in B-City was truly that good—when the sun is out, it’s hard to stay too sad.

Xie Lan tucked his phone into his pocket, listening to the announcements from the high-speed rail station through his earphones. Neither of them spoke.

After a long while, it was Xie Lan’s turn for a taxi. He got in and said, “T-University, Northwest Gate.”

The driver looked at him in the rearview mirror. “Top student, eh? Returning to campus?”

“No, an exam,” Xie Lan said, a bit embarrassed. “I’m not a T-University student.”

Dou Sheng said through the earphones, “Northwest Gate? Aren’t you going to check in?”

“No time.” Xie Lan scrolled through the messages He Xiu had sent. “I’m going straight to the written exam. I’ll check in after I’m done. He Xiu wants to grab dinner with me tonight.”

“Perfect, we’ll go together,” Dou Sheng said. “Tell the Senior to count me in. You’re testing in the Physics and Math Building, right?”

Xie Lan hummed. “By the time you get here, I’ll be finished. I’ll send you the restaurant’s location then.”

“That works,” Dou Sheng said.

The car was already moving. The airport expressway in B-City was beautiful, lined with vast patches of small flowers. The light purple petals hung delicately, and the dots of bright yellow stamens were full of life. He rolled down the window; a burst of fragrance wafted in with the wind.

Xie Lan described the flowers in a low voice to Dou Sheng. Dou Sheng laughed after hearing it. “I know those. I think they’re called Èryuèlán (Orychophragmus violaceus). I used to think the name was a bit rustic, but maybe because you came back to China in February (Èryuè), I don’t think it’s rustic anymore. It feels… I can’t say it, but it just feels different in my heart.”

Xie Lan gave a low “um” against the wind.

After a few minutes, Dou Sheng’s end grew quiet; he had presumably boarded the train.

Only then did he speak in a low voice: “My mom grilled me all day yesterday. She had actually suspected it a few times before, but thought it was unlikely. Seeing it like that yesterday nearly scared her to death. At first, she was extremely unhappy, saying I was selfish and irresponsible. She thought you were probably naive and had been led astray by me. Basically, a whole round of blaming me and blaming herself, feeling like she had failed your mother.”

Xie Lan was stunned. “Auntie Zhao thought that?”

“Yeah, basically she just feels her own son is absurd. Typical her.” Dou Sheng sighed, sounding a bit speechless.

Across hundreds of kilometers, Xie Lan could almost see him curling his lip in dismissive nonchalance.

Xie Lan followed up immediately, “And then?”

“And then…” Dou Sheng hesitated for a moment. “The hospital was very noisy yesterday. Someone in the next ward was about to pass away, and there was a family dispute in the same room. Anyway, we couldn’t sleep. I told her about watching your videos when I was a kid. Well… I exaggerated a bit. Basically made myself sound quite tragic. My mom felt sorry for me, and only then was she willing to listen to the whole story of how we got together. But let me tell you, all that was talk—in the end, I had to rely on a little lie to temporarily stabilize her.”

Xie Lan’s heart tightened. “What little lie? At a time like this, you’re still lying?”

Mentioning this, Dou Sheng suddenly sounded hesitant.

“Tell me.” Xie Lan was dying of anxiety, wishing he could teleport back to H-City and shake his boyfriend by the neck.

Dou Sheng wrestled with it for a moment, then sighed. “After our heart-to-heart yesterday, I felt my mom actually can accept it; she’s not closed-minded. But she’s afraid we have no idea what we want and are just messing around, wasting our lives. She’s especially afraid I’ve ‘corrupted’ you, since you’re so innocent… Basically, her psychological pressure is massive, you understand?”

Xie Lan nodded repeatedly. “Um, um.”

“So the key to this matter was making her understand that regardless of whether we are together, our sexual orientation is just like this. It’s not a whim. Even if we break up, neither of us will suddenly start liking girls.” Dou Sheng paused. “But that’s a hard thing to convince someone of. You know, it’s easy to prove something exists but hard to prove it won’t change. So I was a bit… direct.”

“Just say it!” Xie Lan couldn’t take it anymore. “Saying all this to a half-Brit with ‘trash’ Chinese—are you asking me to do a reading comprehension test?”

As he threw the words out, he caught the driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror, coughed, and shrank back into his seat. “Just say it,” he whispered into the phone. “Please. Just say it.”

Dou Sheng cleared his throat forcefully.

“I had no choice but to tell my mom that, well…”

Xie Lan was confused to his core. He couldn’t imagine anything in the world that would make Dou Sheng hesitate like this.

After a long while, Dou Sheng finally said, “My mom was pressing me so hard, and I couldn’t think of a better story. I had to say… that I’ve always liked guys, and I was with a certain someone for several years. Then, after you came back to the country… ah, you liked him too. Remember when things were a bit unpleasant between us at the start because of my ‘cousin’? I told my mom it was because of that ‘certain someone’ that we were jealous. Later, we fought until we became friends, and eventually we just ditched that ‘certain someone’ and got together.”

“?”

Xie Lan was stunned. This was more convoluted than the trickiest problem Old Ma had ever assigned.

He was speechless for a long time, ignoring the driver’s weird looks. “Wait! I don’t understand. How many people are in this story?”

“Let’s say four, or three is fine too. Basically, it’s me, the current you, the ‘S’ from the past, and a placeholder… let’s call him ‘A’.” Dou Sheng patiently laid it out. “I was with A for six years. I admired ‘S’ from the foreign internet for four years. When you first came back, you liked A, and we had a lot of friction over it. But one day, I suddenly discovered you are S. So I dumped A and started liking you instead. I pursued you, and after you were moved by me, you stopped liking A too. Thus, we are together.”

Listening to the phone, Xie Lan’s IQ had officially left the building. Along with it went his calm; his SAN (sanity) value was plummeting.

Dou Sheng hesitated. “Do you get it? Actually, this story is very consistent with the truth. The only change is adding an instrumental variable, A. If you take A away, isn’t it exactly how things really are? Hey, saying it like that, I feel like I didn’t really lie. Sometimes you need instrumental variables in research. Anyway…”

“Wait, wait, wait!” Xie Lan didn’t fully understand, but he was deeply shocked. “So who is A? Together for six years… you can even make that up? Would Auntie Zhao believe it?”

“She… can.” Dou Sheng paused. “I told her it was Dai You.”

“?”

Dou Sheng fell silent for a long time. “It’s very logical. Dai You is the smartest one. I didn’t even have time to coordinate with him, and my mom called him on the spot to ask. He actually only hesitated for a split second.”

Xie Lan’s heart clenched. “What did he say?”

“He said…” Dou Sheng sighed. “He said over the speakerphone to me: ‘Holy crap, it’s been over for so long, why are you still tattling to your mom?'”

A long, awkward silence fell over both ends of the line.

After a long time, Dou Sheng let out a sigh.

“I’m really a piece of work,” he sighed. “But it was the only way to make my mom understand our current situation quickly. When she’s recovered and her mood is stable, I’ll definitely get on my knees and clarify everything to apologize.”