Jiang Ruotang still remembered the first time he met Lu Wei—those round, bright eyes full of expectation and the desire to be acknowledged. She had been so small he could easily lift her with one arm. In the blink of an eye, ten years had passed, and the once-shy little girl had now grown into a graceful young lady.

Her dance class had just ended when Jiang Ruotang’s car was already parked downstairs, waiting to take her home.

Xiaowei exited the elevator chatting with her friends, her face lit up with carefree happiness. Watching from the car window, Jiang Ruotang was struck with a sudden pang of emotion—a daughter of my house has grown up. Then he quickly scolded himself—he was only fourteen years older than Xiaowei after all.

“Xiaowei, the one picking you up today is your Brother Ruotang. Wow, he’s so handsome!”

“Your big brother won’t introduce us to anyone, and now even Brother Ruotang is off-limits?”

Lu Wei smugly raised her chin. “Of course not—Brother Ruotang is ours.”

“So stingy—!”

Grinning mischievously, Lu Wei waved goodbye to her friends and opened the back door of the car to climb in.

“I think I heard you telling your friends I belong to your family?” Jiang Ruotang asked half-jokingly.

“You are part of my family! But Brother Ruotang, you look especially handsome today! Whose eyes are you planning to dazzle?”

“Today marks the tenth anniversary of when I confessed to your brother. After I drop you off, I’m going to pick him up,” Jiang Ruotang replied.

“You confessed to my brother?” Lu Wei looked skeptical. “But my brother told our whole family that he chased you—that he confessed first!”

Jiang Ruotang chuckled. “With how reserved your brother is, you think he’d know how to pursue someone?”

“He would! Mom said that every time you came over to study, he’d buy you cola and spicy snacks. He waited for your messages and calls every day. Sister Shasha said that during school, my brother once used a badminton shuttle to hook your attention for an entire class!”

Jiang Ruotang’s smile deepened. “Who’s chasing whom, really?”

As she got out of the car, Lu Wei reminded him, “Brother Ruotang, don’t eat anything too heaty again today! You already ate half a plate of fried fish two days ago, and then fried chive-egg pancakes yesterday. If you keep giving in to cravings, you’re going to break out.”

“Alright, alright.”

That evening, Jiang Ruotang went grocery shopping. Lu Guifan got off work early, and the two of them prepared a hearty homemade meal together—no fried food, so no risk of overheating.

Jiang Ruotang excitedly brought up the old debate: who had really pursued whom?

“I looked for every chance to talk to you. Because of you, I went from a hopeless student to a model learner. For you, I got into college on my own merits!”

Lu Guifan replied coolly, “Oh? Studying and getting into college shouldn’t have been for yourself?”

“Tsk. You sound just like my dad when you say that,” Jiang Ruotang laughed.

“If I didn’t get a message or call from you at night, I couldn’t sleep. When you were wrongly accused of cheating, I was so nervous—worried you’d feel wronged, even more scared you’d leave Beicheng Guangyao in frustration. When you went to the capital for the entrance exams, I spaced out during all my classes.”

“Really?” Jiang Ruotang leaned in, his eyes bright and mischievous. “That just proves I made a strong impression on you. It shows you liked me—it doesn’t mean you chased me. Don’t twist the narrative!”

Lu Guifan closed his eyes and sighed. “Is your cleverness on a part-time schedule?”

After dinner, they lounged on the sofa watching a movie with the home theater system.

Everything felt as normal as any other day—because to them, life together wasn’t just ten years. It would be fifty, eighty, or even longer.

Jiang Ruotang laughed silently through the funniest parts of the movie. Just as he was about to say something, he noticed Lu Guifan had already fallen asleep—his black-rimmed glasses tilted, long lashes quietly resting. Jiang Ruotang gently removed the glasses, brushed his fingers over those lashes, and let Lu Guifan lean softly onto his shoulder.

He must’ve had a project lately and had been working overtime just to make time for tonight. The moment he relaxed, he couldn’t hold out anymore.

“Dummy,” Jiang Ruotang murmured. He was about to tap Guifan’s nose but held back, not wanting to wake him. Instead, he quietly muted the film and let it play silently.

The movie played on, but Jiang Ruotang spent more time watching Lu Guifan than the screen.

At some point, Lu Guifan’s peaceful expression twisted into a frown, his eyelids twitched, and tears began to silently fall.

Realizing he was having a nightmare, Jiang Ruotang gently shook his shoulder.
“Guifan, Guifan! Wake up! Guifan!”

After repeated calls, Lu Guifan jolted awake, sitting upright with wide eyes and a layer of cold sweat on his neck.

His blank stare slowly cleared, replaced by a wave of overwhelming relief.

“You really did have a nightmare, huh? That’s rare! People always say your dreams reflect your thoughts—you’re such a focused guy, I’m surprised you had a nightmare!”

Before Jiang Ruotang could ask what he’d dreamed, Lu Guifan pulled him into a fierce embrace—so tight it felt like he was trying to fuse Jiang Ruotang into his own body.

Feeling his partner’s trembling shoulders, Jiang Ruotang instinctively sensed the dream had been about him.

He returned the hug, gently patting Lu Guifan’s back and nuzzling against his cheek and nose.
“I’ll always be here with you.”

Only then did Lu Guifan ease his grip slightly. Had he held on any longer, Jiang Ruotang would’ve been suffocated.

“It’s getting late, how about we go rest?” Jiang Ruotang said softly, brushing his hair.

“Mhm.” Lu Guifan nodded.

His expression looked normal, but Jiang Ruotang could still detect a rare trace of fear behind it.

That dream must have been awful. Maybe it was influenced by a recent news story about a foreign energy expert whose whole family died in a car accident. Or maybe it was from the horror film they’d seen, where the painter protagonist met a tragic end. Jiang Ruotang decided not to ask for details, fearing it might trigger another reaction.

Normally, Lu Guifan would shower first, but this time he said, “It’s our tenth anniversary—let’s shower together.”

He seemed calm again.

Although the shower was large, two tall men still bumped into each other from time to time.

Jiang Ruotang had expected Lu Guifan might initiate something more… intimate. But instead, he simply held and kissed him gently under the warm water.

Affectionate and tender, without the slightest trace of lust.

All Lu Guifan wanted was to reassure himself that Jiang Ruotang was real.

That night, Lu Guifan lay on his side watching Jiang Ruotang sleep, waiting for him to, as he had for the past ten years, slowly snuggle into his arms.

The next morning, Jiang Ruotang woke up coughing and noticed a sore throat.

Well—Xiaowei’s warning came true. After days of fried food, the consequences finally caught up—his throat was dry, itchy, and painful.

As he came out to eat breakfast, he coughed hard twice.

Lu Guifan paused while pouring eggs onto a plate. “Why are you coughing? I’ll take you to the hospital later.”

Jiang Ruotang waved him off. “I’m just overheated—my throat’s scratchy. A little medicine and chrysanthemum tea will do the trick.”

“You haven’t seen a doctor—how do you know it’s just heat?” Lu Guifan looked over, his serious expression not seen since the days of tutoring Jiang Ruotang in school.

“My tongue hurts too—classic sign of heat!” Jiang Ruotang replied.

Lu Guifan fell silent, not pressing the issue further.

After breakfast, he loaded the dishes into the dishwasher. Jiang Ruotang was planning to visit a traditional Chinese painting master. He opened the storage cabinet to pack some tea cakes and cigarettes as a gift—only to find the cigarettes missing.

“Guifan, did you see the cigarettes I brought back from my dad’s house over New Year?”

No answer came.

Jiang Ruotang walked out and found Lu Guifan on the sofa, intently reading something on his phone.

He peeked over—Lu Guifan was looking up symptoms like sore throat, dry itch, and cough. The search results mentioned pharyngitis, heatiness, and more.

When I had BBQ-induced coughs before, he wasn’t this anxious.

“Hey, I asked you a question.” Jiang Ruotang flopped over his shoulder, shaking him.

“Hmm? What did you ask?”

“Where are those two cartons of cigarettes from the storage cabinet?”

“Smoking is bad for your health.”

“I know that! But didn’t you once say you respected people’s right to harm their own health?”

“I threw them out.”

“Huh?” Jiang Ruotang was stunned. “W-why?!”

He remembered clearly—it had been Lu Guifan who helped carry those cigarettes home.

“Smoking causes lung cancer.”

“I don’t even smoke. They were a gift for Master Hong—he’s an old-school smoker.”

“If he smokes them right there, you’ll breathe in his secondhand smoke. And that’s even worse,” Lu Guifan said.

Although his stubbornness confused Jiang Ruotang a bit, he figured maybe it was for the best. If it helped Master Hong live longer, no gift was better.

Jiang Ruotang then tried reaching for a big box of ginseng tea from the top shelf. Standing on tiptoe and stretching out his arms, he was about to grab it when Lu Guifan came over and pressed down lightly on his shoulders to help. With his long fingers, he easily pulled the box down.

Jiang Ruotang caught it and leaned back into Lu Guifan’s chest with a smile. “There, there—I don’t smoke, and I’m trying not to inhale secondhand smoke either.”

“Mm.” Lu Guifan’s expression softened, his eyes filled with gentle affection.

Despite taking anti-inflammatory medicine and drinking chrysanthemum tea, Jiang Ruotang’s throat was still itchy and sore. That night, even Lu Guifan had bitter melon with lily and lotus porridge alongside him.

At night, Jiang Ruotang couldn’t fall asleep from the itch in his throat. He didn’t want to disturb Lu Guifan—but the itch was unbearable.

There’s a saying that the two things in life one absolutely cannot hold back are love and coughing. Jiang Ruotang had no choice but to find a quiet corner and cough his heart out.

Who would’ve thought—as soon as he got out of bed and reached the bedroom door, the bedside lamp on Lu Guifan’s side flicked on.

Lu Guifan threw back the covers, swung his long legs out of bed, and started getting dressed with a grave expression.

“I… woke you up?”

Lu Guifan reached over, cupped Jiang Ruotang’s cheek, and said, “Get changed. I’ll take you to the hospital.”

“Who goes to the hospital for throat inflammation caused by heatiness? At most they’ll give me some antibiotics.”

“We’ll get a scan while we’re at it.”

“A scan…?”

Watching Lu Guifan walk toward the entryway, Jiang Ruotang suddenly realized something.

He was twenty-eight this year.

In his past life, he had died this same year—of lung cancer.

His life had gone so smoothly, and these ten years had been so joyful, he’d nearly forgotten about the hidden danger of his own health.

Lu Guifan was so anxious about his well-being. Just one cough, and Lu Guifan would panic.

At this moment, even without being urged, Jiang Ruotang understood deep down… would he die young from lung cancer again?

He now had almost everything: his beloved, a warm family, kindred friends, a brilliant career. Would it all come to an abrupt end again this year?

The fear crept up on him. He wanted to get to the hospital as fast as possible.

They registered quickly and saw a doctor quickly too.

Influenced by Lu Guifan’s stern aura, the doctor assumed this wasn’t a simple case of throat inflammation. After a thorough exam, the conclusion was still: plain old pharyngitis.

“Doctor, let’s do a blood test and a CT scan too,” Lu Guifan insisted.

“Uh?” The doctor was a bit taken aback.

Jiang Ruotang nodded as well. “Yeah, since we’re already here, let’s get everything checked.”

So Jiang Ruotang gave blood and got scanned.

From the immediate results, his lungs looked perfectly healthy—not even a small nodule.

Yet Lu Guifan still sent the scans to one of their high school classmates. The friend, awakened by the persistent buzz of his phone, saw the caller ID and instantly sobered up.

Whoa—high school’s top student and now a tech mogul was calling him in the middle of the night!

The friend carefully reviewed the scans and reported: everything looks great.

Only then did Lu Guifan finally breathe a sigh of relief.

The bloodwork also confirmed it was just inflammation. But because Jiang Ruotang was coughing so much he couldn’t sleep, Lu Guifan stayed with him and got his medication.

Turns out it worked well—on the way back home, Jiang Ruotang stopped coughing and even dozed off in the car.

They’d been up nearly all night. By the time they crossed the Chengjiang Bridge, the sky was already turning light.

Lu Guifan looked out at the river where the sun was just beginning to rise and pulled the car over.

He closed his eyes and exhaled deeply, as though a huge weight had finally lifted.

Jiang Ruotang had actually woken up when the car stopped. He cracked open one eye and quietly observed Lu Guifan’s profile.

Finally, he couldn’t hold it in anymore.

“Guifan… will you tell me what you dreamed that night?” he asked gently.

Lu Guifan froze for a moment and didn’t respond immediately. It was as though he didn’t know how to describe it.

“I just dreamt… that I lost you.”

Jiang Ruotang’s heart trembled. His fingertips curled involuntarily. The memories of his past life surged like a flood—so much pain, so much regret.

“You won’t lose me,” he said, seriously and firmly.

“Ruotang, I love you very, very much. But I know that no matter how much I love you, I can’t stop life from running its course. In that dream, you had lost everything, yet you were still working so hard for the Lin family. You looked at the stars and dreams others adored, and I… I probably was just that nerd who was good at studying in your memory.”

Jiang Ruotang paused. At that moment, he suddenly realized—maybe Lu Guifan had dreamed of his previous life.

“I remember after we graduated college, I had to come up with all kinds of excuses just to get your WeChat. Stuff like class reunions or giving teachers gifts on Teacher’s Day… But after that? We lived in different worlds. We had no common topics. I stayed silent in your world, and even set my Moments to ‘visible only to you.’ Every time I heard about you from other classmates, I’d post things in my Moments—things I wished I could say to you… as if that way, you’d see them.”

Jiang Ruotang’s heart ached. So those posts that had once touched him—Lu Guifan had written them just for him?

“I thought the most we’d ever share again would be generic holiday greetings. Until someone casually told me, ‘Did you hear? Jiang Ruotang has cancer… lung cancer…’ I couldn’t sleep. I tried every way to find news about you, telling myself it was just a rumor. Until I saw you—so thin, so detached—on the rooftop. I went to the hospital, brought you fruit, paid your chemo bills, brought you food, waited outside the lab for you, and every time I stepped away, I’d get several messages from you. We’d go for walks, sit in the sun… Sometimes I’d be so tired, I’d lie down next to you on the hospital bed and nap… How pathetic, Ruotang. Only at times like that could I be close to you—pretend you were mine.”

Jiang Ruotang shut his eyes as tears streamed down his cheeks.

He had always assumed that Lu Guifan was just fulfilling the duty of an old classmate—that his kindness came from responsibility.

But now he knew—Lu Guifan had always, always loved him.

“You were like sand slipping through my fingers. The sicker you got, the more I studied medicine, looked into targeted therapies, contacted experts overseas… But I still couldn’t save you. Not at all.”

Lu Guifan turned to look at Jiang Ruotang. His expression was calm, but Ruotang saw a bone-deep sorrow behind it.

“I know you love to lie on my back. I used to think it was just your way of claiming territory. But in the dream… when you were tired or in pain, you always curled up on my back, letting me comfort you. Even at the end of your life… as if you’d predicted it, you chose to spend your final moment with me. You were so light, Ruotang… When you left, it was like snow—falling, melting the instant it touched my shoulder… Someone once said, ‘If today we can walk together in the snow, then we’ve grown old together.’ But when snow melts into water and trickles down your collar—it’s really cold…”

Lu Guifan’s voice trembled.

By then, Jiang Ruotang was already sobbing. He reached out and hugged Lu Guifan tightly.

“This time, it won’t be like that. I swear. We’ll be together for a long, long time… we’ll grow old together…”

Feeling the warmth of Jiang Ruotang in his arms, listening to his breath, Lu Guifan finally felt the desolation in his heart start to melt.

The morning sun pierced the clouds and reflected on the river, streaming in through the window and onto their faces.

This was a rebirth. A return brought by unwavering love.

They sat there for a long time, until the storm of emotion passed.

Jiang Ruotang rested against Lu Guifan’s shoulder and suddenly asked curiously, “Guifan… in your dream… why did you like me? It can’t really be because during a monthly exam, your pen broke when Lin Lu stepped on it, and I gave you one of mine, right? Come on, tell me—what made you like me?”

Lu Guifan lowered his eyes and wrapped an arm around him, gently touching his ear. “There were a lot of reasons… probably bit by bit, all adding up.”

“Really? Back then in high school, I must’ve looked like a loudmouth troublemaker to you.”

“You only looked reckless and arrogant, but inside you were kind and principled. Like that time I refused to let Geng Yu copy my homework, and he was about to throw my bag down the stairwell—but you saw it. You said, ‘What if it hits a teacher? They’ll never let you off.’ Then you grabbed the bag and tossed it back onto my desk.”

Jiang Ruotang tilted his head and thought for a moment. Maybe… that really did happen. He just thought Geng Yu’s move was too petty, so he stepped in.

“And there was that time Meng Yang and the others mocked me in the hallway, saying I was just a scholarship nerd. You said, ‘Some people study themselves to death and still can’t get scholarships—don’t know what they’re bragging about.’”

Jiang Ruotang laughed—he remembered that one. He hadn’t liked Zhao Changfeng, and Meng Yang was his teammate. He was just picking a fight.

Didn’t expect it would win Lu Guifan’s heart.

As more and more cars passed on Chengjiang Bridge, Lu Guifan took a deep breath and ruffled Ruotang’s hair.

“Come on, let’s go home and catch up on sleep. If we don’t leave now, we’ll get stuck in rush hour.”

“Mm.” Jiang Ruotang nodded with a smile.

But just as the engine started, Lu Guifan suddenly realized something.

In the dream he’d described, he never mentioned anything about Jiang Ruotang giving him that pen.

So how did Jiang Ruotang know?

In that instant, every time high school Ruotang had quietly stood up for him, every moment of careful affection—all strung together, becoming something incredible and impossibly moving.

His heart pounded like thunder. He turned to look at Jiang Ruotang again, and a thousand thoughts surged through him like molten lava.

“Guifan, what’s wrong? Aren’t we going? If you’re tired, I can drive instead.”

Lu Guifan smiled, the engine humming to life.

“I’m fine.”

I was just realizing—maybe the reason that dream returned was to let me love you, without holding anything back, across time.