Chapter 4 – an
If it had been the Meng Ou of the past, he definitely would have smiled at her narcissistically and said something like, “Look at how good-looking I am.”
He really was good-looking. His eyes, nose, and mouth were all well-proportioned, and you couldn't find anything to fault.
But at the same time, his personality was so damn annoying, a little bit of too smug and cheeky, and he didn't know how to make good use of that face of his, which made it a shame that such fine features had ended up on the wrong person.
There were quite a few girls who liked him in high school. He would stand around in the corridor in his lazy, swaggering manner, and immediately attract a whole crowd of sidelong glances.
If he saw you looking at him, he would smile at you, smiling until you felt like you'd just laid eyes on some kind of pervert and beat a hasty retreat first.
As for the girls who weren't scared off, they would clutch their little maiden hearts and nervously go confess their feelings, only to get some ridiculous piece of nonsense in return.
For example, “My mom had my fortune read. I'm not allowed to date too early, otherwise I'll never get into college,” or, “I observed the celestial signs last night. You're destined to suffer a calamity, and if you confess to me you'll be inviting disaster, so I'll just be a good person to the end and not date you, so you don't have to suffer for it.”
He was so full of mystical nonsense that the girls began to wonder whether they'd fallen for some kind of fortune-telling master.
Later, during what he called his “ambiguous phase with Xiang You,” another girl confessed to him, and he simply changed tactics:
“I made a bet with Xiang You. Whoever falls in love first has to give the other one a thousand yuan.”
He used this excuse to turn away another batch of girls, while Xiang You herself, one of the two main characters in that story, hadn't the slightest idea she was being used as an excuse.
Some of the girls refused to give up and simply egged on their male friends, getting them to go after Xiang You instead.
For a while, this gave Xiang You an especially flourishing peach-blossom luck, and even she couldn't understand what was going on.
By the time she figured out the truth, she was furious.
Those girls had no grudge against her whatsoever, yet they actually wanted her to lose a thousand yuan for no reason!
As for the culprit, Meng Ou, she had already given him a good beating that morning.
She went “pili pala” on him, drumming away at his body, while the boy just grinned stupidly as he took the blows. When she finally got tired of hitting him, he suddenly stretched out his long arm and pulled her into his arms.
Xiang You's mind went blank, and she was forced to press against his chest, listening to the strong beat of his heart.
“Let me hold you for a while, and I won't tell the teacher on you,” Meng Ou said, expertly playing the shameless card.
Tell the teacher about what? Who was telling on whom?
Had he gotten the roles mixed up?
But, strangely enough.
When this annoying bastard held her, she didn't want to pull away at all.
He smelled really good, with the fresh scent of soap.
His body was warm, and his arms loosely encircled her waist, as though he'd originally intended to act like a hooligan, but had paradoxically held himself back at the last moment.
When she came out of his arms, she was surprised to discover that the roots of Meng Ou's ears were red.
This guy, who acted carefree all day long and never put a filter on what he said, could actually get shy.
Maybe she had stared too intently at the roots of his ears, because Meng Ou noticed.
He turned his head away, only to expose the other side, which was just as bright red.
Xiang You burst out laughing and couldn't stop.
Meng Ou, embarrassed and angry, simply used his chest to block her eyes.
This time he didn't hold himself back, locking her tightly in place.
The scorching heat of his body seeped through their thin clothes, warming her face as well.
When he finally let go, both their faces were red.
Since they were both embarrassed now, there was no longer any question of one laughing at the other.
They stiffly turned away from each other and went their separate ways, each taking the road ahead.
They walked all the way out of the empty gymnasium. In the cool night breeze, Xiang You couldn't help rubbing her own warm cheeks.
She turned her head and saw Meng Ou, several meters away, coming out through another door, also rubbing his face.
•
But the Meng Ou of now would no longer answer her that way.
He pressed his lips together noncommittally and gave an “Oh.”
For some inexplicable reason, Xiang You felt a little displeased. “What are you ‘oh’-ing about?”
“You can't even look at me?” Meng Ou raised a hand and took the baseball cap off her head, then with a “pa,” firmly covered his own face with it. “Fine, then you can't look at me anymore.”
Without the brim blocking her view, the world suddenly brightened.
Freed from the pressure of having to meet his eyes, she could also stare at him more freely.
The scene before her seemed somewhat familiar.
Meng Ou had covered his face with his cap like this before.
That had been after they got together.
One day, Xiang You was out shopping with a friend when she was suddenly hit by a car.
In reality, it had only scraped against her when it was turning, and it hadn't been going very fast. But just in case, Xiang You still went to the hospital for a checkup.
Her friend called Meng Ou and told him what had happened.
It was only a couple of superficial injuries. A little medicine and they would be fine.
But when Xiang You came out, she ran into a pair of completely red eyes in the corridor.
“Where are you hurt?” Meng Ou asked her, his voice thick with tears.
Xiang You raised her arm somewhat blankly and pointed to two scrapes about the size of coins.
The air seemed to freeze for a moment.
The longer Xiang You looked, the more she wanted to laugh. “Meng Ou, did you cry?”
It would have been fine if there had only been the two of them.
The problem was, Xiang You's friend was still there beside her.
Her friend couldn't hold it in and covered her mouth, laughing twice beside them.
Meng Ou wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, turned his face away, and gave an embarrassed little laugh himself.
But the more he laughed, the more awkward it became, so he simply pulled his cap down over his head, completely covering his face.
Looking at this “faceless monster,” two clear peals of laughter erupted in the corridor.
Then Xiang You patted him and said, “You can take your hat off. My friend left.”
“Really?” he asked indistinctly from inside the hat.
“Really.”
When Meng Ou finally lifted the hat, he found the two of them laughing so hard in front of him that they could barely stand upright.
“Xiang Youyou, you have a black heart!” Meng Ou accused her furiously.
Her name was Xiang You, true and proper, but every now and then, when Meng Ou wanted to call her by her full name without sounding too serious, he would arbitrarily add an extra character to it.
The fact that he still had a tearful note in his voice as he said this only made it funnier.
Xiang You laughed as she watched his mortified expression, but in the end, her conscience got the better of her, and she asked her friend to wait for her in the lobby downstairs.
After her friend left, Meng Ou still looked rather dejected.
He silently pulled his cap down over his head, covering the upper half of his eyes.
Xiang You moved closer and poked his arm.
Meng Ou waved her off, not wanting to deal with her.
“It hurts,” Xiang You whined.
Meng Ou lifted his chin, revealing the other half of his eyes.
Xiang You raised her arm in front of him. The two pitiful scrapes were so minor that if it weren't for the medicine she'd put on them, they probably wouldn't even be visible.
“It hurts like hell,” Xiang You lied.
Meng Ou nervously took her hand in both of his. His movements were somewhat stiff, as though he were holding the Imperial Jade Seal.
“What should we do? Should we have the doctor prescribe a box of painkillers? Could you have some kind of internal injury? Maybe you should go get checked again...”
As Meng Ou spoke, he suddenly stopped.
Because he saw Xiang You laughing.
The kind of laugh that said she'd gotten exactly what she wanted.
“Xiang Youyou...” he called her helplessly.
Xiang You said nothing.
She only thought that those red-rimmed eyes were really beautiful.
•
And now, Xiang You stared blankly at the New York Yankees logo for a while before she couldn't resist curling a finger and tapping the empty crown of the cap.
The hat tilted to the side, like a hand nudging a clock's needle, and Meng Ou's face appeared.
His eyes were very clear, with sharply defined black and white, while his deep-set eye sockets blurred the boundary of his eyes.
Xiang You had once said that his features were especially flattering, so that at first glance, people always thought his eyes were a whole size larger than they actually were.
And then Meng Ou had replied in that smug, cheeky way of his, “Jealous, huh? Being jealous won't give you a pair.”
But now Meng Ou said nothing.
Xiang You held out her hand. “Give me my hat.”
Meng Ou obediently placed the hat in her hand.
Xiang You took the hat and felt that putting it straight back on her head would seem a little too deliberate.
She simply set it down on the bench, following the motion naturally, then lowered her head and took a sip of coffee in a transparent attempt to cover up her awkwardness.
Meng Ou also took a sip of his bizarre mixed concoction.
The air felt heavy and stifling, like the weather just before a summer downpour.
But this was clearly a cool early spring, when everything that had lain dormant through the winter was happily sprouting and growing.
“Did you see that movie that came out a while ago?” Meng Ou suddenly asked.
“No.” Xiang You shook her head. “I finally managed to find some free time, but when I checked, it had just stopped showing the day before.”
Meng Ou looked at her, his expression difficult to read. “How did you know which one I was talking about?”
Xiang You froze for a moment.
She hadn't deliberately tried to guess. The moment he started speaking, that particular movie had simply popped into her head.
Just like the unspoken understanding they used to have.
But could two people who had been apart for a thousand days still have that kind of unspoken understanding?
She tried to test the waters with a secret code. “The one with five characters?”
“Mm. The one with five characters.”
Of the batch of movies released recently, only one had five characters in its Chinese title.
Xiang You pursed her lips. “Was it good?”
Meng Ou didn't answer. Instead, he asked, “You spaced out again, didn't you?”
“Did I?” Xiang You asked, puzzled.
They had been talking about the movie the whole time, hadn't they?
Meng Ou reminded her, “You still haven't answered my previous question.”
Oh. He was asking why she'd guessed it was that movie.
Xiang You took a sip of her latte and said nothing.
She didn't know how to explain this sudden unspoken understanding.
Talking about something like that with an ex made her feel a little uncomfortable.
“I knew you'd spaced out again,” Meng Ou said with a quiet scoff.
Xiang You looked up at him and saw the certainty in his expression, and suddenly she felt very annoyed.
Nobody liked being seen through and handled so easily, especially when the other person was an ex.
“Maybe because, knowing your taste, that's the only kind of movie you'd like anyway.”
She remembered all the posts she'd read about exes.
In them, every ex was their deepest enemy, and the women would trade one-liners for taking their exes down.
Her own line wasn't particularly clever, nor did it have much bite.
But for someone with her personality, it was an unusually nasty thing to say.
Sure enough, Meng Ou's face turned cold.
His grip tightened around the cup, hard enough that his fingertips turned white.
Xiang You stared at the beautiful glass cup, worrying that he might squeeze it until it shattered.
Then those pale fingertips gradually regained their color.
Meng Ou's hand seemed to go limp, sliding down the side of the cup joint by joint.
The condensation on the cup suddenly went “whoosh” past his hand, reaching the tabletop before he did, as though mocking him.
“Xiang You...” he called her name bitterly. “...You.”
The final character reached the tabletop at the same time as his little finger, tapping it lightly.
It had just created a gigantic crater in the earth.
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