The next morning.

“Where are they? They should be here by now.”

“Should be soon.”

Xu Ye and Qin Zhiwei stood outside the estate entrance, each lugging a woven bag stuffed with a thick winter duvet, scanning the end of the road.

The minutes ticked by.

Qin Zhiwei’s face fell. “What if they’re not coming?”

“They’ll come.”

“They’ll come? Can you be a little more definite about that?”

Xu Ye shrugged. “I’ll call.”

He was quietly anxious, though. It was just a confession — surely she wasn’t going to hold out this long over something like that.

He was mid-thought when—

“There they are!”

Qin Zhiwei spotted the familiar business van and called out.

It pulled up to the curb. Xu Ye said hello to Wang Ruxue first, then Qin Zhiwei, reading the room, took the front passenger seat and left the back row for Xu Ye and Qingqing.

Qingqing didn’t look at Xu Ye once. Her eyes stayed fixed on the window on her side.

Once the car was moving at an even pace, Xu Ye, seeing that she had no intention of acknowledging his existence, lightly hooked one finger around her small hand.

Her brow furrowed. She moved her hand away.

He tried again.

She lifted her hand and smacked the back of his.

He changed tactics — reached out and gave the hem of her shirt a small tug. When she finally turned to look at him, he held up two fingers on his thigh and walked them forward, then curled the knuckles down in an imitation of someone dropping to their knees — a small, wordless apology.

Combined with his most pitiful expression, the effect was immediate. Qingqing nearly laughed out loud.

Seizing the moment, Xu Ye moved to take her hand.

She pressed her lips together, extended one finger, pointed it at him, and gave him the full imperious glare of someone in the middle of being magnificently sulky — eyes saying, clear as anything: I’m warning you. Do not take my hand.

Xu Ye made a helpless face and stood down.

What neither of them knew was that Wang Ruxue, driving, had caught every bit of it.

She hadn’t expected things between these two to develop this far in the space of a single month.

Was this still the Chen Qingqing she used to know?

How exactly had this Xu Ye managed it?

Since they were running a bit tight on time, the three of them moved quickly through the station. They made it to the waiting area just as the gates opened for boarding and got on the train with no room to spare.

This time, Xu Ye had only managed to get two seats together. He hadn’t thought to mention it until they were already on board, so Qin Zhiwei found himself making his way to a solo seat up front with a suffering expression, leaving Xu Ye and Qingqing together in their row.

The moment they sat down, Xu Ye leaned toward her and said quietly, “Are you mad at me?”

“No,” she said, which did not sound entirely convincing.

“You didn’t reply to any of my messages last night.”

“I fell asleep.”

“You look exhausted.”

She opened her mouth, then stopped.

“Do you want to sleep for a bit?”

A small nod.

Xu Ye leaned back against his seat and patted his shoulder with a grin. “Sleep here then.”

Qingqing gave him a look that communicated something between disdain and tolerance, turned her head in the other direction, and rested against her own headrest.

A moment later, a girl came down the aisle trying to hoist a bag into the overhead rack. She looked about their age. Xu Ye watched her struggle for a second, then asked, “Heading to Shanghai?”

“Yeah.”

“My friend is traveling with me — his seat’s a window seat. Would you want to switch with him?”

“Is he going to Shanghai too?”

“He is.”

She agreed without much hesitation — she could see Xu Ye was clearly already spoken for, and a window seat over an aisle seat was a fair trade.

Xu Ye carried her bag over to where Qin Zhiwei was sitting. “Wei-bro, go take my seat. This very nice person has agreed to swap with you.”

Qin Zhiwei looked genuinely surprised, grabbed his bag, and moved over with no further questions.

Xu Ye helped the girl stow her luggage, then went back and sat down.

Five hours was a long trip.

Zhiwei went straight to mobile games, as was tradition. When the train moved into a mountain stretch and the signal dropped, he fell back on UC Browser and started scrolling through serialized novels of a distinctly florid variety, muttering as he went: “I can’t even afford a QQ membership, so why does it keep showing me ten-minute ads for things I can’t buy either?”

“Luxury ads are made for people who can’t afford them,” Xu Ye said. “That way, when the people who can afford them use the product, everyone else already knows what it is.”

“That’s — actually that makes so much sense.”

“What novel are you reading?”

“Perfect World updates too slowly. Looking for something already finished. What are you reading these days?”

It was 2014, and 4G had only just started rolling out — for people their age, mobile phones were mostly for reading novels.

Xu Ye shrugged. “Haven’t been reading much lately. The one that stuck with me most was Abin.” [TL: 阿宾 — a notoriously explicit adult fiction series, wildly popular in China through the 2000s and 2010s — Xu Ye offering this up straight-faced is a very Xu Ye thing to do]

Qin Zhiwei rolled his eyes and opened something called Martial Extremes Under Heaven.

Xu Ye scrolled through stock updates for a while, cross-referenced with recent news and what he could still remember, sold a few positions with middling returns, and picked up some new ones.

A little over an hour in, Qingqing had drifted off against her headrest. She was wearing a loose white letter-print T-shirt tucked into a straight-cut army-green skirt — easy and unassuming in exactly the way that made her look quietly lovely.

Resting against the headrest meant her head swayed every time the train shifted. Xu Ye said her name softly twice, got no response, and concluded she was properly asleep. He reached around, cupped the back of her head gently, and guided it to rest on his shoulder.

He stayed still after that, eyes closed, resting.

When the train went through a tunnel, Qingqing cracked one eye open.

When they were almost through, she shut it again.

Just before one o’clock, Xu Ye tilted his head slightly, her hair faintly fragrant against his face, and said quietly, “Hungry? Want something to eat?”

He’d known all along she wasn’t asleep.

She made a small sound of agreement, then gradually lifted her head. She couldn’t quite look at him — her cheeks were warm, and she kept her eyes on the window.

Xu Ye got three cups of instant noodles from his bag, rousted Qin Zhiwei, and the two of them went off to add hot water.

“Which flavor?”

“Pork broth.”

He folded down the tray table, set the cup in front of her, and added, “Careful, it’s hot~”

Qingqing reached into her pocket for a hair tie — and it slipped from her fingers and fell to the floor.

Xu Ye bent and picked it up before she could. Instead of handing it back, he gathered her long, smooth hair, and with movements that were more practiced than they had any right to be, tied it back for her.

Qingqing immediately peeled back the lid of her noodles.

A cloud of steam rose up, warm and enveloping, covering whatever was on her face in a convenient curtain of mist.

(End of Chapter 91)