Qin Zhiwei brought Shen Xinyi to a restaurant in high spirits.
It was the first time she had asked him to a meal herself.
He was worked up about it. He felt his chance was coming.
Every morning of the winter break, out running, he had put a great many questions to Xu Ye about chasing girls, and he had picked up a great deal of relationship experience from him.
He felt he had the theory well in hand by now. What he had been short of all along was an opportunity to practice on, exactly like this one.
So he started a topic of his own accord. “Do you start classes right after the Lantern Festival too?”
“We do.”
“Have you noticed the first half of this year is really short? It’s March already. Next month there’s the Qingming holiday, the month after there’s Labor Day, and by the end of June we’re on summer break again.”
Shen Xinyi hadn’t paid it much attention. She laughed when he’d finished. “You’re right, actually.”
“Have you got anything planned for the summer?”
She shook her head. “No. I’ll see when I get there. I take everything one step at a time.”
Afraid the topic would die there, she asked it back. “What about you?”
Qin Zhiwei laughed. “I haven’t thought it through either. I’ll see what Xu Ye’s doing and go along with him.”
A few exchanges in, Shen Xinyi had opened up too. She was the one who said, laughing, “How is it I feel like you’ve lost some weight since New Year?”
“I’ve been running in the mornings. Didn’t I post it on Moments?”
“I thought you’d last about three days. Haha.”
“Come on.”
Qin Zhiwei didn’t know how to say the things that please a girl, and he certainly didn’t have the thick skin to come out with the sort of off-color lines Xu Ye used to make people blush.
He simply talked with her, one line each, back and forth, the ordinary way.
But he was visibly more at ease than he had been last year.
When Shen Xinyi finished eating she pulled out a tissue and wiped her mouth, then twisted the cap off her bottled water and tipped her head back for two small sips. She did it all naturally. There was something of the gentle Jiangnan girl about her.
Qin Zhiwei had finished long before. He watched her drinking and didn’t make a sound.
In the end it was Shen Xinyi who spoke first. “Have you had enough?”
Getting no reaction, she raised a small hand and waved it in front of him. Only then did he come back to himself. “I’m done!” he said quickly.
“Shall we head back, then?”
She got up and took her bag, ready to go to the front desk and pay.
Qin Zhiwei said hurriedly, “I paid on my way to the bathroom just now.”
Shen Xinyi looked up at him, her voice soft. “Wasn’t it agreed that I was treating?”
“There’ll be a chance next time.”
They walked out of the restaurant, and Qin Zhiwei drove back the way they had come. When they reached the foot of the girls’ dormitory Shen Xinyi didn’t get out straight away. She could feel that he had something he wanted to say.
“I ate too much just now. I’m a bit full.”
“You shouldn’t sit down right after a meal.”
Qin Zhiwei thought of what Xu Ye had told him, and steeled himself. “Should we take a walk, then?”
Shen Xinyi nodded gently. “Okay~”
He undid his seatbelt at once and got out, and the two of them walked side by side toward the shaded trees by the school’s east gate. Watching Shen Xinyi’s hand swinging back and forth, Qin Zhiwei was thinking: how am I ever going to hold it?
And just then, the things Xu Ye had said in the kitchen at Zhang Ruowei’s house came echoing back in his ear.
They walked for a quarter of an hour and ended up sitting down on a wooden bench under the trees.
Qin Zhiwei kept his head down, making a show of playing with his fingers. He worked himself up to it for a long while before he finally found the courage. “Your hands are so small.”
Shen Xinyi went blank for a moment.
In that instant, Zhang Ruowei’s voice seemed to sound in her ear.
She glanced down at her own small hands, then tucked them into her pockets and gave him an awkward but perfectly polite smile. “Girls’ hands are all small.”
Qin Zhiwei went blank-faced on the spot.
The line he had been going to follow with was: “Should we compare hand sizes?”
He had not expected her to simply put her hands away.
Qin Zhiwei could have wept.
Why aren’t you playing by the playbook? he thought.
…
Half an hour later.
Xu Ye got a call from Qin Zhiwei.
He had barely put it on speaker before Qin Zhiwei was saying, the picture of injured innocence, “Xu Ye, your method doesn’t work either. And to think how much I trusted you.”
Xu Ye was rather thrown.
He frowned. “What are you talking about?”
Qin Zhiwei said at once, “I was just out with Shen Xinyi. I wanted to hold her hand, so I said the things from that playbook you taught me last time.”
Xu Ye: “And?”
Qin Zhiwei: “And I’d barely got out your hands are so small before she stuffed them in her pockets.”
The line went quiet for two seconds. Then the whole of Room 201 burst out laughing.
Qin Zhiwei: “You can still fucking laugh!”
Qin Zhiwei: “I nearly died of embarrassment back there.”
Xu Ye: “There are two possibilities.”
Qin Zhiwei: “What two possibilities?”
Xu Ye: “The first is that Shen Xinyi guessed what you were up to, and she doesn’t think it’s time to be holding your hand yet.”
Qin Zhiwei pressed straight on. “And the second?”
Xu Ye: “She’s got someone coaching her.”
Qin Zhiwei: “Huh?”
Xu Ye: “And I’ve already worked out who.”
Qin Zhiwei: “Zhang Ruowei?”
Xu Ye: “It’d be her.”
Qin Zhiwei: “Has she got nothing better to do? I’m no good at chasing anyone as it is, and she’s in the middle of it causing trouble. Is there any way to get her to mind her own business?”
Xu Ye: “Sure. Find her a boyfriend, or just bribe her into leaving it alone.”
Qin Zhiwei: “Her standards are bound to be sky-high, finding her a boyfriend isn’t realistic. I’ll have to get a chance to talk to her and tell her to stop playing the meddling strategist.”
Xu Ye: “Good luck.”
Qin Zhiwei: “When am I going to be allowed to hold her hand, then?”
Xu Ye: “When you’re walking with her, if the hand on your side has her bag or her phone in it, that means she doesn’t want to hold hands with you. If the hand on your side isn’t holding anything, you can go right ahead and take it.”
Qin Zhiwei ran back over the scene.
He thought of walking into the shade earlier, and of Shen Xinyi carrying her bag in both hands the entire way, and his eyes went wide.
Qin Zhiwei: “Bro! You understand girls so well!”
Xu Ye: “Keep it down.”
Qin Zhiwei: “That’s it for now, then. See you tomorrow.”
Xu Ye: “Mm.”
…
Qin Zhiwei hung up and drove happily off toward his own school.
But this happened to be the evening rush.
A trip that should have taken half an hour at most took him close to fifty minutes, and the heavier the traffic got the tenser he became. By the time he reached the school gate there was sweat on his forehead.
He wiped it away and gradually let himself relax — and it would have been better if he hadn’t. The moment he did, just as he reached the dormitory entrance and was parallel parking, he came in too close and caught the fender on the curb with a sharp scraping sound.
Qin Zhiwei’s eyes went wide and he scrambled out of the car in fright to look.
When he saw the seven-or-eight-centimeter gash the curb had scraped into the fender, his mind went completely blank.
“Oh no!”
…
(End of Chapter 202)