Chapter 37

Jing Miao blinked. “Where is gege going? Will I lose contact with you again for a long time?”
Xi Siyan kissed his lips. “Be good. No, you won’t. Just wait for gege twenty minutes, and I’ll come right back for you, okay?”
“Okay.”
Xi Siyan kissed him again and ran out quickly.
Jing Miao stared obediently at his phone. True to his word, Xi Siyan returned within twenty minutes.
He came back with a thin sheen of sweat on his forehead. The black suit jacket from this morning was draped over his arm, his tie gone, leaving only a white shirt. On his left shoulder, a white lily was pinned.
Jing Miao stared blankly.
A strange familiarity flooded his mind, blurring into the present.
“Gege is back!”
Xi Siyan grabbed his hand. “Come on, baby. Follow me!”
He pulled him into a run.
Through a campus full of people—summer heat, rushing wind, sunlight spilling through Xi Siyan’s hair and onto Jing Miao—everything felt like a movie scene.
Jing Miao felt a hazy thrill, the joy of chasing after someone.
Xi Siyan brought him to the old auditorium where that freshman welcome gala had once been held.
Six or seven years had passed. It was no longer Huada’s biggest hall; newer halls and the stadium had replaced it. It couldn’t host whole-school events anymore, only college-level activities.
Because it was centennial celebration day, the campus crowd was ten times the usual. On normal days, unused halls were empty or closed. Today, for alumni nostalgia, every stepped classroom and all sizes of auditoriums were opened.
This place, carrying too many memories, naturally drew many people.
Xi Siyan led Jing Miao in through a backstage door.
A drama club was rehearsing on stage. Xi Siyan picked up a guitar he had just borrowed from the rock club and placed at the side, then brought Jing Miao to a relatively open spot between the first row and the stage.
“Miaomiao, sit here.”
He placed Jing Miao in a front-row seat, pulled a high stool opposite him, took a few breaths, and began nervously—somewhat rusty—checking tuning.
Jing Miao was completely dazed.
He just sat and waited.
No one knew whether the rock club had spread the word, or too many people had seen them running here, or people in the noisy hall recognized Xi Siyan, or the drama club itself started calling others after cutting rehearsal music.
In the few minutes Xi Siyan retuned the guitar, the hall slowly filled with people.
Xi Siyan felt sweat covering his body.
Hot.
Weather hot, space hot, crowd hot—looking at Jing Miao made him hot too.
Jing Miao had low resistance and sensitive skin; sunlight could trigger rashes, so on very hot days he still wore long sleeves. Su Wan also loved dressing him up—every visit to their place, she brought piles of clothes that made young men look beautiful but that most young men couldn’t afford.
She matched full outfits and told Xi Siyan exactly how to dress him.
Xi Siyan used to think clothes were all basically the same except color—that they looked good only because Jing Miao looked good.
Now, suddenly, he felt his mother had excellent taste.
Jing Miao wore a white tee inside and an asymmetrical light-blue overshirt outside, buttons only halfway done into a V-like neckline. The front hem was tucked in, revealing a narrow waist. The tied cuffs added a subtle sensuality.
He was truly beautiful.
His face was still boyish, his outfit clean and bright, balanced between maturity and youth, openly alluring.
Xi Siyan thought:
You really couldn’t meet a boy this beautiful when you were young…
and you still couldn’t now.
A man almost thirty suddenly felt himself dragged back to clumsy seventeen.
He breathed in, breathed out, brushed the strings lightly, and began the intro to *Encounter*.
Xi Siyan didn’t really sing often. Mandatory school choir didn’t count. He barely went to KTV. He didn’t even know whether his singing was “good.” Back then, during the performance, he had only played guitar and never opened his mouth.
But now, he just wanted to sing once for Jing Miao.
“I hear winter leaving, and wake up in some year and month.”
—He remembered that snowy night when Jing Miao burned with fever. Wind howled outside. Jing Miao opened red eyes from near-unconsciousness and asked hoarsely, “Is gege still angry?”
“Looking left, right, forward—how many turns does love take before arriving?”
…
“The one I wait for—how far in the future is he?”
“I hear wind from subways and crowds; I stand in line, holding my number tag of love.”
Jing Miao felt pulled into another dimension.
He had never heard this song before; it wasn’t familiar at all.
Xi Siyan’s singing voice was gentle, like calm narration, each word clear, no extra techniques.
Yet every word felt like confession.
He didn’t understand why wind came from subways and crowds—he had never taken a subway.
He also didn’t understand why Xi Siyan held a “number tag of love.”
With Jing Miao, Xi Siyan had always been first.
Lyrics whose meaning he couldn’t decode were like English papers he couldn’t fully translate.
Still, in that confusion, Jing Miao heard the love Xi Siyan had folded into the song.
“I fly forward, across a sea of time. We too were hurt in love.”
“I look at the road. The entrance to dreams feels narrow.”
Xi Siyan suddenly struck a wrong note.
Everything stopped.
His throat was dry; his eyes heated.
When Jing Miao looked at him, it was always that focused, pure gaze—a direct corridor into his world.
He no longer cared whether this “performance” was good or bad.
He kept playing.
“Meeting you was the most beautiful accident.”
When the final strum ended, a tear rolled suddenly from Jing Miao’s widened eyes.
He wiped it in a panic, then smiled.
“Gege… gege is so handsome. I never knew you could play guitar. You sing so well too.”
Xi Siyan stood, touched his face lightly, then stepped onto the stage to return the guitar to where it had been.