At two in the morning, the sky was still faintly gray.
Leaning against the headboard, Li Cheng had his phone open.
The screen cast an ambiguous glow, lending an even deeper shade to the gray-blue of his eyes behind his lenses.
The man’s narrow phoenix eyes were fixed on the phone screen, his high nose bridge holding up those silver-rimmed glasses, letting them slip down a little. He had held this pose for who knew how long, the curve of his lower lip unchanged, still set at an angle that carried a hint of sharpness and aloofness. Yet occasionally, as he watched the screen, an emotion almost impossible to detect would flicker through.
By looks alone, it was a rather pleasing picture.
If only the phone’s screen weren’t livestreaming the side profile of another person, fast asleep.
The overhead angle zoomed in on the young man’s face.
At first glance, his features were strikingly beautiful, almost vivid, yet his bearing lent them a certain cool detachment. Only in sleep, when his brows and eyes unconsciously relaxed, was that distance entirely dissolved.
Raven-feather lashes, gently upturned eye corners, together with those refined features, they composed a portrait that belonged to this person alone.
The person on the phone was Jian Yue, who at this very moment lay just on the other side of the headboard from Li Cheng.
The man simply gazed at the young man’s sleeping face on the screen, falling into silence.
This was the secret Li Cheng had discovered a few days ago.
The young man on the other bed seemed, once asleep, to lose all awareness of the outside world. No matter what noise Li Cheng made—even when he pushed the camera straight through the hole in the board and filmed him brazenly, it made no difference.
Li Cheng’s gaze stayed fixed on the phone screen, lingering for a moment on the other’s closed eyes, the tip of his nose, his lips.
The steady rise and fall of his breathing sleeping head to head, Li Cheng could still hear the young man’s breath coming through the board.
Then his well-defined fingers slipped out from under the covers, fingertips lightly touching the young man’s lips on the screen, his expression turning obscure and unreadable. After a long moment, the man’s throat bobbed slightly, and except for those eyes that still seemed calm and restrained, his whole body began, unconsciously, to press closer toward the headboard.
His back against the board, his broad spine arching slightly, his breathing changed.
Only Li Cheng himself knew where his mind had gone, following the young man on that screen.
That usual image of restraint and detachment collapsed in an instant. The corners of his eyes flushed a dense red, spreading from the roots of his ears, creeping outward.
Thank goodness it was still the silence of night.
Otherwise, that nearly pallid, cold-white skin of his would have betrayed just how thoroughly red Li Cheng had become.
Before the sun could rise, Li Cheng was unable to sleep for a long time. It was only when his reason finally returned to its shell that his mind fully cooled.
There were no classes today, so Jian Yue had no intention of getting up early.
Li Cheng, the earliest riser in the dorm, had already left ahead of everyone and wouldn’t return until evening.
Shen Yu, the student council president, was busy running around for student council activities and had gone out around ten.
As for Mu Yansheng, though he came from considerable means, he had no family business to worry about for now, nor any need to involve himself in school affairs. So aside from the occasional outing, he was quite comfortably keeping the late-rising schedule of an ordinary male college student on his day off.
It wasn’t until around eleven in the morning that Mu Yansheng finally sat up in bed, frowning at the young man’s bunk, which hadn’t shown the slightest movement.
Having slept until his head ached dully, he rubbed his temples in irritation and threw off the covers to get out of bed.
The late-morning sunlight was glaringly bright, and the heat stretched through the window into the dorm room.
After a quick wash, Mu Yansheng casually combed his slightly wavy bangs upward with the water still on them, revealing a pair of sharp brows and bright eyes. His gaze lingered for a moment on Jian Yue’s bed before he finally walked over and pulled back the curtain.
His tone carried a hint of carelessness, his attitude still wearing that disagreeable arrogance from before. He unconsciously raised his voice, yet there was something deliberately performative in his movements.
“Hey, it’s almost noon. I’m grabbing food anyway, what do you want?”
The question got no response; the person in bed remained deep asleep.
Mu Yansheng frowned as he watched.
If it weren’t for the covers still rising and falling over the young man, and the slow, even breaths drifting from within, Mu Yansheng would have thought the other had passed out cold on the bed.
“Wake up.” Mu Yansheng’s tone carried a trace of impatience.
But the young man only frowned in displeasure, still showing no sign of waking.
Mu Yansheng gazed at that sleeping face so different from his usual expression, his eyes fixed on the cheek pressed into a curve by the pillow. That unconscious look of displeasure, compared to his usual icy demeanor, carried far more of a young person’s vitality and liveliness.
Apparently, without that infuriating air of distance, this face was actually easier on the eyes.
Thinking this, and as if possessed, Mu Yansheng reached his hand out toward the young man.
His palm stood in stark contrast against that porcelain-white skin, the veins on the back of his hand looking somewhat menacing against that delicate, artwork-like face. It gave Mu Yansheng a strange, inexplicable feeling, as if he were staining it dirty.
The pads of his fingers, with their faint calluses, felt nothing at all as they lightly brushed the eyelashes. His heart began to itch, relentlessly urging his brain to do something or to grip something with that palm.
His fingertips began to tremble as they hovered.
The trembling was extremely slight, yet it made the other’s lashes sway gently along with his fingertips.
The young man’s eyelids gave a faint flutter, but Mu Yansheng failed to notice this sign of imminent waking.
Because his palm was about to cover that entire face.
Those eyes that made one’s heart go numb no matter how he looked at them were being gently covered by his hand. Only through the gaps between his fingers could he vaguely make out that porcelain-fair face, and the rises and falls tracing the contours of its features.
His unconsciously held breath left his oxygen-starved brain spawning strange thoughts, the act of covering the young man’s eyes carrying the air of a clumsy cover-up.
And Mu Yansheng was imagining that pair of elegant, beautiful fox eyes behind his palm, staring unblinkingly at him.
And so everything began to become something else entirely.
Those lips opening and closing slightly with each breath, the neck down to the collarbones… including the body tucked beneath the covers perhaps, in his imagination, it was a scene where the fabric happened to be absent,
“What are you doing?”
Reality shattered the fantasy.
The young man’s voice, slightly husky, carried the same unfamiliar distance as always as he questioned the culprit who had inexplicably blocked his view.
“Oh, you’re awake?” Mu Yansheng withdrew his hand quite naturally, finally getting what he wanted, a clear view of those fox-like eyes behind his palm.
Still hazy from just waking, they looked somewhat moist.
Yet the way those eyes looked at him always left Mu Yansheng feeling defeated.
So, out of habit, he retorted sharply, amplifying that faint, barely-there malice several degrees to display it openly before the young man’s eyes. It was as if to conceal the feelings behind it that made Mu Yansheng feel embarrassed and defeated, as if he knew the ‘truth’ that the moment he revealed his thoughts, the other would distance himself.
“Sleeping until this hour, I thought you were already dead.” With that, he stopped looking at the young man, who had propped himself up into a sitting position, and said coldly, “I’m stopping by the cafeteria on the way. If there’s anything you want me to bring back, tell me now.”