Entering the phone store, Lou Fan didn’t think twice before asking the staff for a flagship model to check out. “White is fine. No need to unbox it. It’s a gift.”
You Ye stood off to the side, narrowing her eyes as she looked Lou Fan up and down. “I was wondering why you’ve been acting so strange lately. I’ve never seen you this busy before. Tell me, who is the phone for? Did you find yourself a partner?”
“As if.” Lou Fan took the bag handed over by the store clerk and gave You Ye’s approaching face a playful, disgusted push. “It’s for Qin Peiran.”
“Qin Peiran?” You Ye blinked. “Who’s that?”
Lou Fan froze for a second, only then realizing that this lifetime’s You Ye didn’t know Qin Peiran yet.
“Well, I recently met a female college student whose family situation is quite pitiful, so I’ve been helping her out with tuition and living expenses and stuff.”
“A female college student?” You Ye looked deeply suspicious. “What year? How old? Which university? Do you have a photo?”
“Hey, are you running a background check or something?” Lou Fan said that, but she still answered honestly. “A freshman at Haida, just turned eighteen. No photos.”
“Heh.” You Ye let out a soft scoff, pulling Lou Fan onto the escalator while continuing to nag. “Sponsoring a college student, paying tuition and living expenses, and now buying her a phone. Don’t be surprised if she ends up moving into your place in a few months.”
“She already lives at my place,” Lou Fan replied calmly.
You Ye stared blankly.
She lowered her voice and hissed into Lou Fan’s ear, “Do you still remember that you’re a lesbian? What you’re doing, this! How is this any different from that sort of thing?”
“What sort of thing?”
“Keeping, well, you know, the kind where you cover all her food, housing, and expenses!” You Ye felt so embarrassed she practically didn’t want to stand next to her.
Wait a minute, you didn’t talk like this in the last life! When you kept someone back then, you insisted it was a romantic relationship, but now that you’re calling it a sponsorship, you’re saying it’s a kept relationship? Lou Fan rolled her eyes and pinched You Ye’s mouth shut. “Keep your voice down.” With that, she gestured toward the bustling weekend crowd in the mall.
“It’s really just a pure sponsorship relationship. She happened to be working part-time at a restaurant near my company, and we got to know each other after I went there a few times. Anyway, I just thought of her as a friend doing a good deed.”
“Is she pretty?”
“Huh?” Lou Fan glanced behind her, feeling like passersby were secretly eavesdropping. “Why are you asking that?”
“I’m just asking if she’s good-looking. Just answer directly. Why are you suddenly acting all shy with me?”
“She’s pretty.” Lou Fan sighed.
“How pretty?”
Lou Fan finally lost her patience, tossing her handbag onto You Ye’s shoulder. “The most drop-dead gorgeous person in the entire universe, are you happy now?”
“Heh.” You Ye snorted from the bridge of her nose. “I knew it. She’s only eighteen, and you’ve already set your sights on her. Aren’t you ashamed?”
“How is that even possible?” Lou Fan raised her voice slightly, attracting several curious gazes. She tugged You Ye’s sleeve to pull her further away and lowered her voice. “Get a grip, bestie. How could I possibly fall for someone ten years younger than me? She’s just a kid. Besides, she’s already in a relationship.”
“Is that so?” You Ye dragged out her tone meaningfully. “Eighteen isn’t that young anymore.”
When the two arrived at the hot pot restaurant and took their seats, Lou Fan bit down on the hair tie around her wrist to pull her hair into a ponytail. “But I’m twenty-eight already. There’s a generational gap when talking to a kid, so how could anything happen?”
Lou Fan rarely tied her hair up outside of casual settings. She tied it loosely, letting a few strands of bangs frame her face, which made the small black mole at the corner of her eye faintly visible. “Besides, I have no interest in being a home-wrecker, thank you very much.”
While waiting for the food to arrive and the pot to boil, You Ye suddenly remembered something else. “Eighteen, isn’t she the same age as your younger brother?”
Lou Fan gave a casual hum as an answer.
“Hey, have your parents tried looking for you again lately?” You Ye thought for a moment before asking. “For things like your brother’s tuition.”
“He didn’t pass the exams,” Lou Fan said.
“Oh?”
The pot began to boil. Lou Fan dropped a piece of tripe into the broth and swished her chopsticks. “You know what Lou Junhui is like. He’s been spoiled rotten since he was little. Back in high school, if a teacher criticized him a few times, his parents would chase them all the way to school to curse them out. How could he possibly endure the hardships of studying?”
The tripe was cooked. Lou Fan dipped it in sauce and popped it into her mouth with a satisfied expression. “No wonder you were so dead set on coming to this place. I thought it was just another internet-famous restaurant relying purely on marketing.”
After finishing a bite, she put down her chopsticks, tapped her phone screen a few times, and slid it across the table.
Dense rows of chat logs filled two conversation boxes. One was labeled “Lou Junhui’s Mother” and the other “Lou Junhui’s Father.”
You Ye scrolled upward with a practiced expression of indifference. There were consecutive 60-second voice messages filling an entire screen, a dozen missed video calls, and long-winded essays mixed in between. Every word was meticulously crafted to pierce the heart, recounting how a pair of parents raised a child and how heartbroken they felt in their old age.
And they never forgot to preach earnestly at the end: [Mom and Dad are old, and it wouldn’t even matter if we died. Who made us give birth to an ungrateful wretch anyway? But you need to support your younger brother. He is your own flesh and blood after all.]
[He is the most important person in this world to you.]
“What is this about?” You Ye handed the phone back to Lou Fan. “Besides, weren’t you a left-behind child when you were little.” She paused, picked up a slice of rolled lamb, and stuffed it into her mouth.
Lou Fan didn’t care. Or rather, those things felt too distant, so distant that she didn’t even feel those memories belonged to her, which also blurred the very concept of family.
“They’re asking me for money. My brother wants to start a business,” Lou Fan said concisely.
“Start a business?” You Ye’s napa cabbage hovered with her chopsticks. She had a million questions she wanted to blurt out, but finally managed to squeeze out just one. “What kind of business does he plan to start?”
“Something about gaming, I think.” Lou Fan shrugged. “I’m not too clear on the details. Anyway, the last time I heard from his mother.” She corrected herself midway. “His mother said he wanted to do e-sports, and he’s right in the middle of needing money.”
“Don’t give them a dime,” You Ye scoffed. “Don’t forget what they said when you first arrived in Shanghai.”
Lou Fan certainly remembered. Back when she fled home in the middle of the night to escape that bizarre engagement banquet, she had been completely helpless in Shanghai. Her money quickly ran out, and when she was dizzy with hunger and placed her last shred of trust in blood ties to ask her parents for help.
They had looked down from above, carrying the smugness of victors. “I told you girls shouldn’t run off so far. If you apologize nicely, we’ll buy you a train ticket home tonight right away. But you need to learn your lesson; you have to obey properly from now on.”
“Yeah, I remember.” Lou Fan smiled easily, as if the past had long been forgiven. She scooped a round shrimp paste ball into You Ye’s bowl. “Good thing you gave me two thousand back then, otherwise you’d be burning tens of thousands of yuan in paper money for my tomb next Qingming Festival.”
“Pffft, what are you talking about?” You Ye glared at Lou Fan in mock anger. “If I hadn’t just found an internship back then, and Beijing rent wasn’t so ridiculously expensive, you wouldn’t have had to live on instant noodles for so long.”
“Thank you,” Lou Fan raised an eyebrow. “It was worth letting you copy my homework for all four years of college.”
“Get lost.”
After finishing their meal, the two went to see a movie and didn’t arrive home until past six in the evening.
“Since you’re only getting back now, won’t that college student you’re raising starve to death?” You Ye leaned her elbow against Lou Fan’s Mercedes-Benz E300 Coupe and teased her.
“Do you think she’s an idiot like you?” Lou Fan pulled out her phone and shook it. “Besides, I messaged her in advance to say I’d be back late and told her to eat on her own.”
“Oh?” You Ye narrowed her eyes with a mischievous smile. The next second, Lou Fan’s phone was snatched away in a blur of movement.
“Hey, what are you doing?” Lou Fan reached out to grab it, but You Ye’s quick mouth was always a step ahead.
“Oho, it’s the only pinned chat too. Even I don’t get that treatment. Let me see what you said.”
“Tsk tsk tsk. There’s food in the fridge, you can cook it yourself, leave the dishes there and I’ll wash them when I get back, or you can order takeout or eat outside, let me know if you run out of money.” You Ye shoved the phone back into Lou Fan’s arms. “You’re so thoughtful, huh? But how come she only replied with a single ‘Okay’?”
“Stop mocking me.” Lou Fan made a motion to punch You Ye’s shoulder. “Just wait until you fall in love, and I’ll make sure to broadcast all your simp chat logs all over town!”
You Ye froze for a moment, then burst into laughter. “When did I say you were in love? You admitted it yourself.”
Lou Fan slid into the driver’s seat, rolled her eyes out the window, stepped on the gas pedal, and sped off.
When she got home, the apartment was pitch black. Lou Fan held her phone and felt an inexplicable wave of annoyance.
How come a proper student was never home all day? Was she out getting mixed up with shady people and doing all sorts of nonsense?
“We should really set a curfew at home.” Lou Fan muttered to herself while changing her shoes, reaching out to feel for the wall switch in the dark. Without any warning, her fingertips brushed against something warm.
“Ah.” She instinctively let out a yelp, but her mouth was immediately covered by a hand, and the lights in the room clicked on right after.
“What kind of curfew?” Qin Peiran’s cool voice brushed right past Lou Fan’s earlobe, making her breath catch.
The warm palm quickly lifted away. Lou Fan bit her lip and walked toward the living room with a feigned sense of ease.
“Nothing much.” She found a comfortable spot to lounge lazily on the sofa, placed the phone box beside her, and tapped it with her fingertip. “For you.”
Qin Peiran’s gaze slid from Lou Fan’s face down to her hand. Her jade-like knuckles tapped irregularly against the paper box, her dark hair falling like a waterfall over her shoulders and casting a hazy shadow across the sofa.
Qin Peiran lowered her head slightly, walking over without meeting Lou Fan’s eyes directly.
“I don’t need it,” she said.
“Your phone screen is shattered. How many years have you had that thing?”
“It still works.”
“Is that so?” Lou Fan raised an eyebrow, her dark pupils narrowing slightly while the corner of her