Qin Peiran leaned in very close, her eyes seeming to dissect Lou Fan entirely and examine her with thorough scrutiny.
Lou Fan heard her own heart beating uncontrollably within the narrow confines of the car. This argument had come out of nowhere, and its premise held no water. Lou Fan ought to have secured an easy victory.
Yet she couldn’t muster a single word of rebuttal.
“Ping!” Lou Fan’s WeChat chimed again, rescuing her from this inexplicable standoff.
“Yan Li?” Qin Peiran asked.
“No.” Lou Fan replied while typing a response, not even lifting her head. “Yu Huai, oh, the one who resigned today, sent me some restaurant discount coupons she hasn’t finished using.”
“Discount coupons?” Qin Peiran leaned back, her gaze fixed on Lou Fan’s phone. “Why wouldn’t she use her coupons just because she resigned?”
“Maybe it’s a bit far.” Lou Fan finished typing and shrugged at Qin Peiran. “I have no idea. Their resignation was pretty sudden.”
As she spoke, Lou Fan opened Yu Huai’s Moments and showed Qin Peiran a photo of the two of them riding bikes in the park. “Look, these two. They couldn’t stand each other when they first joined the company, but later their relationship got so good. It got so good that they’re resigning together. Director Chen is practically tearing her hair out.”
“She…” Qin Peiran frowned, snatched the phone from Lou Fan’s hand, and swiped back and forth across the screen as if confirming something.
“What’s wrong?” Lou Fan looked at Qin Peiran’s profile. Her bridge of nose was high and straight, carrying an air of emotional detachment.
“Yunyun Game Restaurant, do they go there often?” Qin Peiran suddenly asked a seemingly out-of-context question.
Lou Fan nodded, recalling what the two had said that day. “It’s close to the company, and the food is great. They practically lived there.”
Qin Peiran handed the phone back and looked into Lou Fan’s eyes with utmost seriousness. “They must be a couple.”
“What?”
“I’ve seen them at the restaurant several times. They’re definitely a couple.”
A couple. Lou Fan suddenly remembered that day at Yunyun Game Restaurant, when both of them had answered that phone call at the same time, and that mutual gaze as chilling as falling into an ice cellar.
She lowered her head and reopened her chat history with Yu Huai. There, the instructions and precautions for every single discount coupon were meticulously and clearly laid out. It didn’t look like someone quitting their job; it looked more like someone making final arrangements.
Could it be? Lou Fan didn’t dare think further. She re-fastened the seatbelt she had just unbuckled moments ago, glanced sideways at Qin Peiran, and said, “Hold on tight.” The next second, she rapidly started the car and merged back into the heavy flow of traffic.
Lou Fan had only visited their place once before. Relying on her memory, she successfully found the apartment building, parking and killing the engine in one fluid motion.
It was the usual time for post-dinner strolls, and the elevator was taking forever to arrive. Lou Fan and Qin Peiran stood by the elevator doors, surrounded by a noisy group of children wearing rollerblades, exaggerating the latest school news.
“I’m telling you, our new P.E. teacher is a lesbian.” A chubby boy whispered mysteriously, his voice loud and powerful. “Shh, you guys can’t tell anyone else.”
“How do you know?”
“She has short hair!”
“Well, my grandma has short hair.”
“Tch.” Lou Fan felt a flicker of impatience and checked her phone. Over half an hour had passed since Yu Huai sent her that final message. This was the absolute fastest speed at which Lou Fan could have rushed over.
“12th floor.” Lou Fan looked at Qin Peiran and pointed toward the nearby fire exit. “I’m going up. You wait for the elevator here.”
“Together.” Before Qin Peiran’s voice even faded, she grabbed Lou Fan’s hand and bolted toward the stairwell.
Twelve flights of stairs, twenty-four turns. Lou Fan’s vision blurred into a smear of colors, and her heart raced faster and faster as time ticked by, though it was unclear whether it was due to physical exhaustion or something else.
Her legs mechanically took large strides, while various scenes from the time she first met the two women flashed through her mind one after another.
Uncontrollably, various scenarios of what she might find up there began to bubble up.
“We’re here.” Qin Peiran reined in Lou Fan’s unstoppable momentum, taking the lead. “The one on the left?”
“Yeah, how did you know?” Lou Fan wanted to ask how she knew, but the moment she looked up, she understood.
The front door of the apartment on the left stood wide open, and the interior was in absolute chaos.
The framed portraits the two had originally hung on the wall had been chopped in two and tossed onto the floor. The dining table was covered in shredded Polaroid photos. A handmade couple’s ceramic water mug they had made together in Jingdezhen, which Lou Fan had previously seen on Moments, had been smashed against the ground into a bed of jagged shards.
The further inside they went, the colder Lou Fan’s heart grew.
The glass display cabinet was shattered, and the blind-box figures from inside were scattered everywhere. Not only that, but the four walls of the living room, the sofa, and the rug were stained everywhere with sticky, dark blood. Yellow Taoist talisman papers had been trampled into muddy mush, and the entire apartment reeked heavily.
Following the trail of blood, Qin Peiran found a rooster that had bled to death in the corner of the sofa. “Exorcism?” She let out a cold, derisive scoff from her nose.
Lou Fan searched from the living room to the bedroom and finally found the two of them in the bathroom.
Compared to the frantic chaos of the living room, the bathroom was blessedly serene.
The light blue bathtub was filled to the brim with water. Yu Huai was holding Lu Siyuan in her arms, clinging tightly to one another.
Both of them had their eyes closed, their complexions calm and peaceful as if they had long since drifted into a deep sleep. A multitude of empty medicine bottles lay scattered around the corner of the bathtub, rolling across the floor with soft clatters as Qin Peiran rushed in at the sound.
“We’ll each carry one on our backs.” Without a moment’s hesitation, Qin Peiran dragged Lu Siyuan out of the bathtub.
A completely unconscious person is extremely heavy, but fortunately, the elevator arrived quickly this time. Driving smoothly all the way, Lou Fan rushed the two of them to the nearest hospital.
Outside the emergency room, a flood of memories rushed over Lou Fan. In her previous life, by the time she suddenly discovered the two had deleted her from their contacts, a long time had already passed. Thinking back now, it was probably the work of their parents.
Not even a whisper of their deaths had leaked out. Out of fear that the scandal of their daughters being lesbians would be exposed, they had wiped away everyone on WeChat completely.
As it turned out, that illusory concept of saving face mattered far more than two living, breathing human lives.
Time dragged on with agonizing slowness, and Lou Fan’s heart grew tighter and tighter. She stared unblinkingly at the door of the operating room, terrified that a single split-second lapse in attention would make her miss something vital.
“Drink some water.” A warm disposable paper cup was pressed into Lou Fan’s palm. She raised her head and gazed into those cool, refined eyes.
After running up twelve flights of stairs and carrying someone all the way to the hospital, her throat was indeed parched, and her voice came out hoarse. “Thank you. I probably won’t go back tonight. You should hail a cab. Do you still have cash on you?”
“I’ll stay with you.” Qin Peiran sat down beside her, holding her paper cup and taking a small sip.
“You have to work tomorrow.”
“You have to work tomorrow, too.” Qin Peiran turned her head, cutting off Lou Fan’s unfinished sentence.
The cup of water was slowly finished in fits and starts. The empty paper cup was pulled from Lou Fan’s hand by Qin Peiran and tossed away, replaced instantly by a pair of warm palms wrapping securely around Lou Fan’s anxiously trembling hands.
“It’s going to be fine.” Qin Peiran smoothed out Lou Fan’s tightly clenched fingers one by one. Only then did Lou Fan realize her hands had been shaking uncontrollably the entire time.
Her knuckles were meticulously massaged point by point. Accompanied by Qin Peiran’s quiet and rhythmic soothing, Lou Fan finally heard the ringing in her ears clear up, realizing only then that she had been suffering from severe tinnitus.
“It’s going to be fine, it’s going to be fine.” Qin Peiran gently rubbed her cheek against the head resting on her shoulder, repeating those three words countless times until the emergency room doors finally swung open.
“They’re out of immediate danger.” The doctor removed his blue surgical mask. “Are you family members? It’s a good thing you brought them in time, otherwise…”
Otherwise, it would have been just like her past life, without even a proper funeral. They would have been taken back separately to places unworthy of being called home, vanishing from the world in total silence.
Qin Peiran went to the nurse’s station to process the hospitalization paperwork, while Lou Fan, with the doctor’s permission, entered the two women’s hospital room.
The overhead lights of the ward were turned off, leaving only the blue glow of cold medical monitors casting regular beeps that mirrored the rhythm of their heartbeats. Lou Fan sat beside the hospital bed, steadying her own chaotic thoughts to the rhythm of the two long, slow breathing patterns coming from the bed.
“A couple. No wonder.” Lou Fan murmured to herself. She felt foolish for being so dense; she had teased them for months about being inseparable, yet she had never once suspected that was the reason.
“All the paperwork is done.” Qin Peiran gently pushed open a crack in the door, letting a sliver of cold fluorescent light spill in.
She sat down beside Lou Fan, gazing at the two people on the bed who still had their eyes closed. “The doctor said the medication they took wasn’t too mixed, so they should wake up soon. After another three days of observation, they can be discharged. There will be a private nurse tonight, so you can go home first.”
Seeing that Lou Fan didn’t speak, Qin Peiran added, “If you’re worried, I can stay here with you. I don’t have classes early tomorrow morning anyway.”
“No need.” Lou Fan shook her head. She had no reason to make Qin Peiran share this burden of anxiety with her. “Let’s leave once they wake up. We shouldn’t add to the nurse’s workload.”
Lou Fan felt that in this lifetime, the silences between her and Qin Peiran had grown much heavier. Sometimes it was awkward, and other times it felt like a silent, unspoken competition. But at this moment, rather than calling their silence wordless, it felt more like a shared understanding.
Inside the darkness reeking of disinfectant, the electronic sounds traced four silhouettes, while their thoughts quietly crossed paths, bypassing human intentions.
After an unknown duration of this time-suspending silence, Yu Huai woke up, followed shortly by Lu Siyuan.
“Lou Fan.” Lu Siyuan forced the corner of her lips upward, as if trying to comfort her instead.
“I know.” Lou Fan pulled her chair closer and took Lu Siyuan’s hand. “I went to your apartment.”
Yu Huai’s bed was on the inner side. Qin Peiran walked over, adjusted the height control bar at the foot of the bed, and fetched two pillows to prop underneath Yu Huai so she could lean back more comfortably.
“You are… I think I’ve seen you before.” Yu Huai looked up at Qin Peiran with a hint of surprise. “That person from Yunyun Game Restaurant.”
“Qin Peiran.” Qin Peiran tucked Yu Huai’s blanket in and sat back down beside Lou Fan.
“Due to some circumstances, she’s my friend now.” Lou Fan glossed over it, steering the conversation back to the two of them. “Who did this?”