“Dad.”
Tan Ze waved at the middle-aged man standing by the Jiang City High-Speed Railway station exit, stepping forward to take the small rolling suitcase from his hand. Judging by the weight, Tan Chengxuan was only planning to stay for two days at most.
Tan Chengxuan was roughly the same height as Tan Ze. Having reached middle age, he had developed a slight belly, though compared to the average pot-bellied middle-aged man, he still looked relatively slim.
“Why are you still keeping your hair like this?” Tan Chengxuan frowned in displeasure, his voice booming like a bell. “Looking neither like a man nor a woman.”
Tan Ze offered a weak smile and said nothing, smoothly changing the subject. “Where’s the hotel you booked? Let’s grab a cab.”
Tan Chengxuan rattled off the address, and Tan Ze booked an express car on his ride-hailing app. While waiting for the car, he couldn’t bear the awkward silence, so he forced out a dry question: “How are Auntie and little brother doing lately?”
“Mm, pretty good. Your little brother is moving up to the senior kindergarten class, and your aunt says she’s planning to enroll him in a private primary school afterward. I hear the educational quality is much better than public schools.”
“An international private school?” Tan Ze recalled that there were only two private primary schools around that area; it was probably the top-tier one.
“Yes.”
Tan Ze nodded and fell silent again.
“How are you getting along with Director Liang’s son? You two go to the same university, right?”
Images of Liang Xubai’s face flashed through Tan Ze’s mind. He gave a vague, noncommittal reply. “Pretty well.”
All the way to the hotel, Tan Chengxuan droned on about Liang Xubai. Tan Ze found nothing to talk about, but he had no choice except to endure and nod along until the topic finally drifted elsewhere.
Tan Chengxuan lectured that since they got along so well, they should visit each other more often, and that living in someone else’s house required tact so as not to embarrass him.
Internally, Tan Ze let out a dry laugh. Your son’s dignity was already thrown out the trash ages ago—caught red-handed wearing a dress, and busted badmouthing the guy right to his face.
He dropped Tan Chengxuan off at the hotel and escaped using the excuse of an afternoon class. Once freed from Tan Chengxuan’s suffocating presence, Tan Ze felt his body and mind instantly decompress. He stopped by a nearby convenience store to buy a pack of cigarettes, smoked two of them to calm his nerves, and took the subway back to campus.
When Lei Miaomiao heard his dad had arrived, he shivered in sheer terror.
Tan Ze couldn’t help laughing out loud. “Are you seriously that scared of him?”
“Hell yeah! Your dad totally hates me. Every time he runs into me, he gives me a massive earful, always acting like I’m a terrible influence holding you back.”
“Maybe because your overall vibe screams ‘unruly hoodlum,'” Tan Ze joked.
Lei Miaomiao choked on air, looking deeply aggrieved. “I don’t even smoke! Who’s corrupting whom is anyone’s guess.”
“Relax, he’s not coming to see you. You can put your heart back in your chest,” Tan Ze shook his head and flashed his phone screen at him. “He’s meeting someone else entirely.”
Lei Miaomiao gasped in shock. “Your dad’s actually opening up his iron rooster feathers and paying for a meal?”
“Only because he’s treating a rich kid,” Tan Ze sneered.
…..
At the dinner
Tan Ze couldn’t for the life of him figure out the point of this dinner.
At a subtle cue from Tan Chengxuan’s eyes, Tan Ze proactively stood up to pour a cup of tea for Liang Xubai. He set the full teacup down in front of Liang Xubai, the porcelain making a sharp clink against the glass tabletop.
Liang Xubai lifted his eyes to look at him.
Tan Chengxuan took the conversational lead. “Xubai, I hope I can call you that?”
Liang Xubai offered a polite, faint smile. “Of course.”
“How has your father’s health been these past few years?” Tan Chengxuan opened with a textbook cliché of a conversational starter.
“He’s doing well,” Liang Xubai smoothly sidestepped the superficial small talk, playing the role of the shrewd insider. “Though he’s been quite busy lately—he’s away in the capital attending a conference.”
“Hearing that you were coming, he asked my older brother to host you instead.”
Sitting right next to Liang Xubai, Tan Ze paused mid-sip at those words. He genuinely had no idea Liang Xubai even had an older brother. But since dinner time had already passed, whether this mysterious “older brother” would actually show up was anyone’s guess.
It felt awfully like an excuse Liang Xubai had just invented to save face for them.
Sitting right here made Tan Ze feel utterly out of place, as though the oxygen in the room was running thin. Watching Tan Chengxuan—who was usually so uncompromising and stern—bend over backward to put on such an amicable, carefully measured face in front of Liang Xubai made his skin crawl.
Even Liang Xubai didn’t bother acting with the traditional deference of a “junior,” making the entire atmosphere deeply bizarre.
“I’ll go urge them to serve the dishes,” Tan Ze stood up, marching resolutely out of the private dining room. The moment he pushed the door open, he nearly plowed right into someone.
Tan Ze looked up and locked eyes with the person. The man shared about a five-part facial resemblance with Liang Xubai, though he was a bit older—appearing to be around twenty-seven or twenty-eight. Thick, heavy eyebrows weighed down over his inner eye corners, giving him an air of effortless, unprovoked authority the moment he stared quietly down at someone.
Tan Ze stepped aside, clearing a path for him to enter first.
“Running late, my apologies.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Tan Ze saw Tan Chengxuan spring immediately to his feet, bending his waist slightly as he reached out to shake hands and offer pleasantries. The man merely offered a perfunctory, superficial grip before shifting his gaze and clapping a hand onto Liang Xubai’s shoulder.
“I asked you to host on my behalf, so why is there still only a pot of tea on the table?”
Watching the true host arrive, a flash of awkward embarrassment crossed Tan Chengxuan’s face as he shot Tan Ze a pointed look.
With a blank expression, Tan Ze slipped out and hurried the waitstaff along.
The atmosphere remained painfully awkward, especially after Liang Xubai’s older brother joined the table.
Tan Ze introduced himself politely without making a fool of himself by trying to aggressively shake the man’s hand; he simply offered a polite smile and a slight bow.
The tension had already been palpable before Liang Xubai’s brother arrived, but once he did, Tan Chengxuan’s subtle, cringing subservience became even more glaringly obvious.
Meanwhile, Liang Xuying—whose status and posture clearly placed him at the absolute top of the food chain—remained remarkably cool and detached throughout, occasionally furrowing his brow in a way that signaled he was exhausted by the social obligation and thoroughly impatient.
Tan Ze felt like the heavy atmosphere was suffocating him. He drank cup after cup of tea in sullen silence, barely touching his chopsticks.
Out of the four people at the table, Liang Xubai was the only one eating with any frequency; he almost looked like he had actually come just for the food.
“Dad, I’m going to the restroom,” Tan Ze finally snapped under the pressure, announcing his exit and preparing to leave. Right as he stood up, he heard Liang Xubai rise alongside him, chiming in with a casual, “Ge, I’m heading out too.”
The two of them walked out one after the other toward the washrooms. Tan Ze kept his head down in gloomy silence. After using the facilities, he couldn’t be bothered to return to the dining room, so he marched all the way to the end of the hall, pushed open the door to the smoking lounge, and stepped straight inside.
Liang Xubai followed him the entire way, pushing the door open to join him.
Without missing a beat, Tan Ze expertly lit two cigarettes, dropped onto the sofa with his legs splayed wide, and rested his forearms heavily on his thighs. He kept his head bowed in a forward-leaning posture, refusing to meet Liang Xubai’s eyes.
His loose hair fell forward to shadow one side of his face, while the other half was tucked neatly behind his ear. As he smoked, his cheeks hollowed out slightly, a thin trail of white smoke curling up from the tip of his nose.
Liang Xubai’s expression shifted slightly.
“Liang Xubai,” Tan Ze said, calling him by his full name for once as he watched the guy hover nearby. “Can you get the hell out of here?”
A trace of a smile lingered in Liang Xubai’s voice, though it carried zero warmth. He replied coolly, “If I go back in there and sit by myself, wouldn’t the scene be even uglier?”
“…”
Tan Ze fell silent for two seconds. A surge of stifled rage boiled and churned in his chest. He jammed the nearly burnt-out cigarette butt into an ashtray, violently stubbing it out before tossing it into the bin, gritting his teeth to keep from exploding.
“My dad is a vain, hypocritical businessman who loves packaging himself as a neighborhood do-gooder. He’s dealt with plenty of classmates like your dad who used to have some loose ties to him,” Liang Xubai stated calmly, analyzing the situation. “And plenty of people walk right up to make fools of themselves.”
“There’s nothing to be ashamed or furious about.”
Tan Ze lifted his head, locking eyes with Liang Xubai. Those deep, inscrutable eyes of Liang Xubai’s held a complex mix of emotions that Tan Ze couldn’t quite decipher.
Liang Xubai met his gaze unblinkingly, genuinely seeing nothing wrong with what he had said.
A sudden, chilling realization washed over Tan Ze: these people with the surname Liang were an open furnace fire, and his father was nothing more than a moth flying straight toward it out of foolish self-importance—getting scorched into a pile of ash by their sharp, unvarnished arrogance.
Liang Xubai had stated it plainly: people fawned over them all the time, and they were already completely, effortlessly accustomed to that kind of lifestyle.
So what? Tan Ze couldn’t wrap his head around it, and the thought felt utterly pathetic to him.
“What makes you so damn special?”
Tan Ze stood up, a disorienting sensation washing over him as if his legs no longer belonged to him. His lower body felt half-numb, and the boiling rage that had consumed him moments before vanished completely, replaced by a dull, paralyzed numbness.
Tan Ze knew the truth deep down: his father, Tan Chengxuan, was an arrogant, self-deluded middle-aged man, and this unpleasant ordeal was entirely self-inflicted.
Yet he simply couldn’t stand it. It wasn’t that he felt any shred of sympathy for Tan Chengxuan’s humiliation; rather, it was the suffocating embarrassment of his own position in that exact moment.
Because sitting right beside him was a peer of the exact same age—someone he loathed—who had effortlessly seen right through his father’s clumsy, immature schemes. Worse still, that person was probably mocking his delusional overconfidence on the inside, even having the supreme arrogance to tell him he didn’t need to feel ashamed of playing the boot licker.
And he just happened to be that kind of father’s son.
Tan Ze stepped right up to Liang Xubai, spitting out every single word with deliberate force. “Not everyone wants to exhaust themselves trying to suck up to you.”
“I sure as hell don’t.”
With a hard shove, he slammed his shoulder heavily against Liang Xubai’s. He didn’t budge the taller man an inch, but he turned on his heel with an ice-cold face and walked out.
Liang Xubai stood in place for a moment, rubbing his shoulder as a rising sense of absurdity washed over him. He had clearly been trying to comfort the guy.
Why couldn’t Tan Ze tell good intentions apart from bad?
The dinner ultimately concluded in awkward silence. Liang Xuying claimed he had matters to attend to elsewhere and called it a night. Walking side-by-side at the front, he and Liang Xubai exchanged occasional, sparse remarks—both men were men of few words, operating almost like an automated question-and-answer machine.
You toss out a query, the other replies. Repeat.
Liang Xuying’s assistant pulled the car around. Before getting in, Liang Xuying offered a perfunctory farewell to Tan Chengxuan and drove off into the night.
Liang Xubai pulled his car keys from his pocket and took the initiative. “Uncle Tan, let me drive you back to your hotel.”
Tan Chengxuan smiled and accepted, climbing into the front passenger seat.
Having witnessed Liang Xuying’s intimidating aura firsthand, Tan Chengxuan seemed to view Liang Xubai as much warmer and more approachable by comparison. Settled in the passenger seat, he eagerly struck up a conversation with Liang Xubai, the topic naturally revolving entirely around Tan Ze.
He complained that Tan Ze lacked common sense, asking Liang Xubai to keep a watchful eye on him and look after him.
Tan Ze felt like he was listening to a laundry list of his own flaws. Weary to the bone, he slumped against the car window and stayed completely silent.
“Tan Ze, Tan Ze!” Tan Chengxuan twisted around in his seat to glare at him. “Get that hair of yours cut one of these days. Clean yourself up and look sharp—what kind of look is it walking around looking neither like a man nor a woman?”
With a blank expression, Tan Ze didn’t even turn his head, keeping his eyes glued to the passing scenery outside the window. “I’m not cutting it.”
“… What did you say?”
Perhaps this was the first time his usually obedient, compliant son had ever said “no” to him directly; Tan Chengxuan looked genuinely stunned.
Too lazy to repeat himself, Tan Ze pressed his lips into a tight line and stayed quiet.
Liang Xubai pulled the car to a stop. “We’re here.”
Once Tan Chengxuan got out of the car, Tan Ze pulled out his phone and intently dived back into replying to Lei Miaomiao’s string of messages, venting his poor mood as he recounted everything that had gone down that evening.
In the rearview mirror, Liang Xubai glanced back at him. Up front, his phone buzzed with a notification. While waiting at a red light, he took a quick glance.
He had forgotten to switch accounts back; the app was still logged into his burner “Black Dog” profile.
Flossy Yanbei: [Ge, are you coming to watch my stream tonight?]