They walked into the restaurant.
The two of them sat across from each other at a table, and before long, three dishes were served.
“Let’s eat,” Gu Qing said.
She then took two pairs of chopsticks from the chopstick holder and proactively handed one pair to Chen Luo, her movements as practiced as if they were an old married couple.
Chen Luo was dazed for a few seconds.
It felt as if he had found the sensation of dating her again.
Admittedly.
If Chen Luo truly had to spend his life with someone, then it would definitely have been his first love, Gu Qing. It was just that the two of them had ultimately lost each other along the way.
“What are you thinking about?” Gu Qing asked, looking at the distracted Chen Luo.
“Nothing,” Chen Luo said lightly.
Then he took the chopsticks and started eating. Braised beef brisket without cilantro was his favorite. Had Gu Qing still remembered that after five years?
Forget it.
Everything was already in the past.
Chen Luo ate silently.
And Gu Qing really did, just as she had said, simply want a meal companion. During the meal, she did not say a single word to Chen Luo.
The two of them finished lunch.
When they went to the front counter to pay, Gu Qing opened WeChat and asked the proprietress, “How much is it?”
“Seventy-four yuan,” the proprietress replied with a smile.
Then.
Gu Qing scanned the code with WeChat, paid 78 yuan, then took two bottles of Yibao water from the store’s refrigerator. After handing one to Chen Luo, she walked out of the stir-fry restaurant.
As they headed toward the roadside.
Gu Qing said, “Add me on WeChat and transfer the meal money to me.”
“I thought…” Chen Luo said somewhat thick-skinnedly. “You were going to treat me to this meal.”
“Dream on!” Gu Qing said with a heartless expression. “There is no such thing as a free lunch!”
Chen Luo smiled.
Then he took out his phone, scanned the code, and added Gu Qing on WeChat.
Back when Chen Luo fled from Jiangcheng, he was afraid that that psycho would contact his ex-girlfriend and track down his whereabouts, so he deleted all of his friends.
More than a year passed.
He only dared to add back his best bro, Xu Anping.
After they added each other as friends.
Chen Luo immediately transferred 39 yuan to Gu Qing. Then the two of them walked toward the small courtyard across the street. After crossing the road, they returned to the courtyard.
They went upstairs and each returned to their own rooms.
During that time, neither of them said a word. The atmosphere was like that of familiar strangers. In fact, the first thing both of them did after returning to their rooms was close their doors at the same time.
From a distance.
The two doors were shut almost simultaneously.
They were astonishingly in sync!
Back in his room.
Chen Luo went straight to his bedroom. The nearly 20-square-meter bedroom had a double bed, and there was a computer desk by the window.
The window had a protruding extension design.
A potted cactus and a potted succulent were placed there.
At that moment.
For some reason, Chen Luo walked to the window, leaned out, and looked to the left. Just then, he happened to see Gu Qing’s head also leaning out of her window, looking to the right.
The two of them tilted their heads.
Across the windows.
Their eyes met in a way neither of them had expected.
Then.
In less than a second, Gu Qing looked away, quickly pretended to glance downstairs, and immediately pulled her head back inside. Her whole face was panicked.
Her back pressed tightly against the wall.
She looked like she was trying very hard to hide something.
“Am I doomed!”
“She saw me just now, didn’t she!”
Gu Qing clenched her teeth.
It was as if she had done something so embarrassing that she could never show her face again.
Her expression was full of regret.
“What should I do?”
“He won’t think I still secretly like him, will he? How could I possibly like that kind of guy a second time? I’m not that naive little girl from back then anymore!”
After comforting herself mentally, Gu Qing felt much calmer.
On the other side.
In Chen Luo’s room.
He looked perfectly calm. After all, compared with that psycho film queen, Gu Qing did not even count as a small ripple.
During the year and a half he dated Gu Qing.
Chen Luo remembered that the angriest she had ever been was when she refused to speak to him for half a day.
Later on.
He coaxed her back with a pack of strawberry-flavored QQ gummy candies.
Thinking about it now…
She was so easy to coax!
After lying down on the bed.
Chen Luo covered himself with a blanket and took a nap. Fortunately, it was early September, already autumn. The weather in Jiangcheng was especially cool, so even a power outage did not make it hot.
If it had been summer.
Jiangcheng’s thirty-something-degree weather would have been truly unbearable.
He slept for a while.
Chen Luo did not wake up until a little after four in the afternoon. After getting up, he exercised for a bit, casually doing 100 push-ups, 100 sit-ups, and 100 squats.
After finishing his workout.
Chen Luo had worked up a bit of sweat, but looking at his sharply carved abs, he still felt that his efforts had paid off.
After a shower.
Chen Luo sat in the living room and played on his phone. He scrolled through beauties on Douyin for a while and felt that the quality was really uneven, and there were also plenty of edited, special-effect long legs.
His first love’s legs still looked better.
So Chen Luo opened WeChat and tapped into Gu Qing’s Moments, wanting to see what was there.
He entered her Moments.
It was just as it had been back then.
Gu Qing’s Moments had no body photos at all. It was full of all kinds of daily life posts she had made.
Cooking, shopping, drinking milk tea, buying clothes, amusement parks, claw machines, mountain climbing, bungee jumping…
“Wait!”
“Gu Qing actually dared to go bungee jumping?”
Chen Luo was extremely shocked.
He carefully looked at a Moments post Gu Qing had made five years ago. It was a photo of her hanging over a valley, tied to a bungee cord.
『How am I supposed to say goodbye to you?』
This caption…
Why was it so emo?
Chen Luo glanced at the time.
It was exactly the 100th day after their breakup. Even though five years had passed, Chen Luo still remembered the day he and Gu Qing broke up very clearly.
“Why am I thinking about all this again?”
Chen Luo sighed softly.
He opened his phone and was about to ask Xu Anping to go out for dinner, but Xu Anping sent him a bunch of emojis first, all of them expressing shock, surprise, and panic.
“What the hell is going on?”
Chen Luo asked in confusion.
“Brother Luo!”
“I just discovered something incredible!”
Xu Anping replied.
“Stop making such a fuss!”
“You’re already 24. Can’t you learn from me? Be a little steadier and more mature when something happens!”
Chen Luo said in an old-before-his-time tone.
“It’s about you,” Xu Anping continued.
“(⊙_⊙)?”
Chen Luo froze.
“Come out first.”
Xu Anping said, “I’ve already driven to the bottom of your building.”
Hearing that.
Chen Luo put on his shoes, went downstairs, and got into the passenger seat of Xu Anping’s Buick. He looked at Xu Anping with a confused expression and asked, “What’s going on?”
“Do you remember our college counselor, Meng Yue?”
“Of course I remember.”
Chen Luo nodded and asked, “What about her?”
Not only was she their counselor, she had also been Chen Luo’s personal mentor, his safe harbor when he was down, and the warm place he had longed for.
“She seems to live here too.”
Xu Anping took out his phone, opened Meng Yue’s Moments, and said.
After taking the phone.
Chen Luo saw a photo Meng Yue had taken of a potted cactus on a balcony.
Then.
Chen Luo stuck his head out from the passenger seat and looked up at the balcony of the neighbor on the right on the second floor. A potted cactus, identical to the one in the photo, was sitting there.
“Damn, that’s impressive!”
After freezing for two seconds, Chen Luo blurted out a curse.