“Brother, who is Qin Yize?”
The fake child asked him with innocent incomprehension, yet his hands didn’t stop moving, instinctively groping and pinching all over. Unable to move, Yan Jun was whole like a stiff tree branch, used by this silly dog Qin Yize as a backscratcher to rub back and forth.
“Qin… Qin Yize was your name before!” Flusteredly brushing it off, Yan Jun attempted to struggle. But his knee joints were tightly coiled by him, and the details of their bodies were embedded seamlessly together, making it completely impossible to break away.
His voice had even cracked from shouting.
Looking clueless, Qin Yize finally released his arms and let go of his legs. Yan Jun scrambled up in one smooth motion and stood by the bedside, glaring at him with eyes burning like fire, his chest rising and falling, quite furious.
At a single glance, he spotted the fake child’s obvious physical reaction, yet this guy wore a clueless expression, completely failing to understand what this implied.
“You… go to the bathroom!”
“I don’t need to pee.” Qin Yize looked at him in a trance, then lowered his head to take a look, touching it blankly: “Brother, what’s going on with it? It feels uncomfortable…”
Scratching his head with skepticism, Qin Yize walked downstairs with a bulge stubbornly sticking out. The attic finally became quiet, yet Yan Jun felt a buzzing in his ears as if a thunderclap had exploded, the aftershocks vibrating in his mind: Brat!… His mind has regressed, but his body is still working just fine!
He couldn’t help patting his own butt hard: Don’t treat me like a “backscratcher” either! I’m a guy!
Throwing himself onto the bed with grief and indignation, he tried hard to steady his mind. Just as he fished out his phone, Qin Yize came back.
Not looking sideways, Yan Jun put on a stern face and ignored him. Yet this guy walked up to him relentlessly and even pointed: “Brother, can’t pee it out, won’t go down.”
“Will you ever finish!” Yan Jun instantly broke character, sitting up in a frenzy and babbling incoherently: “…Just do it yourself! You don’t expect me to help you, do you!”
The fake child stood by the bed in dejection, pouting like a persistent big German Shepherd: “I don’t know how… Brother, can you help me?”
“How could you not know how?!” Yan Jun was about to go crazy: “Like this, like this! Understand?!”
Observing intently, the fake child then climbed to the inner side of the bed and followed suit. Yan Jun averted his gaze, thinking that looking would give him styes. But a few seconds later, he heard the fake child say: “Brother, it hurts a bit.”
How could it hurt? Suspiciously turning his head to look, he nearly fell flat on his face: “Who told you to go through the zipper?!”
Yan Jun shouted in a breakdown: “Directly, directly—don’t you understand?!”
The fake child uttered an “Oh” of sudden realization, and right after that, Yan Jun was caught off guard face-to-face.
“Damn!” Grievously, he yanked the blanket over his head: “Who told you to do it right in front of me!”
Yet the very next second after he curled up to the edge of the bed, Qin Yize very consciously pressed right up against him! Wrapping one arm around him, just like every previous night.
Yan Jun was about to go mad. He abruptly ripped the blanket away, revealing an exasperated, life-weary, tomato-red face: “Go do that on the other side, why’d you hug me over!”
Yet the fake child rested his chin on Yan Jun’s shoulder, feeling no shame or offense whatsoever, and clinging to him just as a matter of course: “Can’t I hug you?” He sniffed that pleasant lemon scent, “However, hugging Brother is a bit more comfortable.”
The two of them were like entangling snakes, one fleeing and the other chasing, winding tighter and tighter instead. Actually, Qin Yize didn’t know why he wanted to hug his brother either, but at this very moment, looking at that shyly indignant expression on Yan Jun’s face and his increasingly red lips, his heart felt numb and itchy, always feeling like he was looking at… looking at the spicy strips Big Sister Sijia shared with him.
Startled into a “Damn!”, Yan Jun instinctively dodged. The fake child only pecked the corner of his mouth, a sensation akin to being licked by a big dog.
Then, Qin Yize let out a soft moan, followed by a flustered, low cry: “Ah!” He bounced up and bolted downstairs.
Finally regaining his freedom, Yan Jun sat up panting, his pair of eyes staring listlessly at the stairwell, feeling as though he were Sun Wukong escaping from the palm of the Buddha by the skin of his teeth.
After a long while, he heard the fake child calling out to him pitifully from downstairs: “Brother, I—I think I peed in my pants, help me bring a clean pair down!”
“—Ha!” Yan Jun suddenly felt a rush of pent-up anger released: His mentality is still that of a kid after all!
The next afternoon, Qin Yize, having won back all his cigarette cards “by sheer skill,” strutted over with high-spirited vigor holding the cigarette cards his brother made for him to “challenge the dojo” upon seeing the group of kids led by Xiao Hui:
“Xiao Hui, I’ve got cigarette cards too~” Tall and robust, his sidelong, looking-down expression was exceptionally smug, “And I play well; you definitely can’t beat me.”
Giving him a sideways look of discontent, Xiao Hui didn’t rush to accept the challenge. Instead, he stood up and asked swaggeringly, “What kind of cigarette cards do you even have? I’m not playing with you if they’re too cheap.”
Raising an eyebrow with absolute assurance, Qin Yize replied, “You don’t need to worry about that; the cigarette cartons my brother helped me find are all high-end ones~”
Casually pulling out five of them, he held them up to a height where the kids couldn’t reach and displayed them flatly. Sure enough, the little runts stared straight ahead: “Wow! He’s got Zhenlong, Zhonghua, and Heyin!”
This reaction left Qin Yize extremely satisfied. With a backhand sweep, he put the cards away, unhurriedly learning to sit cross-legged on the ground like them, his tall physique towering like a giant among the cluster of kids: “Let’s play! Who goes first?”
Xiao Hui’s eyes rolled around, and he pulled a cheap Baisha card out of his own box: “I’ll go first.”
Not recognizing Baisha, Qin Yize pulled out a Zhenlong card and met the challenge gladly: “Alright~”
Xiao Hui pursed his lips in sullen frustration.
Extending his broad palm, he leaned forward with total concentration and gave a light smack according to the method Yan Jun imparted! Both cards flipped over in sync.
The other kids let out a simultaneous gasp of exclamation. Xiao Hui, who had vainly hoped to win big with a small stake, darkened his face and immediately pulled another card from his cigarette carton to smack on the ground: “Again!”
Placing the cards he won in front of him with supreme smugness, Qin Yize then lifted his eyes and locked onto the large cigarette carton in Xiao Hui’s hands: “How about this, Xiao Hui, if I win fifty cards from you today, you trade that cigarette carton to me, deal?”
“Fifty cards?!” Xiao Hui shouted in unconvinced protest, “No way! There’s no way you can win fifty cards!”
“Then let’s wait and see~” The fake child tilted his head, revealing a self-satisfied smile.
In the evening, Yan Jun returned early from training. Before heading out, he had seen Qin Yize squatting at the opposite storefront with the kids, playing cigarette cards hidden in the shade, looking massive like Snow White with the seven dwarfs. Upon returning, the kids were still there, but Qin Yize and Xiao Hui were nowhere to be seen.
Parking his bicycle and walking into the house, Yan Jun heard a burst of cheerful singing drifting down from upstairs: “Two little tigers love to dance~ Little white rabbit, pull the carrots~”
It was the song Xiao Hui and the others constantly had on their lips.
Climbing up the stairs, sure enough, Qin Yize was sitting at his desk, neatly stacking the cigarette cards and putting them into cigarette cartons in batches.
Just as Yan Jun was about to walk over to investigate, the floorboards creaked inappropriately, prompting the fake child to turn his head and then run over ecstatically holding the box: “Brother, I won Xiao Hui’s cigarette carton, and I won an extra sixty cigarette cards from them!”
Seeing this innocent, handsome face rush up to him, Yan Jun somehow thought of last night’s events. His cheeks heated up, and he instinctively averted his gaze: “How’d you win so many from them?… This box is a Zhonghua, how could Xiao Hui be willing to give it to you?”
“Because I won fifty-seven cigarette cards from him.” Qin Yize was extremely proud, handing the box forward like a treasure and pointing at those sorted cigarette cards to introduce them one by one: “I won eleven Baishas, nine Hongtashans, seven Furongwangs…”
They were all cheap cigarettes! This idiot, being tricked by kids and didn’t even know it.
Just as he intended to ask how many cards he had lost, Yan Jun lifted his eyes and noticed that many patches of skin on his fingertips were scraped raw, with blood faintly seeping from the pads of his fingers. Turning dark in complexion immediately, he seized Qin Yize’s fingers and sharply questioned: “How’d you mess your hands up like this?”
“Hehehe!” The fake child laughed with a guilty conscience: “Played too long, slapped the ground with my hands too many times, and it ended up like this~”
Yan Jun glared at him: “Did you wash your hands?”
“Washed, washed!” Qin Yize nodded vigorously at once.
“—That’s more like it!” Dragging him over to the bed to sit down, Yan Jun fished out iodine and a cotton swab, lightly dabbing it onto his wounds. Gazing at his older brother’s solemn brows and eyes, the fake child felt that numb, itchy feeling in his heart again for some reason, and wanted to open his mouth to bite him.
Yet recalling his older brother’s exasperated expression from last night, he didn’t dare to act rashly, and instead softly hummed “Brother,” leaning in to rest against Yan Jun’s shoulder: “You’re so good to me~”
Yan Jun gave a violent start, hurriedly reaching out to push him away while walking irritably toward downstairs: “I haven’t taken a bath yet! You’re leaning over covered in sweat too, seriously…”
Watching his older brother hurry and vanish into the stairwell, the fake child smiled with curved eyes, blissfully glancing at the blackish iodine on his fingertip for a moment before collapsing onto the bed in happiness.
Until he walked into the kitchen after his shower, Yan Jun could still feel the lingering, damp heat of Qin Yize’s breath on his neck.
This brat… is really getting more and more out of bounds!
Heating up the wok and pouring in the prepared ingredients, Yan Jun tossed and stir-fried with a stern face and slightly reddened earlobes: He really is like a dog, the more you raise him, the more clingy he gets! Completely different from his previous sinister and crafty nature…
Thinking of this, he put down the spatula and let out an inexplicable sigh: Those medicines are almost gone; one of these days he’ll have to be taken to the hospital for a follow-up check… There are also only two bags of flour left, so he’ll have to go stock up again in a few days.
He was the Qin Yize he hit with his vehicle during the last restocking run… Twenty-one days have already passed!
At this moment, the fake child’s voice came from outside: “Brother, I’m going to Sister Sijia’s to watch cartoons!”
Yan Jun snapped to attention instantly: “Don’t you dare eat too many spicy strips with her!”
“Okay~”
Twenty minutes later, three dishes complete with color, aroma, and flavor were done. Yan Jun carried them out one by one to place on the table, called out “Xiaoshu, time to eat!” and unfastened his apron. Right then, a familiar voice drifted in from across the street:
“Uncle, I heard there’s a steamed bun shop on this street that’s exceptionally delicious! Which one is it? I walked a whole circle and couldn’t find a sign.”
Huh?
Ren Yandong turned his head in alignment, scaring Yan Jun into a “Damn!” as he violently shrank his head and squatted down behind Granny.