Just as she reached the entrance of the old apartment building, Xu Yumo instinctively reached into her pocket—only to find nothing.
Huh? Where's her phone?
Could it have fallen in He Linxi's car?
Her heart skipped a beat, and she quickly turned around and hurried back toward the entrance of the neighborhood.
From a distance, she spotted the Aston Martin, utterly out of place against the shabby surroundings.
The window was rolled down halfway, and He Linxi's forearm was casually draped over the sill. A half-smoked cigarette was pinched between his pale, slender fingers, its faint ember flickering in the cold, still night.
Xu Yumo let out a quiet sigh of relief and slowed her pace as she approached.
"Sorry," she said, stopping outside the window. Her breath formed white puffs in the cold air as she spoke, slightly out of breath. "I think my phone fell in your car."
Hearing her voice, He Linxi turned his head.
Half of his handsome face looked at her through the swirling smoke. The cold blue glow of the dashboard lights cast upward across his features, making the small mole at the corner of his eye seem even deeper and more alluring.
His thin lips curved slightly, showing no hint of surprise. He simply asked in a calm tone, "Is that so?"
With that, he stubbed out the cigarette in the car's ashtray, then leaned over and made a show of checking the gap between the passenger seat and the door.
"It really did fall here."
The man straightened up, holding her phone between his slender fingers, and extended it out the window.
Xu Yumo quickly reached out to take it, her fingertips unavoidably brushing against his cool knuckles.
A fleeting touch, yet it felt like a faint spark of static electricity crackling through the dry early-winter air. Her fingers curled slightly, and her heart inexplicably skipped a beat.
"Thank you, I appreciate it." She instinctively avoided his unfathomable gaze, lowering her lashes and offering a polite, proper thank-you.
He Linxi casually withdrew his hand and rested it on the steering wheel. "No problem."
Xu Yumo didn't linger. Clutching the phone she'd just recovered, she turned and walked quickly toward the depths of the neighborhood.
He Linxi remained in the car, neither rolling up the window nor starting the engine right away. He simply watched her slender figure.
Only when the night had completely swallowed her did a faint smile curve at the corner of his lips. He pressed down on the accelerator.
She hadn't stayed up late the night before, so Xu Yumo naturally woke up a little after seven in the morning.
After a simple breakfast, she changed into her work clothes, packed her laptop and documents into her bag, and prepared to head to Matrix Technology to continue the unfinished tests.
Just as she reached the entryway, a knock suddenly sounded at the door.
"Thump, thump, thump."
The rhythm was fast, tinged with urgency.
Xu Yumo paused mid-motion as she reached for her keys. Through the door, she asked, "Who is it?"
There was a two-second silence, then a familiar but slightly hoarse voice came through: "It's me. Momo, open the door."
Zhou Shiye?
Xu Yumo was taken aback.
At this hour, wasn't he supposed to be skiing at the resort in the northern suburbs?
Another knock came, more urgent than before.
"Momo?"
Xu Yumo snapped back to reality. Suppressing the emotions surging in her chest, she opened the door with a cold, expressionless face.
Zhou Shiye looked like he'd rushed back overnight. He was still wearing yesterday's ski gear, his hair was a mess, and there were dark circles under his eyes—clearly exhausted from lack of sleep.
The moment the door opened, his gaze swept past her and quickly scanned the room.
Seeing only a pair of women's slippers at the entryway, a single water cup on the dining table, and the half-open bedroom neat and tidy, the tension in his shoulders finally relaxed, almost imperceptibly.
"Aren't you going to invite me in?" He tugged at the corner of his mouth, his tone slipping back into its usual nonchalance.
"I'm heading out." Xu Yumo didn't step aside. She crouched down at the entryway to change her shoes, her tone no different from usual—except it lacked its former warmth.
Zhou Shiye's brows furrowed. His tall frame blocked the doorway, unmoving. "Where are you going?"
"To the office." Xu Yumo finished putting on her short boots, stood up, and grabbed her bag.
"It's the weekend. Why are you going to the office?" Zhou Shiye stared hard at her expressionless face, his voice finally betraying a hint of barely contained irritation. "If you're trying to avoid me, at least come up with a more convincing excuse."
"I'm not avoiding you." Her tone remained flat.
"How are you not avoiding me?" Zhou Shiye's voice rose involuntarily. "We haven't seen each other in almost two weeks!"
Xu Yumo found it almost amusing. She looked up, trying to keep her composure as she met his gaze. "Isn't it you who hasn't contacted me these past two weeks? How did it become me avoiding you?"
"How haven't I contacted you?" Zhou Shiye's brows knitted tightly. "Didn't I invite you to go skiing?"
"Oh." Xu Yumo gave a faint, wry smile. "Since when did you change your name to Lin Yuhang?"
Zhou Shiye opened his mouth, but the words died in his throat. He was silent for a long moment.
Xu Yumo didn't say anything more. She hitched her bag strap higher on her shoulder and sidestepped past him through the gap. "I'm busy. If you're bored, go find someone else to pass the time with."
"Who am I supposed to find?" Zhou Shiye couldn't help but reach out and grab her slender wrist.
Xu Yumo was yanked to a stop. The days of nonstop work, the overwhelming disappointment, and his self-righteous insistence at this moment finally crushed the composure she had been barely holding together.
She turned around, the corners of her eyes flushed with a fragile red, and stabbed each word at him: "Jiang Yao? Or that girl in your Moments? They probably have a lot more energy than I do."
Seeing her eyes glistening with unshed tears, Zhou Shiye felt his heart squeezed as if by a thin wire. His grip loosened, and his tone softened, carrying a hint of concession: "I'm sorry, Momo. That night I really drank too much, and I was running my mouth… You're different from them in my heart. You're a very important friend to me. I don't want to—"
"A very important friend." Xu Yumo repeated those words, her voice trembling slightly.
She held back the moisture gathering in her eyes, refusing to let it form tears, and stared at him steadily: "No matter how special, no matter how important, it can only ever be 'friend,' right?"
"…"
Zhou Shiye froze, falling into silence.
The hallway grew quiet, leaving only the sound of the cold morning wind seeping through the cracks in the windows.
Xu Yumo's heart gradually turned cold. As if she had finally gotten her answer, she yanked her hand free and went downstairs without looking back.
The sound of her short boots hitting the concrete steps echoed through the old stairwell.
Growing fainter and fainter, until it disappeared entirely.
Zhou Shiye stood outside the half-open security door, his hand still curved in the shape of her wrist from moments ago, unmoving for a long time.
In the Matrix Technology laboratory, the cold white lights were glaring, making Xu Yumo's eyes sting faintly.
She sat in front of the computer, fingers resting on the keyboard, yet she hadn't typed a single character.
Even though she had seen reality clearly that night at the birthday banquet, when she saw Zhou Shiye standing at the door this morning, travel-worn and carrying the chill of the outside, her heart—which had been dead for nearly two weeks—still trembled pathetically.
Until he used his silence to snuff out her last flicker of hope.
This was the first time she had laid bare the feelings she had guarded for so many years in front of him.
What she got in return was an ending with no room for reversal.
Xu Yumo took a deep breath, and another wave of uncontrollable bitterness surged through her nose.
"Rather than sitting here staring into space, you might as well go for a walk outside. At least it'd save the company some electricity."
A low voice came from behind her out of nowhere, startling Xu Yumo so much that her shoulders jerked. She turned around and realized He Linxi had come in at some point without her noticing.
She quickly turned her face away, blinked hard a couple of times, and stared at the screen as she explained stiffly: "I wasn't spacing out. I was just tracing the underlying algorithm logic."
He Linxi walked over and stopped beside her, his gaze landing on her slightly reddened eyes. He didn't spare her feelings: "Tracing logic—does that usually make your eyes this red?"
Exposed, Xu Yumo could only lower her head and clear her throat: "The temperature dropped outside. Maybe I'm catching a cold."
To make it more convincing, she added: "It's contagious. You'd better keep your distance."
He Linxi didn't leave. Instead, he pulled out the chair next to her and sat down calmly: "We just had dinner together last night. If it were really contagious, I'd already be infected by now."
Before she could come up with another excuse, he had already naturally turned his gaze to the computer screen, his tone switching back to a businesslike steadiness: "Which part of the logic is stuck?"
Seeing that he wasn't going to press her about her red eyes, Xu Yumo secretly breathed a sigh of relief. Pointing at a section of code on the screen, she said: "The pressure feedback here has latency under high concurrency. I tried using multi-threading to distribute the load, but it sacrifices the stability of the core algorithm. I haven't found the balance point yet."
He Linxi stared at the long lines of code for a moment.
He leaned in slightly, and his well-defined fingers tapped a few keys on her keyboard: "Move the feedback validation layer up. The core layer only handles logic determination, and push all the remaining data into a cache queue for asynchronous buffering. Split the threshold judgment into two stages. Try it."
As the distance closed, the pleasant scent of cold sandalwood drifted into her nose.
Xu Yumo paused for a moment, then quickly ran through his approach in her mind. The logic that had been tangled like a knot suddenly became clear.
"Let me try." She immediately sat up straight, her fingers landing back on the keyboard as she typed with focus.
A few minutes later, the newly revised algorithm was recompiled and run.
The test program began scrolling rapidly, with lines of data outputting steadily. The feedback latency was successfully compressed to within milliseconds.
It actually worked.
Xu Yumo's tense shoulders relaxed, and the heaviness that had been lodged in her chest unknowingly dissipated as well.
He Linxi turned his head, glanced at her eyes that had regained their brightness, and asked casually: "Still feel like crying?"
Xu Yumo instinctively shook her head: "No, I don't."
The words were barely out of her mouth before she suddenly realized what he had asked. An inexplicable embarrassment crept up to her ears a beat too late. She opened her mouth, frantically searching for a way to cover it up, when He Linxi let out a low chuckle.
He stood up, casually pushing his chair back into place. His tone had returned to its usual cool detachment, as if it weren't him who had just seen through her emotions.
"Then you keep at it. I'll head back upstairs for my meeting."
With that, he didn't spare another glance at her flustered state and turned to walk out of the lab.
Xu Yumo sat where she was, listening to the soft click of the glass door closing, her gaze unconsciously lingering on the now-empty doorway.
The heartbeat that had just settled from typing code inexplicably skipped a beat again.