When Zhu Fan stepped out, the rainstorm showed no sign of letting up.
Raindrops the size of beans slammed against the car windows, and every second inside the vehicle felt suspended in stillness.
Zhu Fan’s fingertip glided across the screen as she tapped the “+” icon in the top-right corner of WeChat, pasting the copied number into the search field.
After sending the friend request, she saved the number to her contacts, typed in the name Fang Qizhou, and didn’t bother replying to Ming Yazhi’s messages.
There were many unread messages on her phone.
Prioritizing by timestamp, Zhu Fan tapped into Fang Qibai’s chat first.
[Fang Qibai: The zither’s fixed. Come pick it up tomorrow.]
[The other party is typing…]
Zhu Fan waited for a while, but no new message came through. She was about to send an OK sticker when a clap of thunder startled her, making her hand jerk.
A cute kitten GIF shooting out hearts popped over.
[Fang Qibai: ?]
[F: Wrong button]
Zhu Fan stopped looking at the chat box where the other party’s typing indicator kept flickering on and off.
All she wanted now was to see Fang Qizhou as soon as possible.
Her blood bag had to be fine. She didn’t want to die yet.
The city was wrapped in gloom, traffic dense and clogged. The driver, navigating roads with near-zero visibility, focused with every ounce of attention, hoping only to drive steadily.
Zhu Fan turned off her phone screen. The foul weather made her heart restless.
Fang Qizhou didn’t live on campus. In her memory, she had information about which residential complex he lived in.
But she didn’t know the exact building or unit, so she could only wait by the complex’s main gate.
The complex was across the street. The driver would need to make a U-turn and drive to the gate—barely a kilometer—but it would take an hour in this traffic. Zhu Fan chose to get out and walk across to the other side instead.
She held her umbrella, waiting at the crosswalk for the light to turn green.
Her hair and clothes whipped noisily in the wind.
Zhu Fan brushed the hair blowing across her face and glanced up at the umbrella overhead.
The umbrella was up, but it was doing little good.
She was soaked through, head to toe.
A sudden gust of freak wind hit her. Zhu Fan couldn’t control her body as the umbrella was snatched away by the wind, and she stumbled, crashing into a blue Kurni parked at the curb.
With nothing to brace against, she could only press herself against the car’s hood.
The window rolled down, and Zhu Fan heard a heart-wrenching voice from the passenger seat: “Just let this heavy rain all fall, just let you not see my struggle on my face—”
“Damn, how many hit-and-run scams is this today?!”
“Bro He, I told you to put that sword I bought you in the car—it’s super effective for scaring off scammers.”
The young man with dreadlocks and a punk getup stuck his head out the window to look at Zhu Fan, not forgetting to chatter at the driver.
“Whoa, Bro He! What a gorgeous girl!!”
Xiang Hao spat out the rainwater that had gotten into his mouth, then turned his head—only to find that his Bro He had already grabbed an umbrella and gotten out of the car.
Zhu Fan wiped the rain from her face with difficulty, her gaze landing on the man holding a black umbrella in front of her.
The man wore a black cap and a black mask, covered from head to toe, revealing only a pair of beautiful tea-colored eyes.
His gaze wasn’t sharp, nor could it be called warm—he simply looked at her quietly.
Zhu Fan was mortified.
Her earlier move looked way too much like a deliberate scam.
She pressed her palms together in apology to the man. “The wind was too strong just now, I lost my footing. I’m not here to scam you.”
“I’m really sorry.”
The girl’s long hair was casually pinned up with a shark clip, her neck slender, her face clear and delicate, with long, curled lashes. A faint blush crept up her earlobes from embarrassment—cool and aloof with a hint of charm, like a regal Ragdoll cat.
Her skin looked especially pale under the rain, like white jade dusted with spring snow.
“I know.”
The man’s voice was warm and smooth.
Zhu Fan noticed that the man had tilted most of the umbrella toward her, leaving his own left shoulder soaked by the rain. She looked up at the umbrella canopy shielding her head.
Feeling deeply apologetic, she took a step back, exposing her entire body to the rain.
She went to retrieve her own umbrella, but to her surprise, she couldn’t see it anywhere.
????
“Someone already picked it up.”
The man’s words made Zhu Fan’s brain short-circuit for a moment.
The owner was right here—how could the umbrella just get picked up like that?!
“Growl—”
Amid the noise of the rain, Zhu Fan’s stomach protested persistently.
She’d only had breakfast so far today.
It had been eight or nine hours since she’d last eaten or drunk anything.
Zhu Fan still had things on her mind, so she didn’t waste any more time. She hurriedly apologized to the man once more.
Wen He watched the girl run off into the rain, and the corner of his eye curved gently.
Zhu Fan had expected it to be a hassle getting into the complex, but as it turned out, she walked right in without even registering.
Two girls stopped at the guardhouse pointed at Zhu Fan and asked the security guard, “Why does she get to go in?”
Behind her, the guard and the young women were still locked in a tug-of-war.
Zhu Fan held the umbrella the guard had lent her and mentally reviewed the resident information he’d just looked up for her.
Spotting the blue Kurni parked by the complex’s greenery, Zhu Fan’s steps faltered slightly.
The window rolled down, and a clear, moisture-laden voice fell into the curtain of rain.
“Walk left for a hundred meters—there’s a 24-hour convenience store. The oden and rice balls there are really good.”
Zhu Fan heard those words clearly.
In the car, Chao Ming clicked his tongue in amazement. “Brother He, you’re not right!”
Wen He glanced at Chao Ming in the passenger seat.
Chao Ming flashed a mouthful of white teeth. “You told the security guard to let this little sister in, left your own umbrella behind, and asked the guard to look after her.”
“And just now you deliberately waited here to see if the little sister came in or not.”
“Brother He, you’re very not right.”
Wen He pressed down on the accelerator, turning a deaf ear to the words beside him.
Zhu Fan, heading toward the convenience store, really couldn’t figure out why the security guard of this residential complex was treating her so specially.
Her stomach was too hungry, so she stopped dwelling on it.
She decided to fill her stomach first before staking out Fang Qizhou.
Before Zhu Fan even entered the convenience store, the aroma of food wafting from inside made her swallow hard.
What surprised her even more was that the person she was staking out was right there in the convenience store.
Fang Qizhou was stingy with any glance or movement toward the looks cast at him from around.
He raised his hand, pinched the plastic fork, and stirred the instant noodles he had just soaked.
Steam veiled the man’s brows and eyes.
Zhu Fan could tell—what she had smelled just now was the aroma of instant noodles.
Fang Qizhou exuded an aura of keeping strangers at bay. Even soaked through, it did nothing to soften his sharp brow bones and cold, hard lip line.
The man’s drenched black short-sleeve outlined the distinct contours of his waist and abdomen muscles, faintly visible, world-weary and defiant.
Zhu Fan withdrew her gaze, noticing that her trouser hems were dripping water onto the floor. She went outside and wrung them out.
After wringing them dry, she came back, picked out a serving of oden, soaked a bowl of noodles, and grabbed a rice ball.
In those few minutes, Fang Qizhou showed no intention whatsoever of eating that bowl of noodles, nor did he ever notice her.
The cashier, seeing Zhu Fan about to sit next to that dangerous man, couldn’t help but warn her: “Miss, there aren’t many people in the store right now. You can sit anywhere.”
Zhu Fan turned back and smiled at the cashier.
Outside the store was the clamor of rain; inside, the lights illuminated the girl’s fair, clean features, soft and translucent.
The cashier was momentarily dazed by that smile.
Zhu Fan calmly pulled out the chair beside Fang Qizhou and spoke to him, who still showed no intention of eating that bowl of noodles: “Don’t like this flavor? I’ll trade with you.”
Fang Qizhou lifted his eyelids, his pitch-black cold eyes casually sweeping toward her.
Their eyes met, and for half a moment, Zhu Fan’s heart felt as if it were being tightly squeezed by someone, then after that half moment, it struggled to beat again.
Fang Qizhou curled his lips, raising an eyebrow at Zhu Fan’s familiar move of swapping the noodles away.
“Miss Zhu, what do you want this time?”
Fang Qizhou looked at her, his dark eyes like fallen leaves sinking into a lake, unfathomable.
Zhu Fan was so hungry her stomach was pressed against her back; right now, she only wanted to eat properly.
“Just came to see you—
whether you’re still alive.”
She almost blurted it out.
A light scoff came from beside her ear.
Zhu Fan had already confirmed Fang Qizhou was intact, and the purpose of this trip had been achieved.
At this moment, she was very tolerant of that face with its world-weary and malicious gaze.
The instant noodles in her hand were too tempting, and she had already started slurping them up.
The noodles were scalding hot, but she endured the burn and swallowed: “Let’s eat first. After we finish, we’ll talk properly.”
She was ravenous, with only food in her eyes.
Fang Qizhou’s arrogance, his malicious and cold gaze—she paid no attention to any of it.
Perhaps seeing how deliciously she was eating, Fang Qizhou, with little interest, picked up some noodles with the plastic fork.
As the noodles entered his mouth, Fang Qizhou’s expression froze slightly.
He could actually taste it.
Zhu Fan took a sip of the noodle soup and noticed that half-second of abnormality in Fang Qizhou.
In just a few short minutes, Fang Qizhou finished an entire bucket of instant noodles, and even her oden and rice ball went into his stomach.
Zhu Fan looked thoughtfully at Fang Qizhou as he went to soak another bowl of noodles and grabbed some other cooked food.
Sure enough, you can’t underestimate a guy’s appetite.
After Fang Qizhou ate one bite of the newly soaked noodles, he stopped moving.
Zhu Fan put down her own noodles and met the man’s dark, deep eyes.
He had just been eating so happily. She was puzzled: “Weren’t you eating just fine? Why did you stop again?”
Fang Qizhou’s brow furrowed slightly at the edges, looking straight at her.
“These—you take a bite of each first.”
Zhu Fan: ??
The air went still.
Seeing the man’s knitted brows and his increasingly cold, heavy expression, Zhu Fan thought of the scene of him seeking death tonight, and her heart clenched again.
She raised her eyes to look into Fang Qizhou’s pupils. “If I take a bite of all this food, will you be a little happier?”