I remembered a night from eight years ago.
We had been on the same bed then too, though the bed was smaller and the room belonged to the old house. Xu had been talking about some song she wanted to learn. I had listened with my eyes half-closed, answering whenever her voice paused. The space between us had been simple. No careful rules. No sharp silences that lasted for days. Just two people sharing the same mattress because the nights felt less lonely that way.
The rift we had created since then was enormous. Some days it felt permanent. Yet after the quiet cooking and the ridiculous conversation in the dark last night, a thin thread of hope had started to form. Even if things got worse again, I would find a way to make them better. I was too tired of the distance to keep accepting it as the final version of us.
That was the last coherent thought I had before morning arrived in the worst possible way.
I woke up with my face pressed firmly against something warm, soft, and unmistakably not a pillow.
My eyes opened.
I was staring directly into the front of Xu Linling’s sleep shirt.
My entire body froze.
Before I could retreat, an arm locked around my shoulders and pulled me in tighter. Xu’s voice, thick with sleep and completely unguarded, murmured right above my head:
“Lets sleep a little longer.”
Panic detonated in my chest.
“Wait… no.”
The arm did not loosen.
“STOPPPPP!”
My protest was muffled for the worst reason imaginable. My face was still buried in her chest. Every time I tried to pull back she made a small sleepy sound of complaint and tightened her hold like I was a body pillow that had attempted escape. My nose was squashed. My mouth was in a deeply unfortunate position. I could feel the exact shape of everything I was not supposed to be feeling at this hour.
I was motorboating my own (adopted)sister.
In my sleep-confused horror I must have made some kind of desperate vibrating noise against her, because Xu finally began to surface. Her breathing changed. Her arm loosened a fraction. I seized the chance to tilt my head upward.
Our eyes met.
Her gaze was still hazy with sleep. Mine were wide with pure spiritual damage.
“Seems like you had a bad nightmare,” I said, because my brain had apparently decided that was a normal sentence to offer while my face was still far too close to her chest. This chapter was copied from novelping dot com without permission.
Xu stared at me for a full three seconds.
Then the realization landed.
She kicked me off the bed with impressive accuracy.
I hit the floor with a thud that knocked the remaining air out of my lungs. From the mattress above me Xu sat up, hair a complete disaster, face already turning red, pointing an accusing finger.
“What were you doing?!”
“Surviving!” I wheezed from the floor. “You pulled me in! I told you to stop!”
“I was asleep!”
“I noticed!”
She grabbed the nearest pillow and threw it at my head. I blocked it and stayed on the floor, deciding it was safer down here.
After a moment I cleared my throat and attempted a more normal tone.
“So. Nightmare?”
Xu scowled at the opposite wall. “I was sleeping on the bed. Then the bed fell off a cliff.”
I processed that.
“Well,” I said carefully, “that is fine. But you said ‘lets sleep a little longer.’ Who exactly were you telling that to?”
The silence that followed was beautiful.
Xu’s face went from pink to a deep, catastrophic red. Her mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. She looked like a person whose entire operating system had crashed and was trying to reboot with emergency excuses.
“It was… my giant plushie,” she managed. “Haha. Yes. The big one. I talk to it sometimes. In my sleep. Very normal.”
I stared up at her from the floor.
A slow, dangerous suspicion began to bloom in my chest.
“You do not own a giant plushie,” I said.
“I do. It is under the bed.”
“There is nothing under the bed except dust and one lost sock.”
“Then it is in the closet.”
“Linling.”
“What?”
“You pulled me in and told me to sleep longer.”
“It was the plushie!”
“The plushie that does not exist.”
She grabbed the second pillow and prepared to throw it. I raised both hands in surrender and finally climbed back onto the far edge of the mattress, keeping a respectful and survival-oriented distance.
We sat there in the morning light, her still red-faced and furious, me still processing the fact that I had just motorboated her while she sleep-talked affection at what she claimed was a non-existent plushie.
The rift between us was still there.
But it was getting harder to take it seriously when the universe kept throwing us into situations this unhinged.
I glanced at her again.
She refused to meet my eyes.
Suspicion officially confirmed.