Xu Ruoping slowly stood up, staring dazed and uneasy at the bottle of perfume. Could it really be such a coincidence?
She freed one hand, battling with her remaining self-restraint for a moment, hesitating back and forth over the moral scale of whether to pick it up and open it for a sniff.
Suddenly, a large hand reached out and snatched the bottle of cologne. Hu Yihui expertly sprayed some under both armpits. Dressed neatly in a suit and tie, with a side-parted crew cut, he stood before Xu Ruoping looking every bit the dashing gentleman.
Such a familiar scent!
Xu Ruoping silently stared at his face. The five o'clock shadow from just a moment ago had been shaved away at lightning speed, revealing a sharp-lined, handsome face that radiated the mature charm of a man, stripped of any lingering student vibe.
When Hu Yihui turned around, he caught Xu Ruoping's lovestruck gaze off guard. The corners of his mouth instantly curled up into his signature mischievous smirk. Squinting a pair of captivating peach-blossom eyes, he extended his right hand very gentlemanly and said, "Well, gorgeous Xu, how about we have an impromptu rehearsal for the cha-cha right here on the spot?"
Xu Ruoping shook her head, secretly mocking herself: *Xu Ruoping, oh Xu Ruoping, you're already a taken woman, yet you still lack such self-control. Have you no shame!*
She was just about to voice a refusal when a thought flashed rapidly through her mind: *There's an embracing move in the cha-cha later. Can I use this chance to check if this embrace feels the same as last night's mystery man's?*
Against all better judgment, Xu Ruoping reached out and met his hand. Back and forth they went, dancing the cha-cha right there in the cramped dormitory hallway as if no one else was around.
As the steps progressed, Xu Ruoping was pulled into his arms.
The feeling was overwhelmingly familiar. Xu Ruoping couldn't help but close her eyes. Who could this be if not the person who had held her all through last night?
She couldn't help taking a deep breath. Aside from the cologne being a bit stronger, even his natural scent was identical.
Xu Ruoping was struck with terror. But the moment she opened her eyes, she ran straight into Hu Yihui's burning gaze lingering on her lips. Accompanied by the sound of his heavy breathing, the guy murmured softly right by her ear, "Shall we practice that mouth-to-mouth resuscitation move from the textbook?"
"Yuck!" Feeling as though a large basin of icy water had been poured over her, Xu Ruoping raised her elbow and jabbed him. "Shameless jerk, I'm getting engaged tomorrow!"
Ever since their freshman year, Hu Yihui had relied on his family's wealth and striking looks to rack up countless girlfriends—from on campus to off, every single one of them campus-belle tier or higher. Any female student in their department with even a hint of good looks was bound to be subjected to his verbal teasing whenever they crossed paths.
Of course, there were those who simply didn't fall for his routine.
Xu Ruoping was one resolute example. Influenced by her hardworking father, she had always preferred honest, down-to-earth guys. Whenever she faced Hu Yihui's subtle and unsubtle flirtations, she could always calmly shoot him down, completely impervious to all charms.
Take this graduation performance, for instance: Hu Yihui was originally supposed to be her dance partner, but he was replaced after her strong demand.
A trace of displeasure seemed to flash across Hu Yihui's eyes, though it quickly smoothed out into calm. He looked at Xu Ruoping with a grim smile and managed a rare normal sentence: "So soon? Well, congratulations then!"
There was a slight hint of sourness in the air.
Xu Ruoping lowered her gaze, avoiding his eyes, and suddenly realized she had wasted far too much time here, while Feng Kunyu was still lying on the bed like a dead pig.
She reached out, grabbed someone's pillow, and angrily muffled it over his face, shouting loudly, "Get up or I'll suffocate you!"
Her voice was very loud, as if trying to cover up some awkwardness.
Driven to desperation by the lack of air, Feng Kunyu had no choice but to drag himself up in low spirits. His pale face lacked a shred of color, looking just like a ghost suffering from consumption. Struggling to open eyes that never seemed to get enough sleep, he muttered, "I told you guys not to drag me into dancing in the first place!"
Then, dragging his tall and gangly frame, he slowly strolled toward the washroom.
The graduation showcase proceeded smoothly. Xu Ruoping didn't attend the subsequent dinner banquet. After hastily bidding farewell to her classmates, she hurried to the subway station before the rush hour peak hit, enjoying the luxury of sitting all the way home.
After getting off the subway, Xu Ruoping still had to transfer to a bus, jolting along for over half an hour before finally reaching home.
At this moment, her heart felt a flutter of excitement, and she casually sent a text message to Xu Jun: "What are you up to?"
The text message was bone-dry, containing neither grand oaths of eternal love nor sweet words. Ever since they started dating, the two of them had rarely kept in touch.
Xu Ruoping wasn't the particularly clingy type of girl either, but with their engagement family banquet being held at her own home tomorrow, she couldn't help but want to disturb him a bit!
Her eyelashes were fine and long, and her clear, spring-like eyes were fixed tightly on the phone screen, her expression solemn and focused.
Time ticked away second by second. By the time the driver chased her off at the final stop, Xu Jun still hadn't replied.
Xu Ruoping's heart skipped a beat, and a wave of ominous foreboding rushed over her. She suddenly remembered when she was thirteen or fourteen, having just learned divination and fortune-telling under Grandfather's coercion and temptation. Awakened to romance for the very first time, she had immediately turned around and calculated a marriage fortune for herself—what was that divination result again? *Lonely star of heavenly punishment, destined for neither marriage nor romance.*
"Bah, bah, bah!"
Xu Ruoping shook her head back and forth neurotically for a moment, completely disregarding the judgmental looks cast her way by bystanders. She held her head high as she got off the bus and strode toward home!
In the distance, she saw an orange glow leaking out from beyond the courtyard walls of her house. The endless, enduring sounds of mahjong were gone, and amidst the lively, bustling noise, there was even a hint of festivity.
Xu Ruoping was a poor rural child. Her father was a mason, leaving early and returning late every day to build houses for others, making barely any money over the course of a year. Sometimes, when they ran into a black-hearted contractor, not only would their wages be docked, but some would even vanish into thin air right when accounts were settled at the year's end.
Her mother hated bringing it up; the mere mention of it would make her blood boil. From morning till night, she either complained about a sore waist or a stiff neck, nagging constantly. In the past, clinging to the family's tiny plot of land, the whole family could at least enjoy fresh seasonal fruits and vegetables from time to time. Now, with urbanization sweeping in, their farmland had been expropriated. Clinging to that meager compensation of one hundred thousand or eighty thousand yuan, she spent every single day playing mahjong and poker with a few gossipy neighbors.
She had three older sisters who had gone out to work after graduating from junior high school, occasionally chipping in to help out the family and tide Xu Ruoping over.
There was also a younger brother who had been a handful since childhood—naughty, mischievous, and scheming. He hadn't done well in school, barely scraping into a third-tier university with tuition fees that were ridiculously expensive.
Amidst the clusters of three-to-five-story villas hastily built by other families who had rapidly shaken off poverty and grown rich, her family's home remained a single-story unfinished concrete house with unplastered exterior walls. The exposed red brick exterior and the low sheds partitioned in the courtyard constantly advertised how out of place they were with the surrounding buildings.
Xu Ruoping walked in silence. All the way there, she couldn't help reaching into her backpack to pull out her phone and check it—still no reply.
This was truly a bit unexpected, bordering on abnormal. Although Xu Jun didn't talk much, whether by phone or text, he had always replied very promptly in the past.
"Maybe he's busy with something right now. We agreed he'd arrive at nine o'clock tomorrow morning anyway."
She comforted herself, and inexplicably, her heart managed to settle down.
That was just typical Xu Ruoping. Any other girl would have already made countless frantic tracking calls.
She slowly strolled into the house. Sure enough, a dozen pairs of eyes—either doubtful or inquiring—swept uniformly toward her, seemingly quite surprised that only Xu Ruoping had arrived today.
Having no choice, Xu Ruoping forced a smile and braced herself to explain that Xu Jun wouldn't arrive until tomorrow.
The gossiping neighbors seemed a bit disappointed not to catch a first glimpse of Xu Ruoping's fiancé. As the night grew deeper, they scattered like birds and beasts.
The moonlight was hazy, a massive silver plate drifting in and out of thick clouds. A tall osmanthus tree in the courtyard was putting all its effort into blooming with fiery, silvery splendor, its rich fragrance spilling over in wave after wave to fill the entire courtyard.
As usual, Xu Ruoping studied her lessons in her room. That paint-peeling, half-blackened desk always let out a "creak, creak" sound, its four legs of unequal lengths. To keep it balanced, Xu Ruoping often had to press down hard on one side with her elbow, leaving her lower back aching after two or three hours.
Halfway through her reading, the bedroom door was pushed open gently. Breaking all precedent, her mother, Ge Qiuhua, walked in holding a glass of milk, her thick waist twisting as she shuffled along in slippers.
Xu Ruoping lifted her eyelids to glance at her without making a sound. Raising a hand, she took the milk and downed it in a few gulps, then handed the glass right back. The sequence of actions was smooth and practiced, yet from start to finish, she didn't speak a single word.
Ge Qiuhua was used to being a chatterbox, and for a moment she failed to adapt to her daughter's silent treatment. Standing like a stone pillar off to the side, she locked eyes with Xu Ruoping in a staring contest for a moment before finally failing to hold back and dragging out a topic: "Listen here, girl, you're getting engaged soon, so stop being so old-fashioned! Go on and do whatever young couples do!"
Xu Ruoping knew right away that her mother's mouth could never spit out anything noble. Slightly lifting her head to face her, she stared coldly into her face and said in a muffled tone, "Sister Hua, are you hinting that it would be best for the two of us to come back together tonight and conveniently get me pregnant, right?"
Ge Qiuhua's face shifted between shades of light and dark. It wasn't a day or two that her daughter had used this kind of attitude, but poking fun at matters between men and women so bluntly was something she couldn't digest right away. Still, she quickly sidled up with a grin: "What are you talking about? Isn't your mother just worried for you? Lately, I've heard that in today's society, there are piles of older leftover women who can't get married, and I was worried—"
"Save it, Sister Hua. Didn't you just see that Xu Jun was born into a well-to-do family, which is why you're so monkey-enthusiastic to marry your daughter off? If he were some poor kid from a mountain ravine, it'd be a miracle if you didn't break my legs and chase the guy out the door!" Xu Ruoping interrupted her nonchalantly, her gaze falling back onto her book.
*No one knows a mother better than her daughter!*
Ge Qiuhua was choked by Xu Ruoping into a prolonged bout of stomachache, her face turning a mix of green and red. The atmosphere seemed a bit awkward. Her hand that wasn't holding the milk glass had nowhere to rest, so she thumped it heavily against her back several times and said in a chanting tone, "Sigh! My old illness is acting up, this waist of mine is hurting again."
Ge Qiuhua's appeal to sympathy worked every single time.
Xu Ruoping put down the book in her hand, turned around to massage her shoulders and pound her back, and said slowly, "Your waist hurts all the time yet you still scrub mahjong tiles day and night. Knowing you shouldn't do it yet doing it anyway—you deserve to suffer."
Ge Qiuhua seemed to thoroughly enjoy her daughter's massage, continuously praising her top-tier technique. Seeing that Xu Ruoping's expression had softened, her throat couldn't help swallowing, and a gleam of delight flashed rapidly across her eyes. Ignoring her harsh scolding, she cut straight to the point: "We raised you up through all the hardships of shit and piss, and sending you to school wasn't easy either. As for... the betrothal gift, naturally it can't be too little. How about we round it off to a lucky number, say 88,888? How's that?"
Xu Ruoping abruptly stopped. Her hands clamped down hard onto the fleshy parts of Ge Qiuhua's shoulders, and she roared, "I'm not even married off yet, and you're already this anxious about the betrothal gift! Snob, be careful you scare the future son-in-law away."
Ge Qiuhua let out an "Ow," squinting as she rubbed her shoulders. Extending a thumb to jab Xu Ruoping's head, she cursed, "We're getting engaged, so why can't we talk about the betrothal gift? Let me tell you, besides the betrothal gift, there's other stuff too: the brother's gold, the banquet money, the bridal car red envelope money—"
Xu Ruoping buried her face into the book and said loudly, "Alright, alright, Sister Hua, I'm tired and want to rest!"
This was a direct eviction notice. Yet Ge Qiuhua refused to give up. With one foot halfway across the threshold, she turned back and dropped one last earnest and profound sentence: "Listen here, girl, you can never finish reading all the books in the world, but the major events of life come first! Take some time to chat on the phone with each other to build up your relationship—that's the real truth!"
She had calculated her abacus thoroughly for quite a while, and even as she walked out the door, she managed to squeeze in that sentence.
"I want to rest!" Xu Ruoping batted her right back with a single sentence.