A Love Confession - Chapter 5

Chapter 5 - Zhou Jingze Said Lightly, "We Broke Up."

Zhou Jingze clearly did not remember her, and a wave of disappointment welled up in the depths of Xu Sui's heart. Immediately afterward, she mustered her courage and greeted him.

Zhou Jingze was generous with his spending, directly taking them to the small restaurant on the second floor of the cafeteria for a private meal. Throughout the entire dining experience, Hu Xixi and Sheng Nanzhou played off each other like a crosstalk duo, with Zhou Jingze occasionally offering a nonchalant, echoing remark.

Hu Xixi disliked celery, but Sheng Nanzhou insisted on forcing her to eat it, even scooping all the celery from his own bowl into hers as he asked her, "Do you know why that Husky of yours is so ugly?"

Sheng Nanzhou, acting on educational principles, waited for Hu Xixi to ask why, intending to educate her directly by saying it was because she was a picky eater. Instead, Hu Xixi picked out every single piece of celery and replied with a serious tone, "Because it looks like you."

"You—" Sheng Nanzhou was so angered that he couldn't utter a single word.

"Uncle, do you think so?" Hu Xixi looked to Zhou Jingze to adjudicate.

Zhou Jingze tilted his head, glanced at Sheng Nanzhou, and held back a mischievous streak: "Not gonna lie, it really does look quite a bit like him."

"..." Sheng Nanzhou.

Xu Sui followed along with a gentle smile. Too lazy to bother with the two of them, Sheng Nanzhou turned his attention instead to Xu Sui and said, "Little Sister Xu, I didn't introduce myself properly earlier. I'm Sheng Nanzhou. Xixi's friend is my friend, so if you ever need anything in the future, just come find me."

"Tsh, you don't even have Zhou Jingze's backing, why would anyone come find you?" Hu Xixi ruthlessly tore down his facade, smiling as she looked toward the other person. "Uncle, don't you think so?"

Although it was meant as a joke, Xu Sui's heart tightened. Pretending to lower her head to eat casually, she was actually waiting for Zhou Jingze's reply. Just as Zhou Jingze was about to speak, the phone placed at the edge of the table buzzed with a vibration, the caller ID displaying Bai Yuyue's name.

Zhou Jingze picked up the phone and held it to his ear to take the call. Sitting directly across from him, Xu Sui could see the smooth, graceful arc of his throat line. His left hand rested at the edge of the table, his fingers tapping absentmindedly against the pull tab of a carbonated soda, mist from the chilled can clinging to his slender fingertips.

Short utterances like "Mhm" and "What is it?" vibrated through the air. Unsure of what was said on the other end, Zhou Jingze let out a very faint, scoffing laugh.

Sitting on pins and needles, Xu Sui simply found it agonizing to endure.

"Hang up," Zhou Jingze said.

After ending the call, Sheng Nanzhou bantered, "Tsk tsk, Master Zhou is truly a badass. His girlfriend initiates ten calls a day, and I've never seen him call back even once."

"Speaking of which, your girlfriend is actually in the same dorm as me. But it seems she doesn't know about our relationship—didn't you tell her?" Hu Xixi asked.

"Too lazy to," Zhou Jingze tossed out a single word.

While they were eating in the cafeteria, Daliu, a classmate of Zhou Jingze's, happened to walk over. Seeing the obedient and well-behaved Xu Sui, he teased, "Changed girlfriends this fast? Switching up your tastes now?"

Xu Sui felt somewhat flustered by the teasing, and this exact scene happened to land right in Zhou Jingze's line of sight.

With Daliu sitting right beside them, Zhou Jingze pressed the tip of his tongue against his left cheek and chuckled, reaching out to gesture forward and motioning for him to come closer.

Zhou Jingze's slender fingers rested on the pull tab. Wearing the expression of someone eager for gossip, Daliu leaned his upper body forward while resting his other hand on Zhou Jingze's neck. With a crisp "pop," the pull tab was ripped open, and a burst of white foam spewed forth, directly covering Daliu's entire face.

Daliu immediately began to struggle. Leaning his back against the chair, Zhou Jingze effortlessly pinned him down with his other hand. Daliu was left in a thoroughly disheveled state, the foam blurring his vision so badly that he couldn't even open his eyes. Only after Daliu repeatedly begged for mercy with cries of "I was wrong" did Zhou Jingze finally release him.

The foam rapidly evaporated into water, dripping wetly down his face—it was hard to imagine a more pathetic sight.

"You guess," Zhou Jingze laughed with an uninhibited, swaggering air of a young prodigal.

"Hahahahahahaha." Everyone around them burst into gales of laughter.

That was simply how Zhou Jingze operated. When he spoke to you nicely, he would employ minor tactics to make you understand that certain behaviors—like disrespecting others—simply shouldn't fly.

Looking at his expression, Daliu caught on.

"You're something else." Knowing he had taken the joke too far, Daliu prepared to apologize when Xu Sui reached out and handed him a tissue to wipe his face.

Daliu felt even more embarrassed: "Sorry about that, little sister, I was just messing with this jerk."

"It's fine," Xu Sui replied with a soft, gentle voice full of good nature.

"Alright, scram," Zhou Jingze laughed and scolded.

After the group finished eating, Xu Sui accompanied Hu Xixi as she headed over to Zhou Jingze's dormitory to pick up some items. Passing by the Beihang athletic field, a group of male students with heavily defined muscle lines, dressed in green training uniforms, were spinning around and around on anti-vertigo rotating chairs to build up their motion sickness tolerance. Others ran while shouting slogans like, "Soar across the azure skies, protect our territorial borders!" to strengthen their physical endurance.

The evening sunset was blazing brightly. Sweat dripped down their cheeks, and one sonorous, powerful slogan after another echoed across the field.

Hu Xixi stared straight at them, prompting Sheng Nanzhou to snap his fingers in front of her face: "Still looking? You're drooling all over the place."

"Two ready-made crew-cut hunks are standing right in front of you, and you refuse to look, insisting on straining your neck to turn back and stare," Sheng Nanzhou remarked.

"Puh-lease." Hu Xixi swatted his hand away.

Walking ahead with one hand tucked into his pocket, Zhou Jingze suddenly bumped into an acquaintance and nodded at the other party: "Senior."

"Been here over a month, are you getting used to it yet?" The senior patted his shoulder with familiar ease, making it look as though the two of them had known each other for a long time.

Zhou Jingze nodded, and the senior smiled. "You made quite a splash as the student representative during the school opening ceremony; even our year group has been discussing you. That was a brilliant speech, though."

"Just talking nonsense," Zhou Jingze curved the corners of his lips dismissively.

After the senior departed, Zhou Jingze led the two female students into the men's dormitory building, though he refused to let them go upstairs, telling them to wait down below.

Just as Zhou Jingze was about to head upstairs, a couple of male students leaning against the second-floor railing spotted the two beauties waiting downstairs—especially Xu Sui, whose fair, soft appearance made her look exceptionally easy to tease—and let out a wolf whistle in her direction.

With his hands in his pockets, Zhou Jingze glanced up at them from bottom to top with a calm expression that clearly conveyed a warning to quit while they were ahead.

The moment the guys on the second floor saw that it was Zhou Jingze, all their expressions fell sheepishly, and not a single one dared to whistle again. Only then did he head upstairs.

Ten minutes later, Zhou Jingze tossed a gift box into Hu Xixi's arms and flicked his chin upward toward the two of them: "Let's go."

Up on the fifth-floor balcony, with a cigarette clamped between his lips, Zhou Jingze fixed his pitch-black eyes on the figures of the two girls down below, especially lingering on the one wearing the white dress.

Sheng Nanzhou flipped open his lighter case to light Zhou Jingze's cigarette, and noticing his thoughtful gaze, bantered, "Already got your hooks in this deep?"

Biting down on the cigarette, Zhou Jingze tilted his head to ignite it against the orange flame. Taking a drag, he held the cigarette in his hand and countered, "Do you really think I'm the type to go for someone like that?"

He never messed with goody-two-shoes honors students.

Zhou Jingze simply felt that she looked familiar.

On the way back, Xu Sui couldn't help asking, "Xixi, how is Zhou Jingze your uncle?"

"Our families have a bit of a distant kinship tie. He's actually my younger uncle, and we all grew up together," Hu Xixi explained.

Upon returning to campus, Hu Xixi went to collect a delivery, leaving Xu Sui to head back to the dormitory alone. Just as she was about to step through the dormitory gates, an orange tabby cat suddenly bolted out from the bushes, meowing at Xu Sui.

The little cat padded over to Xu Sui with rounded paws, its amber eyes staring straight up at her while it tried to rub against her trouser leg. Xu Sui's heart melted into a puddle. Squatting down, she discovered a wound on its face with blood still fresh upon it.

It looked precisely as though it had scampered out on a run and gotten scratched by wild weeds or thorns.

Standing back up, Xu Sui went to the dormitory sundry shop to purchase a bottle of mineral water and a ham sausage. Returning to the cat's side, she used the mineral water to carefully clean its wound, then tore open the packaging of the ham sausage so the little cat could bite down along her palm.

After finishing feeding it, Xu Sui patted its head: "I'm heading out now. I can't keep you."

That evening, with her roommates still not back, Xu Sui opened her laptop and searched online for the freshman representative speech at Beihang for this year, and the search results quickly provided the answer.

Sitting before the computer, Xu Sui quietly watched Zhou Jingze in the video.

Standing on stage amidst a somewhat rowdy crowd, Zhou Jingze reached out a long arm and abruptly raised the microphone in front of him up by a large margin. With undisguised sarcasm on his face, he prompted a wave of explosive laughter from the students below.

Standing off to the side, the department head—who was only a meter-six tall and had just finished speaking—looked rather troubled: students these days were certainly tough to handle.

After adjusting the microphone, Zhou Jingze stood before the crowd and spoke with unhurried poise: "Fellow students, I'll keep it short. Of course, you're also free to consider whatever I say next as complete nonsense."

"Ooh." Someone in the audience let out a teasing sound.

"I believe many of you have formed a preliminary understanding of Beihang by the end of military training. I don't care whether you still hold fast to your dreams, or if you're already feeling the urge to retreat because of alarm clocks ringing punctually at six every morning," Zhou Jingze swept his pitch-black eyes across the audience, a mixture of three parts cynical ruffianism and seven parts casual indifference. "The future might be even harder: dropout rates, the disasters one faces as a pilot, being grounded—these are all issues."

"I don't care about any of that. I once saw a sentence in a book that I'd like to pass on to all of you who chose to become pilots—"

The audience abruptly quieted down, everyone waiting to see what Zhou Jingze would say. Standing on stage, Zhou Jingze cast a haughty, condescending gaze over the crowd, his voice carrying an unyielding, arrogant edge.

"God remains silent, and everything is decided by me."

The students in the audience fell silent once more, that quiet spreading to every corner. Zhou Jingze smiled lightly, folded his speech manuscript into a paper airplane, and tossed it down toward the audience.

The white paper airplane fluttered and drifted in midair for a circle before soaring down toward the vast sea of people below. Suddenly, an eruption of applause and cheers burst from the student crowd.

As if infected by those words, the students began jumping upward in a race against one another, attempting to catch that paper airplane. It was a carnival belonging to them alone, with various voices shouting:

"I'm going to become the greatest pilot!"

"I'm definitely going to take photos of the blue skies and show them to my mom."

A breeze blew past, billowing the corner of Zhou Jingze's black T-shirt. Standing on stage as he watched the students gathered in a rowdy cluster, he slowly smiled.

A youth in black, fiercely sharp and unrelenting—just as he had been from the very beginning, smiling with wild, unbridled abandon.

Watching Zhou Jingze on the screen, Xu Sui felt her heart pounding uncontrollably in her chest, her emotions surging in tandem. There were numerous comments underneath the video, and she clicked through them one by one.

Someone asked: [Who the hell is this guy? What gives him the right to be so arrogant?]

A helpful alumnus answered: [You're too superficial. Right after the college entrance exams, the guy went to play skydiving in the Colorado Canyon in the US, and casually picked up a private helicopter license.]

Abruptly, the sound of the door being pushed open echoed from outside, and Xu Sui panicked, using her mouse to close the browser page.

Striding in with boisterous casualness, Liang Shuang kicked the door open and immediately threw an arm around Xu Sui's shoulder as soon as she entered. "Suisui, didn't you mention to me before that you wanted to find a part-time job? I happen to know a senior who's looking for a tutor, and I've pushed her contact card over to you."

Xu Sui nodded. "Alright, thank you."

"Don't mention it." Liang Shuang pinched her cheek again, finding the skin texture simply too wonderful.

After adding the senior, Xu Sui took the initiative to introduce herself. The senior was very enthusiastic, replying: [Hello, Liang Shuang told me all about it. You're that clinical medicine junior who handles dissections cleanly and has plenty of guts, right? She keeps praising you as an academic top student. My aunt is looking for a tutor to teach a sixth-grader math and English. It's once a week, but each session is two hours long—does that fit your schedule?]

Xu Sui asked: [Where is the general location?]

The senior replied: [Amber Lane in the New Harmony District. Since there's no direct subway line, you have to transfer between several buses, taking a little over an hour in total.]

Over an hour—that was a bit far. If only there were a direct subway route, and Xu Sui also suffered slightly from motion sickness. Just as she was hesitating over whether to go, the senior sent another message: [A lot of people pass on it because of the travel distance... Anyway, tutors aren't easy to find. Could you do me a favor and go check out the interview this weekend? What if you end up really liking the kid? If it doesn't work out, you can just turn it down then.]

Since things had already reached this point, declining further would be impolite, so Xu Sui agreed to go for an interview and see.

No one could have expected that the days in the dormitory ahead would be anything but peaceful. One day, Bai Yuyue returned and suddenly burst into tears inside the room. After crying, she tried making phone calls, but failed to get through after several attempts, infuriating her to the point where she smashed her phone directly into smithereens.

Hu Xixi comforted her: "Don't cry, what happened?"

Meanwhile, Xu Sui silently squatted down to clean up the shattered fragments all over the floor. Wiping the tears from the corners of her eyes, Bai Yuyue spoke in a cold voice: "Nothing, just fought with my boyfriend."

Within a couple of days, people in the class began spreading rumors that Bai Yuyue had been dumped by her boyfriend, and even that she had gone to wait outside his dormitory building for an entire night without managing to reconcile, with all sorts of differing versions circulating.

Liang Shuang and the others didn't believe it; young couples quarreling every now and then was completely normal, right?

On Thursday afternoon, receiving a text message while sitting on her bed in the dorm, Hu Xixi sat up and blinked at Xu Sui: "Zhou Jingze has some business at our school and happens to have free time right now. Come on, I'll take you along for a free meal."

Hu Xixi brought Xu Sui to the east cafeteria, where Sheng Nanzhou was also waiting, and they even had Xu Sui recommend some dishes. Just as Xu Sui finished ordering a portion of clay-pot rice noodles, she puffed out her cheeks and said, "You guys might not necessarily like what I ordered."

Sheng Nanzhou raised an eyebrow: "Now that's a bit of looking down on people. Is there anything your big brother here doesn't dare eat?"

At that exact moment, the cafeteria worker at the window pushed out a tray containing clay-pot rice noodles, and upon taking a look, Sheng Nanzhou saw it was extreme spicy style, floating entirely with bottomless red chili oil.

Sheng Nanzhou cupped his hands in a martial salute: "Farewell."

"I didn't take you for such a spicy little firecracker."

"Just eat your food, why talk so much?" Stepping up from behind, Zhou Jingze gave him a kick. "If you're not going to eat, stop blocking the way."

At the dining table, the gossipy little Hu hadn't even unwrapped her chopsticks before launching into a topic: "Uncle, what's going on between you and Bai Yuyue? She keeps crying in the dorm. Word is you guys broke up, but Bai Yuyue claims you're just arguing."

"We broke up," Zhou Jingze said casually, as if it were no big deal.

Xu Sui was lowering her head to slurp up her noodles, the broth sizzling inside the pot, when hearing Zhou Jingze's words startled her so badly that she choked. The spicy heat surged straight into her throat—stinging and burning—causing her to cough until moisture welled up in her eyes.

Suddenly, a clearly articulated, well-knuckled hand pushed a cup of water across the table. Meeting Zhou Jingze's gaze, Xu Sui instantly felt her heart descend into panic; his eyes resembled rocks at the riverbed—once the water receded, they looked like dark stone, silent yet glowing.

Zhou Jingze was staring right at her.