For Jiang Yan, the past was a source of shame.
Whenever he recalled the past, he would think of Old Mr. Lu’s evaluation of him—a spoiled child from a humble background, unlikely to achieve greatness. He had fought tooth and nail to carve out a place for himself, just to prove Old Mr. Lu wrong, to make him see his mistake, and to slap him in the face with his success.
Yet Lu Xixiao’s words, though spoken without much weight or emotion, still tugged at his pride, threatening to shatter it completely.
But Lu Xixiao was never a patient man. He had only indulged Jiang Yan a little longer because he was in a good mood, and by now, his patience had run out. Without another word, he turned and walked away, ignoring Jiang Yan’s persistence.
When Lu Xixiao returned home, Zhou Wan had just finished preparing dinner.
She was still wearing an apron and turned her head at the sound of the door opening, smiling. "You’re back. Perfect timing—dinner is ready."
"Yeah."
Lu Xixiao walked into the kitchen to help carry the dishes to the table.
Even though it was just the two of them, the meal was lavish. Zhou Wan had reduced the portion sizes but cooked six different dishes and a soup.
As she handed him the chopsticks, he noticed a small mark on the back of her hand. "What happened to your hand?"
"Oh, I accidentally got splashed with oil earlier." It was a common occurrence when cooking, and Zhou Wan didn’t think much of it.
Lu Xixiao frowned, took her hand, and examined it carefully. Fortunately, it wasn’t serious—no blisters had formed. He picked up his phone and ordered a burn ointment for delivery.
Zhou Wan thought he was overreacting and couldn’t help but laugh. "Really, it’s not necessary. It doesn’t even hurt, and it’ll be gone in a few days."
"I told you not to cook."
Lu Xixiao reached out and pinched her cheek. "Did I ask you to move in so you could cook for me?"
"But I want to cook for you."
Zhou Wan blinked. "You can’t always eat takeout or dine out. So much of that food is heavy on oil and salt—it’s not good for your health."
"Why?"
"Huh?"
Lu Xixiao lowered his gaze, looking into her eyes with a quiet intensity, as if trying to dig out a sincere answer from the depths of her heart.
"Why are you so good to me?" Lu Xixiao asked.
Zhou Wan was puzzled by his question and chuckled softly. "I just got splashed with oil—does that count as being good to you?"
"What about before?"
"Before what?"
Lu Xixiao’s words came a little faster. "You celebrated my birthday with me, spent New Year’s Eve with me, went to see the snow with me. Why have you been so good to me?"
Zhou Wan was taken aback, pausing for a moment before letting out a slow "Ah," then smiled. "Because you’ve been good to me too. And, actually, it was you who took me to see the snow."
Lu Xixiao’s expression stiffened slightly.
His thoughts inexplicably drifted back to that summer night—
He had drunk too much, finally mustering a reckless, desperate courage.
He dialed Zhou Wan’s number, only to be hung up on again and again, yet he kept redialing.
The room was pitch dark, illuminated only by the faint glow of his phone screen. The moment the call connected, a surge of impulses washed over him. He thought about casting aside all pride and begging Zhou Wan to come back.
But he was young, stubborn, and emboldened by alcohol. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he clung to the last shreds of his dignity, insisting stubbornly:
"Zhou Wan, just say you love me, and I’ll forgive everything."
The air grew unnervingly still.
After a long pause, Zhou Wan’s voice came through, cold and composed, delivering her reply.
"Lu Xixiao, I don’t love you. I’ve been deceiving you all along."
…Noticing that something seemed off about him, Zhou Wan watched him for a moment before asking softly, "What's wrong?"
Lu Xixiao snapped out of his thoughts and smiled. "Nothing."
After dinner, the burn ointment arrived.
Lu Xixiao opened the door to retrieve it and turned to see Zhou Wan starting to clear the table. "Leave it there. Don't move around."
He walked over to Zhou Wan, lowered his head, and carefully applied the ointment to the reddened spot. His movements were gentle, as if afraid of hurting her.
Zhou Wan pressed her lips together and asked, "Lu Xixiao, you actually knew how to dress your own wounds all along, didn't you?"
"Hmm?" He seemed distracted and didn't immediately grasp why she was asking. "Yeah, I usually handled injuries myself before. I couldn't be bothered to go to the hospital."
Zhou Wan let out a soft "Oh" and leaned slightly closer.
Sensing his low spirits, she deliberately hooked her finger around his, with a hint of playful coaxing, and said, "Then why did you lie to me back then, saying you didn't know how, so I would bandage you up?"
Finally understanding the intent behind her question, Lu Xixiao chuckled. "Only figured it out now?"
"No, I suspected it back then," Zhou Wan murmured. "I just wanted to confirm it."
Lu Xixiao smirked, screwing the cap back on the ointment. "So you were just messing with me back then."
"..."
He stood up and walked over to pour a glass of water. "In a few days, I'll have someone hire a housekeeper to clean and cook."
"There's no need," Zhou Wan said quickly. "Cleaning doesn't take much time anyway, and we both often work overtime and don't come home for dinner."
"We'll figure out the specifics later."
Lu Xixiao handed her the glass of water. The soft light fell on the tips of his hair as he lowered his gaze and smiled nonchalantly. "The years I struggled after going abroad weren't meant for you to endure hardships like these."
Zhou Wan was taken aback.
Lu Xixiao looked at her and said, "As long as you stay by my side, you'll have everything. There's nothing to fear."
In the following days, two new interns arrived at the newspaper office. Zhou Wan had taken three days off at the end of the month, so she worked overtime to finish what she could and handed over the rest.
Time had flown by since graduation.
It was already late April.
Pingchuan City was much warmer than City B in April. After checking the weather forecast, Zhou Wan packed only light clothes.
They arrived at Pingchuan Airport in the afternoon. The two first went back to the house to drop off their luggage, then drove to the hotel where Jiang Fan's wedding was being held.
On the way, Jiang Fan sent Lu Xixiao a voice message asking why he hadn't arrived yet.
It had been a long time since Lu Xixiao had seen his old friends. Aside from Jiang Fan, he had almost completely lost touch with the others since high school.
While waiting at a red light, he lazily replied, "Almost there."
Jiang Fan sent another voice message. Lu Xixiao tapped to play it—
"Everyone's curious about what your girlfriend looks like."
Zhou Wan, sitting in the passenger seat, froze for a moment and turned to him in surprise.
Lu Xixiao smirked. They were almost there, so he didn't bother replying. He set his phone aside, drove into the hotel parking lot, and took the elevator to the banquet hall on the 8th floor.
Zhou Wan felt inexplicably nervous.
Although she had met Lu Xixiao's friends and classmates before, so many years had passed. Moreover, she had transferred schools in a hurry back then and never had a proper chance to say goodbye.
"Lu Xixiao."
"Hmm?"Zhou Wan tugged at the hem of her dress. "Is this outfit okay?"
Since it was a wedding, she had dressed slightly more formally than her usual style—a square-necked black velvet dress, cinched at the waist, with the hem falling mid-calf. It accentuated her figure perfectly, highlighting her slender waist, long legs, and exceptional proportions.
Lu Xixiao raised an eyebrow. "Stay close to me later."
"Why?" she asked.
He said with a straight face, "Dressed like that, you might easily get snatched away."
"..."
It took Zhou Wan a moment to process his words, but then she couldn’t help lowering her head, pressing her lips together to suppress a laugh.
Just then, a voice called out from ahead, "Xiao Ye!"
Xiao Ye.
It had been a long time since she’d heard that nickname.
A man hurried over and bumped Lu Xixiao’s shoulder. "Haven’t seen you in years! Everyone’s been waiting for you—we even made bets about your girlfriend..."
As he spoke, his gaze shifted to Zhou Wan. When his eyes met hers, he froze abruptly, staring for a solid five seconds as if utterly shocked, his voice stumbling.
"S-s-sis... sister-in-law."
"..."
Zhou Wan had met him before. She offered a polite smile. "Hello."
Lu Xixiao tilted his chin up casually. "Let’s head in."
Their table was filled with high school friends who had been chatting animatedly, but the moment they spotted Zhou Wan beside Lu Xixiao, they fell into a synchronized silence.
Lu Xixiao had dated many girls before, but Zhou Wan was the only one who left a lasting impression.
Even after all these years, muscle memory kicked in—they immediately stood up to usher Zhou Wan to her seat, addressing her repeatedly as "sister-in-law."
Zhou Wan felt a bit flustered by the attention and forgot to clarify that she wasn’t yet deserving of the title "sister-in-law." She quickly said, "Please, sit down."
The awkward atmosphere dissipated within minutes, and soon someone started teasing Zhou Wan lightheartedly.
"I always said only our sister-in-law could tame Xiao Ye. Even after all these years, it still has to be you."
They bantered back and forth while Lu Xixiao sat to the side, a careless smile on his face, letting them talk.
"By the way, sister-in-law, did you know how incredible Xiao Ye was in our senior year? Right after you transferred schools, he started studying like crazy—scared the hell out of all of us! We thought he was possessed. Guess what rank he got in the college entrance exam!"
This was a part of his past she had never witnessed or known about.
Zhou Wan’s grip on her cup tightened slightly. Softly, she asked, "What rank?"
Someone slapped the table emphatically. "Fifth!"
Another immediately retorted, "Bullshit! Third!"
"Really? Did I remember wrong?"
"With your memory, you should just shut up."
"Oh, I get it—after you transferred, and that top-ranked bookworm got early admission, my brain didn’t adjust."
Third place.
Zhou Wan’s eyelashes fluttered faintly.
She found it hard to imagine—Lu Xixiao, ranking third in the grade.
She had always known he was intelligent. He’d excelled academically as a child, even winning awards in math Olympiads. But his carefree, unrestrained demeanor was so ingrained in her mind that it was difficult to picture him sitting quietly in a classroom.
She turned to him, leaning close to his ear, and whispered, "Is it true?"
He leaned back in his chair, his arm draped lazily behind her, and raised an eyebrow. "Don’t believe it?"
Zhou Wan shook her head. After a pause, she couldn’t help asking, "Was it exhausting?"
Zhou Wan’s focus always seemed to differ from everyone else’s.While others were teasing and joking, she was thinking about whether he had been tired.
Lu Xixiao curled his lips and said softly, "Senior year is always tiring, but after spending so much time with you and getting used to seeing you study, I don’t think studying is such a difficult thing anymore."
But Zhou Wan knew that climbing from the bottom to third place in the entire school within a year couldn’t have been easy.
Lu Xixiao had fallen too far behind in his studies back then. Although she had taken the time to help him catch up on previous lessons, there was still so much she hadn’t been able to teach him before she left.
No matter how smart Lu Xixiao was, climbing from scratch to the top must have required immense effort and countless sleepless nights.
A hazy image seemed to form in Zhou Wan’s mind.
A young man sitting at his desk in his bedroom, surrounded by silence, alone, with mountains of books and test papers piled before him.
He habitually kept the curtains drawn tightly, perhaps with only a desk lamp lit. He lowered his head, quiet and focused, reading bit by bit, carefully working through problems and writing down answers.
From starry nights until the break of dawn.
...
The wedding officially began, and the bride entered in a pure white wedding dress, its large skirt spreading across the floor.
The bride and groom exchanged "I do" on the stage.
After the ceremony, Jiang Fan brought the bride over to toast. He hadn’t been around earlier, so this was his first time seeing Zhou Wan. After a moment of stunned silence, he came to his senses and said, "It’s still you."
Zhou Wan smiled. "Yeah."
It’s still me.
At other tables, people drank lightly, but at their table, no one needed encouragement—they downed glass after glass. Lu Xixiao, whom they hadn’t seen in a long time, was especially targeted for toasts.
It was all hard liquor, one glass after another.
He had an exceptional tolerance for alcohol, but even he should have been feeling somewhat drunk from drinking like this.
Yet, even when he’d had too much, there was no trace of it on his face—he looked exactly the same as before.
After drinking for a while, someone suddenly remarked, "The last time we drank like this was after graduating from high school, right?"
"Seems like it. Damn, time flies. I’m already 26."
"That time was probably the most we’ve ever drunk. We almost emptied the place. Everyone was so drunk they blacked out—no one even remembers how they got home."
As they reminisced about the amusing past, everyone laughed.
"Oh, right, I think the video from back then is still in my cloud storage."
Others laughed and cursed, "Shit, don’t pull that out. We were all a mess—way too embarrassing."
"Hahahaha, it’s fine. Let’s take a look. We were all embarrassing together, and we probably won’t have chances to be that embarrassing again."
He dug out the videos from the earliest two years in his cloud storage.
They had been recorded accidentally when everyone was almost blackout drunk, and he had never opened them since, suffering from a two-day hangover afterward. It was only when the topic came up today that he suddenly remembered.
A three-and-a-half-minute-long video.
The camera was shaky and unsteady, clearly held by someone already heavily intoxicated.
They were probably in a KTV, with noisy voices and music in the background.
The lighting in the video was dim, but Zhou Wan immediately spotted Lu Xixiao sitting in the corner.
It was the night of their high school graduation, and they were still wearing their blue-and-white school uniforms.
He wasn’t playing dice with the others in the video but sat alone to the side, his expression unclear in the dim light.
This was Lu Xixiao during their senior year.
A Lu Xixiao she had never seen before.He was thinner than she remembered, his demeanor colder, making his bone structure appear sharper and more defined, exuding an air of detachment.
The video had only played for a short while before someone, unable to bear the sight of their own foolishness on screen, snatched the phone away to stop it.
...
A little later, the wedding banquet was about to end.
Lu Xixiao leaned in close to Zhou Wan’s ear and whispered, "I’m going to the restroom."
He was extremely close, his warm breath brushing against her ear, carrying the heat of alcohol.
Zhou Wan turned her head to look at him. His face wasn’t flushed, and he showed no obvious signs of drunkenness, but his eyes were softened by the alcohol, making him seem particularly languid.
Zhou Wan thought to herself that Lu Xixiao was probably a little drunk.
"Mm."
"Stay here for a while, don’t wander off."
Zhou Wan nodded.
After Lu Xixiao left, the others at their table also got up and filed out one by one.
Zhou Wan finished the last of her orange juice, hesitated for a moment, then stood up and walked over to a man nearby. "Hello, could you send me that video from earlier?"
"Of course," he immediately pulled out his phone, smiling. "But sis, there probably aren’t any embarrassing moments of Brother Xixiao in it. He holds his liquor well—even when he’s drunk, he doesn’t cause a scene."
"No, it’s just..."
Zhou Wan paused, lowered her gaze, and said softly, "I just... wanted to see what he was like in his senior year of high school."
Zhou Wan saved the video to her album.
Because the surroundings were noisy, she slightly hunched her back, bringing her ear closer to the phone, and pressed play.
She finally could clearly hear the song playing in the KTV.
No one was singing; the speakers were playing Rene Liu’s original track—"Later."
Later, I finally learned how to love
But sadly, you had already gone far away, disappearing into the sea of people
...
That eternal night
The midsummer when I was seventeen
The night you kissed me
Made me, in the days to come
Whenever I sighed
Always think of the starlight from that day
...
If back then we could have
Been less stubborn
Now we wouldn’t be so full of regrets
How do you remember me
With a smile or in silence
...
It wasn’t the CD version playing, but a live recording, with a slightly raw and choked voice, somewhat hoarse, quiet, and quickly drowned out by the noise.
In the dimly lit KTV, bottles were piled high on the tables and floor.
A group of teenagers were gathered together playing dice, already heavily drunk, drinking glass after glass whenever they lost.
Lu Xixiao sat alone to the side.
Zhou Wan bent her head lower, watching intently.
The noise in the video merged with the noise around her.
In a daze, she felt as if she were being pulled into the scene from the video, truly seeing that version of Lu Xixiao from his senior year of high school.
His gaze was calm and silent, fixed on the TV screen. The flickering light from the screen fell on his face, accentuating his tall, straight nose bridge.
Then he lifted his head.
He sat lazily, his back sunk into the sofa, the back of his head resting against the sofa as he tilted his head upward, his Adam’s apple sharp and distinct, staring fixedly at the ceiling.
Everyone around him was laughing.
Only he wasn’t.
Zhou Wan had hardly ever seen Lu Xixiao like this.
She understood that Lu Xixiao’s heart was like a solitary island, rarely visited by anyone, but he was not a lone boat. Amidst the noisy crowd, he could still blend in well, never seeming out of place.
He ought to be noble, detached, and unrestrained.
Not like this.
From him, Zhou Wan saw fragility and brokenness.
From decisive and ruthless to vulnerable and defenseless.Lu Xixiao like this made her feel a pang of sorrow in her heart.
Rene Liu's voice still echoed in her ears, washed away by the clamor, leaving only the most sincere and heartfelt parts.
"If back then we hadn't
been so stubborn
we wouldn't have so many regrets now
How do you remember me
with a smile or in silence
..."
Suddenly, Zhou Wan's eyelashes trembled, and her entire body froze.
In the dimly lit room, Lu Xixiao's brows and eyes remained as sharp as a newly honed blade, tinged with an unapproachable aloofness.
Yet the corners of his eyes were flushed with a blood-like redness. Under the swirling lights, his eyelashes were wet with tears, reflecting an unusually glaring light.
The college entrance exams were over.
The grueling final year of high school had finally come to an end.
Lu Xixiao had achieved his wish, scoring well and not betraying the hardships of the past year.
Everyone was celebrating—drinking, boasting, singing, and shouting—wild and exuberant, filled with the recklessness and flamboyance unique to youth.
But Lu Xixiao sat alone to the side.
Everyone was laughing.
Only he was crying.
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