Against the Algorithm

Chapter 21: Lines No Longer Imagined

Tong Yao, still flushed from head to toe, her face burning with enough heat to rival a small sun, had absolutely not intended to be involved in any part of this conversation—she had fled the moment she'd seen Sicheng step out of his office, had darted away like a skittish rabbit the instant her brain reminded her of the kiss he'd pressed to her cheek not twenty-four hours earlier, had fully planned on hiding upstairs until the heat left her cheeks and the memory stopped replaying in her head on an endless loop.

But fate, it seemed, had other plans.

Because as soon as Rui had said that—as soon as his voice had cut across the room with the calm, deadly force of someone who knew exactly what chaos he was about to unleash—she had heard it.

Clear as day.

All of it.

And her brain, already short-circuiting from proximity, from memory, from sensation, did what it did best when overwhelmed—spoke without thinking.

"I already got The Talk when I was fifteen," she muttered under her breath, barely louder than a whisper, her voice dry and flustered and sharp with the mortifying edge of someone who was about three seconds from spontaneous combustion, "we had a whole unit on it in Health class... with diagrams... and uncomfortable videos..."

The room fell so still you could've heard Yue's soul ascending.

And then—before anyone could process that, before she could stop herself, before her frontal cortex had a chance to intervene and shut her up—the words just kept coming.

"Not to mention all the times I walked in on Ai Jia and Jinyang."

A beat.

A pause.

A silence so heavy it had mass.

Lao Mao blinked slowly like he wasn't sure if he had just hallucinated. Lao K looked visibly traumatized. Ming pinched the bridge of his nose so hard it might've left a mark. Pang let out a low whistle and shook his head like he wasn't even sure what to do with that information.

Yue dropped his chopsticks and gasped, gasped, like he had just received the single most delightful piece of gossip in years, turning in his seat to face her, eyes wide with utter glee. "You what?" he practically howled, laughter already bubbling up in his chest, "You walked in on Ai Jia and Jinyang—multiple times?! How many?! What positions?! Did Jinyang throw things?!"

Yao, now scarlet from her forehead to her collarbone, realized too late that she had said too much, that her mouth had moved faster than her dignity, and now—now—there was no saving herself. "I—I didn't mean it like— I mean, yes, but—not that I was counting—I wasn't watching—just—they never locked doors, okay?!" She was rambling now. Spiraling. A verbal meltdown of panicked clarification and regret. And the more she tried to fix it, the worse it got.

Rui, covering his mouth with his clipboard, was visibly shaking from the effort it took not to laugh, and Lao Mao finally reached out to slap him on the back with a muttered, "You broke her, good job."

Sicheng, meanwhile, was still standing near the hallway, perfectly still, his expression unreadable except for the faintest twitch at the corner of his mouth, a twitch that said very clearly that he was enjoying this far too much, watching the girl he had kissed unravel in real time as she scrambled to reassemble her dignity in front of a room full of predators, idiots, and Yue.

"This is fine," Yao muttered to herself, gripping the stair railing like it might save her soul, her voice somewhere between resignation and the stunned horror of someone who knew she would never live this down. "This is completely fine. Normal conversation. Excellent. Definitely not dying inside right now." Tong Yao was going to pack herself into a suitcase and live under the bed for the rest of the season. Possibly forever.