The Healing Sunshine (一厘米的阳光)

Chapter 12.3 - The Person in the Past Dream (3)

Boyfriend? ... More like one-sided love, right? At some point in time, he would get married, and then this one-sided love should then also quietly come to an end.

Jǐ Yi could not help giving Yin Qingqing a little shove, feeling too embarrassed to continue this dialogue. "I'm not going to talk to you anymore. Hurry up and go to bed. We still have morning self-study class tomorrow."

With a grin, Yin Qingqing climbed back up the ladder.

Hugging her quilt, Jǐ Yi lay with her cheek resting in the crook of her arm. In this room that was gradually slipping into stillness, she could even hear the sounds of the ticking clock hands. The angle that she was at was just perfect for her to see the alarm clock on the only wooden table in the dormitory room. The clock hands that were painted with glow-in-the-dark powder were silently pointing towards twelve o'clock.

She abruptly shut her eyes.

Hurry and sleep, hurry and sleep. Jǐ Yi, don't overthink it anymore...

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April arrived, and she did very well on her mock examinations.

As a reward, Jì Chengyang brought her to watch Meng Jinghui's play. The response to this tour for Rhinoceros in Love had been very enthusiastic. Jì Chengyang told her, this avant-garde play would indubitably become a classic.

"Let's guess how many editions there will be of it in ten years. If you guess correctly, I'll take you to Eastern Europe."

Four editions? Five? Or would there be six? What number of editions was considered "normal"? ... Jì Chengyang watched her as she wavered indecisively.

Sitting in the sofa chair opposite her, his back toward the brown, floor-length glass window, he gave an undetected smile.

In the end, Jǐ Yi tossed in her white flag. She honestly did not know anything about this.

Jì Chengyang finally let her off the hook. "I was just joking with you. If you really want to go to Eastern Europe, we don't need to wait ten years. After you graduate from university, I'll take you there for two months."

She nodded, suddenly growing quiet.

Each and every word spoken from Jì Chengyang's lips was an enticement. It was like someone was blowing bubble after colourful bubble into the sunlight. She longed to stretch out her hand to grab at them, but she also dared not touch them. He was already twenty-four years old, already an age where he could marry... He would have a girlfriend very soon, right?

She thought about the tall building that housed the television station, thought about the people who would come and go from it and pass it, thought about that dressing room for all the newscasters, thought about all those faces who reported the news... and thought about how she, with a television screen in between them, had been only able to touch the glass and not his face that was far away in the Palestine region.

That was his world—so very far from her.

And if that distance were to be measured in time, it would be at least another five years.

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That Saturday, at the end of April.

Jì Chengyang brought her out from the urban area and drove to the outskirts of Beijing municipality, to a place called Yangfang. He told her, in all of Beijing, this place had the best instant-boiled mutton hot pot. Wang Haoran, after coming here twice, thought very highly of it. In earlier years, when there were not many personal vehicles, there truly had been many people who would still drive here from faraway places because of its reputation, just so that they could have a taste of Yangfang's instant-boiled mutton in a copper hot pot.