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“That’s good,” Lu An leaned over and brought his lips to hers. “I won’t hold it against you if you kiss me.”

“Quick,” Jin Nian replied, “Let’s get you your ring. What kind of ring do you want? I’ll buy whichever catches your fancy.”

Without waiting for a response, Jin Nian unlocked the door to Lu An’s white jeep and pushed him into the car. However, Jin Nian realized she had no idea how to start Lu An’s jeep. She was so used to driving her mini-electric car that operating a jeep was beyond her capabilities. Jin Nian tried getting Lu An to teach her, but he was unwilling to cooperate. “1 drank too much,” he said, “1 can’t… hie… remember anything.”

“I take it you don’t want that ring anyone, then?”

“I want a kiss. I want you to kiss me right now.”

Jin Nian could not take it anymore. “If murder weren’t illegal, I’d have thrown you into the river and let you drown!”

It was just like back then. Things had changed since, yet not much had changed at all. Jin Nian could still remember the sight of Lu An sitting on that bench, refusing to leave. She had walked up to him with a frown, more than a little annoyed that she had had to sneak out of the house late at night just to pick up his sorry arse. Her memories of that day overlapped with the present so much that everything seemed the same, from the temperature to the coat he wore to stave off the chill.

Seated where he was, Jin Nian could not tell what was going through Lu An’s mind. In Jin Nian’s eyes, Lu An was a stranger, having drifted apart as they grew up. His estrangement left a gaping hole in her heart, sorrow making its bed and carving out a place for itself in the hollow. Jin Nian did not know how she had offended him. At that time, she remembered that Lu An had deliberately distanced himself, never taking the initiative to greet her whenever they bumped into each other.

The next thing she knew, he was drinking and getting drunk with his friends, and they, not knowing how to deal with him, had called her for help, insisting that their ‘Brother Lu’ would not let anyone pick him up but her.

The first thing she did when she saw him was to kick him in the shin. “Haven’t you been avoiding me? Why did you call me over? Don’t you have a girlfriend? Why didn’t your girlfriend come to pick you up?” she recalled demanding, firing off a litany of questions like a firing squad at persons on death row.

Lu An had looked up when he heard Jin Nian’s voice. His eyes were bottomless pools of inky darkness. He did not look drunk at all. Those eyes… they held a promise to suck the souls out of those who dared to stare into them. Lu An had always been popular with his sculpted jaw and chiseled physique.

Girls swooned when their eyes fell on him, their cheeks stained with the color of freshly plucked cherries. It was no surprise many a girl could not help but steal second glances as he passed them by.

For all its ups and downs, high school was when teens frolicked with love, or at least the notion of it. Jin Nian often heard the quiet chatter among the female students in her class. She knew quite intimately the whispers and giggles trailing Lu An around like a lovesick puppy.

On the one hand, Jin Nian was happy for him, but on the other, she felt an inexplicable sense of disappointment, one she could not shake off. This was around the time Lu An had deliberately distanced himself from her.

For a long time, Jin Nian had wanted to ask him what she had done wrong. But she could never work up the courage to ask him. The final nail in the coffin came when she heard rumors of the school belle confessing to Lu An while he was playing basketball and in full view of an audience. While Lu An had not said ‘yes,’ he also had not said ‘no.’ Everyone thought the two of them were together.

It was then that it struck her; they had all grown up. Lu An must have found someone he loved, someone he longed to share his life with, and that someone did not include her. She was the only one still stuck chasing the daydreams of their youth.

That was when Jin Nian’s mood hit rock bottom, and everything she did seemed tinted in hazy shades of grey. Nothing mattered. From then on, whenever she saw Lu An in the corridors between classes, she would give him an earful for valuing love over friendship. Even if he had fallen for someone else, he had no reason to stop being friends with her, right?

Drunk as drunk can be, Lu An’s magnetic voice rumbled low and magnetic. “Who told you 1 have a girlfriend?”

“The whole world knows about it,” Jin Nian sneered. “You didn’t reject her when she confessed to you.”

The corners of Lu An’s mouth circled into a half-smile. “Then, does the whole world know why I didn’t reject her? How could 1 humiliate her like that? There were so many people on the basketball court that day. 1 didn’t want to do that to her. Would you have preferred 1 left her in tears, embarrassed before the whole school?”

Despite his first instinct to reject her, Lu An had thought of Jin Nian and what she would have said to him if he crushed the girl’s self-esteem in such an unforgivable manner and found himself unable to put his thoughts into words. Hence, he swallowed his immediate rejection. He politely declined only when everyone left, saying, “I’m sorry, 1 already have someone 1 like.”

“Can you tell me who it is you like?” she had asked.

Lu An shook his head, not wanting to go into details. He feared that if the news got out, Jin Nian would become the center of attention, good and bad, and he did not want that for her. It led him to his decision to distance himself from Jin Nian. He did not want to lose control of himself.

Jin Nian could not have known the effect she had had on him. Even meeting her in passing was enough to steal his breath away.

He did not know what to do.

He may have been on the cusp of manhood, but that did not make him one. Her laughter alone was enough to inject fire into his veins, and it took every ounce of his self-control not to give in to his base desires.

The only thing on his mind were the vague, half-words, sentences barely forming coherent wholes, which hounded his thoughts, forcing him to focus on the fragrance Jin Nian wore, how soft her body must feel, and what it would feel like to taste her sweet lips.

Those were the thoughts that filled his head. He could not stop thinking about Jin Nian; sleep offered no solace either. She haunted his dreams, wandering the dark labyrinthine halls of his mind..