January 14, 2024, Sunday.
6:30 in the morning.
Zhang Yan blinked and stared at the unfamiliar ceiling for a long while before she slowly remembered.
This was Wen Ruan's home, Shencheng Yuefu.
Last night, she had drunk champagne at Qingning's place.
She rarely drank. Even when she did, it was only the occasional can of beer.
After those two glasses of expensive pink champagne went down, they had tasted sweet at the time, like fruit juice, but the aftereffect was no joke. It had made her whole body dizzy. Even now, her head still felt slightly heavy.
But that heaviness did not feel unpleasant. Instead, it made everything seem as if it were separated by a soft-focus filter—hazy and dreamlike, yet especially real. She lay there in a daze for a while, and her thoughts gradually returned.
Zhang Yan stared at the ceiling, the corners of her mouth rising bit by bit beyond her control.
She had crossed that hurdle.
Liu Qingning.
That name had hovered in her heart like a mountain, heavy and immovable, for a full ten years.
From the first time she saw her at the entrance of the No. 1 High School cafeteria when she was sixteen, to countless late nights afterward when she tossed and turned over her diary. She had always thought that was a light belonging to Tang Song, one she would never be able to reach in this lifetime.
But last night, that "light" had reached out a hand to her.
Not only had it not hurt her, it had accepted her gently.
She had finally walked out of that shadow.
Finally, she could... confidently imagine herself in her heart as his girlfriend too.
At that thought.
That voice seemed to ring in her ears again, carrying a trace of choking sobs: