Barely Childhood Friends, I Guess

If I were asked which women I'd been intimate with in the real world,

there were only two.

One was Ji Ran, my former younger sister, though we weren't related by blood.

The father who had adopted us had been exposed, then vanished without a trace.

His enormous fortune, which Yimo could hardly have imagined at the time, had all been confiscated. His company and factories went bankrupt, and he was left with countless debts.

The uncles and aunts our adoptive father had once introduced us to, and even the relatives whose names we'd needed a notebook to remember, all avoided us like the plague.

I was fourteen then, and Ji Ran was thirteen.

Neither of us wanted to be forcibly separated and sent off to find new guardians, so we ran away with the less than ten thousand yuan we'd managed to save.

In the end, a kind woman took us in.

She was Yimo's landlady, and she rented us a place for less than the market rate.

Some officials had come looking for us, saying we were too young and still needed guardians to look after us.

But for some reason, the matter eventually came to nothing.

My younger sister and I began living together.

The apartment wasn't large. There was only one single bed.

I let my younger sister sleep in it and made a bed for myself on the floor.

But whenever I woke up, Ji Ran was always in my blankets.

Her slender body would squeeze into my arms, her head resting on my arm.

Her sleeping face wasn't as cool and distant as she seemed outside. Instead, the corners of her lips would lift slightly in a faint, peaceful smile.

I wanted to tell Ji Ran that we were old enough to know there