Wet dream

For a boy, having an older girl next door usually meant having someone else to pick on, or becoming the one who got picked on...

There were also older girls who doted on the younger boy next door as though he were their own little brother. That should have been the relationship between Qin An and Li Xinlan...

Because of their profession, teachers' families had to comply with the national family planning policy, and almost all of them were one-child households...

Qin An had no older sister, and Li Xinlan had no younger brother. Watching the siblings in other families laughing and roughhousing always made them a little envious, so the two of them should naturally have grown close...

Unfortunately, the age gap between them was a little too small. The sense that they were peers pushed out any feeling of being sister and brother...

Boys and girls of the same age were enemies at that stage of life. Qin An and Sun Pao were practically the nightmares of Li Xinlan's girlhood...

"Xinlan, you're so pretty..."

When a somewhat shy girl got angry, even her scolding had a coy quality. Her nose, dotted with a few cute freckles, wrinkled, but Qin An kept grinning, utterly unconcerned...

Being called pretty did give Li Xinlan a little pleasure. But she felt that Qin An was different from ordinary children, not so innocent, which meant his compliments naturally weren't so innocent either. He was the same sort of person as Tu Gang...

What did Tu Gang want by getting close to Li Xinlan? He wanted to hold her hand, kiss her, and put his arms around her, doing those shameless, mortifying things, just like the delinquent boys and girls at school... That was why Li Xinlan detested Tu Gang so much...

Could Qin An want the same thing? Li Xinlan's thoughts ran wild...

What girl never dreamed of romance? They only dreamed, though, without the courage to accept it...

Qin An paid no attention to what Li Xinlan was thinking. He ran home with his schoolbag on his back. Calling Li Xinlan pretty had only been a greeting, a normal adult response to cover up having been caught stealing a look at something alluring...

That night, Qin An had a jumble of dreams: Ye Zhulan's luscious lips, Liao Yu's large, full breasts and exaggerated curves at her hips, the pale, tender skin at the tops of Li Xinlan's thighs, and the rounded mound tightly wrapped in those white cotton panties...

He had a wet dream. When he got up in the morning, there was a large damp, sticky patch inside his underwear. It was thoroughly embarrassing. A teenage body really couldn't withstand provocation. Even though experiences with hidden "sexual" suggestions no longer did much for him, his body had still been stimulated into the most direct response...

It was only just getting light. Without giving it much thought, Qin An went straight out into the corridor to fetch the underwear he had hung there and change into it...

Li Xinlan's eyes widened as she stared fixedly at Qin An, who wore nothing but a pair of boxer shorts. Her gaze stopped on the wet patch...

"Ugh... filthy thing..." Li Xinlan's cheeks burned as though they were on fire. She hastily dropped her English textbook and rushed through her front door...

Qin An was filled with chagrin. He had only thought that it was early and no one should be up yet, forgetting that Li Xinlan was especially diligent: she finished her homework, went to bed early, and got up early to memorize her lessons...

As a high school student, she understood basic reproductive health. People approached facts about the opposite sex's body with trepidation, learning about them with a state of mind they could not admit to others. Of course Li Xinlan wasn't foolish enough to think Qin An was still wetting himself at his age. His condition was something already covered in junior high health class-a nocturnal emission...

Seeing Li Xinlan's reaction, Qin An felt a little annoyed. What was filthy about it? Didn't she have something once a month herself?

On Sunday, Qin An went back to the old family home to visit his grandfather, Qin Jude...

The old home stood north of town, across the Xiaoqing River. Amid a vast expanse of golden heads of grain, a dense grove stood alone like a dark cloud fallen from the sky...

The old home lay within the grove, quiet and peaceful. It was said that before Liberation, the hundreds of mu of land surrounding it had all belonged to the Qin Family, the great landlords of Qinshan Town...

After Liberation, Qin Jude cooperated with land reform, returning all the land to the hired farmhands and keeping himself safe. He even served as a people's congress deputy after Liberation. During the Cultural Revolution, however, the Qin Family was branded counterrevolutionary again, and the old home was confiscated. It was not returned to the Qin Family until the eighties...

Though the old home was very dilapidated, its white walls and blue-gray tiles were still visible from afar. In the grove, beast heads on upturned eaves gazed out in every direction...

The closer Qin An came to the old home, the more keenly he felt his pounding heartbeat. He could hear neither the birds chirping nor the frogs croaking as he looked forward to seeing that great oak tree...

The pavilion beneath the oak had been torn apart. The painted slogan "Down with capitalist-roaders and rightists" left mottled traces on the sole stone pillar still standing. A stone stool and a stone table remained reasonably intact. A woman with her long hair loose held a yellowed book, reading it attentively...

She wore a plain white long dress, its hem trailing over the gray earth, with a black ribbon adorned with lace tied around her waist. Her dark hair reached her hips, lying over her slender waist. Even the ankle-length skirt could not conceal her shapely long legs...

Even from a distance, he could still see her flawless profile, her finely shaped nose, and the enchanting glow of her rosy lips. Her curled lashes could almost have supported a matchstick...

She reached out to turn a page, her slender fingers as pale and tender as scallions. Casually brushing aside the long hair that covered half her face, she revealed a length of neck as graceful and slender as a swan's, its skin as fine as a baby's...

Qin An suppressed a joy he could only describe as that of a "reunion" as he looked at that utterly captivating face. Ye Zhulan, who still bore a trace of childishness, inspired in him a fondness for her pure beauty. The coolly beautiful Sun Sun could be admired from afar but not profaned. The voluptuous, mature Liao Yu was merely a suitable subject for sexual fantasies. As for Li Xinlan, who was like an older girl next door, for now she could only play the little sister whose head he stroked and who could not wait to get rid of him...

Only the woman before him made Qin An feel pure feminine allure. That exquisitely beautiful air was just as it had been when they first met, piercing through nearly twenty years of subsequent memories. In his daze, Qin An felt again as he had on that first day when he met Ye Zhulan at school...

An Shui-this was the woman who had always treated Qin An as her most beloved little brother, doting on him, always indulging him, wishing she could give him everything she had. When Qin An returned to his father's private school to teach pottery, it was An Shui who introduced her younger sister to him, becoming his sister-in-law, his closest family...

The scene was exactly as he remembered it. This was Qin An's first meeting with An Shui...

Qin An walked up beside her and saw that she was still holding that same copy of Caigentan. It felt like watching a film once and then watching it again: the scenery was always the same, but the feelings were entirely different...

"Those who hold fast to virtue endure loneliness for a time; those who fawn upon power suffer desolation for all eternity... The discerning look beyond worldly things and consider what remains of them after death. Better to endure loneliness for a time than choose desolation for all eternity..." Qin An read aloud...

An Shui raised her head, her gentle eyes resting on Qin An. She seemed to look at everyone with that same calm, kindness, and beauty...