April's weather had already shed the last traces of winter's chill. The gentle midday sunlight streamed through the glass, gilding Shen Shuangjian's white-jade-porcelain profile with golden light. Every detail where his hair fell away was clearly visible.
Over the hour-long drive, neither particularly long nor short, Xie Jinghui had already lost count of how many fleeting glances he had stolen at Shen Shuangjian.
Each glance lasted no more than a second and a half. The traffic lights that stopped them along the way varied in length, yet they became his only opportunities to speak.
"You don't seem to like talking much."
At the only red light that lasted a full sixty seconds, Xie Jinghui turned his gaze toward Shen Shuangjian. Sunlight shone on the sapphire at his knuckle, refracting patterns as pure as the ocean.
"The first time I met you, you didn't say a single word to me."
Xie Jinghui lowered his eyes slightly, his teasing tinged with self-mockery. "Counting today, this is already the fourth time we've met, but I could count the things you've said to me on my fingers."
The numbers on the red light continued ticking down rapidly until they reached zero, and then traffic flowed again.
Shen Shuangjian was slow to answer as well, as though he had never noticed any of the details Xie Jinghui mentioned. After a long silence, he finally replied softly.
"I did, Mr. Xie. You remembered wrong."
Even his answer was so succinct. He refused to add another few words to make his meaning clear and explicit.
And so Xie Jinghui chuckled, his deep-set features relaxing slightly, touched with more barely perceptible tenderness.
He did not rush to respond to Shen Shuangjian. Instead, he concentrated on slowing the car, reversing, and finally parking in front of the convoy beside a large sign.
"Sorry for the trouble, Mr. Xie."
Shen Shuangjian unfastened the seat belt at his waist. As the slightly chilly wind outside swept up his long hair, he unexpectedly heard the man's low murmur from the driver's seat.
"It was four times."
At those words, Shen Shuangjian looked back, his lowered eyes meeting the gaze Xie Jinghui directed at him.
His eyes were so black that their darkness seemed heavy. If he deliberately concealed them, almost no one could detect any emotion that should not have appeared in Xie Jinghui's eyes.
Yet Shen Shuangjian's eyes were so pale that, during those few seconds of eye contact, Xie Jinghui could not even find his own reflection in them.
Like crystalline frost and snow, all those spreading, flowing feelings slowly froze in that instant.
And so, caught up in his heartbeat, Xie Jinghui heard his own voice again, repeating those same words as though they were pointless.
As the car door closed, his thoughts briefly returned once more to an encounter a few days earlier.
Snow fell like a waterfall, withered grass blew through the air; those were the dozens of long winters he had endured.
At one moment, with nicotine filling his nose and breath, he followed a faint fragrance and cast a fleeting glance toward a corner of the world.
And then spring quietly blew into his heart. The snow settled, the wind ceased, and the blazing sun shone.
The belated midsummer he had waited for had arrived.
When Shen Shuangjian got out of the car and walked slowly into the cameras' view in the filming area, the other guests, who had been watching him all along, quickly gathered around to greet him.
"Shuangjian!"
"Shuangjian-gege~!"
For people long steeped in the pursuit of fame and fortune, the greatest taboo was stripping away that thin veneer of civility between people.
Under the cameras, even if they had fallen out so badly they wanted to flay each other alive, once they appeared on camera, they could embrace each other again and put on a show of harmony and friendliness.
After Shen Shuangjian's earth-shattering tears last night, the internet was now in an uproar.
Replays of the screen recording were everywhere online, not to mention all the ways Xie Qingchi had made a fool of himself in the hours after the livestream ended.
An hour after Shen Shuangjian ended his livestream, many people were denouncing Xie Qingchi beneath those two Weibo posts of his.
Even though Xie Qingchi's fans had astonishing fighting power, his earlier humble apology had already put them at a disadvantage.
Not to mention how precious that single tear Shen Shuangjian shed had been. There were far too many netizens and fans who believed beauty was justice, and most casual viewers who had seen the brief clip also sided with Shen Shuangjian.
Public opinion weighed overwhelmingly against Xie Qingchi, yet he remained silent and let it continue to ferment.
Only once the incident had grown heated enough, when everyone was waiting for it to cool down and subside, did Xie Qingchi suddenly jump out again, treating Weibo as his own personal stage.
He deleted those two Weibo posts again, then went to leave comments beneath Shen Shuangjian's posts instead.
He apologized, he explained, and he asked Shen Shuangjian not to delete him from WeChat.
And so girlfriend fans, frustrated with his refusal to do better and unable to accept it, stopped being fans in droves. They no longer maintained what little dignity Xie Qingchi had never managed to hold together anyway.
In the fourth hour of the incident's continued escalation, Xie Qingchi suddenly posted on Weibo, saying that he would temporarily leave the show and would not participate in the next episode's livestream.
The Xie Group's official Weibo account issued a statement at the same time, making Xie Qingchi's schedule for the next two weeks public. In response, the official account of the Real Life production team expressed its understanding.
They also announced that a mystery guest would join the next shoot, replacing Xie Qingchi and filling the gap in the original plan.
And so Xie Qingchi earned the title of the man who quit the show most frequently. His second departure made him a true "so fragrant" monster; all his back-and-forth antics had only cemented his status as a clown.
Shen Shuangjian paid no attention to these things, so he knew nothing about them. But these celebrities, who usually stood at the forefront of public opinion, saw everything clearly and knew it all inside out.
Yet they never mentioned it. Compared with Shen Shuangjian's genuine ignorance, their feigned ignorance looked even more convincing.
"Shuangjian-ge, have you had breakfast?"
Holding a bottle of milk that had been reheated in the RV's microwave an unknown number of times, Yu Sheng stood beside Shen Shuangjian with smiling eyes.
"You didn't reply to any of my messages this morning. I figured you probably woke up late like me, so I prepared breakfast for you too."
Yu Sheng had debuted at seventeen. In three years, he had gone from a rising name to an indisputably popular young star, relying on a pretty face that could be cool or sweet.
Compared with his unmistakably tall frame, Yu Sheng's exquisite, mixed-race-looking face still lacked some of a mature man's angular definition.
When he was not smiling, his deep-set features gave him the cool, AI-like look of a wolf. But when his eyes curved in a smile, the lingering fullness in his cheeks turned him back into a loyal large dog.
The young man's natural air of goofy innocence made him seem harmless enough, as though he were no longer a grown man who had turned twenty.
Instead, he was merely a goofy boy next door who loved talking and laughing. Whatever he did, he gave people the illusion that "he's still just a child."
"Shuangjian-ge, it's still warm. I just offered some to Weiluo-jie, Xuanlin-ge, and the others, but it turned out they all managed to get up on time and didn't want my breakfast."