Waking to an Empty Dream

After lunch, Liu Yan returned to the dorm to sleep. Mo Yuqing stared at her chat with Chen Lu for a long time.

Ever since the day Chen Lu confessed, neither of them had sent the other a message.

She scrolled through their chat history, seemingly trying to find evidence that she had actually treated Chen Lu well.

But there was none.

The one who sent good morning and good night messages on time every day, who repeatedly asked after the other, had always been Chen Lu alone.

Her responses were usually only a word or two. Sometimes she even got annoyed and ignored him altogether.

Chen Lu often reminded her to put on more clothes when it was cold, but she had never sent him a reminder like that.

She couldn't help it. She had really gotten used to it. After all those years, she was far too used to it.

So used to it that she took Chen Lu's behavior for granted and forgot to be grateful.

Mo Yuqing rubbed her slightly reddened eyes, stood up, and cleared her throat. "Can I join your performance?"

"Sure!"

The others readily agreed. Though they didn't know what had suddenly gotten into their senior, having her in the performance would attract a lot more attention.

Both because of her dancing and her looks.

Mo Yuqing quickly caught up with their progress and had no trouble keeping pace.

Mo Yuqing didn't need to practice a dance at this level for long. She only had to run through it a couple of times to know how to dance it.

But her mind kept wandering as she practiced.

She suddenly wanted to see Chen Lu. Aside from classes, this was the first time they had gone so long without seeing each other.

Of course, this was also the first time Mo Yuqing had "missed" Chen Lu.

But she had no reason to see him.

That suddenly left Mo Yuqing in a daze.

It was as though she had suddenly woken from a dream.

Ever since they were little, Chen Lu had always come whenever she called, no matter how little reason there was.

She had never needed a reason to see Chen Lu.

But things were different now...

She actually had to think of one...

During the break, Mo Yuqing sat on the lectern with her eyes lowered, her feelings complicated. It all felt a little unreal.

The "sweet dream" she had always lived in seemed to have truly ended.

Even though she hadn't thought there was anything good about it at the time.

There's still a chance, right? Chen Lu surely can't bear to leave me...

Mo Yuqing silently comforted herself while trying to think of a reason to ask Chen Lu to meet.

Night fell, and the bright moon hung high.

Chen Lu returned to the dorm in high spirits, feeling more at ease than he had in a long time.

As soon as he entered, he saw that the curtains around Jiang Chao's bed had inexplicably been drawn. He couldn't be bothered to ask and turned his gaze to Li Sinian, who was drinking congee.

That way, he wouldn't pull the curtains open and find an antiaircraft gun firing at the sky.

"Drinking congee this late? Taking care of your health, are you?" Chen Lu mocked.

Li Sinian didn't think much of it. "Boss's girlfriend ordered him congee tonight."

"So?" Chen Lu didn't understand what he meant.

"I don't have a girlfriend, so I bought some for myself! Jiang Chao, you xxx! xxxxx!"

Li Sinian muttered several more curses before he had vented enough. He turned to Chen Lu with a smile. "Want some? We're both poor guys with no girlfriends, ordering congee for ourselves."

Chen Lu scratched his cheek with his index finger. He didn't dare mention that a girl personally made him congee every morning.

He really would die if he said it.

With no choice, he walked over and took a couple of spoonfuls.

The next second, he ran to the bathroom and spat it out.

"Damn, why's your century egg so disgusting?" Chen Lu felt a wave of nausea.

"What's wrong with you? Aren't century eggs all like that?"

"Not all of them."

The one Liang Zhirou made wasn't like this.

Chen Lu said that after rinsing his mouth. Now he was even more curious about how he had managed to finish the century egg and pork congee Liang Zhirou had made.

Though he was curious, the corners of his mouth lifted slightly without his realizing it.

Seeing Chen Lu packing, Li Sinian found it odd and asked, "What are you packing for?"

"Isn't tomorrow May Day? I'm going home for a bit." Chen Lu kept his head down, stuffing things he no longer needed, like books he had finished reading, into his bag.

Rather than taking luggage home, he was going back to unload. Whenever Chen Lu went home, he only needed to take back the things that felt unnecessary in the dorm. He didn't have to pack bag after bag like everyone else.

After all, whenever he really wanted to go home, a quick taxi ride would get him there. Taking a backpack was a show of respect for his classmates.

"Whoa, would you look at that? I almost forgot you were a local," Li Sinian said with a laugh.

"Isn't that because I can't bear to leave you good sons of mine?"

As soon as he finished speaking, Li Sinian inexplicably edged over and gave him a gentle poke. "Let me tell you something funny."

Chen Lu turned to him, indicating for him to go on.

"Today, Mo Yuqing's group reported another problem. I went over to take a look, and after fussing with it for ages, I found out they'd plugged the speaker cables into the wrong sockets."

"What's funny about that?" Chen Lu paused, baffled.

"I'm not finished. You know what she said when she saw me?"

"She said, 'Why did you come?'"

Li "Holmes" Sinian pushed up his glasses, looking as though he had seen through everything.

"I suspect she plugged them into the wrong sockets on purpose because she wanted you to come over. After all, she still doesn't know you've stopped helping me handle these things."

Chen Lu spat at him, put his bag aside, and lay down on his bed. "You're nuts. I'd sooner believe Boss would study than believe Mo Yuqing would come back to me."

Seeing that Chen Lu had closed his eyes, Li Sinian walked over and slowly pulled open the curtains around Jiang Chao's bed. Jiang Chao was staring intently at his laptop, taking notes from time to time. Li Sinian muttered to himself:

"But... Boss really is studying..."

Mo Yuqing had just returned to her empty home. After changing into a thin, lace-trimmed nightgown, she curled up on the sofa, hugging her long, shapely legs, feeling a little down.

She didn't want Chen Lu to date someone else, but she wasn't ready to pursue him herself.

For the first time in her life, she understood what it meant to fret over gains and losses.

Only now did she finally come to fully recognize that she liked Chen Lu.

Before, she had been curious about where Chen Lu found so much time every day, and how he managed to worry about her endlessly.

Now she finally understood. It wasn't that he had nothing to do; he cared about her too much.

He cared so much that every day he wondered whether she was unhappy or feeling unwell, so much that he knew her menstrual cycle better than she did.

After a long silence,

she tapped her phone and wrote a post on her Moments:

[I hope I won't have to lose everything I cherish before I learn to treasure it.]

This was Mo Yuqing's hint to Chen Lu.

After agonizing over it for a long time, she still couldn't bring herself to send Chen Lu a message, not even a simple good night.

More than two months had passed since her last Moments post, which she had made on her birthday.

Mo Yuqing opened the picture, and things became even clearer to her.

It was a beautiful bouquet of roses.

The red roses were in full, unrestrained bloom, as though they would never wilt.

Of course they wouldn't wilt.

Because they were all made of paper.

Back then, Chen Lu had spent nearly half a month preparing for her birthday party, then gave her the bouquet he had folded by hand.

A full thirty-three roses, every one of them folded from paper.

Mo Yuqing still remembered the deeply envious looks from the girls around her.

Within minutes, countless comments appeared in a great flood beneath her new post.

"Senior, feeling emo? I'll go watch a movie with you."

"Are you hinting at me? I don't want to lose you either. Even though you rejected me, I've still been waiting for you."

"Yuqing, if you're sad, go for a walk. I'll be downstairs at your dorm in a minute."

"Do you regret it? Just say the word, and I'll be in Hangcheng tomorrow!"

The comments nearly made Mo Yuqing choke. She hurriedly deleted the people she had forgotten to remove.

She didn't even remember these people, so why did they still remember her?

The girls' comments came more slowly, but at least they didn't make her blood pressure rise.

"Hugs for Qingbao~"

"When flowers bloom, pick them while you may; don't wait until they're gone and pluck an empty branch."

Liu Yan, who knew the situation, sent only a sighing emoji, expressing her frustration that iron would not become steel.

Mo Yuqing sighed in disappointment and kept refreshing her messages. This was the first time she had cared so much about the comments beneath her Moments post, because she was waiting for someone.

No matter how eager and enthusiastic these comments were, they weren't what she wanted.

She wanted to see a reply from Chen Lu.

Even a like would have been enough.

A very, very long time passed, and still she didn't get one.

A little uneasy, Mo Yuqing opened Chen Lu's Moments.

Chen Lu's Moments were still empty. He had never made a single post.

The difference was that he had changed his background from a picture of her back to a Pikachu.

The night grew deeper, and the lights in the nearby buildings went out one by one until everything was dark.

The proud girl waited until she fell asleep, but the reply she wanted to see never came...

Cold moonlight streamed through the window, casting a chilly, stunning glow over the bouquet of paper roses on the coffee table.

Behind the roses, the sleeping girl lay on her side on the sofa, her beauty otherworldly.

The moonlight shone on her pretty profile, her fair neck, and her lustrous, snow-white thighs;

and on the long-dried tear tracks on her cheeks.