Chapter 1 Awakening after a breakup

The June evening breeze carried the last of the city's heat, like a bad cocktail, mixed with the noisy music in the bar and the sour smell of alcohol, and hit Su Nian's face roughly.

She lay limply on the bar like a body with its soul drained out, with a few empty bottles scattered in front of her, and her vision had long been blurred into a swaying light and shadow.

The scene from half an hour ago was still seared into her retinas.

She was standing at the half-open door of the box, holding a carefully prepared birthday cake. Through the crack in the door, she could see her boyfriend Li Yuan and the girl named He Qian sitting next to him, both of whom were behaving intimately.

"I swear to God, my heart has always belonged to Xixi. It was Su Nian who kept pestering me. Her attitude was bland and she was even pretentious. There was no interest at all..."

As soon as he finished speaking, a burst of shrill laughter broke out in the box, like countless needles piercing Su Nian's eardrums.

The young man who had once been deeply affectionate towards her was now speaking in a nonchalant tone words that were enough to shatter her entire world.

These words were like a blunt knife, tearing apart all the fairy tales she had constructed over the past twenty-one years.

As an excellent student in the Fashion Design Department of Jiangcheng University, I once thought that my world was made up of two kinds of paint - the lead-colored lines flying on the sketchbook, and the bright white of the canine teeth in the smile of senior Li Yuan.

Today, the latter is more shattered than a crumpled design draft.

As the whiskey slid down her throat, she remembered what her mother often said: "Strong liquor is the tears of cowards."

The spicy liquid burned her throat, but it couldn't suppress the dull ache in her heart. Now she finally understood that some pains couldn't even be borne by tears and could only be diluted by alcohol.

Su Nian stumbled out of the bar after scanning the code to pay.

The moment the elevator door opened and closed, Su Nian floated in like a fallen leaf. She didn't even notice that the elevator was going up.

When the elevator door opened again, she walked out in a daze, following a man who was also walking unsteadily.

The man was very tall, at least 1.8 meters tall. The collar of his white shirt was slightly open, revealing his well-defined collarbone.

Under the dim corridor light, his outline appeared particularly profound.

"Which floor is this?" Su Nian felt something was wrong and wanted to raise his hand to ask, but found that his arm was too weak to lift.

Just when she was about to fall, the man suddenly turned around and supported her shaky body.

"careful."

The deep voice was like iced jade, so clear that it made people's hearts tremble.

Su Nian reluctantly raised her head and met the pair of dark eyes behind the thin black-framed glasses.

The eyes behind the lenses were a little drunken but still sharp. From a close distance, one could smell the scent of cedar mixed with alcohol on him.

Damn, this smell is addictive.

Su Nian staggered with a hint of indulgence and fell into the man's pleasant-smelling arms.

The man held her and opened the door of the room. The two, both drunk, hugged and kissed each other, and the ambiguous atmosphere filled the whole room.

"It's not too late to regret now." The man suppressed the flames leaping in his chest, his voice hoarse and raspy.

He was answered with a small moan.

The man immediately picked up the petite body and threw it onto a soft bed. The two figures overlapped...

When I woke up again, I was in a strange room, with a faint scent of cedar in the air and dazzling sunlight slanting in through the gaps in the curtains.

Su Nian woke up instantly, and the hangover headache made her gasp.

What is even more terrifying is that the naked body under the quilt is like a piece of evidence, silently accusing the madness of last night.

The man beside him was still asleep, his breathing steady and long. The thin black-framed glasses on the bedside table shone coldly in the sunlight, like a judge's gavel awaiting his verdict.

"Adults never collapse late at night, but in the early morning when they wake up from a hangover." When she climbed out of bed and hurriedly picked up the clothes scattered on the floor, the words she had seen on WeChat Moments suddenly took on flesh and blood.

Su Nian glanced back at the sleeping man. His profile in the morning light looked like a Renaissance sculpture.

At this moment, the "sculpture" was frowning, and its Adam's apple rolled slightly with its breathing.

At this moment, Su Nian just wanted to rescue himself from this pillar of shame immediately.

She held her breath and crawled out of the room.

When I returned to the dormitory, the emptiness of the weekend felt like a merciful pardon.

She locked herself in the bathroom and rinsed under the shower for forty-seven minutes. The mist on the mirror rose and fell, just like the memories that she kept trying to blur but then clearly emerged.

When she covered the red marks on her neck with concealer, she suddenly smiled - Li Yuan said that she was "bland and uninteresting", but the strange man's hot breath last night, the naked entanglement, the crimson marks blooming on her skin at this moment, and the pain all over her body, all silently refuted: she was not bland boiled water, but a glass of liquor that was mistaken for it, but Li Yuan was not worthy of tasting her mellowness.

"I heard that Li Yuan's white moonlight He Qian is back?"

"Then Su Nian will be out!?"

The footsteps and whispers of roommates Liu Ying and Zhou Xiaomeng penetrated the bathroom door.

The moment she pushed open the bathroom door, the gossip outside stopped abruptly and the air solidified into an awkward amber color.

"Su Nian, are you here? How was senior Li Yuan's birthday party yesterday?" Zhou Xiaomeng's eyes sparkled with gossipy curiosity.

Su Nian didn't even glance at him.

Some people take advantage of other people's suffering as a side dish, but she won't let them do so.

The sound of Su Nian packing up her books was particularly crisp in the quiet dormitory, like a loud slap in the face.

"Why are you pretending to be so noble..." Zhou Xiaomeng turned to Liu Ying and whispered like sewage from a sewer, making Su Nian unable to avoid it. "I heard that the senior went abroad because of He Qian..."

"Bang..." The loud sound of the door slamming shut cut off the unfinished malicious words.

Su Nian's heels tapped the corridor floor with a "dong dong dong" sound, as if every step was trampling on those unbearable rumors.

In the dormitory, Liu Ying curled her lips: "Why are you so arrogant? She's just a substitute for Senior Li Yuan during his emotional window..."

Zhou Xiaomeng immediately agreed: "Exactly, she doesn't even consider her own weight..."

In the ecological chain of this four-person dormitory, Liu Ying from Chengdu is the undisputed king - her family runs a garment factory, and the red carpet has already been paved for her future; Zhou Xiaomeng, who was born in a small southern county, is Liu Ying's most loyal follower, who makes a sense of existence by selling gossip and extreme flattery of Liu Ying; Zhang Qiuyan, who comes from a rural area in a neighboring province, is probably working in a milk tea shop to earn tuition; and Su Nian, a native of Jiangcheng, was once the object of their envy and jealousy because she was favored by senior Li Yuan.

Li Yuan, the perfect man in everyone's eyes: a star student in the Fashion Design Department, with a good family background, strong abilities, humility and courtesy, and numerous awards.

Before yesterday, didn’t Su Nian also think so naively - how lucky she was to receive the wholehearted love of such a person!

"Oh, your acting is worthy of an Oscar."

Su Nian made a "Pooh" sound at the trash can on the side of the road, as if he wanted to vomit out all the disgust in his heart.

The man who had pursued her for half a year, wrote love letters, brought her breakfast, and played guitar downstairs of the girls' dormitory, turned out to be just an actor with superb acting skills.

Fortunately, she held on to the last bottom line and did not let the hypocrite succeed.

Even if it was better for the stranger last night, it would be better than that scumbag Li Yuan.

At the corner, the library's glass curtain wall reflects the dazzling sunlight.

Su Nian narrowed her eyes, remembering what her mother had said: "The stupidest thing a woman can do is punish herself for the mistakes of others."

She took a deep breath and secretly vowed to pack up, compress and throw all the memories of Li Yuan into the recycle bin.