Chapter 28: Tears and the Swimming Pool
Shinji Mizuno is meticulous and calm, yet tolerant and considerate. He seems to be always steady and reliable, and nothing will ever make him emotionally unstable.
But is it really like that?
Xia Cun sat on the carpet in the living room, observing the man on the sofa who had been silent for a long time.
One thing she was sure of was that Mr. Mizuno was going through a rollercoaster of emotions and was getting angry, because he looked like a blinking light on a charger, flickering on and off, but she couldn't be more certain.
At this moment, Jiang Song was placing a cheese and salmon pizza in front of Mizuno, inviting him to enjoy it with a smile.
For an immature teenager who is used to being taken care of and is always self-centered, such an action seems heartwarming enough. After all, Mizuno likes cheese and salmon, of course, if he doesn't hate pizza.
"No need," Mizuno refused flatly, then stood up with the tablet he was using for work. "After dinner, go to bed early. Get up early tomorrow."
Jiang Song casually promised: "はい."
Mizuno didn't seem to believe it. Instead, he looked at the woman in the living room and said, "Ms. Emma, please urge them to rest early."
"I will."
Like a transfer of power, Mizuno no longer wanted to participate in the youth management affairs of the night. He turned and left. Jiang Song, holding a piece of pizza, watched his figure disappear around the corner above the stairs. He smiled with his eyes crooked, his mood clearly happy.
Zhou Yun also looked back, and after making sure that Mr. Mizuno had left, he asked, "Is he angry?"
He wasn't entirely sure of Mr. Mizuno's emotions; perhaps only Jiang Song could understand him, but it was clear that Jiang Song was the real problem. Jiang Song smiled and nodded. Zhou Yun felt that he deserved a beating, his smile like he'd gotten revenge. He couldn't help but sigh, "You're incredibly lucky."
"How can you say good luck? Typhoons are terrible."
He looks like he's taking advantage of someone.
——At about eight o'clock in the evening, the meteorological department suddenly issued a typhoon warning. Affected by the subtropical high pressure, the path of this year's No. 12 typhoon shifted and would hit the island where they were in 24 hours. The meteorological department reminded everyone to prepare for evacuation and typhoon prevention.
It would be terrible if they stayed on the island, but Mizuno had already arranged a trip back to City H. With the typhoon approaching, he certainly wouldn't let a group of children stay on the island.
What caused Mizuno's emotional ups and downs was the sudden typhoon - his plans were disrupted.
No matter how skilled Mizuno is at dealing with uncontrollable factors, his control will be ineffective in the face of the uncontrollable forces of nature. His emotional outburst seems to be to blame for this, but if you look deeper, you will find that his outburst is more likely due to a sense of unwillingness.
He was unwilling to give in.
However, even Jiang Song, who was most familiar with him, could not notice this. He just knew that Mr. Mizuno was a little angry, no different from before.
The suggestion for midnight snack was made by him after the typhoon warning was issued. Perhaps out of some kind of vicious provocation and revenge, he ordered Mizuno's most disliked fast food junk food, pizza, hamburgers and Coke, and then gave him a cheese and salmon pizza as a prank.
Sure enough, the prank was successful.
"Are you happy?"
After he said that to Zhou Yun with a smile, the silent girl suddenly asked him.
Jiang Song seems very happy.
It was as if he had returned to his free-spirited state, as if even the weather was reluctant to let him suffer any more or endure another day of boredom, and everything became favorable to him again.
Jiang Song sat on the carpet like her. After listening to the girl's question, he nodded subconsciously. He was very happy because Mr. Mizuno had lost the conditions and soil for his strange experiment.
But when he nodded, a strange emotion suddenly came over him like a typhoon. First, he felt inexplicably nervous, and then he felt guilty and remorseful, which he didn't have time to think clearly.
It's so strange, I always feel like something is wrong.
It seems empty.
He held the pizza with only a bite taken out of it and watched the girl get up from the carpet and leave, feeling bewildered.
As Xia Cun left the living room, he heard Zhou Yun whistle and jokingly said, "Oh—you made her angry."
She was indeed angry.
Maybe she was just like Jiang Song, a capricious person. She had just told Mr. Mizuno in the afternoon that she was no longer angry with Jiang Song, but now she was angry again.
Because she hates typhoons.
She sat at the end of the swimming pool. On the other side, the living room had bright light coming from the floor-to-ceiling windows.
They were in the light and she was in the dark, so she could spy inside very well. It would have been great if she had a pair of binoculars.
She wanted to see what kind of expression Jiang Song would have after she left, lazy, indifferent, or confused?
The wind blows, the water sways, and the blue light from the pool wall lights flows in the night. What will the pool look like at this time tomorrow?
Anyway, the swimming pool is annoying.
"If there's a private pool, we can always swim for a while, right?" Xiao Lan said to her before leaving.
Xiao Lan always hoped that she could learn to swim well. Ever since she "took over" her, she suddenly became obsessed with making sure she could learn to swim.
She studied on and off over the course of several summers and winters. During that time, two swimming pools closed down, and the two coaches who claimed to have taught her everything vanished without a trace. Finally, at the age of 12, she received a certificate from the third swimming pool. Xiao Lan printed out her graduation photo and hung it on her strange wall of honor. In the photo, her classmates were six or seven-year-olds.
But after that, she seemed to never swim again.
Because there were too many children in the swimming pool during the summer vacation and they would kick her; because the water in the pool was dirty and she saw a rotten vegetable leaf floating on it; because Xiaolan would not wait for her while she was swimming; because her swimsuit had long outgrown her...
There are so many reasons, but these are not real reasons, they are just excuses.
She didn't want to swim or snorkel in the sea.
What was the real reason for her refusal to swim?
What is the reason why she likes Jiang Song?
Because his hair and face are beautiful, because he looks like an apple tree, because he saves cats on rainy days, because he has dreamy angelic actions?
But he is also very willful, very bad, and very stingy, so his love for him should be offset.
"It's fine if you want to go, but there's a condition." Xiao Lan said this to her when she suggested that she want to spend the summer vacation with Jiang Song.
"What?"
"You must not cry on the day it ends, even if you really like that life... or that feeling."
"Why are you crying?"
Xiaolan laughed at her answer: "Okay, go play."
But now she seemed to know why she wanted to cry.
She hated typhoons, the typhoon that brought victory to Jiang Song, because it meant the summer vacation trip ended early.
She seemed to have shed a tear, because she heard the sound of tears falling into the swimming pool.
With a "plop", it fell like a meteorite, splashing water everywhere.
But the sound came from the other end of the swimming pool. How could her tears fall so far away?
Xia Cun raised his head and rubbed his blurry eye sockets with his germy hands.
The bright living room was empty, but the water in the swimming pool was swaying, and in the aqua blue, the boy was swimming like a fish, his body light and agile.
The deep blue night floats on the waves, and is broken and reassembled again and again in the blue, hazy, slightly trembling night.
The young man swam to the deep water, held onto the edge of the pool and emerged. He brushed his wet hair back with one hand, revealing his pretty face covered with water droplets, and looked at her with bright eyes.
Xia Cun blinked his eyes, as if he saw a mermaid in a fairy tale.
He looked up and asked her: "Naru?"
He always asked her なんで, as if it was a magic word that no one could understand except them. So what was he asking her now?
"Because I hate typhoons."
“ごめんね,” he said, then repeated in Chinese, “I’m sorry.”
Unlike every time he said sorry, he didn't have that usual smile, but looked at her seriously. Xia Cun was sure that this was the first time she heard him say sorry.
"Nana?" she asked him.
Why should he apologize?
Jiang Song didn't answer, as if he didn't understand the magic words. He just changed the subject and asked her, "Do you want to come down?"
She shook her head.
"Then why do you keep staring at the pool?"
She thought for a moment and told him about her swimming lessons. He leaned over the edge of the pool, listening intently, his eyes glistening with tears, because they were so bright. He finished listening and said, "So you're afraid of water."
is that so?
"I'm not afraid."
"Then you come down too, it's so comfortable."
"don't want."
"I'll stay with you."
"don't want."
She refused to listen, and then Jiang Song looked at her with a smile, pushed himself with both hands, and used the buoyancy of the water to get out of the pool.
Wet and sitting by the blue pool light, it is as beautiful as blue crystal.
He turned around and asked for no apparent reason, "Can I invite you to my birthday party after we get back?"
Xia Cun looked at him.
"I bought a lot of gifts and I really want to give them to you."
She blinked blankly: "Why, isn't it your birthday?" "Reciprocity is the norm." He said this, as if he had never considered that she might not give him a gift. Then he asked her, "Have I learned idioms well?"
"As good as me."
She answered him like this. Fortunately, Jiang Song did not find this to be a derogatory answer. He just smiled quietly in the night breeze wearing his wet clothes.
So gentle and cute.
"I want to see Jiang Song wearing winter clothes."
She started talking nonsense again, like making a wish on a shooting star.
But that was because she saw a winter outfit that was very suitable for Jiang Song in the past issues of the magazine that Zhuo Manyi had ordered. He would definitely look very beautiful in it.
"Okay." He agreed casually, as if he didn't understand what she said at all.
"Okay," she announced casually, "I'm going to go in the pool."
On the last day of her summer trip, she would dress like Jiang Song, not afraid of contaminating the water, and jump into the swimming pool freely, sinking or floating.
Without hesitation, she took off her shoes and stood up.
At the edge of the pool, with vague memories of swimming, and the sound of my heartbeat, I took a deep breath of the summer night air and then fell into the water.
Water seeped into her nostrils and ears as she held her breath. All other sounds in the air were blocked out, leaving only the roar of the water echoing in her skull, like a strange heart.
So quiet.
This was in deep water, she thought.
She also thought about how quiet it was when drowning.
So it was that time. She fell into the water and almost melted there, no longer existing. Was it because of this incident that Xiao Lan insisted on letting her learn to swim?
Her hair was floating like seaweed.
There seemed to be a sound, and she opened her eyes and saw the bubbles she had exhaled, winding up and turning into a string of transparent planets. They slowly rotated in the water and then broke one by one.
Under the dark blue and clear water, a beautiful boy broke through the water. She looked at his hand reaching out to her, but did not extend her own hand. Instead, she suddenly revived her body's memory, spread her arms, and kicked the water with her legs.
She paddled and swam upwards.
Bubbles surged with her movements, and the rhythm of her heart intertwined with the flow of water.
Finally, she surfaced, holding onto the wall of the pool and breathing deeply.
"It really does look like a jellyfish."
Then she turned her head and looked at the boy who emerged from the water with a glittering face and spoke strangely, and asked him, "What jellyfish?"
"What's the matter?" (I didn't say anything.)
Hazy night, hazy answer.
But Xia Cun’s thoughts were so clear——
I still want to give Jiang Song that gift, the cutest, most dreamy and most precious gift in the world.
only……
But I will add one more condition.
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Author's note: Volume 2 is finished. It's the same ending as the first volume [Milk Tea], and I'm finally confused! (Really?
Anyway, the third volume will be the final volume, and it will be called "The Prince's Virtues", which was the title I thought of from the beginning.
I've been lost in the comments section lately, and I suspect that the first few chapters were too painful to write, which made everyone else feel miserable too. I'm sorry about that. But I had a great time writing this chapter, and it was the pool scene I wanted to write from the beginning, and it was the perfect ending [milk tea]
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