The tea was cold.
Ye Kai pulled out a chair and sat down slowly. The sun enveloped him warmly. Chen Youhan must have gotten up very early in the morning. How did he get out of bed very quietly, afraid of waking him up? How did he ask Duoji to look through the boxes and drawers to find a decent and formal letter paper? In the pale blue light of the morning, Duoji might have poured him a cup of hot tea. He took a sip, swallowed a few white pills, turned the pen, and began to write this letter. Ye Kai thought, I was asleep at that time. Obviously, I was trying to keep him warm, but shamefully I slept more peacefully and deeply than ever before.
The fingertips, slightly transparent in the sunlight, gently slid along the rim of the cup.
At some point, perhaps it was when the first ray of light finally came through the window, Chen Youhan put down his pen, folded the letter paper, and finally held his forehead hair and stared at it for a few seconds, finally picking up his backpack and going downstairs.
Ye Kai closed his eyes. The sun made his thin, pale eyelids hot. He could almost see Chen Youhan's back as he left.
I opened my eyes and found the room was silent except for the wind blowing the long grass.
Ye Kai dialed Chen Youhan's number, with no emotion on his face when he made the call.
Don't hang up, and don't ignore the call - ever since Chen Youhan repeatedly hung up and blocked him two years ago, he has developed an instinctive panic and resistance to calling Chen Youhan.
After three beeps, thank God——
Ye Kai perked up, his breathing unconsciously becoming shallower: "Brother Youhan."
Chen Youhan's faint smile came through the receiver: "You're awake."
Ye Kai sat backwards on the chair, leaning his elbows on the backrest. He nodded unconsciously and said "hmm". "You're leaving?"
"Just arrived in the county town." The background noise was indeed noisy, occasionally interspersed with a few deep and powerful bus horns.
Ye Kai felt that this was ridiculous for a moment: "You're taking the bus?"
Chen Youhan is a dandy guy even more so than him, a dandy who has never even taken a bus or subway. Now he has to travel around remote towns on a smelly and dirty bus with seat covers washed only once a year.
Chen Youhan smiled and said, "Are you coming in a Lamborghini?"
Ye Kai pursed his lips, and the microphone was silent for two seconds. He panicked for a moment about this brief silence, and asked quickly: "Where are you going? Still going to Deqin?"
Conversation is an interaction between two people, and silence is not something he can control alone. Although he didn't want to, Chen Youhan still paused. The sound of the horn became more shrill, and he finally spoke, his tone naturally evasive: "A very remote mountain, you haven't heard of it."
The wood of the chair back was loose, and if you pressed hard with your fingernails, you could leave a shallow crescent-shaped mark. Ye Kai pressed two white crescents on it, "I thought you wouldn't answer my call."
The waiting hall in the county town was small and old, and the departure and ticket checking were all done by shouting. Many people were lying or sitting on the marble floor, with dirty denim luggage bags bulging behind them. Chen Youhan, wearing a backpack and a black suit, stood under the eaves and smoked fiercely. The smoke dissipated indifferently in the wind. He pinched his sore eyebrows and finally said gently: "No, you can call me if you have any problems."
Having said that, they all knew that no matter how difficult it was, they would have a legitimate reason to go to the other party.
Ye Kai unfolded the letter between his fingers and glanced at it. He knew every word by heart. He nodded and said expressionlessly, "...I promise you."
What do you promise? Promise you to let go, promise you not to hate, promise you to believe in love again, promise you to be happy.
Chen Youhan didn't ask, just said, "That's good." He put out his cigarette, turned around and walked into the waiting room. His backpack was thrown onto the security check conveyor belt with a bang, and the waiting crowd began to flow with the driver's shouting. He whispered, "Tickets are being checked, take care of yourself."
After hanging up the phone, Ye Kai folded the letter in half again, opened the phone case, and put the letter neatly inside.
He was trying to let go, and Chen Youhan was also trying to let go. This reunion was just the waves caused by the unexpected confluence of two streams, and they would eventually move forward on their own.
But why didn't his heart feel lighter at all when he felt relieved? Ye Kai slowly squatted down with the help of a chair, and put his palm against his heart.
When he went downstairs, Duoji felt something was wrong. Mr. Chen's departure seemed to have taken away Teacher Xiaohua's cheerfulness. Teacher Xiaohua was more like a child than ever before in front of Mr. Chen. As soon as Mr. Chen left, he turned back into a polite, distant, and well-mannered adult.
Doji swallowed his laughter and watched Ye Kai walk down the stairs step by step with a little worry.
The leisurely vacation feeling disappeared, and he spent the next two weeks in a tense state, teaching, conducting research, visiting families, going door to door to understand the schooling situation of boys and girls, and going to villages and towns to look through poverty alleviation materials over the years. He was more like a village official than Jiang Yan. Before he left, everyone in the village knew him, and they all knew that Teacher Xiaohua, like Mr. Chen, was going to do some meaningful good things in this village that had just escaped poverty.
Before Ye Kai left, he said goodbye to the college students and children who were teaching in the old school building, and then walked to the new campus alone. The construction site was still the same, but because of the progress of the project, it looked a little more messy than before, with red bricks, bags of lime piled up to form walls, rumbling concrete trucks, wood shavings scattered all over the ground, and two local dogs circling around the foundation, biting their tails. He remembered the first general education class he taught to Ram and the others, in which he described the campus as so beautiful and comfortable. He wanted to say that the beautiful school was on the other side of the mountain, and as long as he studied hard, he would be able to go out and see the beautiful new world. How naive his first lesson was, a student raised his hand, looked at him seriously and unconvinced with his black eyes, and said loudly: "Teacher Xiaohua, we will soon have such a beautiful school too!"
None of them knew Chen Youhan, and when they saw him they would push and shove each other and hide away in fear.
As Ye Kai walked down the mountain, he called Qu Jia and said, "Mom, Chen Youhan has done a great job on what you have always wanted to do."
Drizzle drifted through the bus windows. Under the gray sky, herdsmen in straw raincoats drove their sheep and watched the bus go farther and farther away in the rain.
More than ten hours later, the plane taxied to Ning City. After picking up his luggage and leaving the house, Uncle Lu and Qu Jia were waiting for him at the exit. Uncle Lu took off the huge and heavy mountaineering bag from his shoulders, and Qu Jia handed him some iced Perrier. Sitting in the spacious back seat of the Cayenne, he was once again a pampered young master. The yaks in the plateau mountain villages, the changeable weather, the meadows and lakes full of yellow flowers, and the Tibetan meat patties that he almost vomited from eating all disappeared in the roar of the highway.
Qu Jia was so heartbroken that he didn't know what to do. He held his hand and sighed.
Ye Kai suddenly said: "Mom, you haven't praised Brother Youhan yet."
Qu Jia was choked by him: "Why should I praise him?"
"He did what you've been avoiding doing, and your prejudice against him is unfair."
Qu Jia was speechless and said reluctantly: "I have never denied him. The only problem with him is his private life——"
"He's not messy." Ye Kai paused and raised the corner of his lips: "I can testify to that."
Qu Jia glanced at Uncle Lu in the rearview mirror as if warning, and then asked Ye Kai cautiously: "Have you had any contact with him recently?"
She thought Ye Kai learned about Chen Youhan's charity work from Jiang Yan.
"There were a few times," Ye Kai half concealed and half confessed, "I wasn't familiar with him."
Qu Jia was so nervous that her heart was lifted. She still remembered the pain Ye Kai had gone through. She didn't want to see any signs of a resurgence, so she asked tentatively: "Then you..."
Ye Kai glanced at her calmly: "I'm fine, it's all over."
He slept soundly in the car, and returned to Siyuan Road. Invitations came flooding in along his circle of friends with the address Ningcheng. There were Yang Zhuoning, Lu Fu, and college alumni. Lucas asked him to have a drink the next night. He hesitated for a moment and did not reply for the time being. He opened Gu Xiu's dialog box first.
Gu Xiu said that he would give him the public welfare-related information and asked him when a day was convenient.
Perhaps it involved some sensitive content, so using an electronic version was not very careful. Ye Kai had to go to Ningtong to handle some official business, so he made an appointment with him to meet at the Ningtong headquarters building tomorrow afternoon, and replied to Lucas' message that he was free after 8 pm. Lucas sent him a location, and then said that it was his newly rented house, and he hoped to invite Ye Kai to dinner, just as a way to help him warm up his new house.
Ye Kai looked at the location with a blank expression. Fanning's empty villa. Lucas had been there before and knew that Chen Youhan lived there.
Lucas didn't want him to have any misunderstandings, so he immediately sent a long message to explain that Fanning was in the center of the CBD business district, and the company didn't have a car for the time being, so he could walk to work every day, which was the most convenient choice. It made sense, but it was just a coincidence. Ye Kai only had the initial subtlety in his heart, and he found it a little funny to see Lucas making such a big statement. After all, even if Lucas could become his boyfriend, he didn't care where the other person lived.
Gu Xiu knocked on Siqi's desk at 3:00 p.m. Siqi had been told to come in, and after getting permission from the inside line, she invited Gu Xiu in.
The red solid wood door is steady and low-key, which is in line with Ningtong's tone, but I still felt a little uncomfortable when I pushed open the door and saw Ye Kai.
"Leslie, Mr. Gu is here."
Ye Kai took off his glasses, and his indifferent face turned out from behind the large iMac computer screen. He smiled at Gu Xiu very skillfully, "Coffee? Tea?"
There was nothing wrong with his smile, but Gu Xiu didn't feel comfortable. He simply refused: "No, I'll leave soon."
Ye Kai didn't force it. He nodded to Siqi and asked her to close the door.
"You look more and more like your sister."
Ye Kai raised his eyebrows slightly: "You know my sister?"
"I've seen him a few times. I just ran into him in the elevator."
Ye Kai showed that he was all ears.
Gu Xiu coldly spat out eight words: "The manners are in place, and the eyes are too high."
This is equivalent to cursing. Who knows that Ye Kai laughed heartily instead. He learned a lot from Chen Youhan, and the most useful thing was his elegant and thick skin. He immediately nodded to Gu Xiu, smiled calmly and said, "Thank you for the compliment."
Gu Xiu also smiled, and the atmosphere was somewhat relieved. He threw two thick brown paper file bags on the table: "Youhan asked me to give you this. He had been promoting the public welfare project when he was GC. In this bag are all the top-level designs and operational plans made at that time. The funds, cash flow, and account details are all there. It's a copy. Just take a look and deal with it."
He pointed to another bag smoothly, "After he left, he separated out the public welfare. These are the projects he has been promoting for more than a year. They are very diverse, so you don't need to read them all. Just understand the process of how the next project will be implemented from research to planning. You should have a good idea after reading two sets. In remote areas, the customs and folkways are very different. You don't have his courage and skills, so you can't promote the front-line work." Gu Xiu paused and smiled self-deprecatingly, "Of course, you don't need to get involved in the front line."
"Chen Youhan doesn't need it either."
Gu Xiu nodded: "...He always has to find something to rely on."
"Why did he... suddenly think of doing this?"
Even if Chen Youhan leaves GC, he can still set up his own business and make great achievements.
Gu Xiu curled his lips sternly: "Sorry, no comment."
There was no words for a moment. Ye Kai pushed the chair away and stood up, "I'll take you downstairs."
He took Gu Xiu through the VIP exclusive channel. There were only two people in the spacious elevator. From the 30th floor to the underground parking lot, time was very fast. Gu Xiu endured it again and again, opened his briefcase, took out a document from it and threw it into Ye Kai's arms: "This is what Chen Youhan asked me to investigate. He didn't intend to tell you, but I still think it is necessary."
Ye Kai opened the plastic folder, and inside was an investigation report that looked like a resume, with Lucas's ID photo in the center.
"This is?"
"Your new boyfriend's information, from past love history to family medical history, is all in there. He was crazy and made a fuss. He asked me to check it when he was drunk, and asked me to delete it when he was sober. This thing took me more than a week. The good news is that your boyfriend's family has no history of genetic diseases, nor has there been any mental illnesses such as murder, antisocial personality, and bipolar disorder. There is no high incidence of cancer patients, and the incidence of Alzheimer's disease is also very low. When he gets old, he will probably not have dementia to the point where he needs you to take care of him."
Ye Kai was stunned. His hand did not move for a long time to turn the page. He scanned the ten lines at a glance, but few words took his mind.
"His love history is not clean, he has a rich emotional resume, but most of them ended in peace. Although he is bisexual, he has come out publicly. His social relationships are relatively tolerant of his sexual orientation. You should not encounter any bloody plots of being forced to break up a couple."
Gu Xiu paused for a moment, the elevator number turned to minus one, the door opened, he walked out calmly, and finally said: "Unfortunately, he had a relationship earlier and the other party committed suicide because of him because he didn't handle it properly. But that person herself had mild depression, so you can't blame him. The rest is up to you. Don't misunderstand Youhan, he doesn't have lingering feelings for you, nor does he treat you as a competitor to be suppressed, nor does he have any residual control or possessive desire for you." Gu Xiu glanced at him. From the time they met today until now, he has been suppressing his inexplicable anger, but this look was gentle: "He was drunk that day, he was just worried."
Then he breathed a sigh of relief: "I checked it out and gave it to him before he remembered it. The information is very healthy, and he actually didn't think it was necessary to tell you. I made the decision without authorization."
Ye Kai clenched the document and said coldly, "Mind your own business."
Gu Xiu said politely, "I also think he's worrying too much. Although your new boyfriend is ruthless, you're no less ruthless. You two are the same—" He said two words lightly, "Perfect match."
Ye Kai finally got angry: "What do you mean?"
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