Ruan Xiyan thought that since he didn't have much time left in his tutoring job, he might as well finish it properly. He never expected that his casual remark would come true.
After leaving Jiang Yanyan's house today, the two headed straight for Lu Er's house.
I'm getting used to this kind of life. It's like living in two bodies, each a different life when I open my eyes. Ruan Xiyan wondered if this was a way of experiencing what it's like to be a woman.
No, that doesn't count. His eyes were fixed on Lu Er. This girl wasn't like him. She was herself, possessing a personality completely opposite to his.
Lu Er suddenly turned her head and glanced at him: "What are you looking at?"
"It's nothing." Ruan Xiyan quickly surrendered, her awareness far surpassing his. "I was just thinking... what if your family finds out we've been cooking like this all along?"
Ruan Xiyan suspected that he had prophetic abilities, but he never used them in the right way.
Just as Ruan Xiyan finished cooking and was seeing Lu Er to the door, she was met head-on by Cui Feng and Lu Guoyang.
A nerve in his brain suddenly tightened. Lu Guoyang looked at Lu Er with surprise: "Xiao Er, is this your friend?"
Ruan Xiyan nodded guiltily, while Lu Er remained calm and composed: "Hello, Auntie and Uncle."
Cui Feng and Lu Guoyang ultimately didn't say anything. Cui Feng politely said, "It's rare to have friends come to our house. Why don't you stay for dinner?"
"No need, thank you, Auntie." Lu Er stepped aside and went downstairs first, followed by Ruan Xiyan, who explained, "I'll see him out."
Ruan Xiyan escorted Lu Er to the entrance of the residential area before returning home. Before leaving, Lu Er glanced back one last time, only to see Ruan Xiyan hurriedly running upstairs. She suddenly felt a pang of guilt towards Ruan Xiyan; his pampered life as a young master was a misfortune for her.
Ruan Xiyan entered the house, washed her hands, and began to eat. A silence hung over the table as usual, but today there was an inexplicable, unspoken tension.
Ruan Xiyan didn't take it to heart, but she saw Lu Guoyang glance at Cui Feng's expression and, after thinking it over, say, "Xiao Er, is that boy your classmate? He looks unfamiliar. I don't think I've ever seen you bring him home before."
Ruan Xiyan choked on a mouthful of rice, looking down and coughing a few times. He seemed to know what was going on with this strange atmosphere: "They're classmates." So he suspected Lu Er was dating him, huh?
Cui Feng interjected, "Are you two very close?"
"Oh, I see." Lu Guoyang adopted a more earnest tone. "Your aunt and I didn't mean anything by it. You're in your senior year of high school now, so your studies should be your priority. You know, a second-tier university is always a bit more expensive than a first-tier university..."
Ruan Xiyan was both amused and exasperated: "Uncle and Aunt, that classmate just left something with me, and I was just helping him return it."
"Yes, your uncle is very relieved about you. Although you're a bit introverted, you're usually a very well-behaved child..."
Ruan Xiyan stared at the food in front of him, suddenly losing his appetite. He quickly shoveled a few mouthfuls of rice into his mouth and mumbled, "Mmm."
—
Lu Er usually goes to bed early if she has nothing else to do at night. After taking a shower, she was about to lie down when her phone screen lit up, accompanied by two or three WeChat message notifications.
She picked up the phone and saw a contact named Sheng Jiao, whose name and profile picture clearly resembled a girl's.
[Jiaojiao]: Ruan Xiyan, are you really not coming?
【皎皎者】: How long has it been since we last met? You're not deliberately avoiding seeing me, are you? (Getting angry)
【皎皎者】: Stop pretending to be dead. I saw your post on WeChat Moments. Wen Fei even agreed to come. Aren't you going to come online?
Lu Er frowned, wondering whether she should wait for Ruan Xiyan to give her a tutoring session tomorrow so she could reply herself, when Ruan Xiyan sent her a WeChat message.
【11】: "Image"
[11]: This kid sent you a lot of messages. Take a look and figure out how to reply to him. I'm worried he'll notice something's wrong.
[11]: Do you think we should switch phones?
[11]: That doesn't seem feasible either. What if they call and that's it?
Lu Er skipped the messages and clicked on the top one. The person Ruan Xiyan was talking about was Tao Yangnian.
[Tao Yuannian]: Lu Er, do you like milk tea? I'll bring you some tomorrow if I happen to run into you. There's a really good milk tea shop near my house; I think it's quite delicious, you should like it. All the girls I know say they like it.
[Tao Yuannian]: Do you only teach English? By the way, does that mean you're good at Chinese and math? Could you teach me "The Puppy's Expectation"?
...
The rest were similar messages. Staring at the white message bar that filled the entire chat window, Lu Er's brows furrowed even more.
She remembered that she hadn't known this guy for very long, right? Why was he sending her so many messages?
Lu Er was puzzled, while Ruan Xiyan watched Tao Yangnian fiddling with the message and muttered to herself, "He really has no sense of propriety."
"Who pursues a girl like this? Bombarding her with messages all the time, sending a message every time she goes to the bathroom, eats a meal, or takes a shower." This was the comment from Ruan Xiyan, who had also been single for over a decade. If it weren't for Lu Er, he would have wanted Tao Yangnian to blacklist him.
A moment later, Lu Er replied to his message. She answered the questions more seriously than he had expected, on the premise that refusing to answer them was not exactly the same as saying otherwise.
A short while later, she sent another message.
【Slow Momo】: [Image]
【SlowMomo】: You might also need to reply to this.
As Ruan Xiyan clicked on the pictures, she thought to herself, "It's really weird to exchange screenshots. This young lady, Sheng Jiao, really won't give up until she gets what she wants."
Ruan Xiyan lowered her eyelids and said lazily through voice chat, "Just refuse her directly. She's been urging me too many times. I really don't have time to go. Just use the tutoring excuse to refuse her."
Lu Er replied, and a few minutes later she sent a message saying, "She said if you don't come, she'll go back to find you."
"Let her come. Whether she wants to or not, no one can stop her."
Ruan Xiyan sent a voice message, and Tao Yangnian's message popped up again. Perhaps his complaints had worked, because this time Tao Yangnian directly revealed his thoughts, which were practically written all over his face.
[Tao Yuannian]: Lu Er, actually, I liked you the moment I saw you. Really, I'm not kidding.
He seemed anxious, sending several voice messages in quick succession. Ruan Xiyan raised an eyebrow and tapped the fifty-second-long voice message with her index finger.
[Tao Yuannian]: I didn't want to tell you so soon, afraid of scaring you. But oh well, I just can't keep things to myself, my crush on you has turned into an open crush. I'm not lying, may I be struck by lightning if I'm lying. Because we don't have many opportunities to interact, we're not in the same school, and we rarely see each other... After all this rambling, what I want to say is, are you... are you willing to give me a chance to pursue you?
Just by listening to Tao Yangnian's voice in the audio, Ruan Xiyan could imagine how anxious he was, scratching his head in frustration.
He had always witnessed Lu Er's attitude towards Tao Yangnian. Seeing his friend's failed confession so clearly for the first time, Ruan Xiyan didn't know what to think. He casually replied, "Let's talk again when you get a hundred on your math test."
Ruan Xiyan knew that it was better to hope that Tao Yangnian could reach the top of the leaderboard for all characters in League of Legends than to expect him to pass math.
Ruan Xiyan didn't forget to tell Lu Er about this, and Lu Er said a few minutes later that it was nothing.
Lu Er did as Ruan Xiyan said, and things indeed calmed down on the other end. This girl named Sheng Jiao must be special among them. Ruan Xiyan has many WeChat groups, and she vaguely remembers seeing Jiao Jiao's name appear several times in the latest messages of the group chats.
Ruan Xiyan's private affairs were none of her business to judge. After dealing with these matters, Lu Er turned off the light beside her and drifted off to sleep.
—
The following day's English class.
Ruan Xiyan rested his chin on his hand, utterly bored. He could feel Tao Yangnian's burning gaze sitting next to him, as if he wanted to bore a hole through him.
"Sigh, I should have known better than to give this guy any chance." Ruan Xiyan sighed, tilting his shoulder slightly to avoid Tao Yangnian's gaze, and just then his eyes fell on Lu Er to his upper right.
Lu Er lowered her head and began to write swiftly in her notebook. Her eyes followed Teacher Mina on the stage, her back straight like a sapling. Ruan Xiyan rarely saw herself listening so attentively and couldn't help but admire her for a while.
If his mother saw this, she would probably be incredibly touched that her son is still not suffering from ADHD.
Ruan Xiyan stared at Lu Er, who was daydreaming, when the sounds in the classroom stopped, only to be followed by another.
“Come on, let’s have Lu Er and Tao Yangnian together,” Teacher Mina said with a smile.
Ruan Xiyan stood up blankly.
"You two, come up here and read your lines. One of you will play Midori, and the other will play Watanabe. I'll read the narration for you."
"..."
Desperate Ruan Xiyan and desperate Tao Yangnian took the stage.
Outwardly, Lu Er maintained a composed demeanor, but inwardly, Ruan Xiyan, with her elementary school level of English, paused for several seconds before trying to pronounce it casually: "Hey, hey, say something." Fortunately, the word wasn't difficult to pronounce.
Teacher Mina provided the narration: "Midori said, her face buried in my chest." She gestured for Tao Yangnian to continue.
“Like that.” Tao Yangnian read it even more cautiously than he did.
Fortunately, Ruan Xiyan was able to continue all the English lines, except for a very few words she couldn't remember.
The two took turns having a less-than-smooth conversation. Just as Ruan Xiyan breathed a sigh of relief, he looked up and met Mina's meaningful gaze, which immediately put his alarm bells on.
Teacher Mina smiled and said, "Lu Er, why don't you start translating from the twelfth sentence?" Teacher Mina's intention was good; she wanted to give Lu Er some special training. Unfortunately, she chose the wrong person.
Because this is Ruan Xiyan.
Ruan Xiyan had a reckless expression on her face: "I like you a lot, Midori." "How much?" "Like liking... liking a bear in spring."
"'A bear in spring?' Midori looked up again. 'A bear in spring, what's that?'"
The long, densely packed English text that greeted his eyes almost made Ruan Xiyan dizzy. He slowed his speech, his words becoming hesitant: "On a spring day, you were walking alone, a little bear, a cute little bear, no, a cute little bear covered in fur..."
The students below were all doing their own thing, ignoring everything else.
No matter how hard Ruan Xiyan racked his brains, he couldn't come up with anything else. Just as he was about to confess, he heard his own voice: "Teacher, I'll do it."
Many heads were drawn to the sound, turning their gazes toward its source. Ruan Xiyan paused for a moment. Lu Erhui volunteered, causing Teacher Mina's eyebrows to rise considerably.
She agreed: "Okay, Ruan Xiyan, you come."
"In the spring fields, you're walking alone when a cute little bear comes towards you, its fur as soft as velvet and its eyes round and bright. It says to you, 'Hello, miss, would you like to roll around and play with me?' Then you hug the little bear and roll down the clover-covered hillside, playing all day long. Isn't that wonderful?"
"marvelous."
"That's how much I like you."
...
The boy's voice was clear and pleasant, like spring rain pattering on the ear, with a clear and distinct quality, like striking ice or jade.
Startled, Ruan Xiyan unconsciously rubbed her earlobe with her fingers. An inexplicable thought popped into her mind.
He wondered, are all girls so easily swayed?
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