41. I'm just afraid you'll throw me away.
After having dinner at her parents' house that evening, Mu Jia was almost exasperated when she bumped into Chu Chiyi again as she approached the entrance of her residential complex. She stared at him for two seconds before giving up and snapping at him: "Why are you here again?"
“I think,” he looked at her, “I want to make everything clear to you.”
She felt even more helpless, tossing and turning, unable to understand what else he had to say.
Mu Jia looked at him and listened to him say, "It's because I've always felt I'm not good enough for you."
There was a two-second silence between them.
"You're not good enough for me?" Mu Jia seemed to have heard the biggest joke, subconsciously emphasizing the words "you" and "me" in her speech.
But then I heard the person on the other end say very confidently, "Yes."
His voice choked for a moment, but he still gritted his teeth and continued, "But your feelings change so quickly, I'm afraid you'll throw them away soon too."
He looked at the girl across from him with an incredulous expression: "But now that I can say it, it means I don't care anymore. Even if you only like me for three minutes after you find out, even if you get annoyed and tired of me tomorrow, it's all my own fault."
He stared at her, his eyes reddening under the streetlight. "Jiajia, now that I've said this, can you really give it a try with me?"
Mu Jia suddenly felt that her mind was a little slow, and she stood there silently.
Chu Chiyi stepped forward and tentatively reached out to take her hand, which was clenched in front of him.
A few seconds later, she pushed him away: "What do you mean? What do you mean I would abandon you?"
Wasn't it him who clearly rejected her a long time ago, and then repeatedly disappointed her? Why is he now turning around and blaming her?
Suddenly, her nose stung with tears, and she looked up with red eyes: "Chu Chiyi, it's been eight years since you were eighteen. If we start counting from when we first met, that's a full ten years. How many decades does a person have in their lifetime?"
Besides, it's a very good and young decade.
"Let's both be more open-minded and let each other go, okay?"
"I can't do it." Mu Jia saw that his eyes were bloodshot. "I can't do it, Jia Jia."
A tear finally slid down the man's cheek.
Since they met, Chu Chiyi didn't seem to have ever said "can't do it" to her, and Mu Jia's emotions suddenly became very complicated.
She looked down at the shadows of the two people on the ground, and for some reason, she suddenly remembered how she had carefully concealed and tested her parents and Lu Siming at the dinner table to see if they had noticed the local news from the previous night.
Looking back now, it was really embarrassing and pathetic...
Then I heard myself finally lose control and blurt out, "So what do you want? Or do you think I don't deserve to be loved openly and honestly? That I only deserve to sleep with you secretly for eight years like a rat in a gutter? And what about after that? Are we going to continue sleeping like this for another eighteen years, or twenty-eight years?"
Before Chu Chiyi could finish speaking, he was suddenly struck and knocked to the ground by a figure that rushed out.
Mu Jia was dumbfounded when she saw Lu Siming appear out of nowhere.
She was truly dumbfounded; she had completely forgotten that Chu Bike and Lu Siming, who had just eaten together at home, were still in this neighborhood.
It's unknown how much of what they just said was overheard by the two people who came later.
The change came too suddenly. She was stunned, as if a vacuum had been suddenly pulled out of her body. She stood there blankly, watching Lu Siming pin Chu Chiyi down on a stone platform in the green belt and beat him.
He yelled, "You bastard! So it was my sister who ruined this! I'll beat you to death today!"
After an unknown amount of time, the two women, each holding one side of Lu Siming's sleeve tightly, finally managed to pull the two of them up from the ground.
Lu Siming's suit was covered in dirt, he was panting heavily, and his eyes were bloodshot.
He wasn't actually injured, because Chu Chiyi had just been beaten up unilaterally.
After a few seconds, Lu Siming's chest heaved violently, and he suddenly turned his head. "Ke'er, didn't you ask me before why I used blind dates to test Chu Chiyi, and why I wanted to bring them together?"
"I told you before it was because of my high school notebook, but it's not entirely because of that."
Chu Bike stared at him with wide eyes, only to see him turn his head towards Mu Jia, who was holding his other arm: "It's because of her!"
Lu Siming looked at Chu Bike and said, "Do you know? The year she started working, she was sent to Colombia for a rotational training program. That summer, I went to the Americas with a friend and visited her. We didn't know about the local security situation, so we wore designer clothes. As a result, we were targeted by motorcycle gangs as soon as we got off the plane, and her phone and bag were stolen as well."
“In places like that, if you lose something, there’s basically no chance of getting it back. Reporting it to the police is just going through the motions.”
“But do you know what Mu Jia did back then?” He glanced at Mu Jia. “She managed to use the phone’s GPS to find the last location of that phone, in a red-light district in Colombia.”
"Later I found out that it was the most chaotic old town in the area, a place where the police didn't care. Thieves, robberies, and kidnappings were nothing to it. It was said that there were corpses buried underground... But this girl, who didn't know what was going on, insisted on squatting downstairs at the thieves' den, trying to find the robbers and get her broken phone back."
"It's dark now, and anything can happen in the red-light district after dark. It's just an old cell phone. I told her not to take it, but no matter how I tried to persuade her, she wouldn't listen."
Of the four people present, apart from Lu Siming and Mu Jia, the other two were all taken aback.
Lu Siming chuckled: "Guess what happened next? She waited all day and actually caught up with the thief. In the end, she gave him a thousand euros and bought the old phone back."
He looked at Mu Jia: "What did you tell me back then? You said you had a lot of photos saved on your phone and couldn't bear to lose them, right?"
"It's actually a photo of farts! You can't bear to part with that phone because of the Polaroid photo that was on the back of your phone case, right?"
As soon as he finished speaking, Mu Jia's expression suddenly turned to shock.
How did Lu Siming know all this?
"Mu Jia, who's in that photo?" Lu Siming suddenly shook off her hand and glared at the man opposite her. "That's a photo of him and your mother from high school. You took it from the school's honor roll, didn't you?"
Mu Jia looked at him in surprise. After a while, her face flushed red and then turned pale. Finally, she couldn't hold back her anger any longer: "Lu Siming, what right do you have to peek at my phone?"
Lu Siming ignored her and continued to glare angrily at Chu Chiyi: "And him, do you know why he went to study law?"
"Chu Chiyi, the year we filled out our college applications, you subtly asked me what Mu Jia would study. At the time, we happened to have a relative who was a judge, who said that Mu Jia had been debating since she was little and had a very eloquent mouth, so she would be suitable to study law. I just casually mentioned it to you. Who knew that you would turn around and apply to the University of Political Science and Law."
He suddenly chuckled angrily, "But you didn't expect that, did you? Mu Jia didn't study law at all in the end, so you're just a damn smart aleck!"
Mu Jia looked at Lu Siming blankly, as if she couldn't understand Chinese anymore, and heard him continue to scold: "He was the top science student in our grade, but he only applied to one university that year. A science student, what kind of stupid law did he go to study? Have you been comfortable studying it all these years?"
As Lu Siming spoke, he couldn't contain his anger any longer. One was his best brother, and the other was the girl he treated like a younger sister. For so many years, they had conspired to make a fool of him.
He acted like a clown, harboring the anxieties of other people's youth, sometimes feeling sorry for them, sometimes striving for them, and sometimes taking precautions for them.
Who knew that what happened between the two of them wasn't some pure, beautiful, slightly melancholic, and unrequited love story at all, but rather something that had long been mixed with a lot of drama and turned into a filthy, shameful, and unspeakable affair!
In the end, he was the only one sitting foolishly at the children's table; he was the only clown!
And how could Chu Chiyi do this? How could he treat Mu Jia like this?
That silly girl Mu Jia, isn't she usually pampered by her family? How come she didn't utter a single word to them even after suffering such a great injustice?
He was so angry that his face turned red and his neck bulged: "You two, do you think you're so smart, so good at pretending? Just because others don't get angry, does that mean everyone else is stupid?!"
After cursing, he was still so angry that he swung his fist at Chu Chiyi.
Chu Bi couldn't hold him back at all, and she was so anxious that tears were about to come out.
Seeing the blood splattered on the stone pavement in the residential area, Mu Jia cried out in desperation, "Chu Chiyi, fight back! Do you want to die?"
Wasn't he a great fighter when he was a kid? So why is he acting like a block of wood now, letting Lu Siming beat him like that?
But Chu Chiyi acted as if he hadn't heard, and continued to let Lu Siming, who was in a fit of anger, do whatever he wanted.
Mu Jia was at her wit's end and could only cry and beg him, "Alright! Brother, I beg you, please stop hitting him! It wasn't his fault! I was the one who forced him back then!"
Lu Siming's hand finally paused. He grabbed Chu Chiyi's collar, turned around, and glared at her angrily: "Mu Jia, you can't even lie anymore? You forced him? He's a grown man, and you're just a little girl. Tell me, how can you force him?"
The entire space fell into an eerie silence for a few seconds.
The next second, Lu Siming forcefully shook off her and Chu Bike's hands and pounced on Chu Chiyi, yelling, "If I don't beat you to death today, I'll change my name!"
The situation quickly spiraled out of control again.
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