A Rare, Hidden Desire

After the first monthly exam of their freshman year of high school, Su Mofeng became Gu Chengnan’s seatmate behind him. She soon struck up conversations with the people around her. In the midst of all the noise, she happened to glance toward the front left, and the quiet boy with his head down, working on his problems, became the person she would spend the next three years chasing after.

With her seatmate’s introduction, Su Mofeng became part of Gu Chengnan’s circle of friends and made several close friends of her own, bringing a distinctly youthful splash of color to her busy, monotonous high school life.

She quietly took him as a model for her studies and wrote about him in her diary. She hoped that after each exam, their names on the rankings would be a little closer. She longed for chance encounters and dreamed of attending the same university.

Su Mofeng wrote in her diary: “You are the stars and ocean I can see but never reach.”

Later, she decided to forget him and focus on preparing for her exams. But how could forgetting him be so easy?

At university, they were in the same province but attended different schools. They took buses and transferred several times, or rode the subway, to visit each other’s campuses.

At last, Gu Chengnan had the confidence and courage to confess his feelings to her.