A Breeze That Leaves You Drunk

[Cringeworthy old stuff. Don’t read.]

When Song Li was fourteen, she was diagnosed with depression. A fortune-teller said she wouldn’t live past eighteen.

At sixteen, she met Ye Guinan for the first time. She’d heard that he’d beaten people up, that he got excellent grades, and that he was fierce. When they first met, he was as cold as a white lotus on a mountaintop, naturally distant, though every now and then he seemed to smile at her.

Song Li realized she might have a crush on him.

She liked calling him Nannan, and he seemed to like it too.

“He’s lonely, just like me. We can keep each other company.”

On her seventeenth birthday, the boy held out a cake and pulled her into his arms. His voice was low and husky, and his eyes were so tender it hardly seemed real.

“Do you like me?”

“I do.”

She nodded in a daze, feeling as if she’d found all the happiness in the world. They promised to attend the same university. But Song Li broke her promise.

Six years later, they unexpectedly met again. The boy of her past had become the feared Master Ye. His eyes and brows had grown sharp, but the moment he saw her, his expression softened.

The girl from back then, meanwhile, was all alone. She had lived six years longer, but she had only those six years.

Ye Guinan: “I’m back. Did you miss me?”

Song Li: “I did. Every day.”

“Shall we start over?”

“Okay. But I’m afraid… I can’t hold on anymore.”

The night before they were supposed to get married, she broke her promise again.

At the singing competition in their second year of high school, she stood in the corner of a yellowed class photo, the corners of her mouth lifted in a sweet smile. At the end of her gaze, the boy smiled faintly, lips curled, as he looked back at her.