[Secret Crush x No Direct Confessions x Mutual Pining]
[When guzheng strings entwine with the voice of the ocean, a secret crush sounds like the ebb and flow of the tide]
Su Jin, an aquaculture major in the School of Fisheries, rushed into the rehearsal room clutching her guzheng with a broken string. Chen Mubai, the lead singer, was adjusting the microphone to a recording of waves sampled aboard a fishing boat.
As he turned, his fingers happened to catch a raindrop sliding from her temple. "Next time we meet," the young man said, tapping the paulownia case in her arms with a fingertip, "remember to tap me on the shoulder. Let me see what a peerless beauty looks like."
Chen Mubai, a student in the School of Marine Fisheries, had a secret: he could use sonar data to predict fishing seasons in the East China Sea, but he couldn't work out the rhythm of his own throat bobbing as Su Jin tuned her strings.
And tucked into a compartment in Su Jin's music stand was a diary disguised as aquaculture logs. It recorded the scent of the tides from different seas that clung to Chen Mubai's shirt each time he performed.
Backstage at the school anniversary celebration, Su Jin clutched a program dampened with fish sauce and said softly, "When you were in line buying model boat supplies, I was first in my line." Chen Mubai smiled to himself. "I was first in the other line." His fingertip brushed the nylon strings wrapped around the guzheng's bridges. "I saw you. I wasn't sure, so I didn't dare say hello."
As the lead singer's voice carried the winds of the North Pacific, and the guzheng's tremolo rippled with the breath of coral reefs, two people who had been testing the waters in the intertidal zone again and again were finally swept by moonlight into waves meeting head-on. As he helped her restring her guzheng, the nylon thread wound around his fingertips gave away the technique used to weave fishing nets. And in the pages tucked into his lyric notebook, she secretly wrote "high tide tonight" using a chart of shellfish growth cycles.
