The Glazed Light of Bite-Ear Alley

Summer in Yuguang Alley is always sticky-sweet, but Lin Youke, the new community police officer, is so busy she barely has time to catch her breath. She mediates disputes at vegetable stalls, helps elderly people living alone fix their plumbing, and has even been handed three sets of blind-date profiles by the neighborhood committee aunties. Then one day, while on patrol, she comes across a newly opened dental clinic at the end of the alley. A man in a white coat is bent over, coaxing a crying child into having a baby tooth pulled. His cool voice sounds like it’s wrapped around a mint: “Good girl. Count to three, and I’ll give you a star.”

Shen Zhiyao’s patience is as precise as his disinfectant.

When the blazing sun leaves Lin Youke wilted, he “just happens” to offer her a chilled sour plum drink. And when he gets harassed by a difficult patient, she leans against the clinic entrance with her police helmet in her arms and raises an eyebrow. “Need legal assistance?”

Wisteria covers the old walls of the alley. One of them chases a car thief and tramples the clinic’s potted plants; the other deliberately records her nagging and sets it as his ringtone while she’s getting a filling.

Then, one stormy night, Lin Youke rushes into the clinic, soaked through, to borrow an umbrella. Shen Zhiyao suddenly takes off his gloves and wipes the raindrops from her eyelashes with a warm fingertip. “Officer Lin, you’ve watered all my mint plants to death. Don’t you think you owe me something else?”

Only later does she learn that the drawer of his examination table holds the button she lost on duty, her cracked police badge, and a Qixi card he wrote three years ago but never sent.

The gentlest love had been quietly seeping into the old alley’s bricks, like glaze.

**[Cool-faced, warm-hearted doctor × spirited policewoman | A slow-simmering, heartwarming romance | A slice-of-life fairy tale]**

“Dr. Shen, your heart rate goes through the roof when you grind your teeth.”

“Mm. Ever since you sat down in my dentist’s chair.”