Lin Mo always thought he had a “superpower”: he could turn every girl into one of the guys.
When he was still in diapers, he climbed trees with his neighbor Xiaomei to raid bird nests. She called him a coward, but he took it as the bond of revolutionary comrades. In elementary school, he helped the class representative for Chinese snatch up the homework notebooks, then handed the cookies she gave him to all the boys in class. In middle school, he shared an umbrella with the girls' basketball captain. Half her shoulder got soaked, but he just teased her for “not understanding teamwork.” In high school, his deskmate rested her head on his shoulder and cried. He patted her back and said, “Don't cry, bro. I'll take you gaming.”
Even in college, he still called Su Xiao and Li Ran his “bros,” whether he was saving seats for Su Xiao at the library at dawn or helping Li Ran fend off drinks. But when his roommate hit him with the soul-searching question, “Do you treat every girl like one of the guys?”, he began to doubt the meaning of those two words for the first time.
Su Xiao's brown sugar milk at six in the morning, the jacket Li Ran draped over him, still scented with gardenias, and all those blushes, sidelong glances, and tender gestures he'd overlooked suddenly came back to him with startling clarity.
It wasn't that he had a knack for making female friends. He'd mistaken his heart pounding for a trick of the mind and hidden his feelings inside the shell of “brotherhood.”
As cherry blossoms fell in Li Ran's hair, she smiled and said, “Who wants to be your bro?” Lin Mo finally understood: all those years of “brotherly affection” were just the clumsiest kind of teenage flirting. The courage to cross a maze of misunderstandings and find their way to each other was the sweetest answer of all.
From slinging an arm around her and calling her “bro” to nervously admitting he liked her, from fear of getting hurt to loving without reservation, this is the story of a clueless boy stumbling his way toward love. It turns out the best kind of love is finally daring to drop every mask and admit, “I don't want to be just your bro.”
