The Orange Glow of a Paintbrush

This is a story of awkward approaches and gentle devotion. A cool-headed top student will break his own rules for her, while a dreamy, sensitive artist will find the courage to be brave for him. Over four years, they prove that the best kind of love is growing from youthful uncertainty to unwavering devotion together, from campus days to growing old side by side.

When Lin Xi, a freshman in the fine arts department, dragged her suitcase straight into Jiang Yi’s arms, she never imagined that the boy in the white shirt she’d taken for free labor would become the leading man of her youth.

But the icy top student wasn’t so hard to get close to after all. He brought her chilled orange soda when she was buried under club flyers, offered to walk her home “since he was going that way” when she was afraid of the dark, and tapped her on the head in the library to remind her, “Stop staring at my eyelashes and daydreaming.” And without realizing it, Lin Xi began sketching him in her notebook: his soaked white shirt at the sports meet, the pocket he warmed for her on a snowy day.

From the patch of sunlight in a library corner to the butterflies at a joint club exhibition, they followed the aroma of sweet-and-sour ribs, the rhythm of tapping keyboards, and the soft scrape of brush against paper, turning youthful crushes into a love that went both ways. When Jiang Yi knelt before her at graduation, holding up the sketchbook filled with drawings of him and saying, “From school uniforms to the rest of our lives, let me be the one to come to you,” Lin Xi suddenly understood: some summers stay tucked inside the pages of a sketchbook, and some find a home in all the years to come.