Kiss Me Gently in the Moonlight

Kissing Me Softly in the Moonlight (This work and its characters are entirely fictional)

As the fifth morning light spilled over the ornate iron gates of the aristocratic school, another half of the mother-of-pearl button between Li Liping’s fingers broke. Oulun Yi’s Patek Philippe chimed right on time at 7:15:03, like a stone tossed into the morning mist, sending ripples through the fifth repetition of her seventeenth year.

God’s design is hidden in the details: water stains on the school’s corridor pillars, the web of cracks in the milk foam of Spring Day Café, the twenty-eighth time she looked up while reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra. She was a spoiled girl with a pigeon-blood ruby ring; he was the school heartthrob, his white shirt carrying the scent of fir. Fate had trapped them in the folds of time.

In the first loop, an ink bottle left the fading shadow of Monet’s water lilies across his chest. In the second, the coffee stain climbed up her uniform along the same old path. The seven-spotted ladybug in her amber pendant beat its wings, revealing a pattern that matched the one on his collar. It turned out God had already tied their paths together in an inseparable bow.

The five repetitions weren’t a punishment. They were a chance for their love to settle in the river of philosophy class. When the last camphor leaf falls, can they finally let the eternity inside the amber shine into a real spring?