On Su Nian’s first day at her new school, she noticed Lin Xu.
He stood beside the podium introducing himself. Sunlight slanted in through the window, making him glow. She lowered her head and dared only to sneak glances at him, her heart pounding so loudly she worried her deskmate would hear it.
They became friends later on.
He helped take out the trash when it was her turn to clean the classroom, and slid over a sheet of scratch paper with solutions to the math problems she couldn’t do.
She kept every little thing in her heart, writing about it on the last page of her diary and drawing a tiny flower beside it.
But he never said a word.
On graduation day, she waited for a long time by the school gate. Everyone else had left before she finally saw him running out of the school building.
“Su Nian!” He was out of breath, clutching a slip of paper. “W-where are you going to college?”
She told him the name of a city.
He froze for a moment, then smiled. “Oh. That’s far away.”
Only later did she learn that he had gone to a school in the neighboring city, just a two-hour train ride away.
What she didn’t know was that the slip of paper he had never given her held the words he wanted to say.
At their class reunion ten years later, he got drunk.
Someone teased him, asking whether he’d had a crush on anyone back then. He slumped over the table and muttered, “Don’t make things up… She was such a good student. I couldn’t distract her…”
Everyone laughed.
She laughed too, until her eyes began to sting.
Suddenly, he lifted his head and stared straight at her, his eyes terribly red.
“Su Nian, you know… I’ve even picked out names for our kids.”
The private room fell silent.
She froze, her heart skipping a beat.
It turned out that all those feelings they had carefully hidden away over the years had never been her secret alone.
It's super pretty. Go and try it.