What If I Really Waited Ten Years?

(All characters in this book use aliases. Please don’t assume they represent real people. Any resemblance is purely coincidental.)

In 2013, summer in Lang County, Gansu, was hot and ordinary. Ma Tianhong, a second-year middle school student at Lang County Middle School, had little interest in studying and spent his days hanging out with his friends Liang Hong and Wang Tian. Then he suddenly realized he had fallen for Wen Yaqi. Clean and quiet, she became the brightest light in Ma Tianhong’s youth.

In the second semester of his final year of middle school, Ma Tianhong worked up the courage to confess. Wen Yaqi said yes, but that same afternoon, she passed him a note asking him to treat her like a sister. Unable to accept it, Ma Tianhong could only keep quietly putting a few cartons of milk in her desk every week and secretly giving her birthday presents, hiding his feelings in a corner where no one would find them.

After the high school entrance exams, their lives took completely different paths. Wen Yaqi and Wang Tian got into the prestigious Luocheng High School, Ma Tianhong went to a vocational school, and Liang Hong dropped out early to drift through life, achieving nothing. In high school, Ma Tianhong gave Wen Yaqi presents twice, but she returned the second one and sent him a letter that said, “Please leave me alone.” From then on, he stopped bothering her and only watched from afar.

At high school, he also made two friends, He Jun and Wan Hao. As time went by, their friendship became precious, especially his bond with He Jun. The two could talk about absolutely anything, and for much of the time, they became each other’s confidants.

Over the next ten years, they each went off to university and into the wider world. They remained single, living in the same city yet worlds apart. In 2023, he finally let go of his ten-year obsession, freeing Wen Yaqi and himself from the past that had kept him trapped in his youth.