Thirty-One Years of Misaligned Teeth, Until Our Hearts Finally Fell into Rhythm

(Please, dear readers, stay a moment and give this a look. I promise you won't be disappointed. Leave a few comments too, so I can improve.) Su Nian first noticed Lu Chenyi because of a math solution on the blackboard, marked with the word “Brilliant.” What she didn't know was that the quiet, taciturn boy had spent three years observing the sky alone from the school's observatory, recording the 31-year orbital cycle of a pair of binary stars: drawing closer, then drifting apart, as he waited for a point of closest approach only he knew about. An 800-meter race and a fall. An MP3 player lent to her. A piano piece called “Twilight in a Deep Hypnotic State.” Under the red light of the darkroom, he taught her to develop film; in the evening dusk at the observatory, she kept him company as he waited seven minutes for Io to transit Jupiter. He gave her a gear he'd made himself, its teeth spaced incorrectly. It couldn't fit into any clock, but she wore it over her heart, warming it with her body through countless days and nights. Two gears sawed from the same copper rod. An old clock that had been stopped for nineteen years. An observatory key that took three tries to obtain. From high school to college, from “waiting” to “moving forward,” they traveled along their own orbits, yet always shared the same point of closest approach. At the end of the story, the observatory window is open, and Tian Shi Yuan SZ is drawing near: not once every 31 years, but on every night they are there together.