[Blurb written on 2025.9.9]
[The cover uses the more literary title, Fictional Love [Mutual Secret Crushes]. I'll change it after the novel is finished. That's right, it's mutual pining. If you like it, please bookmark it, qwq.]
Just about to start her final year of high school, Ruan Qingguang takes a friend's recommendation and gets into a female celebrity couple that exploded in popularity seven years ago.
There are tons of content and fanworks everywhere. Even now, they're always trending and are often held up as a comparison to other couples.
On a whim, she starts a fan account and begins making graphics for them.
But the name of her account accidentally matches the title of a new fic by "Nuanqing," a popular fanfic writer who's been writing in the fandom for seven years. The coincidence sparks a lot of discussion in the fandom.
At the time, she just laughs it off. Later, she realizes it may have been the beginning of fate.
She really does fall in love with her.
She tells a friend as a joke. Her friend: ...Is there no less embarrassing way for you to start an account in this fandom? Wait, are you serious?
How would she describe the words this woman writes? Ruan Qingguang thinks they're gentle, delicate, and perceptive. Perhaps only the moon in the sky could compare.
She organizes a theater screening of a movie starring one half of the couple. While checking the attendees' Weibo IDs, she sees someone tall and slender with extraordinary poise. Those eyes seem to hold all the lights in the world.
The woman shows her Weibo profile. Before Ruan Qingguang can cry out, she covers her mouth, a playful glint in her eyes. "It's me. Don't tell anyone."
She sits beside Ruan Qingguang to watch the film. Ruan Qingguang is so startled that she spills the water she just bought.
After the movie, a heavy rain begins to fall outside.
They walk into the rain side by side and exchange personal contact information.
"How am I ever supposed to forget her?"
Her feelings grow wildly, impossible to suppress, but Ruan Qingguang knows all too well what reality is like.
She rereads the fictional stories written by "Nuanqing" countless times, along with their sporadic chat logs. From bits and pieces, she puts together what she knows is only fictional "love" when she's thinking clearly.
Timid and cowardly, she looks at the moon on the horizon and longs for the warmth of her own fantasies, but never dares approach.
She's easy to please. She can live on fictional love alone. She's always lived that way.
Reason and delusion battle in her mind day after day. At last, she decides to just make it through the college entrance exams. Once they're over, she'll definitely let go.
After the exams, she gets her phone back. Seeing the woman running toward her with a bouquet of flowers, Ruan Qingguang stares blankly and opens the chat she's pinned at the top of WeChat.
It's a long confession.
She never imagined that such flawless writing could one day be used to describe her.
The clear sunlight falls on her spirited, passionate face as she embraces the woman beside her, close enough to touch.
It turns out she wasn't the only one who kept testing the waters and inventing a hopeless love in her own mind.
At the end of the downpour, the sky clears.
[An apparently gentle, refined, but actually delicate (?), adorable college senior who writes fanfiction, and an apparently cheerful, outgoing but inwardly sensitive high school junior who reads it and runs a fan account. College senior and high school junior, four-year age gap.]
[The Ruan family has a little money. This is a story about a very rich girl and a very loving girl.]
[Also known as: A High School Senior's Guide to Secretly Crushing, and What to Do When You Fall for Your Favorite Fanfic Writer]
[Little Ruan's personality may be a bit extreme at first. I don't want to spoil anything, so if it's not for you, just drop it without telling me.]
[A story about loving yourself before loving someone else.]
[And, little angels, please don't waste your final year of high school secretly crushing on someone like Ruan!]
Theme: Find something real in an unreasonable world.
