The summer when seventeen-year-old Song Zhimu met Wen Jingchen, Tanzhou was as hot as a steamer.
He is a student sitting in the third row of the cram school. He is a young teacher who just came from Yincheng. Two months of summer courses are enough to make a heart quietly fall.
Song Zhimu began to record everything about Wen Jingchen—his cuffs stained with chalk dust, his explanations with a Northeastern accent, and his small movements when pushing up his glasses. These tiny fragments have become the most secret thoughts of the young man.
Wen Jingchen was not unaware of that fiery gaze. But he just pushed up his glasses and wrote new formulas on the blackboard, deliberately maintaining the distance a teacher should have.
Before the tutoring session ended, Wen Jingchen left a string of numbers on the blackboard: "This is my work WeChat account."
That summer was over, but Song Zhimu's secret love had just begun.
He found various excuses to send messages, create "accidental encounters", and filled his diary with love letters that he dared not send. But Wen Jingchen's response was always restrained and distant, like the winter rain in Tanzhou, bitingly cold.
"I am your teacher." This is the line drawn by Wen Jingchen.
"But I have never regarded you as just a teacher." This was Song Zhimu's unspeakable confession.
When Wen Jingchen suddenly decided to go to Germany for exchange, Song Zhimu watched the tall figure passing through the security check behind the pillar at the airport without looking back once.
Seven years later in Shanghai, they met again in a cafe.
Song Zhimu is no longer the young boy, and Wen Jingchen is no longer the teacher who deliberately kept a distance. Time has changed so much, but it has not changed the heartbeat when we first met.
"Now, am I not your student?" Song Zhimu asked.
Wen Jingchen looked at the mature and steady man in front of him and smiled softly: "Not anymore."
This time, there was finally no insurmountable boundary between them.
This is a story about secret love and waiting. It's the sunset on the street, the chalk dust in the cram school, and the obsession that will last seven years.
Some heartbeats are destined to go against the light from the beginning.
But where there is backlight, there will also be light.
Intention: The meaning of some relationships does not lie in the results, but in the growth gained in the process. Those days of walking against the light eventually became the brightest background in life.