On the first day of the second year of high school, Lin Zhi ran into Gu Yanzhi's arms. The scent of gardenia never left his memory.
He was as silent as a deep pool. She is the English class representative and has a whole summer hidden in her name. Tables were randomly assigned and they became tablemates. The "Chu River and Han Boundary" could not separate the note that was quietly pushed over - the four words "consider it" were the first words he said to her: I will take you seriously.
A chance encounter in a bookstore, a trip to Arashiyama, and the "Big Four" study group, they gradually get closer. At the sports meeting, he jumped over the crossbar, and when he failed in the midterm, he handed over "the fluctuation range is normal"... She thought that he was different.
She plucked up the courage to invite him to watch the English speech finals. He agreed, but never appeared in the audience. She returned disappointed, not knowing that a button was quietly left in the corner of the backstage, nor that the circled "Linden" in the dictionary had already exposed all the young man's thoughts.
The senior high school students were in chaos, and they supported each other. On the eve of the college entrance examination, he finally sent a message: "After the exam, I have something to say to you."
She waited one day, two days, three days. The group was still lively, but he seemed to have disappeared without any active contact. She thought that everything was just wishful thinking on her part, and that the phrase "we'll talk about it after the exam" would eventually come to nothing.
Just when she was frustrated, he asked her to meet in the library.
In the afternoon when gardenias are blooming, in the corner of the city library. He handed over a USB flash drive with the password being her birthday plus Linden.
"In there is everything I know about you."
It turns out that he didn't forget or retreat. He just wanted to wait for all the dust to settle and say that sentence in the most solemn way -
"I've liked you for a long time."
From "considering" to "normal fluctuation range", from a button to a dictionary, from hesitating to speak to finally speaking. This is a long two-way secret love, two souls on their own orbits, deflecting light for each other again and again.
All the waiting and missing are for the quietest answer when the gardenias bloom.
Intention: Real love is not to declare loudly, but to write "you" into every unspoken detail.