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When Le Zhi was in her first year of high school, her mother asked her to bring meals a few times to the new neighbors who had just moved in across the hall.
Through the closed door, she heard someone suppressing a cough. When she walked inside, her eyes met a boy's burning gaze.
He called her by the name his mother used for her: "Liaoliao?"
"No, it's Le Zhi," she hurriedly corrected him.
The boy curled his lips into a smile and apologized. "Sorry."
Later, Le Zhi ran into some bad people on her way home.
Someone rushed out to save her and led her to safety. Though she was panting, the other person was only slightly flushed.
That person's eyes were exactly like He Mingcheng's.
Le Zhi didn't know why he was pretending to be sick, and never asked.
Though they seemed to have no connection in the eyes of others, the two quietly kept up their secret relationship, understanding one another without a word.
The nickname once reserved for her mother's lips gradually became a lovers' secret, whispered when they held each other close.
But then.
At a lively birthday party, she arrived as promised, only to be stopped at the door. Someone passing by asked him if he knew her.
He shook his head indifferently, like a different person.
"I don't know her," he said. A few careless words ended the relationship between them, which no one had known about in the first place.
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Seven years later, at her engagement party with another man.
He Mingcheng watched her be intimate with someone else, his eyes as calm as a stagnant pool.
She thought he'd finally let go.
But that night, with only a door between them, he trapped her in a tiny space where she couldn't move.
Outside the door, her fiance frantically searched for her.
Inside, their breaths mingled as the man whispered "Liaoliao" by her ear over and over, just as he used to.
-
At the end of the year they broke up, Le Zhi spent New Year's at the hospital because her mother was ill.
Around midnight, a light snow began to fall. She reached out, and a snowflake melted into a small drop of water in her palm before slipping between her fingers.
By the flickering streetlight downstairs,
a boy in a thin jacket stood with blood at the corner of his mouth, looking at her with gentle eyes. A layer of snow had already settled on his shoulders and neck.
"Happy New Year."
"Liaoliao."
Gentle and steadfast x cold on the outside, warm on the inside / winning her back after a breakup / happy ending / from school to the city / First version scheduled for 2023.10.09
Theme: Study hard and make progress every day.
