Midsummer Fireworks

[New Urban Romance Story: Marriage Before Love, now updating!]

[1v1 sweet romance + age gap + an old flame rekindled + secret love comes true]

Noble, aloof heir to a wealthy family vs. cool, reserved female student

*

When Wei Yan was eighteen, her family suffered a sudden disaster,

and she moved in with Zhao Yancheng, the big brother she had secretly loved as a child.

She admired Zhao Yancheng from afar in silence.

On the day she finished her college entrance exams, she finally worked up the courage to confess her feelings to him,

but outside his study, she heard someone speaking inside.

His friend asked Zhao Yancheng, "She's not even your real sister. You dote on her like she's your wife. Don't tell me you have feelings for her?"

The study fell quiet for a moment, followed by the sound of Zhao Yancheng flicking his lighter.

"She's my sister," he answered his friend indifferently.

Wei Yan let go of the doorknob.

*

After the college entrance exams,

Wei Yan, whose grades were among the best, got into the university of her dreams.

As soon as she arrived, one suitor after another came calling.

She thought that if she'd been rejected, so be it. She could always find someone else.

But at the birthday party of one of her suitors, an upperclassman,

a luxury car pulled up outside the hotel.

Zhao Yancheng got out and looked displeased as he glanced at the upperclassman standing beside her. "This guy?"

"What's wrong with him?"

Zhao Yancheng took her wallet from her hand and pulled out a picture clipped from a magazine, tucked into its inner pocket.

The person in the photo had a face exactly like Zhao Yancheng's.

Gently, he exposed the girlish secret she'd guarded so carefully. "Then why did you hide my picture in your wallet?"

"Oh." Wei Yan took the picture as indifferently as he had all those years ago, then tore it in half. "I used to like you. I don't anymore."

When she looked up again, the eyes of this always calm and rational man were bloodshot.

*

Extra scene:

The news of Zhao Yancheng's wedding flooded the internet for months.

No one had expected the woman he finally married

to be the little sister he'd doted on since childhood.

While preparing for the wedding,

Wei Yan happened to find the photo she'd torn in a drawer of Zhao Yancheng's desk.

The photo, ripped in two, had been pieced back together,

the glue along the edges applied with such care and tenderness.

*

From the first day she came to live in his home,

he wanted to make her his.

She was the rose he had raised with his own hands,

the one selfish desire of a saint.

-

Urban Romance Story: Marriage Before Love

All through her girlhood, Lai Ya had a secret.

Its name was Gu Yu.

He was a law student two years above her, a presence who always shone onstage and commanded the room, and the name that inevitably came up again and again after the girls' dormitory lights went out.

After graduation, lost in the vast sea of people, she thought that glimmer of starlight had long since sunk to the bottom of memory, never to stir again.

Until, at a matchmaking dinner, before the matchmaker could finish saying, "He's quite a catch, just a little busy," Lai Ya looked up and saw the figure almost etched into her memory.

Gu Yu.

In his suit and tie, his gaze behind gold-rimmed glasses as calm as ever.

*

Three days later, they registered their marriage.

In the red-background photo, Gu Yu's expression was calm, while Lai Ya's smile looked a little stiff.

Looking at the marriage certificate, Lai Ya felt as if she were holding a ticking time bomb, or an unbearably extravagant dream.

Married life was like a silent film running on a preset program. Gu Yu was busy with work, and Lai Ya had her own design work.

Until that rainy night.

Gu Yu came home late. Only a small lamp was left on in the living room. Lai Ya was curled up asleep on the sofa, still clutching the design sketches she'd only half finished looking through.

Her arm unconsciously looped around his neck, and she nuzzled against his shoulder with sleepy affection, mumbling a complaint thick with drowsiness: "Gu Yu... your tie is digging into me..."

He was all the starlight of her first love.

The most unexpected disruption in a peaceful marriage, and the happiness they now held securely in their arms.

Theme: Love makes us better people.