Fake Lovers

Xie Yanzhi, thirty-eight years old, has paralyzed legs. At school, he is a gentle, refined associate professor, an aloof flower on a high peak. At home, he is a lonely man who falls asleep beneath the moon.

One day, he discovered that a young, handsome shadow had begun following him around.

When he fell in the rain, his shadow was even more anxious than he was, helping him up and taking him home before thoughtfully brewing him ginger tea. When Xie caught a cold and his throat hurt, his shadow ran nearly a mile to buy him medicine. On weekends, instead of going out to have fun with other young people, his shadow pushed him, a man in a wheelchair, through the park to admire the golden leaf-covered paths...

Xie Yanzhi: Could he be trying to... Absolutely not!

He unilaterally distanced himself from this shadow, refusing his calls and pretending not to know him when they met.

Until one day, he heard that his shadow's luxury car had been smashed to pieces in a highway crash, and that even while unconscious, he had kept murmuring Xie Yanzhi's name...

After fifteen years of loneliness, Xie Yanzhi felt the tiniest stir of affection. "When you graduate, if you still want to, we can talk."

The shadow, Lu Nansheng: ?! I don't know what you mean, but just letting me get close is enough.

A year after Lu Nansheng graduated, Xie Yanzhi said, "All right!"

Lu Nansheng: Even today, I'm still fretting over how to get closer to Professor Xie...

At last, one day, Lu Nansheng understood what Xie Yanzhi meant by "all right." Baffled but overjoyed, he said, "If being lovers is the closest I can be to you, then I'll play the part with all my heart."

A sunny, cheerful, needy and secretly unhinged younger wolf-dog seme x an aloof, sensitive, needy, gentle older uke in a wheelchair

Content warnings: The age gap is nearly twenty years; the uke was his seme's mother's first love and idealized crush; the uke is disabled and uses a wheelchair; the two are at cross-purposes about their feelings for an extended period...

Important note: The uke is a university professor, and the seme was once his student. But the uke is strict with himself, and only begins considering accepting the seme's feelings after he graduates (he thinks they're romantic feelings, but they're actually not). They won't truly start dating until many years after the seme graduates.

Theme: All suffering can be healed.