Milk Chocolate

[Coming next: Only the Cherry Blossoms Know, Meet You at Moonrise, Cross the Spring Night

Updates by Yuan Yu. Please add the author's column to your collection]

*I revise the story frequently. Pirated versions may have inaccurate plot details, and I take no responsibility for them.

Blurb:

Serious version:

There's a highly upvoted answer online to the question, "What was your secret crush like back in school?"

@Sesame Rice Ball: One Christmas in eighth grade, he gave everyone in class a piece of chocolate. It was a small thing that everyone got, but it was one of the few sweet memories of my youth. Because of that one piece of chocolate, I had a crush on that boy, as sweet as milk, for years...

Back then, Tang Yuan was just an ordinary student who worked hard. Her family's difficult financial situation made an already sensitive and insecure adolescence even harder.

Chen Mubai was someone everyone would envy: a happy family, excellent grades, and the bold spirit of youth. For a time, he was the brightest star around.

Many years later, Tang Yuan no longer had to worry about tuition and had been accepted into the Chinese department at her dream university.

She still thought of Chen Mubai from time to time: his photo on the honor roll, his clean, tidy uniform, the warm look in his eyes whenever he smiled...

She never imagined they would meet again. Then, during her freshman year, on Christmas Day, she was at the campus convenience store when someone took the last piece of chocolate from the shelf. She turned her head and saw the face she'd known from her dreams. The boy was as handsome as ever, but now he looked worn and defeated. Outside, snow fell thick and fast.

Later, that online answer was updated:

@Sesame Rice Ball: Thanks for your concern, everyone. He's my fiance now. We're on our way home for Christmas, and he's asleep beside me.

On the other side of the phone screen, a girl slept peacefully with a coat draped over her, nestled in the boy's arms. Beyond the car window, the snowy night stretched on. No matter how dark the rest of this life gets, you'll be by my side.

*The sly version:

Chen Mubai had been spoiled since childhood, with everything going his way. He thought of himself as cold and aloof, with standards too high for anyone to meet. He never expected to fall for the girl next door, someone he'd known since childhood: a timid, gentle girl who took her time with everything.

He paid a price for his arrogance and eventually surrendered.

On the night he found her again, the girl curled up in his arms with tears in her eyes, like a ragdoll cat. She reproached him in a soft voice: "Chen Mubai, didn't you say no one in the world could bully me, including you?"

After years of tasting every kind of feeling, pain and relief alike, he let himself be wicked in a way he never had before:

"Baby, be good. Just this once."

A gentle, resilient, humble, honest, poor, adorable, well-behaved girl x a gentle but wicked, fair and beautiful, cunning, sly, tsundere, aloof boy, the golden child of a powerful family

A crush comes true / reunion after years apart / the arrogant one bows to love / breaking up and getting back together / a long road to winning her back

A slow-burn story of healing / warm and comforting / from school to the city / bittersweet at first, then delicious

/The colder he looks, the more shameless he is inside. The cuter she looks, the more fiercely she cries and fights back

/The heroine is highly sensitive and emotionally tangled

/The hero's name is the only thing about him that's white

Blurb written on 2023.3.31

[Blurb for Only the Cherry Blossoms Know:]

1,

[Wen, I've actually liked you for a long time!]

On impulse, Xi Ying confessed to her longtime crush, a high school classmate. Naturally, she was rejected

He replied a few hours later.

[Who are you?]

"..."

Xi Ying decided to play dead. She thought they could leave it at that, but

Wen Jin was like a ghost, haunting her wherever she went.

She went with a friend to take some photos, and the location happened to be Wen Jin's school.

Under the cherry tree beside the teaching building, Xi Ying climbed onto a chair to pose. She lost her balance and fell into the arms of a boy passing by after class.

His knit vest was clean and warm, carrying the scent of spring. Xi Ying's face burned as she looked up and met the boy's cool, unreadable, yet wordlessly seductive eyes behind his rimless glasses.

His voice was just as restrained, utterly devoid of emotion.

"Careful, classmate."

Xi Ying's heart pounded. She decided she could survive another mortifying moment. No, be brave one more time!

"Wen Jin, hello. Let's get to know each other again. I'm Xi Ying, your high school classmate you haven't seen in four years!"

2,

Wen Jin was a robot.

"Wen, want to grab a meal together?"

"1."

"Want to go to the amusement park together?"

"1."

"Watch a movie?"

"1."

There was only one exception

"Wen, would you be my boyfriend? Reply 1 if you agree."

"..."

"3."

3,

Heartbroken, Xi Ying deleted every way to contact Wen Jin and went to another city alone for an internship. Her rental apartment lost its water and electricity. On a howling, stormy night, she curled up in the corner of her room and couldn't help calling the number she'd long since blocked. "Little robot, I miss you so much."

The young man landed in the middle of the typhoon and knocked on her door, looking at her calmly. "I'm here."

She rushed over, her voice full of tears, the stars in her eyes turning as she looked up at him. She asked timidly, "Can you hold me?"

The young man braced the door with his long leg and pulled her into his arms. "Kiss me. Now."

4,

Later, one day after work, Xi Ying parked outside the school and ran into a high school classmate. The classmate asked, "Xi Ying, what are you doing here?"

Xi Ying: "Picking up my husband after school!"

Her classmate's eyes went wide, and their gaze turned deeply suggestive.

The next second, Wen Jin came over from across the street, carrying books and wearing his rimless glasses.

Xi Ying immediately bounced over. "Honey!"

Classmate: "???" What a shock. The former top student had become a married man after all!

After seeing the classmate off, Xi Ying rolled up the car window. Wen Jin pulled her into his arms.

Xi Ying's face turned bright red. "Wen Jin, what are you doing?!"

He said the coldest words while doing the most shameless thing: "Taking my wife to work overtime."

Help! The aloof type is like this in private!

5,

Wen Jin was a genius in the mathematics department at Jiang University: cool, refined, and from a privileged family. His friends called him a robot without a trace of emotion. For the first twenty-odd years of his life, he cared about nothing but his studies and had no plans to date. He also thought his high school classmate Xi Ying was just someone he barely knew.

Being pursued by Xi Ying for months only confirmed that impression.

Until a class reunion, when he saw Xi Ying talking to a male classmate and certain memories came back

One evening during their second year of high school, after evening study, he was standing by the window packing up his textbooks. He saw Xi Ying below the teaching building, on a cherry-blossom path in the rainy night, carrying her schoolbag and holding a transparent umbrella while that male classmate confessed to her.

He was consumed with jealousy.

Then and now.

"I like you. Only the cherry blossoms know."

"Now you know too."

Xi Ying x Wen Jin

Naturally adorable girl x chaste, possessive, robot-like man

A girl's daily pursuit of her crush / the aloof prince comes down from his pedestal

Theme: There will be many winters in life, but none of them will bury me.