Anonymous Affection

● Energetic sweetheart x reserved top student

● Epistolary format / school life / secret crush

The first time they met, Yu Nian stumbled upon Song Ennian at his most wretched.

The boy huddled beneath a mottled brick wall. Three tattooed young men dragged iron rods, the scraping metal shrill and grating.

What era is this? There are still gangsters?

They're even robbing people here?

"Hey!"

The iron rod stopped at the trembling end of Yu Nian's voice. The tattooed young man turned around and weighed the rod in his hand. "What do you want?"

She was a little scared. "Someone's coming!" she yelled.

Afraid they might come after her, she hurried away as soon as she had spoken.

She didn't notice the boy in the corner lifting his head, catching a glimpse of the words on the girl's school ID.

*

At seventeen, Song Ennian was a rust stain in the alley.

Gloomy and taciturn, his school uniform was always washed pale.

His father had run up enormous debts and vanished, leaving him and his grandmother to depend on each other.

The debt collectors came to their door again and again, smashing things and looting. When they couldn't find anything valuable to take, the creditor menacingly demanded that he pay a thousand yuan every month.

That day, the debt collectors came to cause trouble once more. Protecting his grandmother, he was cornered by them against a wall.

His past experiences blurred together, and he thought this time would be the same: just another beating.

Only she was the one thing that changed.

Class 3, Grade 10. Yu Nian.

Song Ennian pressed the bruise between his teeth with the tip of his tongue, grinding those six characters to dust and swallowing them into his bones.

*

From then on, Song Ennian couldn't help keeping an eye on that girl, learning every little thing about her: her life, her habits.

He hated himself for being like a filthy rat, yet couldn't stop his gaze from drifting toward her.

He knew every one of the girl's smiles and all the things she liked.

Those deliberately arranged chance encounters, perfectly timed gestures of kindness, and subtle closeness when they took photos together were all hints he had rehearsed again and again.

But the nights spent tossing and turning were too sleepless to bear. His heart burned with longing, so he turned on his desk lamp and wrote letters to an angel from behind the cover of anonymity.

He mocked himself for being a pervert who watched her all day, then curled up under the covers at night to write her love letters.

Until one day, the love letters he had written were delivered to Yu Nian. The boy's conflicted and despicable thoughts were laid bare before everyone.

The final line of the letter was filled with reverence: "Yu Nian, please remember me."

But he never had the chance to say all the words left unspoken to her in person.

The downpour of his seventeenth summer would drench every summer of his life to come.

#Epistolary story told in flashbacks, shifting perspectives##Mutual secret crush#

#Bad ending#

*I caught a ray of light in the abyss, and from then on, I spent every night tracing her outline.

Author's Weibo: @Chun Yao Lv, come find me and let's hang out~

"Hello, dear readers! The author has something important to take care of at the moment, so this story is temporarily on hiatus. But! I will definitely be back! I will absolutely finish this story properly. Thank you for loving it~"

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Theme: Cherish the people you have