Qiu Qiu always felt that Lin Ye was like a piece of candy wrapped in time, one that would take a long while to taste sweet.
The first time they met, at a street food stall in City A, he was a boy who hid his "quiet tenderness" in his dimples. He shielded her from trouble on the street, then gently hooked her heart with his name as they parted. When they met again in the new school's office, though, he had become a cool, aloof academic ace in thin-framed glasses. As he turned away with a stack of homework, his words, "I don't know you," shattered her memories into starlight.
Only later did she discover that this "model student," who solved problems in class and seemed to win every award, had two sides to him.
Out of his school uniform, he rode a roaring motorcycle through the night and smoked beneath the neon lights of bars, his languid expression making him seem like an entirely different person from the one she knew by day.
"You seem... different from that day," Qiu Qiu couldn't help saying.
He looked up, and the gaze behind his lenses suddenly softened, like half a piece of candy melting. "Oh? Which one do you think is really me?"
As cicadas sang through the corridors, she finally understood: some people's contrasts are a secret code for those who know how to read them. From that fleeting first glimpse at a street food stall on a summer night to their reunion at school, his hidden edges and tenderness would one day come crashing into her heart, along with the words he never said: "I remember you."
Slow-burn push and pull / contrasting sides at school / reunion after a long separation
Cool on the outside, warm on the inside, a contrast-filled academic ace x a warm, gentle, adorably spacey ray of sunshine. He uses his two sides to spell out "I care about you," while she learns, in time, that "he didn't forget."
Theme: Some people, it turns out, are destined to stay in your memory from the very first glance.
