An Unopened Summer

A Second Heartbeat

In the season when we first met, I lost you again.

That midsummer seven years ago, the cicadas screamed deafeningly.

The boy Jiang Shuhe tapped a popsicle against the perfectly sealed window of Yan Jiming's home, and recklessly knocked open the locked world inside him.

The hospital corridors, heavy with the smell of disinfectant, were where they once shared their pain.

Until a silent betrayal brought everything to an abrupt halt, and their burning love shattered into pieces of glass that could never be put back together.

Seven years later, another summer sweltered beneath waves of heat.

Yan Jiming had become a top cardiac surgeon, aloof and cold, an untouchable beauty in his field.

The newly transferred anesthesiologist Jiang Shuhe still wore the same bright smile, but when facing Yan Jiming, all that remained was a formulaic calm.

A high-risk operation that could mean the difference between life and death tied the two, long estranged, together once more.

On the operating table, a patient teetered between life and death. Beneath it lay the past, with seven years of misunderstanding and pain between them.

Old wounds were peeled open layer by layer, and truths left unspoken quietly fermented in the scorching air.

Would they repeat the same mistakes, or... mend what was broken?

"Yan Jiming, want to give it another try this summer?"

"Try what?"

"Try starting over, try... burning us both to ash, then growing again from the ashes."

This summer, a story of love and redemption, of a second heartbeat.

And the person I love stopped at eighteen for the second time.

Premise Two:

Jiang Shuhe, 34, and Yan Jiming, 37, have been together for three years. Their love has cooled from passionate to placid, and after an argument, they enter a "cooling-off period." Yan Jiming moves out of their shared home, and they agree to think things through separately before contacting each other again.

Jiang Shuhe shuts himself away at home. For three days, he doesn't go out, eat, or reply to messages. Yan Jiming doesn't reach out himself, but asks his older sister to bring food over and check on him every day.

Starting on the twenty-third day of the twelfth lunar month, the Little New Year, and spanning the entire Spring Festival until the fifteenth day of the first lunar month, the twenty-three days find them living in different corners of the same city, each facing the things they've never said, the problems they've never confronted, and the wounds that have never healed.

Like the mist on a winter windowpane: visible, untouchable, gone with a wipe, only to gather again.

Please don't hate the characters for everything. Hate me instead.

Happy Ending

Theme: A second heartbeat