Chapter 28: Zhao Qiyan's Quiet Jealousy

Zhao Qiyan had always moved through the world with a wide circle and a light touch — friends across cities, plans that shifted easily, the comfortable freedom of someone who had never felt compelled to account for his time to anyone. Since he had started seeing Ruan Jing, all of that had quietly rearranged itself. He had become, by any observable measure, remarkably well-behaved. Several of his friends found this so disorienting that they had taken to joking about it — that Zhao Qiyan, who had never in living memory stayed in one place when he could be somewhere more interesting, had apparently developed a preference for staying home.

Zhao Qiyan paid these observations no particular attention. Other people's readings of his behavior had never held much weight with him. He knew what he felt and he knew why he was making the choices he was making, and both of those things satisfied him entirely. That was enough.

The calm, slightly remote quality he had always carried — that particular ease that made him seem untouchable — had been softening at its edges without his full awareness, giving way to something warmer and less careful. He was no longer quite so uniquely unreachable. His friends noticed the change before he did, and found themselves increasingly curious about whoever had managed it. But Qiyan had proven unexpectedly close-mouthed on the subject — he wouldn't offer a name, deflected questions with the kind of effortless non-answers that made it clear the topic was genuinely off the table — and they found, for the first time, something that looked very much like nervousness in him whenever it came up. Faced with a host who was plainly uninterested in discussing it further, they let the subject rest.

He was probably aware, in some part of himself, that the intensity of what he felt was running slightly ahead of what was wise. But the object of that feeling was Ruan Jing, which made the arithmetic different from any previous calculation. She had taken root somewhere deep and specific — somewhere close enough to the center of things that the smallest disturbance reached his nerve endings before he had time to reason about it. He knew she had this effect on his self-control. He had decided, with full clarity, to let it.

When Xu Wei finally understood — fully and without remaining doubt — that Qi Yan had fallen for Ruan Jing in a way that left no room for interpretation, she felt the particular bitterness of someone who has been hoping quietly for a long time and has just run out of reasons to keep hoping.

They were walking out of the coffee shop. She couldn't stop herself. "Qiyan — can I hug you?"

Zhao Qiyan smiled, stepped close, and put his arm around her shoulder in a brief, unambiguous gesture that held exactly the warmth of genuine friendship and none of anything else. "Goodnight, Weiwei. Be careful going home."

Xu Wei understood what he was giving her. It was more than she had any right to expect, and she knew it. If she wanted to hold onto this friendship going forward, the only reasonable path was to start pulling this feeling back, piece by piece, from wherever she had let it grow. "I'm sorry," she said, and meant it. "I can't hypocritically tell you I wish you both well. Not yet."

"Even without your blessing," Qi Yan said, his voice settling into the quiet certainty of someone simply stating what is true, "she and I will be together regardless."

"Ha." Xu Wei exhaled, something uncomfortable moving through her. "Do you have to make it so easy to feel ashamed of myself?"

"No. Weiwei — it's only that I can't do without her. Even if someone objects somewhere down the line, I'll find a way through it. That's simply what I want. I know how selfish that sounds."

Xu Wei felt the sadness of it settle fully in her chest. She took one step back, and then another. "Zhao Qiyan — you understand that whoever invests more in a relationship is the one who loses everything if it falls apart. Does that not frighten you?"

Qi Yan's brow creased faintly. "Thank you for the concern. If that day ever came," he said, after a moment's thought, with something that might have been resignation and might have been simple honesty, "I imagine I'd be completely devastated. That's all."

That's all. Xu Wei turned and walked toward her car, each step a small and deliberate act of closing a door she should have closed some time ago. The fact that she hadn't been able to bring herself to say something crueler at the end — some parting word designed to create distance — was perhaps the last consolation she had available to her.

Xu Wei's words had landed somewhere they weren't supposed to, and Zhao Qiyan knew it. He had never been entirely certain of his footing with Ruan Jing — there was always something slightly held-back in her, some reserve he couldn't quite see past — and that uncertainty made him careful in ways that didn't come naturally to him. He didn't ask to see her every day. He didn't call three times before noon. He kept the pressure of what he felt compressed into something manageable and released it the only ways available to him — a game of ball at the sports center, an hour in the pool, whatever burned off the edge.

On one such afternoon, leaving the gymnasium and cutting through the higher education park, it occurred to him — almost as an afterthought, almost before he'd consciously decided anything — that Ruan Jing was now working at N University. He turned onto Xueshi Road and pulled up at the entrance without having fully formed an intention to do so.

It was lunch hour. Students moved in steady streams through the gates. More than a few of the women passing by slowed slightly, eyes drawn toward the man leaning against the black sports car — because Zhao Qiyan was, by any honest assessment, exactly the kind of person who attracted that kind of attention without trying.

He leaned against the car door, head down, phone in hand, opening it and then letting the screen go dark again. He was starting to think this had been a pointless impulse — that he should simply get back in the car and go — when someone called his name.

His heart turned over before the rest of him had processed it.

"How did you end up here?" Ruan Jing came toward him at something close to a run, her expression genuinely startled and pleased.

"Just passing by," Qi Yan said, with the ease of someone who has decided this version of events is close enough to true. He smiled. "I was thinking of inviting you to lunch, if you're free." As he said it, his eyes moved briefly in a direction slightly past her, and Ruan Jing turned instinctively to follow his gaze. Jiang Yan was standing approximately ten meters behind her, waiting.

He had said he needed to discuss some school matters with her — there was no other free time that worked, so it had to be the lunch hour.

"I'm afraid that won't work today." Ruan Jing hesitated, the apology genuine. "I'm sorry. Tomorrow?"

Zhao Qiyan put both hands in his pockets. "It's nothing." He said it easily, cleanly, and meant for it to sound that way. He was wearing a beige sweater today — composed and unhurried on the surface — but for just a moment, something moved through his eyes that he didn't manage to contain entirely. Something brief and real, before it was put away again.

He had always understood this about himself: he was not invincible, had never been, and sooner or later the proof of that came for everyone. He had simply hoped it might wait a little longer.

He reversed out of the parking space with practiced ease. Before he completed the turn, his eyes went to the rearview mirror once — registering what was behind him — and then he looked away and drove. The cold air through the cracked window moved through his hair. He became aware, somewhere in his chest, of a feeling that he identified without particular pleasure as jealousy, and acknowledged it with the resigned practicality of someone who knows that fighting it would only accelerate the fall.

That evening, Zhao Qiyan left the coffee shop through the back door. He had been carrying a low-grade headache all day, his temples pulsing with the dull persistence of accumulated tension, and he had decided to go home early and sleep it off. He had barely made it to the far end of the alley when something in his body registered danger before his mind caught up. He turned.

A wooden stick came down toward him.

His arm came up on reflex, absorbing the blow before he had time to think. He staggered back two steps, and a deep, bruising pain radiated up from his right arm. The two men who had attacked him didn't press further — they picked up their suit jackets from the ground, took his wallet, and ran.

Two hours later, Zhao Lin arrived at the hospital.

Zhao Qiyan was sitting on a bench outside the ward with a white bandage wrapped around his right hand, looking as though he had been sitting there for some time without moving. He was not, she noted, a person who often wore this expression — something muted and inward that wasn't quite like him.

He heard footsteps, looked up slowly, and when he saw her, managed something that was approximately a smile. "I'm sorry to drag you out in the middle of the night."

"What did the doctor say? Is it serious?"

"No bones broken. Lucky."

Zhao Lin let out a long breath she had been holding since the phone call, then immediately directed a mild complaint at him with the efficiency of someone who has been worried and is now redistributing that energy. "How could you be so careless? You've always been quicker than that."

"I was distracted," he said, with a small, quiet smile at whatever he was thinking of.

"That's an exceptionally convincing defense."

He stood. "Let's go."

Zhao Lin looked at him carefully. "You're certain you're all right? You look pale."

"I'm fine." The sound he made was low and almost amused. "Just tired."

After the incident, Zhao Qiyan stayed home for two days. The injury was to his right hand, which inconvenienced him in small ways — chopsticks required his left — but nothing that made the days unmanageable. Friends came and went throughout, filling the apartment with the comfortable noise of people who know when to make themselves present and when to leave quietly.

Around seven in the evening on the second day, the landline in the living room rang. Qi Yan had just stepped into the bathroom. KK picked it up. "Hello."

A pause on the other end — the brief, surprised silence of someone who had expected a different voice. Then, carefully: "Is — Zhao Qiyan there?"

"He just stepped away. Can I help you with something?"

Another pause, shorter this time. The consideration of someone deciding. "It's nothing." Then, as an afterthought: "If he comes back — would you ask him to call me? My name is Ruan Jing."

Ruan Jing set her phone down and sat with it for a moment.

She had been unable to reach Qi Yan for two days, and somewhere around the middle of the second day the silence had begun to do something to her that she hadn't entirely anticipated. She had asked Zhao Lin for the apartment number, telling herself it was a reasonable thing to do, and had called without thinking the impulse through to its natural conclusions. A woman's voice. That was not something she had prepared a response for. She sat with the phone in her lap and looked at nothing in particular and thought, with a clarity that arrived slightly late: she should not have acted on that impulse. She really, genuinely should not have.