Heading for the Plains - Chapter 42

Facing Ping Yuan’s question, Zhu Cijing simply replied, “I actually don’t know exactly when Xia Chao started liking you.”

She spoke with total sincerity, and her earlier words certainly hadn’t been a bluff. Some things in this world work like that; a quantitative change leads to a qualitative leap. By the time you vaguely perceive a shift, the most fundamental transformation has often already taken place in silence.

Thus, Zhu Cijing whispered, “I just felt that since Xia Chao arrived, you’ve become visibly happier. But lately, your mood has soured again. So, I figured something must have happened between you two.”

“And it must be something irreversible,” she continued, slipping into full detective mode, deducing with precision. “A normal sisterly spat wouldn’t leave you in such a miserable state. And when you talk about irreversible… that usually means a confession.”

After all, you’ve become so close, she thought. Living together, even sharing a bed; slow-burn couples might take months or even a year to reach that stage. Yet they had jumped straight to the conclusion. If you stripped away the “sister” label, the level of intimacy was dangerously out of line.

Ping Yuan fell silent. Regarding their ambiguity, anyone no matter how dense,would have understood after what happened at the amusement park.

Especially her.

“So…” Zhu Cijing sighed, returning to her primary question. “When did Xia Chao confess to you?”

They eventually switched to a direct phone call. In the world of instant messaging, silence becomes deafening. Zhu Cijing held the phone to her ear and heard Ping Yuan take a few shaky breaths. After a long pause, she finally spoke: “It was that day I told you about, the day we went to the amusement park.”

“Something happened that night…” Ping Yuan skipped the complex preamble, forcing her logic to prioritize the key points. “While skating, she accidentally bumped into me. The atmosphere was chaotic, and suddenly… it happened.”

Zhu Cijing’s heart hammered. “What happened?”

“She tried to kiss me,” Ping Yuan said softly, the phantom sensation of hair brushing against her cheek seemingly returning for an instant. “I rejected her.”

Zhu Cijing wanted to scream.

Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap.

The storm inside her could only be expressed through internal cursing. You couldn’t blame her for overreacting; after all, who was the Ping Yuan standing before her?

There was a reason she had never been able to pin down Ping Yuan’s sexual orientation over the years.

Ten years ago, back when Facebook was still Facebook and everyone was on campus BBS boards, nineteen-year-old Ping Yuan had been nominated every single year as the “Untouchable Flower” of the undergraduate class, thanks to her ethereal beauty and icy personality.

Though Ping Yuan didn’t care, Zhu Cijing doubted she even knew such polls existed; her reputation meant that her pursuers were a constant tide of casualties. When the most popular guy from the Computer Science department tried to serenade her, she had coldly opened her window and said, “Classmate, if you keep disturbing the peace with that guitar, I’m throwing water on you.” When a younger girl in their own department tried to catch her eye for an entire semester after fighting for a spot in the same elective, Ping Yuan had simply frowned and said, “Classmate, I’m not letting you cheat off me during the final exam.”

The sound of that girl’s heartbreak could be heard through the dorm walls.

And now, who would believe it? This woman, whom she had mocked for years as an “ice cube spirit” and filed under the category of asexual, was sitting here in the middle of the night with a voice that sounded like a total surrender, saying: “I rejected her.”

What was the difference between this and a 3 AM horror story? Well, the difference was that it was only 1 AM.

Zhu Cijing took another deep breath. The tables had turned; after she had spent the night dropping bombshells, her friend had delivered the finishing blow. But she quickly knit her brows.

“Wait, that doesn’t add up,” she questioned rapidly. “If you rejected her, it means you don’t like her. So why do you still look like your world is ending? But if you do like her, why on earth did you reject her?”

“Because we are sisters. It’s a matter of ethics.”

Guilt.

The word stayed caught in Zhu Cijing’s throat. Her eyes widened. She suddenly felt this scene mirrored a classic moment in literature far too closely.

She didn’t get a chance to speak. She could hear Ping Yuan’s breathing grow heavy through the phone. She didn’t know if Ping Yuan was thinking the same thing, but she didn’t care. The answer was on the tip of Ping Yuan’s tongue. Zhu Cijing heard a hitch in her breath; a second that felt as long as a century.

Then, after that century passed, she heard Ping Yuan whisper: “What if my conscience is unclean?“

“This wasn’t some free, mutual romance. I’m the one who lured her in.”

Her voice was as light as a feather, yet as heavy as a final verdict. The prisoner had finally bowed her head. Zhu Cijing realized with a start that this was what Ping Yuan had been terrified of all along.

And her friend had laid down her arms, speaking in a sleepwalker’s voice in the dead of night.

“At first, I just thought having an extra person in the house was a nuisance.”

“You know me, Cijing. I’ve lived alone for so many years. I’ve never even met my biological mother, so there was no ‘feeling’ to speak of.”

“So when Xia Chao first arrived, I actually hated her. I thought she was a burden my mother dumped on me, an annoying kid looking for a handout. In my heart, I never considered her a sister.”

“But then… somewhere along the way, I realized it was Xia Chao who was taking care of me more.”

“She knows how to do everything. She can cook, slicing fish as thin as a cicada’s wing. She knows exactly how many minutes to boil a bowl of noodles. She does housework, knowing how to fold the sheets so the corners are crisp and don’t slip… everything my mother never taught me, she knows.”

Ping Yuan gave a short laugh, but she wasn’t really asking a question. So Zhu Cijing didn’t answer; she just gave a soft “mhm” and continued to listen.

The night was as deep as a tide. Only Ping Yuan’s breathing, accompanied by the faint glow of the call screen, drifted across the boundless sea.

“At first, I treated it as revenge. I felt entitled to her care, treating it as compensation for my mother’s abandonment and for the fact that she had ‘stolen my place’ all those years.”

“But I soon realized that… I was becoming more and more dependent on her.”

“It made me feel unsafe. Originally, I thought it was just a domestic dependency. So, I started learning to cook with her and splitting the chores, thinking I could break the habit.”

“But once I learned to handle the kitchen myself, I realized my dependency was emotional.”

Ping Yuan’s voice was soft. The dishes Xia Chao made weren’t complex—just standard home cooking. Like their first time in the kitchen, when Xia Chao taught her to stir-fry bitter melon with beef—a Cantonese style from a kitchen seasoned by years of domestic warmth. Back then, she had held her breath, amazed by the “magic” of thirty seconds, thinking she enjoyed cooking. She didn’t realize she just enjoyed the feeling of being with Xia Chao.

She hadn’t grown up with a silver spoon, yet she acted like she’d never touched dishwater, finding novelty in pots and pans. But she had done chores before. After graduating, she lived in a cheap group rental, walking out of narrow alleys to take the subway to a grand CBD office. She ate box lunches at work and cooked in a cramped, cockroach-infested communal kitchen on weekends.

The smell in those kitchens was vile. A girl in the rental kept a cat against the landlord’s rules, and the litter box sat right in the kitchen. Ping Yuan had endured the stench to cook for herself—washing, chopping, dealing with the oily smoke, and then scrubbing the greasy leftovers off the plates with a rag and dish soap.

The communal kitchen was far smaller than her current apartment. There was only one sink, and the counter was tiny. There was no place to put clean dishes, so she had to perform a dangerous acrobatic act, stacking them one by one on the edge of the sink. She had to move with extreme caution to get everything washed and carried back to her room.

So, as soon as she could afford it, she moved to a place with a private kitchen. A double sink, sparkling new stainless steel, a full set of cast-iron pots, and a wide countertop. She thought she would make cooking a habit then, but she never did.

Until Xia Chao arrived.

Some people have a Midas touch. She stood there gently, a slender waist tied into an apron, using her damp, clean fingertips to touch Ping Yuan’s hand, teaching her how to use the tip of a knife to separate translucent fish meat from the bone. Suddenly, even the steam rising from the kitchen felt sweet.

How terrifying, Ping Yuan thought. She had even reached a point where she couldn’t sleep without Xia Chao beside her.

Even Zhu Cijing realized it. She remembered her stay at Ping Yuan’s. She had to wake up early for a train and looked like a ghost, while Ping Yuan had woken even earlier, looking radiant and full of life. Her black hair cascaded over her shoulders like silk as she stood in the bright morning light, smiling at a tiny sticky note.

The only way to describe that moment was “the heart fluttering.” In hindsight, that was the sign of falling in love.

Zhu Cijing understood because she had gone through a failed relationship herself. The most dangerous thing in love is never the earth-shattering, frantic moments; it’s a tiny, tender crack. Perhaps in the morning, or perhaps at night, you receive a little sticky note with a penciled smiley face that reminds you of a pond blooming in spring.

And then winter melts away, and summer arrives.

“You realized something was wrong with you then, didn’t you?” Zhu Cijing said softly through the phone.

Her voice traveled as an electronic signal from S-City to Ping Yuan’s ear in Q-City. Ping Yuan lowered her eyes. “Mhm.”

“I just didn’t want to admit it,” she whispered. “I was terrified. If I was the only one with those feelings and she only saw me as a sister, could our current life still last?”

“Probably not.”

“But I couldn’t bear to lose that happiness. So, I pretended not to know anything. Consciously and unconsciously… I started luring her.”

To get her smile, Ping Yuan would smile at her first. To get a good night’s rest, she would go to the living room first to “suffer from insomnia” on the sofa.

This wasn’t to say everything was a cold calculation. Many times, her laughter was genuine. The first time she sat in the dark living room with her knees pulled up, she hadn’t truly expected to encounter Xia Chao.

But there was still something impure in it. Who could say that when she rose from her tossing bed that night and chose the living room over the bedroom, she didn’t harbor a hidden urge to change something?

She knew she was beautiful. She knew she looked good when she smiled and looked forlorn when she was quiet. That night she turned to go back to her room and Xia Chao called out to her under the moonlight, she had turned slowly, knowing exactly how her long hair would slide off her shoulder like a slow-motion shot in a film.

She was waiting for an invitation to “sleep together.” She had always known. Just like that day at the orphanage. She didn’t want to leave too early, and she wanted Xia Chao to be good to her, so she sat under the tree, looking at Xia Chao with such a dazed, innocent expression.

The young girl had taken the bait, just as she expected.

At the time, she still comforted herself: We are just sisters. Since we’re sisters, nothing we do is out of line.

She didn’t expect the events at the amusement park to shatter her selfish fantasy so quickly.

Did she really not know Xia Chao liked her? Did she really not know Xia Chao wanted to kiss her in that moment? No one in this world is born to be someone else’s antidote. Was all that meticulous observation and gentle care simply because Xia Chao was her sister?

No, of course not. Xia Chao could do all that because her eyes were full of love. Not a sister’s love for a sister, but the love of a young girl who had tenderly seen her with a heart first awakened.

And Ping Yuan had greedily enjoyed it all, even indulging it. The fireworks at the park were so beautiful, soaring into the sky and blooming. She had stood there, unmoving, because in that instant, she had also thought about kissing her.

“That is where my conscience is unclean,” she whispered, finally delivering the verdict on all the chaos that had come before.

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