No One Knows [Rebirth] - Chapter 16

Chapter 16: So Cute, So Beauti…

The hospital room was so quiet that the sound of a needle dropping could be heard.

Although Tang Ruibai knew this was fake, her heart couldn’t help but thump wildly. The probability of someone with a crush suddenly running up to you and confessing their desire to date is lower than that of a planet colliding with Earth. Therefore, no matter how one looked at it, it felt bizarre. Yet, Qin Yu’s eyes were incredibly sincere.

Tang Ruibai, caught in a dilemma, gave a light, scoffing laugh: “A model student dating in high school?”

Qin Yu was completely unfazed: “It won’t affect my studies. If you’re willing, I can help you study together.”

Tang Ruibai: “…”

Tang Ruibai couldn’t grasp Qin Yu’s underlying motives; many guesses flickered through her mind, but none reached a conclusion. After all, there really wasn’t anything about her worth plotting for. However, in her earlier state of panic, she had forgotten something. Now, after reflecting on it, she lifted her eyes to look at Qin Yu: “You like girls?”

Qin Yu had spent five years in an era where same-sex marriage was legalized, where numerous LGBTQ+ films and TV shows had appeared in the market. On big screens and hot-search lists, same-sex relationships were no longer things to be avoided or shrouded in secrecy. She didn’t feel it was an issue at all. But suddenly, she remembered—in this current time, same-sex marriage wasn’t legalized yet, and heterosexuality was still the mainstream trend.

However, Qin Yu was facing Tang Ruibai—the person in the world who should know best that she liked girls.

“Yeah.” Qin Yu picked up a tangerine from beside the bed; the tart, sweet fragrance spread through the room. She lowered her eyes and peeled away the white threads from the segments before handing it to Tang Ruibai. “Is that so strange? Or was I not being obvious enough?”

Tang Ruibai took the tangerine segment and bit into it gently, the juice blooming in her mouth.

“But I don’t,” Tang Ruibai said, turning her head to look out the window. Her voice was cold and clear, using a reasonable excuse to push Qin Yu away: “Your crush is over.”

Qin Yu nearly laughed at hearing this. Tang Ruibai doesn’t like girls? She loves them. If she didn’t, how had they ended up together? Qin Yu and Tang Ruibai had only been able to get together because, during their kisses, they infused their personal emotions into them, and after one kiss, they knew from a single look that the other was the same kind. Lips can lie, but the body is always honest.

But Qin Yu knew that the current Tang Ruibai was resisting her, so she naturally couldn’t push too hard. She lowered her head and whispered an “Oh.” “That’s okay. Not liking them now doesn’t mean you won’t like them in the future.”

Tang Ruibai didn’t pick up on that and changed the subject: “You didn’t seem happy this morning. Why?”

Qin Yu chuckled: “You noticed. Does that mean you…”

“Stop.” Tang Ruibai cut off the “care about me” that was about to follow and said coldly, “Just asking casually. I wouldn’t have known what else to say.”

Qin Yu wanted to continue chatting, so she smoothly pivoted: “I just remembered something. A friend of mine has been married to her wife for several years, and she always thought her wife loved eating a certain food. But later, she suddenly found out her wife didn’t actually like it at all, but every time her wife saw her, she would eat it with great relish, so she felt lied to by her wife.”

Qin Yu masked all the key details, making the story sound vague.

“People’s preferences change, or maybe they hide their true preferences because they like someone,” Tang Ruibai commented coolly. “Why are you sad about other people’s business?”

Qin Yu: “…”

“Yeah, why am I sad?” Qin Yu smiled at her with composure: “From now on, I will only be sad for your business.”

Tang Ruibai was choked and couldn’t be bothered to speak further. Sunlight spilled into the room, looking full of vitality. Before long, the medicine took effect; Tang Ruibai’s breathing became steady and rhythmic as she fell asleep.

Qin Yu removed one of the extra pillows propping her up and tucked her in, her movements entirely natural. Tang Ruibai was restless in her sleep, her brow furrowed, so Qin Yu reached out to smooth it. The sunlight hit Tang Ruibai’s eyelids, making her uncomfortable, so she simply turned over to face Qin Yu. Qin Yu stood up, drew the curtains halfway, and then sat on the chair, staring intently at Tang Ruibai.

It was as if she could never see enough of her. In her previous life, she rarely did this—not because she lacked the opportunity, but because she felt they would always see each other. Staring at Tang Ruibai this closely was an act reserved for when they were in bed.

Occasionally, she would stare at Tang Ruibai on purpose, then kiss her from the hairline, forehead, brow, left eye, right eye, tear mole, bridge of the nose, tip of the nose, side of the cheek, and then gently hold her lip peak in her mouth.

Their time together hadn’t just been about reckless, wild sex. The patient foreplay was like a hunt. She loved watching the usually dignified, self-possessed, and composed Tang Ruibai slowly blush, even feeling embarrassed enough to want to pull a sheet over herself in bed. Qin Yu would grab her hands and make her look at her.

She didn’t know what Tang Ruibai was thinking back then, but she knew what she was thinking—So cute, so beautiful, this is mine. And then she would proceed to mark her even more aggressively, leaving behind her own traces. Finishing an act of love felt like winning a great battle.

To be honest, Qin Yu could feel that their interactions were implicitly led by her. Qin Yu had always thought it was because Tang Ruibai had a balanced, moderate personality, while she was the outgoing and extroverted one who naturally spoke and did more. But she hadn’t expected the seventeen-year-old Tang Ruibai to have such a distinct personality.

Qin Yu had feared she wouldn’t see familiar shadows in the seventeen-year-old Tang Ruibai, but the sleeping Tang Ruibai was exactly the same as when they had first gotten together. She habitually hugged her arms tight, her body slowly curling up like a snail. She looked incredibly insecure.

Qin Yu raised her hand and placed it on her shoulder, patting it rhythmically. Just like in the past, after watching a horror movie or waking up from a nightmare, Tang Ruibai would gently pat her shoulder and hum a few off-tune melodies. Tang Ruibai sang beautifully, even if she was just humming. Qin Yu would fall asleep to that coaxing and have a good night’s rest.

Thinking about it carefully, Tang Ruibai was so wonderful—how could she have been so pig-headed and obsessed as to divorce her? If they hadn’t divorced, even if Tang Ruibai had reached the final chapter of her life, she could have stayed by her side. Perhaps then, Tang Ruibai wouldn’t have chosen to commit suicide.

Qin Yu looked at the sleeping Tang Ruibai and shed another tear. After a while, Tang Ruibai pretended to turn over nonchalantly and slept with her back to Qin Yu.

Tang Ruibai felt that she had become a substitute. She didn’t know whose substitute, but it was someone Qin Yu liked. Otherwise, why would Qin Yu shed tears in front of her? And look at her with such affectionate eyes? This realization made Tang Ruibai feel irritated and disgusted.

At noon, as the two were about to order takeout, Ms. Wen had already sent over lunch: pork rib and corn soup, water bamboo with shredded meat, sweet and sour pork ribs, red pepper beef, and stir-fried lettuce. Almost all the ingredients were meant for recovery, and it was easy to guess for whom. Tang Ruibai didn’t have much of an appetite, but because the food was genuinely delicious, she ate more than usual.

Having eaten too much, she couldn’t fall asleep and just lay there, lazily basking in the sun. Qin Yu, meanwhile, sat to the side, chatting on her phone. Qi Miaoyan and Ling Feng in the group chat were both asking what had happened and why she wasn’t coming to school. Qin Yu skirted the issue, making up a few casual excuses to brush them off. Then, they sent over the assignments. Each subject had two sets of papers. Qi Miaoyan said in the group: “These are all due next week. If you do them early, we can go out and play on the weekend.”

Qin Yu opened the pictures and glanced at them—a math paper. Her vision went black, and she turned off her phone. Qin Yu had scored 132 in the math section of the college entrance exam, which was above average. But she had majored in German in college, which involved no advanced mathematics.

Aside from that, in the years between graduating from the college entrance exam and her rebirth, she had only played one math-related role—a guest appearance as a supporting character in a popular drama who stood on stage to explain a math problem to students. The problem was just a simple trigonometric function. So, in her life, mathematics was a very distant subject.

But now, back in her second year of high school, the most serious problem she faced wasn’t the “recovered” Tang Ruibai or the nearly bankrupt family company, but… the college entrance exam. Especially since Qin Yu was a science student—it was even more desperate. After a moment of despair, Qin Yu began to fight against fate. Humans couldn’t possibly forget all these knowledge points, right?

Thus, she found paper and a pen, opened the pictures on her phone, and started calculating away. Functions and derivatives, sequences, trigonometric functions, spatial geometry… The more she wrote, the more desperate she became. She remembered that in high school, it felt like divine intervention whenever she did these problems—she finished them simply and never felt they were difficult. Why, in this second life, were these things so hard?

When Zhang Huixue and Liu Ying arrived again, this was the scene they saw: Qin Yu sitting in front of the hospital bed, despairingly chewing on her pen, while Tang Ruibai was quietly closing her eyes in feigned sleep. The only sound in the room was the rustle of the pen moving across the paper. Zhang Huixue walked over and glanced at it: “Hah, high school math, that tough, huh?”

Qin Yu put away her pen and gave a dry cough: “It’s okay.” It wasn’t the problem’s fault, she had just forgotten everything.

“Little dunce?” Zhang Huixue teased her. “You can’t even get three out of five questions right—what kind of big talk are you spouting?”

Qin Yu: “…”

Her resolve had crumbled.