The Long Night - Chapter 38

The final part of the book signing was for the guests to take a group photo on stage. Yan Liao stood at the very edge to make himself less noticeable. Even so, some people with cameras knelt in front of him and took a flurry of photos.

He lowered his gaze and suddenly saw the shiny eyes of the people below, looking at him with the same expectation as the twinkling stars in the vast Milky Way. For some reason, Yan Liao suddenly felt that their eyes held the expectation of a person who walked with a limp about to fall. It was as if the hands below were not waiting to applaud but were ready to throw their arms up and shout to join in on a spectacle.

This strange and absurd feeling was fleeting. Yan Liao squinted and didn’t think too much about it. After getting off the stage and returning to his seat, Shen Yi-ran, who was helping him clean up the desk, suddenly glanced at him. “Your collar is crooked.” He lowered his head and, muttering “such a hassle,” straightened it out.

The orange light floated in the humid air, like a piece of candy wrapper softened by water.

“Do you ever feel like we’re cellmates in the same prison?”

It was nine o’clock in the evening. In the study, the only sounds were the clicking of a keyboard and the rustling of a paintbrush. Yan Liao suddenly asked this question with sincerity.

Tang Shaocheng stopped typing when he heard this. “…”

Yan Liao twisted his sore shoulders, hearing his bones creak. On the desk was a small box of moss. When Tang Shaocheng bought this plant, he joked, “This is the smallest grassland on Earth.” The seller thoughtfully included models of a cow and a horse. Yan Liao looked at the two animals and suddenly felt a bit insulted.

He muttered, “We haven’t been out to play in a long time. Let’s go somewhere else.”

Tang Shaocheng turned his head. A pair of silver-rimmed glasses rested on the bridge of his nose. The look in his eyes behind the lenses was very serious. “Where do you want to go?”

“Anywhere with you, as long as you have time.”

It felt like a long time had passed since they last went on a trip. Yan Liao held a black pencil in his hand and suddenly suggested, “Let’s book a hotel room this weekend and pretend we’re on vacation.”

“…Huh?”

“I saw it online,” Yan Liao’s expression became more proactive, full of the spirit of finding joy in hardship. “…It’s not just to book a room. Let’s just try it.”

It was the first time Tang Shaocheng had heard such a suggestion, but he quickly accepted it and coaxed him, “Okay, do you want to pack a suitcase? It’ll feel more like a trip.”

“I’m too lazy for that.” Yan Liao looked up and snorted through his nose, but his fingers suddenly began to twirl his pen, a small habit he had when he was impatient.

Tang Shaocheng looked at him and instantly understood the other’s impatience. It was as if there was a teleprompter floating above this person’s head, and no matter what he said, he could always know what was really on his mind.

They should still find time to go out. Around the New Year would probably not work. Maybe they would be free after March. Even though the Spring Festival hadn’t arrived yet, Tang Shaocheng was already seriously planning where to go with Yan Liao between March and May. He suddenly felt a sense of light anticipation.

Tang Shaocheng had always believed that a person should live in the present and do what was in front of them, but now, even things that hadn’t happened yet could make him feel happy. He even felt that this was the most wonderful part of love.

In the morning, a breeze blew in from the window. The curve of the curtains was like a half-moon-shaped eye, and the gentle sunlight was in that eye.

The sunlight crept from the floor to the bed, flowing onto Yan Liao’s lean, naked back, guiding Tang Shao-cheng’s fingers to trace the patches of light as if they were steps.

Yan Liao was half-asleep and half-awake, and the fingers lingering on his skin made his scalp tingle a little. When he opened his eyes, his Adam’s apple bobbed. Just as he was getting greedy and about to reach for a certain place, his wrist was held, and then he heard Tang Shao-cheng ask, “Do you want to go for a run with me?”

…

Yan Liao closed his eyes again, his face showing an expression of “I shouldn’t have woken up.” After a long while, he mumbled, “I don’t want to.”

A few days later, it snowed again, and the roads were too slippery for running. It just so happened that Lu Xiao also moved to Pingcheng in early January, and his boxing club opened its second location here. The three-story building had everything from a gym to a swimming pool. Tang Shaocheng would occasionally drive over there.

He often saw Ge Dong-lin there as well. A few times, when he and Yan Liao went there to swim, the four of them even ate together, and it felt like they were back in their high school cafeteria.

They would occasionally talk about some of their high school experiences. At the turn of the year, people often felt nostalgic. But Ge Dong-lin had changed so much that when others brought up things related to him, it was as if they were talking about a completely different person.

It was impossible to connect the sniffling, limping tag-along of the past with the elegant and composed adult of today.

Even in winter in the past, Yan Liao was very mindful of his appearance. Even though the school required them to wear their uniforms on the outside, he would never do something as shocking as “stuffing a down jacket under the uniform.” Even at ten degrees below zero, he would only wear a sweater and his uniform and would still accessorize to look cool.

In the past, Ge Dong-lin, who followed him, often looked like he was wearing all the thick clothes in his closet at once, puffed up like a Vienna sausage.

But now, Ge Dong-lin’s sense of style and financial situation had both improved. He had even grown a little taller in the past four years of college. Wearing a white cashmere coat, there was no trace of his former self.

They had their annual leave at the end of January. Tang Shaocheng and Yan Liao only went home for five days. The high-speed train was full of people from all over the country heading back home for the New Year. It was very lively all the way. The aunt in front of them even enthusiastically shared some flatbread with them.

When they went home, they would always run into acquaintances. Even though they had lived in Pingcheng for half a year and knew some neighbors, their greetings were limited to “Have you eaten?” or “You’re getting off work early today.” Even if someone saw that the two boys were living together, they wouldn’t do anything to make the atmosphere awkward. Their interactions were marked by a sense of cold and restrained propriety.

But when they returned home, every neighbor they met had watched them grow up. They were all surprised to see the two of them still inseparable. “It’s so rare that you two are still so close.”

They had heard this many times from different people and were keenly aware of the potential for gossip. If any little detail were to be discovered one day, it would be spread as some kind of outrageous, topsy-turvy story.

In the eyes of some older people, being gay was not much different from having a mental illness.

So Yan Liao began to consciously keep some distance from Tang Shaocheng. Even when they went out to buy things together, they would be separated by the distance of a billboard. If they accidentally touched hands or arms outside, he would jump three feet high to get away, and his facial features would form a facade of calm that was full of flaws.

Perhaps because he never had the thought of “just being friends with the other person,” even his attempt at being cautious looked like a complete breakup.

At home, he didn’t dare to be too close in front of their parents. One would be in the living room and the other in the bedroom, as if separated by a clear line. For a few days, Tang Shaocheng even stayed in the dusty, empty apartment upstairs that hadn’t been cleaned in a long time. Yan Liao’s mom thought the two of them had a conflict and reasonably assumed that her own kid was at fault. She washed two apples and put them in Yan Liao’s hand, then pushed him into the bedroom, telling him to go and apologize.

The suitcase on the floor was like an open clam, exposing its insides. Tang Shaocheng was leaning against the headboard, reading. “Aren’t you going to hide from me now?” He casually put the book on the cabinet next to him. Yan Liao walked over and burrowed into his arms, wanting even more to burrow into the suitcase and have this person take him somewhere, anywhere.

There were many dinner parties at the end of the year. On the first day of the new year, the two of them also attended a high school classmate’s wedding. She was a girl from Tang Shaocheng’s class and had a “friendship” with Yan Liao from having to write self-criticism together in the teacher’s office many times, so she also sent them an invitation.

The bride was considered a prominent figure at their school. The love story between her and her ex-boyfriend in their senior year was known to the entire grade. The two had broken up and gotten back together countless times. The girl’s father even went to the school and threatened to kill the boy, and the boy’s family was also said to have caused a huge scene. Two months before the college entrance exam, the two of them almost held hands and jumped off a building together. Since then, even the teachers and parents had compromised, saying that as long as they didn’t have a child, they wouldn’t interfere.

At that time, everyone thought they would be together forever, but today they were back to attend the girl’s wedding. The boy who had almost jumped off a 36-story building with her to die was helping her greet the guests, his lips held in a forced smile like a safety pin piercing his skin. When he sat down, he joked to the sympathetic eyes of the crowd, “Can you not look at me with that pitiful expression? I’m already content to be in the same wedding as her.”

A few drunk classmates around him egged him on to steal the bride, but when the bride and groom came over to toast, everyone tacitly acted as if nothing had ever happened. There was no impulsive, passionate scene that a teenager would have imagined. It wasn’t them at eighteen reuniting five years later; it was two people in their twenties, no longer immature but not yet mature, greeting each other as if they were meeting for the first time.

Even though people become more certain of life’s impermanence as they get older, and that life is mostly unsatisfying, seeing a scene like this still made them feel a little emotional. A classmate jokingly asked, “Do you regret not dying with her back then?” The boy shook his head in surprise. “Of course not. She’s very happy now, and I’m doing great too.”

The Spring Festival holiday passed quickly, and they ate very well during this half-month. They both turned a year older and reached the age where they had to give red envelopes to the younger generation instead of receiving them.

Yan Liao’s heart bled a little at the thought that he wouldn’t have children, so this money would never be returned. But when he heard a few of his relatives’ kids arguing in the living room like it was Ragnarok, he was grateful that he wouldn’t have to be a parent.

The two of them returned on the sixth day of the new year and started work on the seventh. Over the next few weekends, they had a series of gatherings. The list of clients Tang Shao-cheng had to meet was almost full until the end of February. He had to drink at a dinner party one night, so he couldn’t drive, and Yan Liao went to pick him up.

“The overpass is jammed again. It’s going to take an hour to drive back. There are so many people everywhere on the weekends.”

The road on the navigation was all red. Yan Liao bent his index finger and poked at it, wanting to make it explode like a match-three game.

Tang Shaocheng was properly buckled in the passenger seat. He still smelled of alcohol, and the speed of his speech was a little slower than usual. “I’ll take the subway home next time.”

The car slowly drove out of the underground parking lot and into an open space. Yan Liao glanced in the mirror and saw him holding his head and rubbing his temples, looking like he had a headache.

“You’re so annoying.” A sudden feeling of gloom and bitterness was like an arrow that hit his body. Yan Liao blurted this out to the person next to him, and then immediately bit his lip. He didn’t even know what he was annoyed about. He turned the steering wheel halfway and sped onto the main road, then found a reason to argue. “Why would you say you’ll take the subway?”

Tang Shaocheng’s blinking was even slower than when he was sober. “Hmm?” He rolled down his window to let the wind blow in. “You don’t like traffic.”

Yan Liao quickly rolled up his window and flashed his hazard lights continuously to refuse the car behind him from merging.

In just a few seconds, he thought of several sarcastic remarks. After they fermented in his mind for a while, they were flushed away like they were being pushed by a button, whooshing down the vortex of the drain. Yan Liao said in a defiant and domineering tone, “I just wanted to come and pick you up. I don’t care if we’re stuck in this terrible traffic for a hundred years, okay?”

Tang Shaocheng turned his head to look at him, and his soft laugh was very clear in the car. “Okay.”

And then Yan Liao felt that it might have really been a hundred years.

When the car finally drove back into their neighborhood, Yan Liao suddenly remembered a news story he had seen many years ago. A bus driver had a sudden heart attack but still managed to pull over to the side of the road to let his passengers get off safely. After all the passengers had left, he collapsed on the steering wheel. At this moment, he was waiting for Tang Shaocheng to get out of the car.

Midway through their ascent to the apartment, the elevator suddenly malfunctioned. For a brief second or two, the elevator, which had been going up, suddenly dropped without any warning. Tang Shaocheng subconsciously wrapped his arm around Yan Liao and pulled him into his arms, but before he could make another move, the elevator returned to normal without a hitch. The door opened with a nonchalant “ding.”

After Tang Shaocheng walked out, he immediately called building maintenance. Both of them were a little shaken. In that one second, Yan Liao suddenly thought of the wedding he attended at the beginning of the year, and the two silhouettes that almost jumped off a 36-story building.

For several days after that, Yan Liao didn’t take the elevator. The feeling of falling for that one or two seconds would always reappear. Sometimes, when he was walking on the street, it would suddenly feel like he had stepped on a loose manhole cover and was falling.

It wasn’t a premonition out of thin air.

Winter seemed to never end. In early March, many northern provinces were still covered in heavy snow. The continuous snowfall caused many places to shut down schools and businesses.

With nothing to do at home, going online became one of the few pastimes. Perhaps to provide some entertainment for bored people, many entertainment news stories were trending these days.

Yan Liao never thought that one day he would see his own name on them.