The Long Night - Chapter 51

Qin and Yu’s Story (Continued)

The faint sunlight fell on Yu Xing, his soft features exuding a pale white glow. He was beautiful and refined, with fair and translucent skin, like a perfect person generated by a computer.

He held his back very straight. In the past, when he participated in shows, a camera would be on him every minute, so he never dared to relax his back.

Yu Xing had never found it difficult. He was used to adjusting to his best state at all times, a habit that remained to this day.

A large amount of blank time appeared in his life, and he didn’t know how to fill it. There were always moments of bewilderment.

It was like floating in midair, not stepping on the ground. He always felt panicked, and even holding the hand of the person next to him didn’t relieve this sense of being suspended.

When Qin Yun-qi saw him like this, he asked him directly if he regretted it. “Do you want to go back and be a big star?”

He said these things even though he knew they would hurt him.

Yu Xing didn’t answer and passively bore the other’s emotions. He felt like he was a container.

In all aspects, he was like a container.

Qin Yun-qi opened a restaurant, which quickly became a popular place in the area and was packed every night.

He had a new social circle and new friends here. No matter where he was, he could quickly blend into the environment. He was born with a charismatic leader’s demeanor that made people trust and want to follow him.

Qin Yun-qi’s personality was obsessive, proud, and aggressive. He didn’t believe there was anything in the world he couldn’t do. Once he set his mind on something, he would see it through, even if it meant getting beaten up. He was used to life being about climbing majestic mountains and hadn’t yet adapted to the tranquility of a gentle stream.

But he soon found a new thing that excited him. The nearby forest was full of dangers. He and his friends often went hunting. The bloody prey was sent to the kitchen to become the ingredients for dinner tonight.

The spoils of one hunt was a deer head. Qin Yun-qi made it into a specimen and hung it on the wall of the room. The beautiful antlers and the pitch-black eyes were frozen at the moment of its death.

Every time Yu Xing saw that deer head, he felt a chill all over his body, and his stomach churned violently.

Yu Xing couldn’t speak the language here, so he couldn’t talk to anyone. He had to wait for Qin Yun-qi to come back every day.

After a long period of silence, he sometimes had the illusion that he had become mute.

He wanted to learn the language, but Qin Yun-qi didn’t have the time or patience to teach him slowly. Very few people here spoke Chinese. It was almost half a month before Qin Yun-qi found a doctor who had taught himself Chinese to be his teacher.

Yu Xing held his notebook and studied diligently every day like a middle school student. But he couldn’t tell if he was working so hard because he wanted to fit in here and live in seclusion with Qin Yun-qi for the rest of his life, or because he was too lonely.

At that time, he also didn’t know that his loneliness wasn’t the loneliness of not finding a companion; it was the loneliness of not finding himself.

The doctor said in his broken Chinese that Yu Xing’s voice was very pleasant, like “large and small pearls falling on a jade plate.”

Yu Xing had never been praised in such a literary way in real life. He couldn’t help but cover his mouth and laugh. His fair and slender fingers covered the lower half of his face, making his exposed eyes look especially captivating.

The next morning, when Yu Xing went to the empty room with his notebook to study again, Qin Yun-qi stopped him. “You don’t have to go again.”

“I fired him.”

At that moment, the room suddenly felt very cold, as if he were in the Arctic, surrounded by frozen seawater and snow-capped mountains. Yu Xing was speechless. He felt that his breath was about to freeze into frost.

That time, Qin Yun-qi didn’t show anger, so he didn’t learn his lesson.

There was a piano in the corner of the restaurant. There were few customers that night. Yu Xing sat on the piano stool and played a sonata. He didn’t know when the light accurately shone on him, or when the customers started to gather around him like a tide. But he felt a long-lost joy in the applause. The feeling of being liked by many people, the feeling of hearing applause, cheers, and praise, was always so good.

He smiled contentedly and stood up to bow, but in an instant, he saw Qin Yun-qi leaning against the door. His long, narrow eyes were expressionless, and a gloomy cloud seemed to have gathered between his eyebrows.

That night, Qin Yun-qi became inexplicably irritable. He got into a dispute with a customer in the restaurant and smashed the wine glass in his hand. The red wine on the ground gathered into a small, blood-colored lake. The harsh, sharp sound of the glass shattering made Yu Xing’s teeth ache.

Even such a brief moment of happiness from playing music was taken away.

There was still one kind of happiness left. On the bed in this foreign land, which smelled of damp wood, the feeling of the world collapsing made him feel as if he had reached the end of the world, and then the apocalypse arrived.

Only at this time would Qin Yun-qi say “I love you” to him. Qin Yun-qi’s deep voice saying “I love you” was like a lifeboat floating in the hot lava after a volcanic eruption.

“I love you,” these three words flowed down his skin like blood. Yu Xing’s scalp tingled. His fingers trembled slightly on Qin Yun-qi’s back, which was full of hot sweat. He suppressed a sob and whispered, “I love you, too.” This was his key to the lifeboat.

When the apocalypse came, Qin Yun-qi was the only person who spoke the same language as him.

Sometimes, “I’m scared of pain” from Yu Xing would come before “I love you.” He struggled like a fish thrown on a cutting board. Qin Yun-qi’s cold hand covered his moist eyes and gently told him, “It won’t hurt when you fall asleep.”

He instinctively obeyed. As long as it was the other person’s command or decision, he would accept it completely. He even had the thought that if Qin Yun-qi wanted to give him to someone else as a gift, he would just obediently walk into the box.

The foreign food was always unappetizing. Many seafoods were eaten raw. But as long as it was cut by Qin Yun-qi and put in his bowl, he would obediently eat it all.

He was a container. So anything was fine.

At night, he was always woken up by stomach cramps. He curled up into a ball like a snail. When he really couldn’t bear it, he would tiptoe to the bathroom, bend over, and vomit until his throat was hoarse. In the mirror, his eyes were red from the violent vomiting.

He looked at the strange face in the mirror and didn’t know when he had become so ugly.

Tears crawled up his throat like a yawn. He thought he was just a little sleepy, and it wouldn’t hurt when he fell asleep.

In this country, tattoos seemed to be a culture. Many people had dense, intricate patterns from their arms to the back of their hands, and even on their fingers. Qin Yun-qi became interested in this. He quickly learned, and Yu Xing became his test subject.

Thorns and roses from the base of his thigh to his lower abdomen. Qin Yun-qi made him lie flat on the bed, his knees bent to his chest. The sharp needle tip pricked the delicate flesh. The pain bloomed into beautiful patterns.

Yu Xing was wearing a black eye mask. His vision was blocked. The unknown fear made him tremble. Since he came to this strange place, every day of his life had been filled with countless unknown fears.

He wanted to grab onto something, to grab something like a branch in a flood, but he could only hold his knees, becoming an accomplice to his own downfall.

The taut string in his mind finally reached a precarious state. He seemed to feel that a few fibers, unable to bear the pressure, had begun to slowly break.

It wouldn’t hurt when he fell asleep.

Sometimes, Qin Yun-qi would take Yu Xing to some dinner parties. At these parties, Yu Xing’s beautiful face would always amaze people. His fair and delicate skin, his dark and moist eyes that turned up slightly at the ends, his soft lips, and even the tiny fuzz on his face were like works of art.

The guests praised him, “He’s a boy as clean as vanilla.” Qin Yun-qi translated this sentence for him.

Yu Xing felt a violent, churning pain in his stomach again, but he could only force a smile. It was also a habit left over from before: when he needed to be a male companion at an event, he had to be decent and not embarrass Qin Yun-qi.

But when he was alone, Yu Xing was always listless and uninspired.

Qin Yun-qi called a doctor to prescribe some antidepressants for him.

While the two of them were in the room, the doctor secretly slipped a bottle of sleeping pills into Yu Xing’s hand. His Chinese was still halting, and it took Yu Xing a few moments of thought to understand each word.

“I hope I can help you. Make him sleep. I can send you back to your hometown.”

Yu Xing looked at him blankly.

It seemed that what he couldn’t understand wasn’t the other person’s action, but the meaning of “hometown” in this sentence.

“You can go here first,” the doctor took out a wrinkled map from his pocket, pointed to a small village on it, seemed to be thinking about how to describe it, and finally said, “A utopia.”

“Then someone will take you home.”

The doctor looked at Yu Xing with a worried expression and sincerely suggested, “You also need to accept treatment.”

Yu Xing pursed his lips and shook his head, rejecting his kindness. “Thank you, I don’t need it.”

After one dinner party, the two of them went home. The alcohol stimulated his nerves, and Qin Yun-qi became more aggressive and violent than usual.

He looked at Yu Xing’s fair and beautiful cheeks, which were flushed. He wrapped his fingers around the lock of wet, short black hair, his tone obsessive, almost a murmur.

“You are mine.”

He liked to touch his eyelashes, which were like the feathers of a small bird. The small bird was in his palm.

In the night, Yu Xing’s lips were bright and crimson, like ripe berries.

He closed his eyes. His thick, dark eyelashes trembled constantly. He opened his lips and teeth without a word, relaxed his body, and submissively let Qin Yun-qi plunder him.

It was like a kind of inertia.

In the pain of inertia, he heard a voice in his mind say, “A utopia.”

Someone there would take him home.

He wanted to live a real life.

It was as if there was a thick soundproof glass between the two of them.

After it was over, Yu Xing endured the swelling and pain to get up and get a cup of warm water from the living room. When he returned to the room, he saw Qin Yun-qi lying on the bed, his muscular upper body naked. The cigarette between his fingers had a crimson glow.

In the misty, milky, rising smoke, both of their faces were a little blurry in each other’s vision.

Yu Xing watched as Qin Yun-qi drank the water with the pill in it.

The medicine quickly took effect. The room was like melting snow. The person on the bed’s breathing slowly became long and even.

“I love you.”

Yu Xing stared at the soft features of the sleeping face in the night and whispered, “But I am my own.”

“All of me is my own.”

The container shattered.

Only then did his taut nerves completely relax.

At that moment, under the bright, clear moonlight, he seemed to have a moment of sudden enlightenment.

A misty haze silently filled his eyes. He looked at Qin Yun-qi’s face in the darkness and smiled with infinite tenderness.

Yu Xing had never gone to college. He only had the chance to meet a drama professor when he was filming.

That well-respected professor had told him that all mistakes could be forgiven. Mistakes during rehearsals, mistakes during live broadcasts, would not ruin your life.

So, when facing the camera, just relax.

He tried to relax his body and leaned on the soft back of the chair. All the scenery outside the speeding train kept moving backward.

Would all mistakes be forgiven?

—What about mistakes caused by the weakness of his own will?

When he was giving the medicine, he was worried that an overdose would cause nerve damage to the other person, so he reduced the number of pills.

He thought that Qin Yun-qi would just wake up a little earlier, but as long as he was on the speeding train, he wouldn’t be caught.

That teacher had also said in a public class, “Don’t fall in love with someone who looks down on you,” but Yu Xing had already forgotten.

The morning sun rose. The fog gradually dissipated. The surrounding scenery slowly became clear, like a film immersed in medicine.

He leaned against the car window and had a bumpy dream.

He had been dreaming frequently again recently.

In every dream, there was Qin Yun-qi.

In the dream, Qin Yun-qi was the person who pulled him out of the abyss again and again.

The longest memory in this life: a dimly lit, ambiguous bar. Qin Yun-qi held his wrist, felt his pulse, and asked him teasingly why his heart was beating so fast.

“Your heartbeat doesn’t lie. You like me.”

The warmth on his wrist seemed to have never left.

Morning.

The city slowly woke up in the scorching sunlight.

The restaurant was not yet open, but the door was open. The doctor who had been talking eloquently at the banquet yesterday was now tied under the bar, covered in blood.

The man in the cowboy hat grinned and teased, “Your little pet still hasn’t learned to be obedient.” He looked at the half-dead doctor and said with a half-smile, “You don’t even know you’ve been tricked.”

“I will make him obedient.”

Qin Yun-qi’s voice was cold, like a hard ice cube smashing on a concrete floor. His well-defined fingers toyed with the black key.

The key to the basement shimmered with a cold light in his palm.

“I will make him learn to be obedient.”