Not Quite a Confession

——Forum-style opening——

[Forum] kl, if you see this, get in here. : dddd : got it : got it : Guys, I’m terrified. Is this real or fake? Does dating the top donor count as a scandal?

/Reply: kl doesn’t act cute for fans and doesn’t cater to girlfriend fans anyway. What scandal is a singing streamer supposed to have? Come ship it!

/Reply: Guess you want the classic clip of some blue-haired girl coldly rejecting her dream girl.

/Reply: Lmao, the person above me is killing me. : I’m shipping to death right now. How does m know kl can speak Cantonese and sing Cantonese songs? She’s been streaming for four years and kl never mentioned it. Why did she sing the second m asked today?

/Reply: One dares to request, one dares to sing. 666

/Reply: Sister m is claiming ownership.

/Reply: I’ve spam-requested Cantonese songs before, even that super popular one. kl said she didn’t really know how to sing it. How long did she have to practice this song before she could sing it so well? I don’t get it!!

/Reply: Actually, sister m has single-handedly crowned every Cantonese song [side-eye smile].

/Reply: That damn kl has been streaming for four years and still hides things from us family [angry].

/Reply: I’ll say it first; half the rumor is true. kl met m offline [facepalm].

/Reply: Babe, it’s fine to say it.

/Reply: Hello? Is nobody noticing that when kl sang the chorus, her voice cracked a little on the high notes? She even laughed at herself while singing… that laugh was so cute, I’m losing it.

/Reply: Yeah, and that was exactly when m started spamming combos.

/Reply: Is this random ship actually becoming real? kl almost never thanks gifts while singing.

/Reply: It was when she got to “only then did I realize this was love” that she stopped and laughed while thanking for the gifts. I’m shipping and suffering at the same time.

/Reply: So sweet I’m fainting. So this is what kl is like when she’s in love.

/Reply: It really feels like she’s seen m and is dating her. After m gave her that Carnival rain, the whole second half of the song was sung with a smile. She likes pink Carnival rain that much? Why didn’t she ask us for it before?

/Reply: The way kl talked to m was different too. Before, whenever m came in and comboed, she’d thank the rankings properly. Not like today; it was practically like she was acting cute just for sister m…

/Reply: +1. I’ve shipped too broadly before, I’m sorry. I thought kl was already special to yu, but it turns out m is on a whole other level TT…

/Reply: m stayed through more than half the show, unprecedented. I even saw a mod from another fanbase come in to fish for info [side-eye smile]. But if kl has the backing of a super-rich donor like m, will she still keep streaming? She didn’t exactly have much ambition to begin with.

/Reply: kl still loves singing.

/Reply: And m loves listening to her sing.

/Reply: m is flooding the whole platform; doesn’t seem like that much possessiveness.

/Reply: Don’t jinx it. Why can’t kl be the possessive little dog instead, making a deal with her sister: I won’t sing for anyone else, and you won’t gift for anyone else either ^^.

/Reply: You’re just entertaining yourself with your headcanon and leaving the rest of us with our three thousand true-song fans out in the countryside herding cattle.

/Reply: Luckily we’re used to being trained. What’s left are all song fans and mom fans in one [at peace].

/Reply: kl’s whole vibe in this stream was weird anyway. Her mind didn’t seem to be on streaming at all… did you see the 12:15 mark in the replay group? Wasn’t that the sound of a door opening and closing?

/Reply: It did sound like it, but she just got discharged and moved back home, so it must be family coming to take care of her.

/Reply: Isn’t her mom’s account IP still overseas?

/Reply: That’s too much speculation, sis. Delete it fast.

/Reply: Does nobody dual-open yu’s stream [facepalm]? A cpf asked her to connect with kl. I watched yu’s hand movements; she definitely clicked to request a connection, but kl didn’t accept [side-eye smile].

/Reply: Thinking about it carefully is terrifying! Thinking about it casually is so satisfying!

/Reply: Don’t bring up coworkers [shh]. It’s good to unlink.

/Reply: Sister, when will our kl puppy officially become your one-and-only favorite protection streamer? When will you give her a fan badge, push her to level 20, get the fan-club card to 5201314 intimacy, and let the whole platform know sister m’s money only gets spent on kl [starry eyes]?

/Reply: Agree.

/Reply: Agree.

/Reply: From now on, if I ever see Emperor m gifting some other streamer, I’ll really get angry!!

——

The bullet comments were still full of question marks.

Xu Zhitong glanced at them, felt a little smug, and pretended not to notice as she took a sip of water. “There are too many effects; I can’t see the bullet comments. Let me check the song list. I’ll sing the next one.”

To avoid slipping up, Xu Zhitong didn’t plan to chat too much. She only picked out a few bullet comments to read, then sang whichever song got the most requests.

After singing seven or eight songs, Xu Zhitong felt it was about enough. In a very good mood, she told her fans, “That’s probably it. I’m getting ready to end the stream. Once I’m feeling better, I’ll do a camera livestream.”

Not long after she finished singing the requested songs, Lin Yang went back to the study and curled up in the recliner with her phone.

Xu Zhitong looked at her once, twice, three times.

Why wasn’t there any reaction? Shouldn’t they be exchanging a smile right now, then secretly hooking fingers under the table?

In the end, she couldn’t hold back and coughed softly to herself.

“I’ll sing one last song. Didn’t you all say you wanted to hear Cantonese songs?… I’ll sing you a sweet one.”

[Why is it another sweet song?]

[Where did our god of pain songs go?]

[Teacher Ku, I want to hear a pain song; I want to cry.]

Xu Zhitong laughed when she saw that.

“What, now you don’t want to hear it?”

[We do]

[We do]

[It sounds good, keep singing!]

Xu Zhitong chuckled a few times and started the accompaniment.

It was still the song she had tried out that morning, the one she had sung for Lin Yang.

She really liked it; it had this beautiful feeling of two people living happily together.

As she sang, she couldn’t help looking at Lin Yang again.

All right, maybe she was shy and hadn’t looked back.

Xu Zhitong felt a little disappointed. After finishing the sweet song, she said goodbye to her fans and promised that next time she would continue posting stream previews in the fan group.

She also didn’t ignore the messages urging her to post selfies in the fan group. After tussling with the bullet comments for a while, she still agreed.

The livestream ended.

Xu Zhitong felt a little awkward, but she was extremely excited.

Her eyes were bright too. Lin Yang didn’t understand where her excitement was coming from; she only thought Xu Zhitong looked a little too worked up.

Xu Zhitong seemed hesitant. She opened her mouth as if she wanted to say something, then after a moment said, “I’m going to take a shower first.”

“Go ahead,” Lin Yang said.

Sitting in the recliner, Lin Yang squeezed the stuffing in the chair. Only after the bedroom stopped making any sound did she stand up and walk to the desk.

Actually, she hadn’t been very interested in the whole stream.

Because for the long years before, Xu Zhitong in the livestream room had never belonged to her at all, and had never needed her either.

When she’d seen Xu Zhitong tense up about streaming earlier, Lin Yang hadn’t comforted her much. More or less, she had also been thinking, If she really can’t accept streaming, that might not be so bad.

But Xu Zhitong adapted effortlessly.

She had originally said she was nervous and would only stream for 30 minutes, but she ended up streaming for 40 on her own, and when the fans asked, she even stayed until the hour changed before logging off.

That initial awkwardness and tension disappeared quickly in her conversations with the fans.

Xu Zhitong seemed born to do this.

Lin Yang’s feelings were hard to describe. She couldn’t even retrace her own actions; why, seeing Xu Zhitong chatting happily with her fans, had she gone out, logged into her alternate account, and started sending gifts to steal her attention?

And even requested a Cantonese song. She knew Xu Zhitong had never sung Cantonese songs before the amnesia.

Crazy.

Lin Yang sneered at herself inwardly.

Xu Zhitong didn’t even know who “Mian” was, and still chatted so happily with “Mian,” didn’t she? That same slightly coquettish tone toward her could be used on anyone.

For Xu Zhitong, maybe whoever it was didn’t matter.

She wanted happiness, wanted something fun; she wanted companionship, and what she received with a high demand for it, and her way of acting intimate was simply her usual method for getting steady companionship and pleasure.

In the end, her changing accounts and sending gifts hadn’t brought Lin Yang any comfort at all; if anything, it only made her own embarrassment look even worse.

Lin Yang felt anxious.

Her fingers trembled as she tried to stop the endless self-consuming spiral. She opened the livestream replay and, beside it, made a task list.

She needed to handle the private messages that had to be answered. The top hundred donors from today needed to be reminded to thank Xu Zhitong for the gifts; the new fans who’d sent big gifts needed to be added on WeChat.

This break in their contact, followed by reconnecting, had brought in a lot of curious onlookers and a big wave of traffic, which had also added a lot of fans for Xu Zhitong. She could seize the opportunity and have the moderators prepare rewards for fan-made content; maybe they could go viral a few times and spread beyond the usual circle.

Then there was business.

Lin Yang opened the browser, found Xu Zhitong’s email interface, and prepared to check whether any brand collaboration offers had come in over the past two weeks.

Maybe because her fingers still hadn’t stopped shaking unnaturally, she accidentally clicked into the web version of Weibo.

Her hand, poised to close the page, stopped.

Xu Zhitong’s Weibo, set to “only visible to myself.”

It wasn’t possible not to be curious, but first, she had already looked at Xu Zhitong’s Instagram, and guessed the Weibo posts probably weren’t much different; second, the last few times she’d had Xu Zhitong’s phone, it hadn’t been the right moment to look.

Lin Yang hesitated for two seconds, opened incognito mode, kept her expression calm, and opened the profile page.

A garbled username, a black avatar, like a secret diary no one was meant to pry into.

The posts were sparse, with long gaps of many days between them; it was a dumping ground for emotions.

The moment she saw the first one, Lin Yang nearly bit her tongue.

[Annoying… is she really in this city? Fish said we could move to Sheng City together; I heard the climate would be better, and without her, it’d be good for me.]

[Not looking at Moments anymore. It’s torture]

[Actually, this is pretty good now. No contact, no overlap.]

[Tired; don’t feel like talking]

[Hate it. Always having those meaningless dreams]

[But if I could do it over, I wouldn’t want to know her again or do those things.]

[I seem to always be regretting things.]

“……”

The world seemed to go silent all at once.

Lin Yang’s fingers trembled slightly. Suddenly, she felt a little nauseous.

The next second after she made out the last line, she shut off the computer’s power; the screen went dark instantly.

As the screen went black, it felt as if she had lost all her strength in an instant too. She slowly leaned back in the chair, staring blankly at the computer screen, now pitch black.

Reflected in the screen, through the floor lamp’s light, was Lin Yang’s dazed, wretched face; her eyes were wide, the black of them heavy against the obvious white around them.

…What did that mean.

Her mind suddenly became chaotic, yet, in a very clear way, everything was laid out in front of her.

It wasn’t that she had never thought about it.

But sometimes, she did think about it.

Even in her final year of high school, when Xu Zhitong hated her so much; hated her enough that whenever they ran into each other in the hallway, Xu Zhitong would deliberately grab another girl’s arm beside her, speak loudly, and then shoot her a look on purpose.

But that had already been six or seven years ago.

Time always blunts everything. In college, when the class monitor from high school called everyone to add WeChat, Lin Yang pretended nothing was wrong, joined the group, and in the tide of mutual friend requests, added Xu Zhitong on WeChat again; Xu Zhitong accepted.

Lin Yang thought then that maybe Xu Zhitong didn’t hate her that much anymore, maybe Xu Zhitong had forgotten her, maybe Xu Zhitong still had some lingering feelings for her…

Lin Yang often dreamed of everything from that time: the classroom after school, with only the two of them left. Xu Zhitong sat on top of a desk, looking a little uneasy as she leaned down toward her, her eyes so bright, so scorching, her whole body carrying the fearless courage of youth.

Or even earlier, during a volunteer event in winter, when Xu Zhitong came running from such a distance that she seemed to bring an everlasting warmth with her; the tip of her nose was red and adorable, her face flushed too. She panted in short breaths, her voice even trembling a little, and said she wanted to know her school and her name.

Whenever Lin Yang thought of those things, she would feel motivated to keep going with her boring life.

But she had never once imagined that Xu Zhitong would regret it.

Regret knowing her?

Xu Zhitong was such a clear-cut person when it came to love and hate.

It would be better for her to keep hating her than to regret it.

Lin Yang looked at her fingers, which were trembling more and more out of control, and after a while, she slowly covered her eyes, as if completely deflated.

-

When Xu Zhitong came out after her shower, she felt the atmosphere in the living room was a little cold and quiet.

Did the temperature drop?

She pulled her coat tighter around herself and walked out, looking for Lin Yang.

Lin Yang stood by the floor-to-ceiling window in the living room, arms crossed, looking at the night view outside.

Her back looked a little lonely.

Xu Zhitong went closer and called softly, “Little Sheep?”

She was rarely this shy and bashful. Just thinking about her interactions with Lin Yang during the stream tonight made her heart race.

Had she been a little too direct when confessing to Lin Yang?

Did Lin Yang understand what she meant?

But Lin Yang had been the one to request the song for her first, so she’d just given back that sweet song in return.

She had no idea how she had confessed to Lin Yang before the memory loss, or how Lin Yang had agreed. Confessing really was complicated.

Xu Zhitong couldn’t work it out. She leaned in and asked, “What are you doing?”

She also really wanted to hear Lin Yang praise her, so she asked, “How was my livestream tonight? There were a few flaws, but overall, I didn’t slip up, right?”

But when she came around to the front, she found that Lin Yang had no expression at all.

She wasn’t even looking at Xu Zhitong; instead, she was staring blankly out at the high night sky beyond the window. The city lights were dazzling, reflected across her beautiful profile like transparent candy wrapper.

It took Lin Yang quite a while before she finally turned around and called her name.

“Xu Zhitong.”

“Mm?” Xu Zhitong looked at her with a puzzled expression that was innocent and carefree, mixed with expectation she didn’t understand.

Lin Yang was silent for a moment. When she opened her mouth, it was like she was forcing out something far too painful to bear.

“Sorry,” she confessed softly. “Actually, we stopped being best friends a long time ago.”

Author’s note:

Finally got to the synopsis line, and it feels amazing. It doesn’t hurt, really; it’s just a little sore sometimes. Don’t worry about Zhitong’s dog-brain logic, everyone!

TL Note:

Reminder that "kl" refers to Kun Lan (sleepyBlue)