It Wasn’t for Kissing After All

Xu Zhitong clutched her phone and could hardly believe it.

Eight years had passed, and her best friend was...

So stunning!!!

Xu Zhitong still had the heart of a seventeen-year-old girl; suddenly faced with the twenty-five-year-old Lin Yang, her eyes could barely keep up.

That waist looked like one hand could wrap around it. The fishtail skirt emphasized her waist and hips, and when she turned, the soft curve of her waistline became even more striking.

She was wearing light makeup, and the glittering jewelry around her beautiful collarbones made her look exquisite, like the kind of polished professional woman Xu Zhitong had once imagined she might become in the future.

Up close, there was a faint white tea fragrance in the air.

The Lin Yang Xu Zhitong was used to seeing was in oversized school uniforms, bare-faced, her back slim and straight beneath the fabric, with the occasional glimpse of a pale wrist like a section of lotus root. An outfit that hugged the body like this was simply unheard of.

When she’d looked at the photos in the group chat, Xu Zhitong had thought that when Lin Yang got here, she would have to grab her by the waist and see if she was really that skinny, then interrogate her properly and make her eat obediently.

But face to face, the real person was far more overwhelming than a photo. Xu Zhitong’s face felt hot just looking at her; even thinking about her waist seemed like a kind of offense.

Xu Zhitong was rarely this shy. Under Lin Yang’s unreadable gaze, she looked away and, very embarrassingly, didn’t quite dare meet her eyes again.

Touching the bandage on her head, Xu Zhitong said softly, “I got dizzy from staring at my phone earlier, so I went to find the doctor. When I came back, I happened to see you at the door.”

Then she reached for the fruit basket in Lin Yang’s hands. “And you even brought fruit... Come in.”

When her fingers accidentally brushed Lin Yang’s, Xu Zhitong went blank. Lin Yang had even painted her nails with glittering, slender extensions set with diamonds; they were so beautiful, like a work of art...

Xu Zhitong’s hands itched. Without any restraint at all, she touched them once, and her fingertips felt the same smooth delicacy.

“...” Lin Yang glanced at the back of her own hand, not sure if that sensation had been her imagination.

After they went inside, Xu Zhitong carefully tucked herself into the hospital bed and resisted the urge to lean in and sniff the finger that had just touched Lin Yang.

Lin Yang paused, smoothed her skirt, and sat down beside the bed a little stiffly. Her hands didn’t know where to go, so she simply took out an apple and began peeling it slowly.

She knew Xu Zhitong was watching her. That gaze was too bright, too strange. After holding it in for a while, she still asked, “What did the doctor say?”

Xu Zhitong said, “Oh, oh, the doctor told me to look at my phone less, especially pages with a lot of text. Apparently the mild concussion is still affecting me.”

As soon as she finished speaking, she immediately took her phone out of her pocket and set it on the bedside table, very obedient.

All those bad habits from middle school were still in her head. She had forgotten that she’d just woken up after being unconscious for several days from a concussion, and after staring at a novel packed with tiny text for more than ten minutes, she’d gotten so absorbed that only then did she realize she was starting to feel nauseous. She’d hurried off to ask the doctor if she was about to pass out again.

—Of course, the fact that she had been dizzy and nauseous while walking all the way to the doctor’s office was also hard to assess.

Lin Yang narrowed her eyes slightly. “...A concussion?”

Xu Zhitong lowered her head to show her. “Mm-hm. Look, I’ve even still got a bandage wrapped around my head.”

The conversation ended there. Lin Yang fell silent, and no one knew what she was thinking.

Xu Zhitong kept staring at her, full of curiosity. “How’s work been lately?”

From the moments she’d seen in the photo album and on her Moments feed, she couldn’t figure out what Lin Yang did at all. The way she dressed was so polished and mature; she had definitely started working by now.

Unlike her twenty-five-year-old self, with this blue hair, she looked like someone who didn’t have a serious job at all.

Lin Yang said, “I just opened a coffee shop.”

Wow.

Wasn’t that their dream back in school? Opening a coffee shop and keeping flowers in it.

Xu Zhitong’s eyes lit up instantly. “Where is it? Wow, what does it look like? Do you have pictures for me to see?”

Lin Yang: “...”

She looked at Xu Zhitong strangely, then glanced around the room.

No one else. No hidden cameras.

Lin Yang said, “Wait a moment.”

She freed one hand, opened her phone, and found the pictures for Xu Zhitong to see.

Sure enough, it was almost exactly the layout they had imagined in high school, the plan they’d dreamed up while chatting on the sports field during evening self-study.

Xu Zhitong was delighted, and asked, “Then do you know what I’ve been doing lately?”

Her bank balance now had eight digits, but her style was so aimless, and there was hardly any work chat in WeChat. Xu Zhitong had been baffled.

“...” Lin Yang said, “Aren’t you still a singing streamer on Yinfu?”

Xu Zhitong remembered the fan groups and moderator chats in WeChat and finally understood. So those were her fan groups and management!

The older version of herself was amazing.

She had taken something she was good at—singing—and turned it into a job that made money, while her good best friend was also fulfilling the wish they’d had as children. Everything was so happy.

Xu Zhitong was so happy that she said sincerely, “Yangbao, this is great. After we grew up, our relationship stayed this good.”

Maybe her brain really had been damaged. Looking at Lin Yang’s face, she actually had the urge to cry from joy.

Sniffling, Xu Zhitong lowered her head secretly.

So she didn’t see that Lin Yang, sitting beside the bed and peeling fruit, had flinched at her words and cut a small wound into her thumb with the knife.

Blood welled up and stained the apple.

Lin Yang looked at that streak of red, lowered her lashes, and slowly bent her head to take a bite of the apple flesh.

The fruit basket she’d chosen was the most expensive one. The apples were full of juice. Lin Yang chewed slowly, her gaze lowered toward the bedsheets, thinking that maybe she shouldn’t have come.

A dense, prickling ache and humiliation rose in her chest.

Had Xu Zhitong found out?

Had she discovered her lurking, her constant monitoring, and deliberately tricked her into coming here, just to stab her a few times and tell her: I know what you’ve been doing.

Maybe this was revenge.

Revenge for her rejection of Xu Zhitong; after seven or eight years and just two or three WeChat messages plus a selfie, Xu Zhitong had come rushing over to “visit her in the hospital.”

Lin Yang’s fingers trembled uncontrollably. She could barely keep hold of that cold and distant facade.

Xu Zhitong blushed for a bit. When Lin Yang didn’t react, she grew unhappy instead.

Half seriously, half playfully, she began to act pitiful and pour out her heart. “Right now, I only have you keeping me company. You have no idea, I woke up and it was eight years later, I didn’t know anything, I was about to freak out, sob sob sob...”

What?

Lin Yang caught the key words that sounded unusual and looked up at her.

Xu Zhitong was still putting on a crying face with her eyes tilted upward toward Lin Yang. When their eyes met, she subconsciously wanted to dodge, but then noticed the water-bright softness of Lin Yang’s lips after that bite of apple.

Her fake crying suddenly stopped.

“...”

Her best friend’s mouth looked soft, moist, and tender.

It looked so soft, so red.

For some reason, Xu Zhitong’s heart itched.

No, no—why...

Why did she want to kiss her best friend’s mouth?!

The moment she became aware of that desire, Xu Zhitong was struck by immense shock.

Lin Yang seemed unaware of her inner turmoil. She leaned forward a little, brows furrowed, and looked directly into Xu Zhitong’s clear eyes.

“What did you say? Just now,” Lin Yang said carefully, “you woke up and it was eight years later?”

“Huh? Oh...” Xu Zhitong barely managed to pull herself back into the present, and only then remembered that she had forgotten to tell her best friend that the person she was now was the seventeen-year-old version of herself.

Xu Zhitong had loved reading novels since middle school and had read this kind of amnesia setup before. She accepted it with startling speed.

She was only afraid Lin Yang wouldn’t be able to accept it.

Honestly, she said, “Yeah. The doctor said I hit my head. Besides the mild concussion, I also have temporary amnesia. I’ve lost eight years of memory, so now I only remember things from when I was seventeen. More specifically, I only remember up to the National Day holiday in the second year of high school. The night before, we’d agreed to get spicy hotpot behind the school gate the next day.”

Lin Yang: “...Will it come back?”

Xu Zhitong didn’t notice how strange that question sounded, and obediently answered, “It will, it will.”

Lin Yang fell silent again.

The atmosphere grew a little stiff. Xu Zhitong felt uneasy. Did the twenty-five-year-old Lin Yang dislike the seventeen-year-old version of herself? Did she have nothing to say to her?

Carefully, she peeked at Lin Yang’s expression. Even when they were in school, Lin Yang had rarely shown emotion on her face; after growing up, she had only become more inscrutable. At Xu Zhitong’s current level, she couldn’t make out what she was thinking at all.

When she got anxious, Xu Zhitong asked, “Why aren’t you talking to me?”

Lin Yang pressed her lips together. “No, I was just thinking...”

Xu Zhitong looked at her eagerly. “Thinking about what?”

Lin Yang said, “...You need to tell your fans first. With your face like this, and not having streamed for several days, plus not asking the moderators to announce a leave of absence, they should be very worried.”

Xu Zhitong nodded in understanding. “Oh, oh. Then, then can you help me ask for leave? I don’t even know which app I was streaming on before, and I’m still a little dizzy.”

She handed over her phone trustingly.

Lin Yang drew in a light breath, took the phone, hesitated for a moment, then entered a four-digit number.

It unlocked smoothly.

Her movements were so natural that Xu Zhitong, sitting right next to her, didn’t notice any uncertainty about the passcode.

Xu Zhitong leaned in, watching from a not-too-close distance as Lin Yang opened an app.

She didn’t seem very familiar with it. She clicked into private messages by mistake and looked through a few lines before switching to the homepage, where she edited the profile and added a notice saying she was resting for a few days due to illness.

Then she opened WeChat, scrolled up and down the message list—probably looking for the moderator group—before going inside and sending a message: I’m not feeling too well; taking a few days off. Please help notify all the fan groups.

After sending it, Lin Yang looked up at Xu Zhitong and handed the phone back.

Xu Zhitong asked her to put it on the bedside table. “That’s it? So fast.”

Lin Yang said, “Mm. But writing it that way, the fans may still worry. After all, the reason is illness. Once you’re more familiar with the situation in a few days, open a voice room and chat with them for a bit to reassure them.”

Xu Zhitong asked, “What’s a voice room?”

Lin Yang said, “A livestream without the camera on.”

Xu Zhitong immediately accepted that explanation. She felt that Lin Yang looked more reliable now than she had back in school, when she used to arrange her homework every day and help her choose extra study materials.

But along with that trust came a little shame. She had actually developed improper, ambiguous thoughts about her best friend. Had her brain been damaged so badly that even her nerves were miswired?

Xu Zhitong pitifully said, “Then you’ll stay with me, right? I don’t know anything.”

Lin Yang took another light breath and said, “Mm.”

That was good.

Xu Zhitong studied Lin Yang’s expression and sensitively noticed that her mood was much better than when she’d first arrived, so she became bolder. She touched the back of Lin Yang’s hand, her fingers misbehaving as they traced the diamonds on her nails.

“Then tell me in detail what I’ve been doing since I graduated from high school, okay?”

She acted spoiled. “Yangbao, you’re the best.”

A prickling itch spread over Lin Yang’s hand, then numbed all the way into her limbs, her whole body.

She endured it and said, “Your gaokao score was pretty good. For undergrad, you chose Jiangshi University. There wasn’t much to say about your years in school... As for how you became a streamer, it started when one of your electives in junior year asked you to post a short video on Yinfu. You uploaded a video of yourself singing while playing guitar, and it unexpectedly went viral. After graduation, you started doing full-time social media livestreaming. You have more than six hundred thousand followers now.”

Xu Zhitong blinked. “That’s it?”

Lin Yang: “Mm.”

Xu Zhitong: “What about you?”

Lin Yang said, “I went abroad for my master’s and doctorate. I only came back to China a year ago.”

Xu Zhitong let out a disappointed little ah. “Then we were long-distance, huh.”

Lin Yang lowered her lashes and smiled. “It didn’t affect anything.”

Whether it was long-distance or not, they weren’t in contact anyway.

Xu Zhitong said, “Of course. I can tell with my toes that we must have been calling each other every day.”

Lin Yang probably understood how Xu Zhitong had come to that conclusion. At seventeen, she and Xu Zhitong were still the best, purest kind of best friends.

No kissing, no confession, no hurtful words, no falling out.

Seventeen-year-old Xu Zhitong was the kind of person who never remembered anything. After saying that, she didn’t care anymore and started instructing Lin Yang, “Yangbao, project my phone screen onto the TV. I don’t know a lot of things right now, so you can teach me while you’re at it.”

Lin Yang picked up Xu Zhitong’s phone again.

She walked to the television to set it up. The TV faced the hospital bed, so Lin Yang was right in front of Xu Zhitong with her back to her.

Xu Zhitong couldn’t help looking at her back.

Her long, tea-colored hair fell slightly forward as she lowered her head, revealing a pale shoulder and the slightly raised line of the back of her neck.

That fishtail skirt of silky fabric even had a long bow tied at the back of the waist, the ribbon hanging down to the hem. It brushed against her slim calves, which looked like a crescent moon, swaying lightly.

Back in school, Lin Yang had naturally been beautiful too. She’d won the school beauty vote on the No. 1 Middle School confession wall by a landslide.

But it was different. The sixteen- or seventeen-year-old Lin Yang was so beautiful that Xu Zhitong had wanted to get close to her from the very beginning, to take the initiative and become her best friend, to understand everything about her, care about her life, eat with her, listen to music with her, listen to her, and be lifelong friends who would always stay together.

And Xu Zhitong absolutely refused to admit that her twenty-five-year-old amnesiac self, looking at the beautiful Lin Yang, was thinking about kissing her lips, smelling her hair, lightly kissing her shoulder, touching her—best of all, undoing the bow at the back of her waist...

Xu Zhitong leaned back abruptly, disbelieving.

Why was she really, over and over again, having these kinds of thoughts about her best friend?

Author’s Note:

Merry Christmas [hug]