After so many days, the two of them talked again, but for a moment, they had little to say to each other.
In the long silence, Xie Tao could still hear his shallow breathing.
Later, Xie Tao sniffed, finally stopped crying, as if hesitating for a long time, she suddenly asked cautiously, “Can I ask you a question?”
“Mmm.” His voice remained soft, as if involuntarily restraining all hostility, adding a touch of indescribable gentleness.
Xie Tao tightened her grip on the phone next to her ear, bit her lip, and said, “Do you… not like me?”
In fact, during this brief moment, Xie Tao had also wondered if she should really ask him this.
These days, she had already had many guesses in her heart.
As long as she didn’t mention it now, perhaps they could still get along as before, perhaps everything could continue in this ambiguous manner.
But she couldn’t.
There were some things she had to clarify.
And when Wei Yun heard her question, he was first startled, then after a while, he spoke, “Why do you ask?”
He didn’t answer directly, but to Xie Tao, it sounded like he had confirmed something vaguely. She pursed her lips, her eyes slowly reddening.
“On my birthday, were you also drunk?” she took a deep breath.
“No.”
“Then why did you… respond to me?”
But hearing her question, Wei Yun lowered his eyes and fell into a moment of silence.
Why?
Wei Yun couldn’t deny at this moment that the reason he didn’t refuse back then was indeed for another purpose.
It was to find out the mysterious person lurking in the shadows, who was scheming to take his life, it was to find out the connection between this copper pendant and the mysterious light curtain he occasionally glimpsed since childhood… it was to eliminate all unstable factors, but it wasn’t because he liked her.
That’s what he thought at that time.
But he couldn’t speak out the truth at this moment.
Wei Yun couldn’t describe the feelings in his heart at this moment, it was like a long-lost guilt mixed with many unexpectedly unfamiliar emotions, making him feel unsettled in facing her question at this moment.
And his sudden silence, for Xie Tao at this moment, was like a silent answer.
Perhaps she should have noticed it long ago.
He never revealed his specific address, rarely mentioned his own affairs to her, he had always been so mysterious, there was always a misty distance between them, as if it was farther away than a thousand mountains and ten thousand rivers.
Xie Tao thought, perhaps even the drunken words she blurted out that night were wrong.
They were originally two people who had never met, even though he had helped her step by step to reclaim justice from those campus violence perpetrators when she was most helpless and confused; even though he always comforted her in his own way when she was most upset; even though in every lonely day in the southern city, he made her feel a bit more secure in this city she once desperately wanted to escape.
Like a dim yellow street lamp that remains silent, he is always reticent, always indifferent, but the faintly scattered light still shines warmly on her.
Since the moment she was thoroughly disappointed in her mother, Xie Tao has come to the conclusion in this world that she is all alone.
No reliance, no warmth. On New Year’s Eve that year, she walked out of the Zheng family and sat on a snow-dusted bench all night long.
From that day on, she was truly all alone.
But even as time passes and seasons change, how could one truly get used to loneliness?
So when she encounters warmth, she instinctively wants to grasp onto it.
Xie Tao isn’t clear about her feelings towards Wei Yun, but from the moment she became increasingly curious about him, everything became unclear.
And the quiet excitement of that night was real.
That’s enough.
However, now she realizes that he might not harbor the same feelings as her.
“I’m serious,” Xie Tao, tears in her eyes, looked out at the night sky through the window, her expression somewhat elusive. After a while, she softly said, “But it seems like you’re not.”
The girl’s delicate voice trembled slightly, as if unable to contain a hint of tears.
At that moment, Wei Yun heard her sniffle and then say, “If you really haven’t liked me, then… forget what I said that day.”
Saying such words took a great deal of courage for Xie Tao.
She knew what consequences her actions might bring, but she had to do it.
There was no better choice.
Xie Tao told herself this in her heart.
Those mysterious deliveries, his different way of speaking compared to hers, even his ignorance of many things in modern society, these things have been circulating in her mind many times.
He seemed so mysterious that she began to have a momentary retreat in her heart.
So why not just start over?
Perhaps for him, this would be the best thing.
After all, he never took anything seriously.
“And then?” Wei Yun listened silently to her words until now, only then speaking.
His voice remained cold and flat throughout, without any ripples. Xie Tao couldn’t feel his emotional fluctuations through the phone.
Perhaps he didn’t have any changes at all.
“And then?” Xie Tao was stunned for a moment, reacting for a while as if she didn’t understand the meaning of his words.
After a while, she finally spoke, “And then what?”
She wiped away the tears from her face, sounding a bit sulky, “I’m going to block you!”
“I won’t talk to you anymore…”
“You are naturally very irritating when you speak, I don’t want to put up with it anymore!”
“And your bag of gold, who wants your stuff?”
“Don’t think you’re so great. I think I must have been drunk at the time… You didn’t take it to heart, and I didn’t either.”
“Anyway,”
She rambled on and on, and finally, she moved her lips, her eyes welling up with tears again, she said, “Just pretend I never said those words…”
Listening to the girl’s slightly choked voice, hearing her say so many things that “belittled” him, his eyebrows and eyes, inexplicably, became gentler and gentler.
Like ice and snow that never melts, finally showing some signs of melting.
When he heard what she said, the heart in his chest felt as if it had been stung.
Had he never been moved?
Wei Yun thought that he should have never been moved.
But at this moment, the indescribable emotions inside him kept him from being calm.
He thought he was sober enough, thought that everything was under his control, but in fact, maybe from the moment he felt compassion for this little girl, everything changed.
Entirely different from the noble ladies of the entire capital, Wei Yun had never met a girl like her before.
Talkative, meddlesome, without modesty, not observing social norms, and also gluttonous.
But at the same time, she was also a girl who, for the sake of friends, dared to give everything without asking for anything in return.
When she had a dispute with someone and almost lost her life, Wei Yun remembered asking her, “Are you afraid?”
She just answered, “I haven’t thought that much.”
In his interactions with her, Wei Yun was very aware that she was actually a very timid girl, always appearing meek and easily bullied to others.
But it was precisely her who showed Wei Yun her unexpectedly courageous side.
Wei Yun didn’t know the rules of her world, which were different from his, but he sensed that in her world, women weren’t as restricted.
When he realized she seemed to be living a hard life, he could tell from her words the efforts she made to survive.
Wei Yun had also been displaced for a decade, accustomed to the world’s coldness and ugliness, and knew well how difficult it was to live in this world.
Like him, she was all alone.
Wei Yun had almost never heard her mention her family.
She depended on no one and refused to accept too much charity, more resilient than he had imagined.
Thus, he didn’t know when it started, but he gradually became tolerant of her talkativeness, even going so far as to have Qi Mingxu’s cook come to the Imperial Advisor’s house for her temporary cravings.
This was very unlike him.
Even though he was aware of it, he always deliberately avoided it.
After losing contact with her these days, he couldn’t help but think a lot.
Some things couldn’t be as he wished, no matter how much he wanted them to be.
But like a traveler who had walked too long in the endless night, there was a moment when he began to yearn for the daylight and the color of the water.
Thus, the compassion he felt in a moment, without knowing when, started to change.
“But I heard it.”
His voice fell into the starry sky, clearly reaching her ears.
In such a pitch-black night, amidst the endless silence, this young master, who always seemed calm and untroubled, would blurt out because of a moment’s impulse.
The next moment, he stood frozen in front of the desk, facing the many lights, the night wind coming through the window, his eyes lowered, his eyelashes like crow feathers trembled.
His knuckles suddenly tightened, and he broke the brush in his hand in an instant. When it landed on the desk, it splashed the thick ink from the inkstone, staining the paper on the desk with specks of ink.
“How can words spoken be taken back so easily?”
When his cool voice reached Xie Tao’s ears, she was holding her phone, completely stunned.
“Xie Tao.”
In the dimly lit room, she sat at the desk in front of the glass window, hearing him call her name so clearly.
She just sat there.
In that instant, her breath caught, and her heart suddenly fluttered.
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