Chapter 55:
I Did Not Run Away!
“KILL YOU?” Xie Qingcheng gritted out each word through his teeth. “Aren’t you the clever one. Is that why you ran away?”
He Yu hadn’t expected him to say something like that. A gash immediately appeared in the easy nonchalance and grim fierceness he had only just cobbled together, and it revealed a youth’s mortification underneath. The boy’s smile faded in an instant and his face paled slightly.
“I didn’t run away!”
“You didn’t run away?”
“That wasn’t running away. I just… I…”
“You just?” Xie Qingcheng narrowed his eyes, closing in on He Yu with each step.
He Yu didn’t know how to respond.
“You just woke up early, pulled up your pants, and, upon seeing that the weather outside was nice and you were feeling fine and dandy, decided you might as well go for a healthy, relaxing morning jog? Because you didn’t want to be disturbed by the fiasco from yesterday, you blocked my fucking phone number and WeChat, and then you thought, ‘All is well with the world,’ as you walked straight out of the room, so cheerful that you even forgot to take care of the fucking bill you ran up? Is that it?!”
He Yu’s expression turned even uglier, as though he’d been poisoned.
“You’re truly a piece of shit, He Yu. You’re a piece of shit who only knows how to run away after you’ve done something wrong.”
He Yu’s face went ashen, his embarrassment and anger mixed with some indignation and even a bit of humiliation. “I said I didn’t run away! I came back and paid the bill right after I got your call, didn’t I?!”
Xie Qingcheng lost his temper too. “Have you no shame? You think I wanted you to pay the bill? Listen, if it weren’t for…I’d never want to see you again for the rest of my life!”
His Fatherliness wasn’t lying. If he had 1.68 million yuan on his card, then he really would have settled the bill himself and never would have bothered with calling that bastard He Yu back here to begin with. He was a man too! As if he wanted He Yu to pay for the room!
He Yu glared back at him through this torrent of verbal abuse with a stricken look on his face.
Even though they both subconsciously kept their voices down, it was impossible to conceal the hostile atmosphere crackling between them. When the young lady who had just taken care of their bill stole a glance in their direction from the reception desk across the lobby, she really couldn’t help but roll her eyes at Xie Qingcheng this time.
Fucking hell. This grown-ass man spent 1.68 million yuan of the young master’s money in a single night and was still giving him a hard time? Could he possibly be any more shameless?!
Their confrontation dragged on for a long while, until He Yu reined back his anger and made a pointed decision to stop talking to Xie Qingcheng about this. Steadying his breathing once again, he forced himself to calm down.
“So, what do you want to do about it now?” he said contemptuously. “Since I’ve already come back here, why not just ask the front desk for a knife and kill me outright?” He Yu’s voice was laced with vicious sarcasm as he stared at Xie Qingcheng.
“Kill you?” Xie Qingcheng laughed bitterly. “You’re too naive. I want to take a fucking knife and dissect you alive, piece by piece!”
He Yu smiled as if he had been expecting this, but his eyes still reddened and his face still paled. “All right…all right. That’s fine. Whatever you say, it’s all fine, Xie Qingcheng. Whether you want me to undergo death by a thousand cuts or whip my corpse to shreds, I don’t care. It doesn’t actually matter to me whether I die or not. Dead or alive, I’m just garbage that no one gives a shit about anyway.” It was difficult to tell whether the corners of He Yu’s mouth were curving out of ridicule or self-hatred. “Did you know…in the past, I believed all those lies you told me. I was such a damn idiot, trying so hard for so long. And now, my faith has crumbled overnight, all thanks to you. In fact, I wish Lu Yuzhu’s aim had been a little better when she fired that gun. I wouldn’t be so disgusted now if I’d just kicked the bucket right then.”
His dark eyes moved slowly and landed on Xie Qingcheng. There was a note of pain suppressed within his voice when he said, “You wish the same thing, don’t you? It would’ve been cleaner if I’d died back then—you wouldn’t be in such an awful situation now either.”
Xie Qingcheng jabbed a ferocious finger at He Yu with a savage, snarling force, but before he could say anything, he found his heart unexpectedly rattled at He Yu’s mention of Lu Yuzhu.
He didn’t know if He Yu had said it on purpose, but the matter with Lu Yuzhu in the archives was precisely why Xie Qingcheng felt he owed He Yu a debt.
A myriad of hateful emotions welled up in Xie Qingcheng’s heart, but his ears seemed to echo with the sound of that gunshot. The blood that had spilled from He Yu’s shoulder had been so red, searing its crimson color painfully into his retinas.
In the present moment, the crack of that gunshot transformed into a vine that wrapped around Xie Qingcheng’s rage and reined it in, stopping him from ruthlessly slapping He Yu across the face.
“He Yu,” Xie Qingcheng finally spat, gritting out each syllable with deliberate emphasis. Between the discomfort in his body and the torment of his mind, this pointless bickering with He Yu had left his voice incredibly hoarse—weak, yet icy. “You want to hash this out with me today, do you? Fine. All right. Then listen up. Even if I didn’t do everything right, even if I didn’t want to take the risk and continue being a doctor, even if I let down my teachers and was disdained, cast aside, and looked down upon by my former colleagues…I didn’t deserve to be tortured like this by you. I may not have handled everything perfectly, and I may have made you resent me, but when I was treating you, I never did anything that I truly need to apologize for.”
He Yu didn’t respond.
“Be reasonable,” Xie Qingcheng continued. “What you did—don’t you find it despicable?” He took a deep breath. Battling his intense headache and dizziness, he murmured in a voice that sounded slightly wet, “Think about it.”
If their earlier argument had only made He Yu feel embarrassed…then these words truly stabbed him where his scars hurt the most.
He hadn’t planned on talking to Xie Qingcheng any more than absolutely necessary. Nor had he wanted to bring up the matter involving Xie Xue. But suddenly, he couldn’t hold back anymore. Under the watchful gazes of numerous pairs of eyes, he pulled Xie Qingcheng into the bathroom and locked the door with a click.
“What do you want me to think about, huh? Xie Qingcheng, what do you want me to think about?! Do you still think that I don’t know anything?” He Yu’s emotions were becoming frenzied. “Let me tell you, I know everything now! I understand everything! Delusional disorder, self-preservation, nihilism—all those things I remember Xie Xue doing, they were all just figments of my imagination I was using to numb myself to the fact that they were things I could never have. I understand it all!”
Xie Qingcheng’s face paled, making him look even more like a wandering soul.
“I know everything…” He Yu’s eyes were unhinged. Although his voice was very soft, every word seemed to slice into Xie Qingcheng’s face like a knife. “Doctor Xie, you knew everything too, but you didn’t say a word. You just stood by as I made a fool of myself because you were worried that I would become too attached to her, that I wouldn’t be able to accept the truth—so you stalled and didn’t tell me anything, reminding her to stay away from me the whole time.”
He Yu went on. “For seven years, even my old man knew that the only friend I relied on was nothing but a figment of my imagination. I was the only one who didn’t know! I only dug myself deeper! Did you have fun watching this farce play out? Was it funny, Xie Qingcheng? Don’t you think you were being incredibly cruel and arrogant, never once taking my feelings seriously? What exactly am I in your eyes? A partially imagined person—even if I only wanted a tiny bit of comfort, I still had to rely on a partially imagined person! There’s never been anyone who truly loved or cared about me. Even on my birthday, I could only spend it by myself…and rely on a delusion to give me a birthday wish and a piece of cake.”