Xie Qingcheng looked down and took the tulle. The movement made his lab coat flutter lightly in the breeze, like the cast-off feathers of a crane that had transformed into a demonic spirit. “Thank you.”
At that moment, He Yu suddenly caught a whiff of a faint medicinal smell coming from his cuffs.
Research had shown that the feelings between people were largely dictated by the scents on each other’s bodies. That was to say, if someone gave off a scent that you liked, then it would be easier for you to fall in love at first sight. On the other hand, if their smell made you annoyed or afraid, then you probably wouldn’t have a very promising future together.
He Yu didn’t like Xie Qingcheng’s scent.
It was ice-cold and unyielding—like the countless bitter pills he’d swallowed ever since he was a child, like the alcohol and iodine solution they would wipe on his arm before injections; like pale, white, ice-cold hospital rooms, devoid of human company and suffused with the odor of disinfectant.
He was almost instinctively terrified of this kind of smell. Subconsciously, he frowned.
But the housekeeper grabbed his shoulder and smiled as he introduced him to that doctor big brother who made him feel unwell all over. “Doctor Xie, this is our boss’s young master.”
Just when he was about to look away, Xie Qingcheng paused and fixed his dark eyes on He Yu. “…So, it’s you.”
The look in his eyes irrationally reminded He Yu of a surgical knife. It was abnormally incisive, giving He Yu the strange feeling that he was going to cut open his heart and put it under a microscope.
“Nice to meet you,” the young doctor said. “I’ll probably be the one treating your illness in the future.”
He Yu was afraid of doctors. He deeply disliked even gentle female doctors, to say nothing of this terrifying apparition emanating stern iciness from head to toe. The eight-year-old boy immediately felt unwell. He forced a smile, then turned around and left.
His mother, Lü Zhishu, happened to see this scene from the balcony. When she finished work that night, she called her son into the study. There was a cup of hot cocoa at just the right temperature on the tea table covered in emerald-green velvet. She pushed the cocoa over to He Yu.
“That Doctor Xie, you met him today?”
“I did.” He Yu’s family upbringing was strict. He was always very prim and proper to his mother, and a distance was maintained between them.
Lü Zhishu was considerably disappointed in this abnormal son. At that point in time, she had already birthed a second child. Although the younger boy wasn’t as clever as the elder, he was at the very least cute, sweet, and healthy, so she focused all her attention on him. When she talked to He Yu, she had nearly no patience. “His name is Xie Qingcheng. He’ll be your personal physician from now on, and he’ll come to our house every week to examine you. You must cooperate with him, and if you ever feel unwell, you can call him over at any time.”
“Mm.”
The composure of the eight-year-old boy in front of her always made Lü Zhishu feel a little scared, a feeling she tried to dispel with a sigh and a bit of teasing. “He Yu, we’ve signed a slave contract with Doctor Xie. If he can’t cure your condition, he’ll end up as a long-term laborer for us. He’ll never get paid or be able to take any days off. He won’t even be able to find a wife and get married. Do you know what this means?”
“Not really.”
“It means, if you don’t cooperate, you’ll lower the efficacy of his treatment, keep him from regaining his freedom, and leave him unable to eventually find a wife. Then, you’ll have to take responsibility for him and support him for life.”
Even though he was mature for his age, He Yu was still only eight—young and gullible—and was thus horrified. He looked up at once. “Can I cancel his contract?”
“No.” On her flights the past few days, Lü Zhishu had obsessively watched Republican-era dramas about torturous love and family infighting. With a fleeting thought, she added something even more cutting. “Also, he might want you to take responsibility by becoming his wife. Look at how pretty you are—you’d make a decent foster bride.”9
Back then, He Yu had no interest whatsoever in love, nor did he have any desire to learn more, so he didn’t even know marriage was restricted to heterosexual couples in this region. At Lü Zhishu’s words, his psychological trauma deepened; there was even a period when Xie Qingcheng’s silhouette would appear in his nightmares.
“No, I don’t like you… I don’t want to marry you…!”
These nightmares weren’t dispelled until six months later, when He Jiwei heard the story and roundly cursed out his own wife. “What the hell did you tell our son?”
Then he cursed out He Yu. “How’d you fall for this kind of joke? Where has your usual intelligence gone? You’re a man, Xie Qingcheng is also a man—what do you mean you need to marry him and be responsible for him? Do you have rocks for brains?”
He Yu felt very dispirited.
Over the course of the past half a year, at the thought of how he’d end up as that ice-cold doctor’s foster bride if he didn’t cooperate and let Doctor Xie cure him of his psychological condition, all he could do was constantly pretend to be stupid and foolish in front of the doctor. He hoped to leave a very negative impression on this man, so that even if matters got to that point in the future, Doctor Xie would definitely never develop any untoward interest in himself.
However, he didn’t expect that after playing the fool in front of Xie Qingcheng for six months straight, his dad would tell him, “Your mom was teasing you.”
If not for He Yu’s strong self-restraint, he might have already blurted out a “Fuck you!” Unfortunately, he was monitored too closely. Forget about curse words—at age eight, even the word “bastard” had yet to enter his childhood vocabulary.
But, in any case, through those six months of diligent effort, persevering hard to embarrass himself before Xie Qingcheng, He Yu had more or less managed an extraordinary feat: no matter how hard he strove, in the following six or seven years…
No, it was longer than that. Even after he parted ways with Xie Qingcheng at age fourteen, even today, to Xie Qingcheng, He Yu was still a massive, three-dimensional, living and breathing dumbfuck with a capital D.
And in this moment, the hideous bowl of fried rice in his hands was the strongest evidence of the fact that, in Xie Qingcheng’s eyes, after four whole years, he was still the ultimate dumbfuck who couldn’t even make fried rice properly.
He put down the offending dish and handed the apron to the head of the Xie family, the elder brother who was dressed immaculately in a pressed suit and leather shoes. He Yu appeared calm and collected, but he was a little dejected. That was a miscalculation, he thought to himself. He shouldn’t have personally done the cooking to begin with. Wasn’t this just giving Xie Qingcheng free entertainment?