“What, you’re still not satisfied?” Yan Zihan slapped the table. “This is a dare with a seventy percent rejection rate! Who are you looking down on? Besides, we want to hear the truth. You’re the one refusing to tell us.”
“Brother Yan’s pheromones smell like tangerines. Whether they’re ripe or not depends on his mood.” Luo Zhiyu knew him far too well. “Do you think I don’t know him?”
When Xiao Yan was in a bad mood, he smelled like green-skinned tangerines. When he was in a good mood, he smelled like yellow-skinned ones. Luo Zhiyu had experienced both varieties.
Luo Zhiyu was practically screaming hints at them. For instance, Xiao Yan’s hand was still firmly locked around his waist.
“Fair enough.” Someone found a reasonable explanation for his answer. “You two have fought so many times, and your pheromones have battled it out plenty, too. You must know each other’s scents pretty well by now.”
“No wonder you don’t care.” Yan Zihan nodded along. “Wait, no. I just remembered your pheromone compatibility is practically zero. Everything you do together is supposed to be completely innocent. How about we pick someone else?”
Luo Zhiyu struggled twice, desperate to stand up and prove that there was nothing innocent about them.
“Sit still. Stop moving around.” Xiao Yan lightly tapped the back of his hand. His voice, falling beside Luo Zhiyu’s ear, sounded a little huskier than usual. “Didn’t I tell you before? When you’re sitting on my lap, don’t move around.”
Luo Zhiyu stopped moving.
“I don’t think you did…”
He had probably already completed the biggest dare of the night.
Meanwhile, Yan Zihan was still hosting the dare, and the finger pointing at Xiao Yan shifted to Fan Yue, who was sitting beside him.
“Let’s pick someone else.”
“Me?” Fan Yue, who had been enjoying the show, jumped straight off the sofa in fright. He didn’t even need to turn around to know that his deskmate had just shot him a vicious glare. A chill immediately ran down his spine. “I-I-I have a stomachache. I’m going to the bathroom! Save some beer for me!”
Fan Yue made his escape under the pretense of needing to pee.
Xiao Yan kept Luo Zhiyu’s hand clasped in his own and never let go for a single moment.
No one heard Luo Zhiyu’s truth. No one saw his dare. And he never got another chance to draw the little heart on the three of hearts. Furious, he went online and posted a question.
[Question]: Do all of you trust pheromones this much when you’re dating?
Best Answer: Not absolutely, but if your pheromone compatibility is really high, it feels amazing. You know what I mean.
Other Answer 1: Not necessarily. My ex and I had 89% compatibility, and we still got divorced. Pheromones alone aren’t enough.
Other Answer 2: Exactly. Are you choosing a person or choosing their pheromones?
Other Answer 3: Just don’t go below 33%. It doesn’t make that much difference.
“What are you looking at? What kind of bizarre question are you asking?” Xiao Yan pried Luo Zhiyu’s fingers apart one by one and snatched his phone away. “And why is there even a best answer…”
Xiao Yan: “…”
“Got it.” Xiao Yan nodded solemnly. “I haven’t been trying hard enough. I can make you feel really…”
Luo Zhiyu slapped the back of Xiao Yan’s hand.
“Give it a rest.”
If Xiao Yan wasn’t trying hard enough, then who was? All that affection he had been accumulating lately certainly hadn’t gone to waste.
“Brother,” Luo Zhiyu said softly, “happy eighteenth birthday. I’ll catch up with you as soon as I can.”
It was Xiao Yan’s birthday, and plenty of people had been dragging him around to drink. Luo Zhiyu returned to the sofa and took lots of pictures of everyone. When they left the KTV, it was exactly nine in the evening. Since nobody was staying at school that weekend, they could all take taxis straight home.
Fan Yue had managed to get himself thoroughly drunk. He clung to Tang Yuan’s leg and cried, insisting that he knew too many secrets and that one day he would make everyone pay.
“Fuck, get away from me.” Tang Yuan tugged at his trouser leg. “My boyfriend bought me these pants.”
“Luo Zhiyu, can you take Xiao Yan home?” Among the crowd of people who were all half-drunk or barely conscious, Luo Zhiyu was the only sober one. Zhang Shu assigned him the task. “You two live together anyway.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. We don’t live together, we just live close by. I guarantee he won’t spend the night wandering the streets.”
With half of Xiao Yan’s body leaning against his shoulder, Luo Zhiyu watched the group of drunkards disappear with a melancholy sigh. Only then did he turn to Xiao Yan.
“Stand up straight. If you keep pretending to be drunk, I’ll leave you here.”
“Is that how you’re supposed to treat your boyfriend?” Xiao Yan asked lazily. “I think I might actually be a little drunk.”
He was at least a little drunk. As soon as the others had left, his pheromones began surging toward Luo Zhiyu with particular ferocity, as though they couldn’t wait to reaffirm their claim over him.
When sober, Xiao Yan’s sense of guilt kept his alpha possessiveness in check. But with even the slightest hint of drunkenness, his pheromones exposed his true intentions first.
Xiao Yan wrapped both arms around Luo Zhiyu’s neck from behind and rested his head on his shoulder. The person celebrating his eighteenth birthday wanted a few privileges that he didn’t normally get.
Luo Zhiyu knew perfectly well that Xiao Yan was pretending to be drunk, but he stopped calling him out on it. The two of them silently conspired to accept the fiction that Xiao Yan was intoxicated.
“Peach.”
Xiao Yan buried his face in the crook of Luo Zhiyu’s neck.
“What did you just call me?”
Luo Zhiyu’s voice trembled a little. He couldn’t tell whether it was because of the nickname or because the person pretending to be drunk had just gently licked the gland at the back of his neck, his sharp canine pressing against the skin.
His omega weakness was in the other person’s hands. He had no idea whether Xiao Yan might suddenly open his mouth and bite him, so Luo Zhiyu didn’t dare move at all.
Xiao Yan had remembered the nickname he’d accidentally overheard during their last voice call.
“Brother,” Luo Zhiyu called him. “Only family members are allowed to call me Peach. If you’re calling me that, does it mean you want to become part of my family? So, which do you want to be—Cicada or Peach?”
“Then this must be a multiple-choice question.” Xiao Yan changed the rules again. “The answer is all of the above.”
As the school year progressed, coursework and exams piled up. The countdown on the senior-year classroom blackboard dwindled day by day. The three in the hundreds digit gradually became a two, then a one.
The New Year came a little hurriedly that year, but Luo Zhiyu took advantage of the first day of the lunar year to sneak over to Xiao Yan’s house and pay his boyfriend a New Year’s visit.
Xiao Yan had sent his parents out early that morning. At home, there were only him and a parrot.
The parrot had grown very familiar with Luo Zhiyu. Whenever they met, it would recite poetry or use its high-school-level Chinese literature knowledge to praise Xiao Yan to the skies. Luo Zhiyu had taken it aside and taught it all sorts of things it probably shouldn’t have learned.
The winter break for seniors was short. School would resume on the eighth day of the lunar year, and the atmosphere of the upcoming college entrance examination was becoming increasingly intense.
With just over forty days left before the exam, however, the countdown in Class Three of Senior Year had somehow become stuck in the hundreds. The reason was simple: Luo Zhiyu, who was in charge of maintaining the countdown, had gone on strike.
Luo Zhiyu had been feeling restless lately. He attributed it to a sense of impending crisis that had first appeared on Xiao Yan’s eighteenth birthday. He often found himself running upstairs, and he could increasingly feel the atmosphere of graduation season approaching in May and June.
In less than two months, Xiao Yan would graduate. His boyfriend was going to college.
The “long-distance relationship” separated by a single floor slab was about to become a real long-distance relationship. Luo Zhiyu had been worrying about it for days.
“I wish I’d been born a year earlier.” Luo Zhiyu lay across Xiao Yan’s desk and sighed. “Then I could go to college with you.”
“Why don’t I just repeat a year and stay with you?” Xiao Yan couldn’t bear to watch him suffer. He seriously began considering the possibility of being held back. “Let me work out how I could repeat a year. It seems a little difficult.”
Fan Yue, who was calculating which universities he could get into based on his mock exam scores, felt as though he’d been struck by a critical hit.
“What are you talking about?” Luo Zhiyu drew a cross on Xiao Yan’s scratch paper, rejecting the impractical suggestion. “If you repeat a year and I take the arts entrance exams, the principal and the directors will both start questioning their lives. You focus on your exams. My boyfriend absolutely has to be the most outstanding student of his graduating class.”
“So you’ve decided to take the arts entrance exams?” Xiao Yan had heard Luo Zhiyu mention it several times and wasn’t surprised. “You seemed a little hesitant about it back in your first year.”
Considering Luo Zhiyu’s consistently strong academic results and the expectations his elders had of him, choosing the arts entrance examination was indeed a somewhat rebellious decision.
“I’ve already done something much more rebellious than that.” Luo Zhiyu tapped Xiao Yan’s nameplate with his pencil. “Do you think I’m afraid of this?”
He had tasted the sweetness of rebellion.
In June, the senior-year classrooms emptied out almost overnight. Taking advantage of the weekend, Luo Zhiyu went to the alpha dormitory building to help Xiao Yan move his belongings. The dorm rooms were about to be cleared, and visitors were no longer restricted from entering.
Luo Zhiyu dragged over a stool and sat by the doorway like a human obstacle, watching Xiao Yan do the packing himself.
“Give it back!” Tang Yuan was fighting with an orange cat over his little floral bedsheet.
Zhang Shu had gone to handle the checkout paperwork for all four of them, while Fan Yue had been summoned by the dorm supervisor to collect the four mini-fridges that had been confiscated from them over the past three years.
“You kept my school uniform?” Luo Zhiyu spotted a familiar red-and-white uniform. It was the one that had been torn by the bushes when he and Xiao Yan had tussled during their first year. It had been washed perfectly clean and folded neatly inside Xiao Yan’s wardrobe. “I thought you’d thrown it away ages ago.”
“Not bad.” Luo Zhiyu and his stool blocked the wardrobe as he pretended to hold a vocabulary book in his hands. “You call me a little hooligan every day, and yet you’re keeping my old clothes. Could you be any more shameless?”
“Move, move. If you’re not going to help, at least stop getting in the way.” Xiao Yan picked Luo Zhiyu and the stool up together and moved them aside. He then took a can of soda from the mini-fridge and shoved it into Luo Zhiyu’s hand.
It was peach-flavored soda.
Luo Zhiyu seemed to think of something, and the happiest smile he’d worn all day spread across his face.
“I’ll come find you.”
U University was right here in the same city. Luo Zhiyu had already figured out how he was going to have fun.
Since Xiao Yan was about to become a first-year university student, Luo Zhiyu thought there was one thing he could look forward to after all.
The graduating class at No. 1 High School once again achieved the best college entrance examination results in the entire city. Xiao Yan’s score lived up to everyone’s expectations. The principal was busy giving interviews, while Director Wu was busy distributing congratulatory notices.
“Wonderful!” Director Wu wiped away a tear of emotion. “Xiao Yan has finally gone to university. Now we won’t have to worry about him fighting with Luo Zhiyu anymore.”
At that moment, Director Wu believed that the nerve-racking years he had endured could finally come to an end.
“It’s over.” He drew a full stop in the student conduct record book. “No more worrying.”
All those agonizing lessons during which students watched the minute hand crawl around the clock would eventually end. Even the seemingly endless hours of evening self-study would one day reach their conclusion.
That year’s senior graduation ceremony included a new segment that had never been part of previous ceremonies: representatives from the graduating class and the class below them would exchange their best wishes.
“On a day this important, you two aren’t going to stand up there and insult each other, are you?” Before they went onstage, Director Wu anxiously reminded the two outstanding student representatives, “Speak nicely. You’re going your separate ways after this.”
“Don’t worry, Director. I’ll come back to visit often,” Xiao Yan reassured him. “We’re not going our separate ways.”
“Come back often,” Luo Zhiyu echoed.
Director Wu: “?”
Under the watchful eyes of the students and their parents, Xiao Yan picked up the microphone at the podium.
“I really like No. 1 High School. I like everything here. I like the bushes, the soda, the school uniforms, and the little path behind the teaching building…”
The mention of the “little path” immediately set off a burst of laughter among the students below.
“And most of all, I like the people here.”
Under the table, Xiao Yan kicked Luo Zhiyu lightly in the shin.
“Please catch up with me as soon as possible. I’ll be waiting just a little way ahead.”
“Right, well, I’m this year’s student representative for the class about to enter senior year. You all know me, haha. I’m here to offer my best wishes to the graduating seniors.”
Luo Zhiyu took the microphone and kicked Xiao Yan right back.
“May all your hard work and hopes bear fruit, and may tomorrow bring you everything you wish for.”
U University’s military training began in late August and lasted a month.
Luo Zhiyu didn’t show up on the day Xiao Yan registered. He didn’t appear when Xiao Yan moved into the dormitory, either. He didn’t reply to messages, and whenever Xiao Yan called, he said he was sleepy.
Xiao Yan was disappointed for several days.
[Tangerine]: Fairy frowning.jpg
[Tangerine]: Weren’t you supposed to come find me?
[Cicada]: I’m in my final year of high school now. I’m busy studying. Wait another couple of days.
[Cicada]: Don’t rush.
Xiao Yan vaguely sensed that Luo Zhiyu was planning something big, but he couldn’t guess what kind of mischief the little hooligan had been cooking up.
Until one scorching midday in late August.
The students in Class Three of the School of Economics and Management stood in neat formation at the edge of the sports field. Under the blazing sun, with temperatures above thirty degrees Celsius, sweat covered the faces of every first-year student.
University military training was much stricter than high-school training. Breaks weren’t granted easily. Everyone remained silent, waiting for the dismissal bell to ring.
The faculty flag fluttered even though there was no wind. A pair of white sneakers stepped over the stairs, and someone sat down on the ground beside the flag.
The white-and-green senior-year uniform of No. 1 High School stood out conspicuously among the university freshmen undergoing military training.
Following the navigation on his phone, Luo Zhiyu had finally found the formation belonging to Xiao Yan’s class. He dropped his heavy backpack onto the ground and took out can after can of soda—dozens of them in total. Finally, he produced half a watermelon.
He arranged everything neatly on the steps and took a picture to post on his social media first.
Xiao Yan: “…”
The formation began to stir.
“Fuck? Is that something a human being would do?”
“What’s going on?”
“Where did this high-school student come from? What school is that uniform from? What’s he doing here? Soda, watermelon, and ice cream? He’s definitely doing this on purpose!”
“That looks like the senior-year uniform from the city’s No. 1 High School.”
“What’s a high-school student doing here?”
“Ahhhhh, I’m losing my mind! He’s ridiculously good-looking, but why is he such a little shit?”
“Go somewhere else! Why did he have to pick our class? Does someone here know him?”
“That’s too much! Don’t high-school seniors have to study?”
“I’m crying. This is so damn cruel. He’s practically begging to get beaten up!”
“Silence!” the instructor barked. “You’re university students now. Why are you still chattering like children?”
The formation fell silent, casting resentful looks at Luo Zhiyu, who was sitting not far ahead of them.
Luo Zhiyu didn’t care in the slightest. He kept his eyes fixed on Xiao Yan in the middle of the crowd, a mischievous grin on his face that he didn’t even bother trying to hide.
He imitated the gesture Xiao Yan had made back then, casually raising the peach-flavored soda in his hand for everyone to see before pulling the tab open.