[Orange]: Cicada, did you go to school early this morning?
[Orange]: Peach?
[Orange]: Luo Zhiyu?
[Orange]: Are you angry?
[Orange]: \*shocked.jpg\*
[Orange]: I was wrong last night. Next time, don’t call me “big brother” when I’m teasing you.
[Orange]: Are you in the library or the classroom? I’ll come find you.
[Orange]: I checked your class schedule. I’m here.
Luo Zhiyu hadn’t looked at his phone. He was listening attentively to the lecture in the classroom. The slides on the screen at the front had turned to a new page, and Luo Zhiyu tapped the keyboard of his laptop to follow along.
The classroom’s back door opened, and a figure slipped inside and sat down next to Luo Zhiyu.
“You…” Luo Zhiyu knew who it was without even looking up. He was far too familiar with him. It was Xiao Yan.
“Are you auditing the class, student?” The teacher nodded at Xiao Yan. “Every class has to take this reproductive health course. There’s no need to audit it. Nobody gets to skip the assignments, either.”
“It’s fine, Professor. I’m taking the class with my boyfriend, just to reinforce what I’ve learned.” Xiao Yan answered very politely. “Your lectures are so good that I could listen to them any number of times without getting tired of them.”
The teacher: “…”
Laughter erupted throughout the classroom. Luo Zhiyu glared at Xiao Yan and pushed his laptop over to him. “Then you take notes. I’m not doing it anymore.”
“You don’t have to take notes, either.” Xiao Yan seized the opportunity to coax him in a low voice. “Our little Peach is so smart. You already know all this stuff.”
“Should I say you’re a good teacher?” Luo Zhiyu replied dryly.
Xiao Yan: “…” Oh, no. He was genuinely angry this time.
A short length of bandage was still wrapped around Luo Zhiyu’s neck. The collars of his early-autumn clothes were low, and no matter whether he looked up or down, he couldn’t hide it. The glances people cast at the two of them were tinged with all sorts of suggestive thoughts.
Yesterday, Xiao Yan had once again gotten into an argument with him over a certain form of address. He had held Luo Zhiyu against the doorframe, and with his hands too weak to support himself, Luo Zhiyu could only cling tightly to Xiao Yan’s neck. He had completely lost control of his own body, swept up and down by waves of sudden pleasure. Forced to beg for mercy, he had pressed his lips close to Xiao Yan’s ear and called him by the title he wanted, over and over again.
Luo Zhiyu decided to stay angry for two days to put Orange’s arrogance in check.
[Cicada]: Don’t you have class at this time?
[Orange]: The professor took leave, so the class was moved to next week. I came over to keep you company.
[Cicada]: Go sit somewhere else. I’m angry.
[Orange]: …
“To sum up,” the teacher continued lecturing from the podium, “we can, to a certain extent, consider sexual incompatibility to have an impact on the relationship between partners.”
Luo Zhiyu kicked Xiao Yan in the calf.
Xiao Yan: “!!!”
[Orange]: Are we incompatible?
[Orange]: qaq
[Orange]: Is it my problem?
[Cicada]: Hmm…
[Cicada]: It’s not your fault. I’m just someone who often turns around and refuses to acknowledge anything after the fact.
[Orange]: You tell me to hurry up, then tell me to slow down. I had no choice but to make my own decisions.
[Orange]: You clearly enjoyed it yesterday.
[Cicada]: Tsk. Orange is ripe.
Five minutes later.
[Cicada]: ? Can’t you let me be seriously angry for once?
U University Campus Forum—
[A lovey-dovey couple taking a reproductive health class together? Fine, actually, I’m just jealous.]
1L: I’ve noticed that this professor is different from the teachers in other classes. He’s especially welcoming toward people with ulterior motives who come to audit his lectures.
2L: There’s already an entire thread about those two. There’s no need to start another one. [Link] Just go here.
3L: Just a little couple, that’s all. They have the weirdest ideas. Yesterday, I ran into Luo Zhiyu and his boyfriend on the road by the back door, learning how to ride a bicycle. I have no idea which one of them came up with the idea of giving someone a ride on a bicycle.
4L: So neither of them knows how to ride? Hahahaha.
5L: They probably know how by now. But I feel like I’ve gotten a little closer to the top student. Even he has things he doesn’t know how to do. (A very unusual perspective.)
6L: I wandered into U University’s forum and actually found a thread about Luo Zhiyu and Brother Yan, hahaha. As their former high school classmate, let me tell you: the top student’s thought process really is weird. I can’t make sense of it.
“I’m going to the company for a bit. Do you want to go home first?” After class, Xiao Yan and Luo Zhiyu went downstairs together, blending into the crowd.
“Maybe not. If I go home, I’ll have to eat takeout. If I go to the company, I can at least mooch a meal.” Luo Zhiyu said, “I also want to complain to your parents and tell them that Xiao Yan bullies people.”
Xiao Yan: “…”
On the top floor of the XX Company building, Luo Zhiyu was dozing off on the office sofa with a blanket draped over him. He had finished half of his homework, and his laptop was sitting on the table beside him.
An employee glanced toward the office from a distance and spotted Luo Zhiyu sleeping soundly.
“Who’s that? Some young celebrity from one of their partner companies? He’s actually dozing off in the boss’s office. He’s got some nerve.”
“Huh? Let me see.” Another person said, “He’s pretty good-looking. I’ve never seen him before. I remember that President Xiao’s son, Xiao Yan, got engaged to an Omega from the Luo family two months ago. That should be him, right? The two families used to bicker all the time, but now they’re treating Luo Zhiyu really well.”
“Forget dozing off in the office. He has a say in the entire company.”
Luo Zhiyu had already woken up and was complaining to Xiao Yan’s mother.
“He said he was going to the company and told me to go home and eat takeout.”
“How can he let you eat takeout? It’s so unhealthy!” Xiao Yan’s mother said indignantly.
“I’m really sleepy today. I can fall asleep just leaning against the sofa. I even had classes this morning. It’s all Xiao Yan’s fault.”
“I’ll talk to him later,” Xiao Yu said.
In the mere two months since their engagement, Luo Zhiyu had completely erased the impression that he was a fierce little tyrant in Xiao Yan’s family. His image-cleansing campaign had gone very smoothly.
“Ah, I really do have a bad temper,” Luo Zhiyu admitted honestly. “I get irritable over the smallest things.”
“It’s not your fault, it’s not your fault. Luo Zhiyu is a very sensible child. We didn’t have a complete understanding of you before,” Xiao Yu said. “Xiao Yan has loved provoking you since he was little. In about six out of ten cases, he was the one who started it. We know a fair bit about that.”
Take, for example, when Luo Zhiyu was in third grade and Xiao Yan was in fourth grade.
They attended different schools. Xiao Yan lived at school, while Luo Zhiyu went home every day. Once or twice a month, the two of them would happen to cross paths on the road.
Little Luo Zhiyu had earphones in and was walking toward a roadside convenience store, surrounded by a group of elementary school students, when a paper airplane came wobbling through the air from a distance and hit him on the head.
Luo Zhiyu: “?”
“Luo Zhilia!” Five meters away, a certain fourth-grader waved happily. “Long time no see!”
“Luo Zhilia?” The elementary school students around him had never heard that name before. They immediately found it novel and repeated it several times, rolling it around on their tongues. “Why Zhilia?”
“Don’t call me that.” Luo Zhiyu glared at them one by one. “Do you think you’re allowed to call me that?”
“Then I’m allowed to call you that?” Fourth-grader Xiao Yan asked excitedly. “Then I’ll call you that from now on.”
Luo Zhiyu: “?” I’ll punch you.
The two children fought from one end of the street to the other. Their families rushed over after hearing about it and separated them, ordering them to ignore each other whenever they met on the road from then on.
Even the two families, who had failed to stop the fight and had ended up trading insults with each other instead, had never imagined that, more than ten years later, those two children would end up together, conspiring to steal their household registration booklets so they could get married.
Although Luo Zhiyu was fierce, if you traced things back to the beginning, aside from that incident when he bit someone, it really was Xiao Yan who had repeatedly provoked him first.
“What are you saying about me now? You’re always reporting my misdeeds.” Xiao Yan had just returned from downstairs when he heard them discussing him as soon as he entered the room. “Luo Zhilia, get up and pack your things. Come home with me.”
“Now we’re talking about how you deliberately drank ice water and ate iced watermelon in front of Luo Zhiyu during military training back then,” Xiao Yan’s father said coolly. “I’ve finally learned the whole story behind that video with forty thousand likes.”
Xiao Yan: “…” But Luo Zhiyu had done the same nasty thing to him later, and he’d repaid him in full, with interest.
“Oh, right, Uncle! Last semester, Xiao Yan insisted that I attend class for him, which led to this semester…”
Luo Zhiyu hadn’t even finished his complaint before Xiao Yan covered his mouth and dragged him away.
“I’ll deal with you when we get home.”