Chapter 68#

In Yan Zishu’s mental portrait of Fu Jinchi, the man was charming and volatile, cunning beyond his years, inscrutable, and vindictive to the last degree — any number of words, favorable and unfavorable, could apply to him. Relentless was not one Yan Zishu had ever thought to reach for.

Perhaps also: shameless.

The whole situation struck him as deeply surreal.

And Fu Jinchi himself had the air of someone who had decided he had nothing left to lose.

“If this is about me snapping at you that day, I can apologize — I wasn’t actually planning to never see you again, that was said in anger.” Yan Zishu reached over to the nightstand, found his glasses, put them on, and rubbed his brow. “But please don’t use this kind of… approach again. Appearing in someone’s room in the middle of the night with no warning — any normal person would end up with a heart condition.”

He turned the nightlight up one notch. It lit Fu Jinchi’s face — pale, with deep shadows. Only now, up close, did Yan Zishu see something he rarely encountered in the daytime: exhaustion, showing plainly.

Fu Jinchi said “sorry,” then let his eyes drop, and said: “It’s not your problem. It’s mine.”

He was not without awareness of how irrational he’d been acting.

Perhaps he had always had something crooked at the root. But at least he had once been good at concealing it.

This past half-year had brought a kind of weariness Fu Jinchi had never experienced before. Every day burned through something. Yan Zishu, of all the things consuming him, burned through the most. There were others waiting for the chance to strike back against him — and Fu Jinchi wanted to see every one of them destroyed. He had been running from place to place; even the people working for him could see the toll. Did he himself not know he was tired?

Exhaustion slowly corrodes the outer layer of a person — the polished surface worn away until the rust underneath is exposed, grinding and struggling to keep moving.

Fu Jinchi was like a traveler in a desert, heavily burdened, near to dying of thirst and still unable to stop.

When you’ve been walking like that and you suddenly come to an oasis — does anyone genuinely manage to approach it gracefully?

Does anyone really walk up slowly, testing the water, checking whether it might be a mirage?

No. No one does.

There had been nights aboard the rescue vessel, and other nights wandering aimlessly along the beach. Fu Jinchi had stood in the wind, the salt smell of turning tides around him, and opened his phone’s photo album to look at Yan Zishu’s face. He had thought: maybe this is how it is now. Maybe this is all.

The screen glowing in the dark, then dimming. And when the screen went dark, Yan Zishu was simply gone from the world.

In those moments, Fu Jinchi had always felt something not quite willing to let go — and a loneliness too acute to endure.

But now, finally, he could stay inside, warm and quiet, and listen to Yan Zishu lecture him.

After everything that had come before, that alone was enough. Fu Jinchi felt a loosening — a relief — and the return was more than he’d expected.

“I’m being polite, but really, most of it is your fault.” Yan Zishu glanced at him, suppressed the urge to hit him, and repeated himself: “At the very least, I only raised my voice at you once — I didn’t show up in your room uninvited in the dead of night to haunt you.”

Fu Jinchi gave a nearly inaudible sound, something between a laugh and an exhale: “Any time you wanted to, you would be welcome.”

Before Yan Zishu could respond, Fu Jinchi moved quickly and wrapped both arms around him. “I’m sorry — it’s me who’s wrong. I know I’m not in my right mind. I really have been… you don’t know. I was nearly going mad looking for you.”

Even saying it brought something back up in his throat, a sourness he couldn’t quite suppress. “I would have taken anything — even you appearing in my room like a ghost in the middle of the night. Just half a month ago, if you could have done exactly that, I don’t know how glad I would have been. By the end I was even thinking — even if you were genuinely gone, surely you’d come back at least once, on the seventh night after death, just to tell me to give up. At least then I’d have stopped worrying…”

A self-mocking note: “I kept imagining you’d washed up on some remote island, and the only one who would ever go looking for you was me.”

Yan Zishu went quiet. He didn’t push him away. After a moment, he said: “It was coastal water. You don’t generally get washed up on remote islands.”

Fu Jinchi said: “I know. All of it was just deceiving myself.”

He smiled again, faintly: “But you’re actually alive. Yan Zishu — I truly am not going to let you go again.”

Fu Jinchi’s breath was against his ear — warm, faintly present, not alarming.

Since their reunion, Fu Jinchi had been like this: always wanting some form of physical contact with Yan Zishu, urgent about it — if not an embrace, then a touch, a point of proximity. Exactly as he’d said: as if to prove that this wasn’t a visiting ghost.

Yan Zishu thought: he himself was hardly in his right mind either. Strangely, with Fu Jinchi pursuing him this relentlessly, what he felt was not pressure — it was closer to relief. Before, he had always felt unmoored, never knowing where the fall would happen. He didn’t feel that anymore.

Fu Jinchi didn’t look like he was going to give up on him.

Yan Zishu found himself almost smiling. “Fu Jinchi.”

“Mm?” The answering sound, attentive.

“Saying your full name still feels odd to me.”

“You can call me whatever you want.”

“And that last thing you said — not letting me go. What does that look like?”

“Even if you hated me, I’d keep you close.”

Until you die first, or I do. That part he didn’t say.

“All right,” Yan Zishu said. “Then have you noticed — I don’t actually hate you.”

Fu Jinchi went still. But he held his breath, waiting.

Yan Zishu said: “If I genuinely hated you, I wouldn’t have spent all that time worrying about whether you were alive or dead. But I found I couldn’t do it. I would rather see you living. The reason I still won’t let myself say whether I loved you — do you know why?”

He felt the arms around his waist tighten in response, pulling him back until his shoulders were pressed against Fu Jinchi’s chest.

If only they’d gotten here sooner, Yan Zishu thought. If either of them had held on this tightly from the beginning, it wouldn’t have come to any of this.

Was the word love so difficult to pronounce?

More accurate to say it was simply too embarrassing to say first. Their relationship had started in bed rather than outside of it, freely enjoying each other without other complications. But in matters of feeling, it was as though whoever said it first had already lost — already given the other person complete power over them.

Yet the path to Fu Jinchi’s inner world, which had once seemed like a swamp full of miasma and hidden dangers, had somehow cleared. The miasma had largely lifted. You looked and saw that the swamp witch was just an ordinary old woman, and you were no longer afraid. You even felt like going up to say hello.

Yan Zishu seemed to hesitate, thinking how to put it into words: “Of course, I have plenty of my own failings in this. I kept a lot of things hidden for a long time. But since I’ve started, I may as well say it properly. The reason is that you’re too solitary. So solitary that I couldn’t picture anyone having a real relationship with you. I didn’t trust myself. I didn’t think I could be the one.”

“I’m not saying this to complain — you’ve been this way from the beginning, always that mysterious, impenetrable quality, and I know you have a great deal of appeal. I was willing to be drawn in. But I also knew that someone with your temperament — if I had responded like everyone else, thrown myself at you without reservation, made it obvious I was devoted to you — you would have lost interest very quickly. You’d have found it ordinary.”

“So I rarely went looking for you first. If I didn’t look, I didn’t have to be afraid of being turned away. But when you came to me — I was probably enjoying that, and I hadn’t even let myself realize it. Over time I started to feel that you were willing to make an exception for me, that maybe I was somehow different from the others. I even let myself think: perhaps we really were the same kind of person.”

Fu Jinchi was right there beside him as Yan Zishu spoke, but his mind had gone slow, and he could only look at the side of that face.

“You’re not a good person — and honestly, neither am I. I became willing to follow you into the mud. But the more I wanted, the more I found myself realizing that you simply didn’t need me. You didn’t tell me anything. I never knew where you were. You were like that — impossibly good when you wanted to be, and then vanishing without a word the moment you didn’t, turning cold without warning. That made me feel like a failure. It made me anxious.”

“I don’t have your kind of ease.” Yan Zishu pressed his lips together. “I get hurt. I get afraid. Do you understand that?”

“I do. I understand.” Fu Jinchi’s mouth pulled into something that wasn’t quite a smile. His own harvest of bitter seeds.

“When you say you understand — are you saying you understand, or just saying the words? This kind of afraid — I was afraid of you thinking less of me. Afraid of being laughed at. Afraid of becoming something you grew tired of. I could keep all of those things hidden by myself. But I found I no longer knew how to be around you. The more care you showed, the more frightened I was of you pulling away the next moment. Were you playing at drawing me in? How was I supposed to know what you’d do once you had what you wanted?”

“What I eventually discovered was that life was considerably easier when I wasn’t close to you, when I stopped hoping for anything. So I started avoiding it. It didn’t solve anything at the root, but avoidance had its own momentum, and the quiet life felt acceptable enough.”

For two people both accustomed to concealing themselves, genuine candor was, as it turned out, extraordinarily difficult — no different from abandoning your own dignity and cutting yourself open.

Yet Yan Zishu had done it. This was less an offering of an opportunity to the other person than it was settling accounts with himself, doing all that was humanly possible and then leaving the rest to what it was. At minimum, when this period of his life came to mind years from now, he would be able to say that he had at least once tried to communicate clearly.

As for how Fu Jinchi responded — he had decided not to manage that.

He had said what needed saying, and felt the fullness of a complete thought. “In any case — what’s past is past. Fu Jinchi, I truly don’t hate you. Thinking about it honestly, I never showed you anything that gave you reason to trust me. And I deceived you. For that I can only say I’m sorry — there’s no way to explain the reasons, but I had thought about finding another approach…”

“It’s fine, it’s fine, don’t apologize for that.” Fu Jinchi suddenly pressed a hand over his mouth. “That was my fault. I genuinely regret it. Don’t remind me of how pleased with myself I was when I ended things… I never wanted any of that.”

Yan Zishu made a slightly surprised sound: “Oh.”

“I’m the one who was a coward. Nothing you said before that I can argue with. I just didn’t know how to keep someone — so I kept doing the thing that worked, the thing that hurt them. That hurt you. Because it was effective.” Fu Jinchi said. “But if I were really as unbothered as I pretended, I wouldn’t be humiliating myself like this. If nothing else I’ve tried is going to work, the only thing left is to get on my knees and beg you not to leave. Would you like to see that?”

“Save it for another time.” Yan Zishu let out a faint smile. “The fact that I said any of this at all is embarrassing enough — it could only have come out at this hour, in the middle of the night, with my head not entirely clear. Don’t expect to hear any of it again tomorrow morning. I’m not acknowledging any of it in daylight.”