How to… comfort.
…
Lin Zhexia sat in the chair by the window. The moment she heard these words, her brain temporarily stopped functioning.
After quite a while, she finally found her voice: “Can’t you sleep by yourself? You’ve grown this big and still don’t know how to sleep?”
“What can I do?” Chi Yao said. “I can’t sleep today, so I don’t know how.”
Lin Zhexia felt that the atmosphere now was even stranger than before.
Summer in the north should be relatively cool, but she now felt a bit hot.
“Why don’t you lie down and try hard yourself?”
She paused and then added, “Or how about this? I’ll play you some sleep-inducing BGM, so you can lie in bed, close your eyes, and with this distinguished background music in the room, it should help you.”
“…”
Chi Yao was amused by her two terrible suggestions.
The young man barely visibly tugged at the corner of his mouth in a smile: “So this is how you comfort someone.”
Lin Zhexia was silent for a moment: “Then, shall I count ducks for you?”
Chi Yao didn’t make any further comments on her suggestion. He rarely showed such an obedient side. He reached out and pressed the switch next to the bedside table. The light in the room went out, leaving only weak rays filtering in from outside the window.
Then Lin Zhexia heard a rustling sound.
It was Chi Yao lifting the blanket and getting into bed.
The darkness effectively concealed the emotions between them.
Just as Lin Zhexia cleared her throat, preparing to say “one duck,” the person on the bed spoke: “Don’t want to hear about ducks, count something else.”
“What do you want to hear then?”
Lin Zhexia thought for a moment, “Count sheep? Count…”
Her examples were interrupted before she could continue: “Count rabbits.”
“…”
“Why count rabbits?” Lin Zhexia struggled, “Isn’t counting sheep good enough?”
However, the attitude from the other side was resolute: “What do you think?”
“What’s wrong with counting sheep?”
This time, the other side clicked his tongue: “Is this your attitude when comforting someone to sleep?”
It wasn’t that she didn’t want to count; it was just that mentioning rabbits made her think of Little Rabbit Xia Xia.
And the day they caught dolls, the lucky doll they saw together.
The word rabbit had become special because of these shared experiences between them.
So special that her heartbeat would unconsciously skip a beat when she said it: “Fine, if it’s rabbits, then rabbits it is. One rabbit.”
“Two rabbits.”
“Three rabbits.”
The girl deliberately lowered her voice, afraid of disturbing his sleep, softly counting downward.
“Nineteen rabbits.”
“Twenty rabbits…”
Chi Yao lay on his side, half his face sunk into the cotton-like pillow, his hair scattered messily.
Through the dim light, one could only glimpse a bit of his sharp chin, and below that, the smooth contours of his neck.
Listening to this voice, sleepiness gradually overtook him.
He wasn’t asleep yet, but it felt like he had fallen into a dream.
He seemed to hear another voice, very similar to the present one, suddenly resounding in his ears through the long period and space.
—”If I don’t have a dream for now, does protecting someone else’s dream count as a dream?”
Back then, Lin Zhexia’s voice was still quite childish.
She was troubled about her essay, lying on the desk, drawing a bunch of oddly-shaped people on her draft paper, even numbering them.
At that time, he was about to say disdainfully, “What kind of dream is that?”
But before these words could leave his mouth, the person lying down suddenly sat up, turned her head to look at him: “Then my dream will be to protect your dream.”
The afternoon sunlight was dazzling.
It also brightened her eyes: “Anyway, I don’t have a dream right now. I hope you can fulfill your dream, that’s my dream, then.”
…
Lin Zhexia counted for about ten minutes, heard Chi Yao’s slowed breathing, guessed that he was probably asleep, so she stopped and experimentally called his name: “Chi Yao?”
After calling, she waited a moment, then spoke again: “Chi Yao is a dog.”