Their lips met, and Zhu Yun floated.
When he pulled back, he said quietly: “I’ll be gone a full month. There’s still a lot to wrap up at the base — I need to brief everyone properly, otherwise it’ll become a mess.”
Zhu Yun said softly: “……If there are any unfinished projects, I can pick them up for you.”
Li Xun heard this, and something — whatever it was — crossed his mind. The look that spread across his face was thoroughly shameless.
“Princess, you really are versatile, aren’t you.”
He leaned close to her ear. “Clothes on or clothes off — equally useful.”
“……”
She moved to kick him. He blocked it with one palm.
Li Xun straightened up. “You don’t need to do any of that. I’ll leave you something else.”
Zhu Yun looked up. Li Xun continued: “Go back and pick my courses for me. I’m afraid I’ll forget about it by the time I’m done.”
Now that he mentioned it, Zhu Yun remembered — online course registration for the next semester was coming up very soon.
Was that really all.
“Here — your payment.” Li Xun reached casually into his pocket, pulled something out, and placed it in Zhu Yun’s hand.
A little flutter of feeling in her chest. She was already wondering when he had prepared this, and then she looked down——
It was a throat lozenge from the in-flight meal.
Zhu Yun felt a breath lodge itself somewhere in her throat, going neither up nor down. She was just about to shoot him a glare when she looked up and found he had already walked away.
That long, lean silhouette raised a hand in a casual wave without looking back.
Zhu Yun felt like she wanted to be irritated, and also somehow felt like laughing.
She tore open the lozenge and put it in her mouth.
Cool and faintly tingling, carrying a clean freshness.
Just like this summer.
*
In truth, Li Xun’s departure had saved Zhu Yun quite a bit of trouble. At the very least, she no longer had to agonize over what scheme to cook up to convince her mother she was staying on campus for the break instead of coming home.
Once Li Xun’s plans were settled, Zhu Yun saw no reason to linger either. She went back to the dormitory, packed up a few things, and set off for home that same day.
She arrived home, presented her award certificate, and her mother was a thousand times satisfied.
“You came back so late — how can a competition take that long.”
“The schedule is fixed, they can’t just change it……”
Her mother had missed her and pulled her close, asking all manner of questions. Zhu Yun naturally could not recount every “dramatic turn of events” from the competition in full — she selected the milder-tasting portions and shared those.
Her mother asked: “And Fang Zhijing?”
Zhu Yun made a sound. “His group…… ran into some trouble, it seems.”
“What kind of trouble? How did they do?”
“They didn’t win anything.”
“I knew it!” Her mother clapped her hands together, eyes sharp with satisfaction, and said to Zhu Yun: “Must have fallen apart. If they’d done well, knowing his personality, he would have called long before now. He’s always been like that since he was a boy — just clever enough to be dangerous, absolutely terrible under pressure, not cut out for anything serious.”
Zhu Yun, who was largely responsible for Fang Zhijing’s team having “fallen apart,” had nothing she could possibly say to this, and sat in silence.
After their talk, Zhu Yun went to her room, showered, and then lay down on her bed with her phone.
She sent Ren Di a text——
“Done.”
A few minutes later, Ren Di replied——
“Don’t send me messages in English. Congratulations!”
Zhu Yun smiled.
Her social world was extremely simple — no particularly close friends to speak of. This was something she could really only tell Ren Di.
The next day, Zhu Yun went to the bookstore and came home with a stack of programming books. She drew up a detailed study plan for herself. The entire break was mapped out end to end — except that every so often, Zhu Yun would notice something perhaps slightly wrong with her: she’d be sitting there reading perfectly normally, and then, for no apparent reason, she would simply start smiling.
She didn’t reach out to Li Xun.
That creature was getting exclusive one-on-one instruction. She knew how completely he threw himself into whatever he was working on.
Zhu Yun kept carefully in mind the “task” Li Xun had assigned her. She had made a note of it the very evening she arrived home. When the day came, she logged into the academic affairs system using the password Li Xun had given her and registered his courses.
With motives she preferred not to examine too closely, Zhu Yun simply copied her own course selections in their entirety…… after all, Li Xun never actually paid attention in electives anyway.
The only thing she hesitated over was physical education.
For his first-year gym class, Li Xun had registered for Fitness and Bodybuilding. Not because he had any particular interest in it, of course, but because it was the one physical education course where one could legitimately slack off.
The class was supposed to be held in the school’s gymnasium — but the gym’s equipment had grown so comprehensive that it had been opened for commercial use, which meant finding a free space during class time was nearly impossible. As a result, the course had gradually shifted to being mostly lecture-based, with the actual content wrapping up within about the first third of the semester. After that, no one supervised anything at all.
In her own first year, Zhu Yun had picked yoga — for the indoor setting, and for being spared the sun and wind.