“Dependent personality disorder is constantly immersed in the fear of being abandoned. When the attachment object wants to terminate the relationship, a pathological sense of frustration follows, and the patient falls into a pain and despair that they themselves cannot bear.”
What happened that day has already become blurred in my memory.
I only remember we seemed to have a hysterical fight. By the end, I felt it was impossible to communicate with him, so I could only coax and deceive him: “Let’s go back. I won’t go, okay? You can’t really keep me locked up here for the rest of my life.”
He said, “The new project manager will be leaving in three days. We’ll just stay here until then.”
I practically jumped up and yelled, “You’re fucking sick!”
I rushed outside recklessly. He grabbed me with one pull, the force so great it nearly broke my arm.
We both fell onto the deck together. I kicked him hard, stomped on him, bit down fiercely on his shoulder. He cried out in pain but still didn’t let go of my hand.
A man’s strength is ultimately overwhelming. I was finally carried back into the room by him and fell onto that bed.
“Don’t you touch me! If you dare touch me again, I’ll kill you. I mean what I say!” I roared like a madwoman.
He restrained me and said, “It’s too late. Why must you leave?”
“I’ve told you many times! I have to clean up the mess I made, then I can get my bonus, then I can get promoted. Don’t you understand human language!”
“Even if you don’t go back, you’ll still have all of that. I promise.” He looked at me urgently, his eyes filled with deep sadness. “You’ll definitely get promoted. Even if you don’t get promoted, it doesn’t matter… Calculate your salary as a total, okay? I’ll give it to you.”
I was going crazy, so crazy I couldn’t help but laugh out loud.
I believed him. Wasn’t there that saying? One generation’s years of hard study can’t match three generations’ efforts, and Cheng Xia’s family had more than three generations of effort. He could afford to pay for my entire lifetime of struggling against death.
But it wasn’t the same. How could I make him understand—it wasn’t the same.
Seeing that I was no longer struggling, Cheng Xia carefully pulled me into his embrace and said, “Seeing each other once a month is too difficult. There are so many men around you. Every day I think, what if you start to like someone who can ride horses and shoot arrows? Will you get tired of me? If not, then why don’t you reply to my messages?”
He kissed the top of my head, his breath warm. “Stay here, okay?”
I temporarily had no strength and lay there numbly, saying, “So you’ve been seducing me ever since I came back, right?”
Setting up a scheme to have my dad take over my house.
Using his resources to tempt me to stay.
Oh right, how could I forget the honey trap? He was even using love and passion to seduce me into staying here.
“Yesterday you clearly liked it too. Stay, okay…” He kissed behind my ear, revealing his delicate collarbone. I had to admit he really did have a body that could be called beautiful.
Taking advantage of his unpreparedness, I flipped over and pinned him beneath me, randomly grabbing a pen and pressing it against him. “I said, don’t fucking touch me again!”
He gazed at me, his expression sad and weak. “I don’t understand.”
Looking at him, I finally said those words: “You’ve never loved me at all, Cheng Xia. We were just playing house, pretending to be in love.”
If you truly loved me, you would think about what I like, what I want to do, how important this project is to me.
Instead of being like a child who, when unhappy, clutches his toy tightly in his arms.
I ultimately didn’t hurt him and got up to leave.
Before I could even touch the door, my arm was grabbed tightly by Cheng Xia.
He said coldly, “Think whatever you want. You can’t leave.”
All the softness and gentleness vanished from him completely. He coldly and forcefully dragged me back.
This triggered all the rage in my heart.
I frantically swung the ballpoint pen in my hand, attacking him. I didn’t know what I was doing. I only knew that no one should fucking try to control my life!
When I came to my senses, the floor and Cheng Xia’s body were covered in spots and streaks of blood. I had actually injured him with that extremely blunt pen tip.
The star lights, photos, and flowers that had been so beautiful yesterday were now all scattered on the floor from our struggle, like an apartment after an explosion.
How did we become like this? Had I gone crazy too? I sat trembling on the floor, the ballpoint pen sliding down from my fingertips.
Cheng Xia approached me, picked up my blood-covered hand, and placed it against his own face.
He was smiling, his gaze gentle. “It’s okay, Dongxue. It doesn’t hurt at all.”
He pulled me into his embrace, applying force bit by bit, as if he wanted to crush me. “We’ll never separate.”
——
He went to cook. We ate grilled meat and clam soup facing the sea at sunset, along with a case of cold beer. If this were some vacation day, I should be very happy at this moment.
But right now I had no appetite at all, yet I still ate big mouthfuls. To leave, I had to build up my strength.
If I returned to the company tomorrow, I should still make it in time.
I had once seen a movie.
The general idea was that the female protagonist wanted to do something, but everyone came to frantically obstruct her. In fact, the female protagonist was dreaming, and these people were all incarnations of the dream, coming to prevent her from waking from the dream.
If my world were a huge dream, and the world itself obstructed my upward climb, transforming into an irritable boss, greedy workers, a crazed competitor… it should never have transformed into Cheng Xia.
He should stand there clean and bright, his body coated with a layer of fuzzy golden light.
Any dream with him in it should be a beautiful dream.
Thinking of this, I couldn’t help but shed tears, which fell into the soup. He probably didn’t see it.
After the meal, we took a walk by the seaside until the orange sunset slowly sank below the horizon.