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He’s become a regular fixture—an honorary media student, almost, with the amount of time he spends at Nanwu University’s media campus. He’s there often enough that just about all the media first years know who he’s there for, but this doesn’t stop the murmurs that they probably don’t think he can hear, that float down towards him in the hallways.
“Ugh, so handsome.”
“Stop looking. We don’t stand a chance.”
“You never know!”
“As if he’d ever break up with her. I heard they waited for each other since high school. Have you seen the way he looks at her? You just know he can’t see anyone else.”
Ensconced safely in his hoodie, Sang Yan purses his mouth and nods sagely in agreement. At least that one’s more observant. He wonders idly at the unrivalled ability of school hallways in carrying sound, as the girls and their voices fade into the distance.
He burrows deeper into his hoodie and glances down at his watch. The minute hand hits twelve, and on cue, the bell marking the end of the hour chimes and the bustle of students swells up behind the doors of the seminar room.
Sang Yan waits patiently, tucked in his little alcove—Yifan is not usually one of the first few out the doors, and she knows where to find him. His phone rings and he reluctantly hooks it out of his pocket, peers at the screen. Su Hao An.
“What?” he says without ceremony.
“Where are you? Today’s the computer engineering club’s outing day, did you forget?” Su Hao An screeches from the other end of the line. “You’re at the media campus again aren’t you?”
“Mm,” Sang Yan shrugs, distracted when Yifan arrives in front of him, smiling and lovely and happy to see him. He pulls the phone away from his ear to press a kiss to her temple. “Wen Shuangjiang. How was class?”
“Oi,” Su Hao An’s voice, faraway and tinny through the phone line, shrieks up at them from somewhere around Sang Yan’s waist. “I knew it!! Wen Yifan, tell him by hook or by crook he’s got to be here, he promised me!!”
“I said no such thing,” Sang Yan snarls into the phone. “I’m hanging up.”
“You should go,” Yifan says, raising an eyebrow. “Didn’t he say you agreed?”
“Can’t remember,” Sang Yan shrugs, slipping his phone back into his pocket. “It doesn’t matter.”
“We don’t have plans for this afternoon anyway,” Yifan tugs at his sleeve, and he follows her towards the building’s main door. “Don’t worry about me. If you go I’ll just pop by home for a bit to see my pa. With midterms coming I might not have time to go home this weekend.”
Sang Yan sighs, gives up on his plans of a quiet afternoon with just her for company. “I’ll walk you to the bus stop.” His tone brooks no argument. “And I won’t stay the night with them, I’ll pick you up from home later.”
🍃❄️
It’s past eleven at night by the time the doorbell rings, startling Yifan out of her unintended nap on the sofa. She peels herself out of the nest of blankets she’d made for herself and pads on bare feet to the door, checking through the peephole to make sure it’s Sang Yan before she opens it.
“Hey,” she smiles sleepily at him. “You’re here.”
Sang Yan hovers at the entryway. “Sorry I’m later than expected, that Duan Jiaxu wouldn’t let me leave any earlier. We might have to grab a cab back to the dorm. Where’s Shushù?”
“Pa has gone out for his night shift already,” Yifan yawns. “Come in. Are you in a rush to head back to the dorm? The buses will stop running soon, he said you could stay the night here if you needed to.” She reaches past him to close and lock the door, and Sang Yan’s heart stutters along with the thud of the lock.
“He’d trust me alone with you?” he says.
“Why ever not?” she smiles up at him, sleepy and ruffled. The neckline of her oversized soft shirt sits low on her chest, and her pale, creamy legs stretch bare below her lounge shorts. “He trusts you. You can sleep on the sofa, if you don’t mind.”
I don’t trust myself, Sang Yan wants to say, as he follows her mutely back to the living room and watches her resume her place in her nest of blankets on the sofa. She pats the empty space next to her and yawns again.
“Did you have a good time with your friends?” She’s got the heating cranked up so he shucks off his jacket and hoodie, leaving only his t-shirt, and joins her on the sofa. Yifan slips her arms around his neck and snuggles up close.
Sang Yan only nods in response, silently wrapping his arms around her. She rests her head in the crook of his shoulder and doesn’t ask more, and they sit in comfortable silence, the white noise from the period drama playing on the TV a low murmur in the background. Yifan is soft and warm in his arms, and they’ve never really quite been alone like this before, in an enclosed space, nor has he ever held her quite this close. The buzz of the couple beers he’d had with his classmates is still thrumming through his veins and the further she slowly sinks into his arms, the more he feels like he’s on fire. Every inch of his skin touching her is on fire—
He just barely resists the impulse to jump when Yifan suddenly presses her face into the crook of his neck. “You smell so good,” she murmurs, her mouth warm and soft against his skin. Sang Yan feels his pants tighten, as his body begins to take an increased interest in these proceedings.
“Wen Shuangjiang, are you trying to flirt with me?” Sang Yan says. He makes the mistake of looking down at her, her lovely face nestled so close to his—but she is the one who makes the first move, slipping a hand behind his neck to pull him down to her. She cranes her neck up to meet him halfway, presses parted lips to his mouth. His free hand moves on its own accord, cradling her face, and then he’s pressing her back into the sofa cushions, his mouth hot and hard against hers.
They’ve kissed many times before. He’s never been afraid to show the world he loves her (who cares what everyone or anyone else thinks or says?), and often kisses her when they meet or part. On the top of her head, her forehead, her eyelids, her cheeks. The corner of her mouth as she smiles hello or goodbye at him. The tips of her fingers when she hand-feeds him strawberries she likes to buy from the street vendors outside the university gates. They’ve shared a few open-mouthed, exploratory, gentle kisses, behind one of the larger trees near the back gates of the university dorms. In the lifts of their parents’ apartment buildings. On the rooftop of the computer engineering’s highest building.
They’ve kissed many times before, but never like this. He feels like he’s falling, as she lets his breath and his tongue in, and he closes his eyes and just takes like he’s never let himself do before, as he settles his body over hers. His hands chart new territories—the softness and fullness of a breast through layers of fabric, the warmth of her skin as he slips a hand under the hem of her shirt. She is delightfully responsive under his touch, arching up against him, and his arousal brushes against the curve of her hip. He stills for a moment, a brief curl of panic flashing through him that he might scare her off with his desire, with how much he wants her—but she only presses herself closer to him.
Sang Yan tears his mouth and body away from hers with a valiant effort. “Wen Shuangjiang,” he rasps, holding her at arm’s length, his voice hoarser than he had intended. “Do you know what you’re doing to me?”
Her eyes are wide and dark, beautiful mouth red and bee-stung from his kisses and for a mad moment he thinks: I did that, and almost takes her into his arms again. She nods, looks away, swallows. Shy.
“I felt… it,” she whispers. “But I thought… it meant you liked it.”
“You have no idea how much I want you, you silly girl,” Sang Yan presses his nose into her hair. Her scent, sweet and heady, envelopes him. He’s never wanted anything, anyone, the way he wants her. But he knows this is not the right place, not the right time. She deserves more than hurried sex on a sofa for their first time. He wants to take his time, wants to learn and map out every inch of her, wants to slowly set them both on fire. She’s warm under his body and soft under his fingers, and he knows he must not rush this. He is not taking any chances with the only girl he has and will ever love.
“Another time,” he whispers into her hair. He feels her tremble under him, and he drops a chaste kiss on her mouth. “I’ll make it worth your wait.”
🍃❄️
Yifan slowly wakes to the clink of porcelain tableware, and the faint hum of conversation drifting in through her closed bedroom door. Mildly disoriented, she sits up and looks around—she’s in her own bed, tucked snugly in under her covers, but she could have sworn it was Sang Yan’s arms she had fallen asleep in last night, lulled into slumber on his chest by the rhythmic beat of his heart.
Wrapping herself in a chunky knit cardigan, she slips out of her room and heads towards the kitchen. Sang Yan is there with her pa, still dressed in yesterday’s clothes, and setting the small kitchen table for breakfast. His hair is tousled and unstyled and falling over his eyes, and his eyes crinkle into her favourite crescents as he smiles at her.
“Shuangjiang, you’re awake,” her pa sets a bowl of steaming congee in front of her. “Sang Yan made breakfast this morning. Though you really didn’t have to,” he shakes his head at Sang Yan.
“It was nothing, Shushù,” Sang Yan shakes his head. “Thanks for letting me stay over last night.”
“He’s a good lad, this one,” Yifan’s pa says, vigorously patting Sang Yan on the back.
“Morning Pa,” Yifan says. “Sang Yan. Did you sleep okay?”
“Slept like a log,” Sang Yan says, placing a plate of fried eggs on the table. “Don’t worry.”
🍃❄️
It’s a crisp morning, but the sun is out and it’s warmer than usual for early spring, and so they decide to walk back to the campus after breakfast. Neither of them have any morning classes, and they leisurely thread tree-lined paths, hand in hand. It’s a walk that will take them almost an hour, but Sang Yan is more than content to just quietly spend the morning with her.
They walk along in comfortable silence, and Sang Yan finds his thoughts drifting back to the night before, when he had dozed off with Yifan in his arms on the sofa, only to be led into visions of an alternate reality where Yifan had left him on the day their university admission results were released. She’d broken their promise and said harsh things to him—things he could never have imagined coming from her—and left for another university in a distant city. And yet he hadn’t been able to stop loving her.
His dreams, if any, tend to be more vivid post-drinks, but this nightmare—he thinks the dream justifies this label—was so real that even now, he still feels the pain echoing in his bones. He was almost convinced that that was his new reality, almost resigned to having been transported into a parallel universe, when Yifan had shifted in her sleep, stretching like a cat in his arms, and successfully roused him from his alcohol-induced stupor and the nightmare it had locked him in.
He had held her a little tighter, had stared at her a little longer after carrying her to bed and tucking her in, had let his lips rest for a few moments longer on her cheek. Back alone on the sofa, he had been unwilling to fall back asleep, afraid of re-entering the same painful dream, but the alcohol in his system had had other ideas. Thankfully, the following slumber was deep and dreamless and the next moment, he was waking to the sound of the Yifan’s father’s key in the lock.
“Are you okay?” Yifan peers up into his face. “Why do you look so pale?”
“I wasn’t quite honest earlier,” Sang Yan says, stopping in the middle of the path to pull her into his arms. “I had a bad dream last night. It’s just lingering. I’m fine, alcohol always tends to give me overly vivid dreams.”
Yifan’s eyes search his for a few moments, her gaze uncharacteristically sharper, but she seems to be able to tell that he doesn’t quite want to say much more about it. Instead, she wraps her arms tightly around his middle, nestling her head into his shoulder. “Then don’t drink so much next time anymore.”
Sang Yan nods, holds her close, breathes her in.
At least in this lifetime, she’s here with him. And with their youth, others would laugh and say how can you be so sure of the distant future ahead? At just twenty odd years old? Yet he somehow just knows with absolute certainty that in this lifetime, they will only ever be each other’s.
She tiptoes, lifting her face to kiss him, easily dispelling the last vestiges of the nightmare.