SG 48

Chu Baiyan froze for a moment, then quickly understood what his coworker meant. He held the cup and smiled, and he asked, “You could tell from the surveillance video?”

“If he wasn’t someone very important to you, why would you react like that?”

Chu Baiyan thought for a while, and he answered calmly, “The shop owner is my boyfriend.” He didn’t plan to come out at work, but since she had already noticed, there was no reason to hide it.

He preferred honesty to lying or making up a clumsy excuse to cover the relationship between him and Yan Anqing.

“No wonder I saw so many videos online of you helping in the shop, guess it’s what they say, being near the water gets you the moon first.” The coworker wasn’t too surprised. They had talked before about how Chu Baiyan and the shop owner were always together, and now it turned out they were in love.

She hadn’t thought much about it before. It wasn’t like she could assume that every close friendship was romantic just because she watched too many shows. But now that he confirmed it, it felt like witnessing a real-life couple from those stories.

“Don’t worry, we’re not the kind to judge. Come on, it’s not like it’s the dark ages. If we’d known you two were together, we’d have been quietly rooting for you already. Tell me, who made the first move?”

They were already this far into the topic, and she was curious. Both of them looked so calm, she really couldn’t tell who had made the first move.

The question caught Chu Baiyan off guard. Between him and Yan Anqing, there had never been any real “chasing.” They had been drawn to each other naturally, step by step, until their relationship formed on its own. But if he thought about it, he realized he was probably the first to notice his feelings were unusual.

“Me.” When he said that word, he smiled because of the memories between them.

“Nice one, Xiao Chu, looks like the handsome ones always get the handsome ones.” She laughed, it figured that only someone like Chu Baiyan could win over someone that good-looking.

“I said we shouldn’t post the clarification video yet because I was worried about that influencer’s fans. If they twist things and drag it into talk about sexuality, people will lose sight of what really happened.”

After her little bit of teasing, the coworker shared the concern she hadn’t said earlier in the lounge. The internet was full of all kinds of people. Just because they were open-minded didn’t mean everyone was. Some people still had a lot of hostility toward same-sex couples, and she didn’t want Chu Baiyan or the shop owner to end up getting hurt.

“Yeah, let’s wait and see. The attention might die down in a few days. Anqing doesn’t really care about how many customers he gets. If it only affects business, that’s not a big problem.” Chu Baiyan agreed with her reasoning.

“Anqing? ‘An’ for calm, ‘Qing’ for green? That’s the shop owner’s name?”

When Chu Baiyan nodded, she smiled and said, “That sounds so nice. Baiyan and Anqing, your names match perfectly.”

Yan Anqing didn’t know anything about the video going viral. He never watched short videos. When Chu Baiyan came home from work and saw him in a normal mood, he felt a bit relieved.

“How was the shop this afternoon?” Chu Baiyan asked that night while they were in bed.

“No difficult customers. More people than the past few days.” The crowd didn’t bother him. It was only the golden week, and he could handle a few busy days.

“If you meet anyone like the last guy who tried to get something for free, don’t answer. Just ignore them. Put on your headphones and watch SpongeBob. They’ll get bored and leave. It’s the holiday, and tourists are everywhere, so you might run into rude ones.”

Chu Baiyan told him what to do, just in case. He didn’t tell him about the video, first because Yan Anqing wouldn’t understand how to handle it, and second because he didn’t want him to see how nasty people could be or to make him afraid.

Yan Anqing rested his head on Chu Baiyan’s chest and hummed, then lifted his hand toward him. “Hand cream.”

Ever since Chu Baiyan bought him hand cream, it had become his nightly task before bed. He smiled, took the tube from the nightstand, squeezed a bit of the white cream onto the back of Yan Anqing’s hand, and spread it softly, making sure to cover each finger.

He didn’t miss the palms either. After working with clay and water every day, Yan Anqing’s palms were rough, the opposite of his smooth hands.

“When you’re in the shop, remember to use the cream too. If your hands get too dry, they’ll crack and hurt.” Chu Baiyan finished rubbing it in and reminded him. He had bought two tubes so that one could stay in the shop.

“Okay.” Yan Anqing lifted his hand to his nose and sniffed it. The citrus scent was his favorite. He wrapped his arms around Chu Baiyan’s neck and kissed his lips to show he liked it.

Chu Baiyan held his chin, caught his soft lips, and kissed him again. The kiss deepened before Yan Anqing could react.

During his rest breaks after each show, Chu Baiyan always checked his phone. The situation online wasn’t calming down like he hoped. More and more related videos kept appearing.

Tourism posts and videos had huge traffic during the holiday. People searched for popular destinations, and that influencer had used the timing to make his video spread again and again.

Each show during the holiday was a twenty-minute story performance. Chu Baiyan wore a wig and goggles underwater. Behind glass and seawater, visitors only got a brief view, so it was nearly impossible for anyone to recognize him as the other person in the video.

He worried more about Yan Anqing, who was fully exposed online, but he didn’t have a good solution. Some people had asked him to do paid gigs during the break, but he refused. He wanted to stay home every night with Yan Anqing.

On the fifth, after the show, he went back and found that the door of “Starfish Pottery” was locked from the inside. A sudden wave of fear hit him. He took out his phone and called Yan Anqing.

When Yan Anqing answered and said it was fine, he finally exhaled. By the time he waited for him to come down and open the door, the sweat on his back had already soaked his clothes.

That afternoon, someone had come into the shop filming while saying provocation after provocation. Yan Anqing ignored him, and the man just turned his phone on him. Once the man left, Yan Anqing closed the shop.

“You did great.” Chu Baiyan pulled him into his arms. “Stay with me for now. People might come again, and it’s safer in my apartment. They can’t get in there.”

Right now, keeping Yan Anqing safe mattered more than anything.

“I’ll take you to the shop in the morning. You can work in the studio and keep the front door locked like today. Don’t open for business. When I get off work, I’ll come, and we’ll watch the shop together at night.”

Yan Anqing didn’t understand what was going on, but he nodded and agreed.