SYU 25. Wintering

“What do you think you’re supposed to do when someone gets mad?” Chen Xiucheng propped his chin up with one hand while tapping his fingers on the table with the other, murmuring as if to himself.

Zhao Xi, sitting beside him, perked up with a nosy gleam in his eye. “What class is she from? Don’t tell me it’s a senior?” His curiosity thoroughly piqued, he looked more energized than ever and urged him on. “Not bad, Chen Xiucheng. What’s there to think about? If you’re in the wrong, admit it. If you’re not, apologize anyway. Just show off that ‘charge through fire and blades’ energy and win her over.”

“It’s Wu Jinshan,” Chen Xiucheng replied weakly.

“…What?”

“I said it’s not a girl. It’s Wu Jinshan,” Chen Xiucheng repeated.

Zhao Xi’s excited expression collapsed on the spot. “He’s a guy. Why do you even care if he’s mad?”

After they parted ways that night, Chen Xiucheng had figured Wu Jinshan was a grown man and would be fine, so he went back to play games with Lin Lu and the others. It was past midnight when he finally returned to Room 502 in the dark, only to find Wu Jinshan’s bed still empty. That was when panic finally set in.

He sent several messages and made multiple calls to Wu Jinshan, but got no reply. In the end, he started waking up nearly the entire dorm floor, including Song He downstairs, going around asking if anyone had seen Wu Jinshan.

Everyone thought Chen Xiucheng must have lost something valuable to be making such a fuss, but all he did was shout frantically, “Wu Jinshan is gone! He’s missing!”

No matter how well-liked he usually was, waking people in the middle of the night to go looking for someone did not win him many supporters. Besides, Wu Jinshan rarely talked to others and always kept to himself. Who knew where he could have gone? He was tall, not exactly the type who could be kidnapped by traffickers.

“What do you want us to do? Call the cops?”

“What is he, your wife? You two can’t go a day without arguing or getting all clingy?”

Some even threw out sarcastic remarks, which drove Chen Xiucheng to the brink. He shouted back incoherently, accusing them of being heartless and not caring about a fellow student’s safety.

Eventually, a few classmates with more sympathy for his anxiety helped him analyze the situation and offered some practical advice.

First, Wu Jinshan was an adult. Second, it had only been five hours since Chen Xiucheng last saw him. Third, there had been no signs of mental instability or suicidal thoughts recently. They advised Chen Xiucheng to get some rest and wait until morning to report it to their counselor.

Maybe Wu Jinshan had just snuck off somewhere for fun and would climb back over the dorm wall later. It wouldn’t be the first time someone had done that.

Still unable to sleep, Chen Xiucheng left a message for the counselor and waited a few more hours, anxious and restless. He only fell asleep when sheer exhaustion finally overcame him.

He hadn’t slept for long when a call woke him. It was past seven in the morning, and the counselor had called back. The counselor told him that Wu Jinshan had checked in around ten the night before, saying he planned to stay off-campus for a while because the dorm was too noisy and he couldn’t focus on preparing for finals.

That morning, Chen Xiucheng skipped class, didn’t eat, didn’t shower, didn’t brush his teeth. He beat the hell out of the frog plushie at his bedside, then crawled back under the covers and slept like the world didn’t exist.

He swore, in his nineteen years of life, not even the time when his mom and dad had a blowout fight and his mom stormed off in the middle of the night, drove to a club, hired a male escort for a “heart-to-heart,” and blew a few grand had made him this worried.

If his classmates hadn’t stopped him last night, he might have actually called the cops. He’d been terrified something had happened to Wu Jinshan. He hadn’t slept a wink all night. And in the end, the guy was perfectly fine, had randomly decided to move out, and hadn’t told him anything. Ignored all his texts and calls like his concern was some kind of joke.

To make matters worse, when Chen Xiucheng finally woke up in the afternoon, he found Wu Jinshan’s stuff and luggage completely gone. The desk and wardrobe across from him were empty. The bedding had vanished too. When he asked Zhuang Ming about it, he found out Wu Jinshan had come back that morning while he was still asleep and quietly packed his things.

Wu Jinshan had never kept many personal items, and he always kept his space neat. It hadn’t taken him more than an hour to get everything in order and drag his suitcase out the door.

“Where did he go? Why didn’t you wake me up? Why didn’t you stop him?” Chen Xiucheng grabbed Zhuang Ming by the collar and shouted loud enough to wake the dead. It was like if he couldn’t find Wu Jinshan, then Zhuang Ming had to die in his place.

As the long-suffering witness to their constant arguments and fights, Zhuang Ming had long since given up on the idea of peace.

“He told the counselor he was gonna stay off-campus for a while, didn’t he? What do you want me to do about it? I’m not his dad. I can’t tell him what to do.” Honestly, Zhuang Ming thought Chen Xiucheng should be thrilled. If Wu Jinshan wasn’t living in the dorm anymore, wasn’t that supposed to be a good thing?

He wasn’t the only one who thought so. None of the other students could figure out why Chen Xiucheng had completely lost it over Wu Jinshan temporarily moving out. For three straight days, he yelled at everyone like a lunatic.

Once his temper cooled, Chen Xiucheng hugged his frog plushie and began reflecting on himself. If this whole mess was because of the dating thing, that was something they could have just talked through. If Wu Jinshan didn’t like Song He, fine, he’d help him find someone else. Trying out a few guys was no big deal. It wasn’t like he was forcing him to be with Song He.

But when he sent that explanation to Wu Jinshan, there was still no reply.

So he thought harder. Maybe the real issue was that he’d uploaded Wu Jinshan’s photo to the dating app without asking. That had been careless. That was his fault. He texted an apology.

At the same time, Lin Lu suddenly stopped showing up to school. Even with finals coming up, he wasn’t attending classes.

Chen Xiucheng tried calling him, but every number came back as out of service. He had to ask the counselor again before he found out that Lin Lu had been hospitalized. When he pressed for details, asking what kind of illness it was and how serious, the counselor fell silent.

He had no idea how he made it through those next few days. Get up. Go to class. Eat. Come back. Shower. Sleep. In the final month of his second semester, he was finally living the peaceful college dorm life he’d once dreamed of. But he couldn’t stand a minute of it.

The only thing that stirred the slightest ripple in his heart was the 800 yuan he’d lent Lin Lu suddenly getting transferred back to him.

It hadn’t exactly flown back to him either. It was Zhao Xi who handed the money over. But when Chen Xiucheng asked how Lin Lu suddenly had the cash to repay him, Zhao Xi also looked completely in the dark.

Lin Lu came back to campus a few days before finals week. The injuries on his face had not healed. Bruises and scabs still remained, and he walked with a limp. Rumors started to spread at school, saying that Lin Lu had been beaten up by loan sharks because he had failed to pay back gambling debts.

After he returned, Lin Lu was no longer the arrogant, aggressive person he used to be. Every day, he either buried himself in studying or lived quietly with his head down. Most of all, he avoided Chen Xiucheng like the plague.

Once, Chen Xiucheng bumped into him by chance and greeted him like usual, but Lin Lu reacted as if he had gone mad, clutching his head and running off in panic.

But by then, Chen Xiucheng no longer had the energy to care about Lin Lu. The only thing on his mind was Wu Jinshan, who still refused to acknowledge him.

For a while, Chen Xiucheng kept asking the counselor for Wu Jinshan’s off-campus address, but he would not tell him.

The counselor probably knew the two of them didn’t get along, and with Chen Xiucheng looking so frustrated and on edge, he couldn’t even explain clearly why he needed Wu Jinshan’s address. The way he looked made it seem like he just wanted to pick a fight, so in the end, the counselor didn’t tell him anything and simply advised him to focus on finals instead.

Chen Xiucheng had no way of explaining his relationship with Wu Jinshan. When he looked at his own face in the mirror back in the dorm, even he had to admit he looked like someone out for revenge.

Since he could not get anything out of the counselor, he decided to find Wu Jinshan himself.

He confirmed that Wu Jinshan was still attending classes regularly, mostly at the Veterinary Medicine. Chen Xiucheng went by the college a few times but never worked up the nerve to go inside. That was because his mother, the absolute authority in the household, was a professor there at Qin Hai Medical University.

Chen Xiucheng weighed the odds of running into Wu Jinshan against the chances of running into Professor Lin. In the end, he hesitated and backed off.

He had no idea where in the college Wu Jinshan might be, and with how busy the end of term was, he could not hang around there all day. He tried looking for him in the round white decorative building behind the Veterinary Medicine, but he never saw him again.

He noticed that the food bowls for the stray cats on the lawn kept getting refilled with fresh kibble. He wondered if that was Wu Jinshan’s doing. The thought made him jealous of the orange tabby, thinking Wu Jinshan treated that cat better than him.

One day, Chen Xiucheng sat inside the same white round structure, headphones on just like Wu Jinshan used to do. On a whim, he dug out the voice recording where Wu Jinshan had once sworn he would make him feel good, and listened to it again. He wondered if Wu Jinshan had really gone impotent because he had always mocked his technique.

In truth, Chen Xiucheng knew exactly how it had felt to have sex with Wu Jinshan. It had never been bad, never something he would want to push away. For someone who had only just begun exploring sex, it had been overwhelming, too much to handle. But there was no denying that it had been pleasure he had never known before, something he could not stop wanting. Still, those were words he could never bring himself to say aloud.

He wanted to delete the recording, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. What exactly was he reluctant to let go of? Wu Jinshan was gone now, ignoring him, but he still wanted to see him. Why?

Chen Xiucheng and Wu Jinshan had been fighting for almost a year, ever since school started last fall, all the way to this semester’s finals. They had argued over every petty little thing, even gotten into physical fights. Now that Wu Jinshan had finally been driven away, he should have been happy. But he wasn’t.

Maybe there were just some things in this world that couldn’t be reasoned through. Sometimes, it was better to simply follow your heart.

After finals, the students in the dorms gradually started heading home. Lin called to tell Chen Xiucheng to wait for her in her lab on the last day so they could go back together.

Chen Xiucheng never expected he’d run into Wu Jinshan there. He was standing outside the glass window of Lab B57 when he spotted that tall figure crouched behind a row of empty cages. He recognized him immediately.

“Wu Jinshan?”

“Chengcheng, you’re here,” Professor Lin said when she saw her son standing frozen at the doorway. Then she turned to Wu Jinshan and asked, “You two know each other?”

She was used to her son running around with all kinds of people. Ever since he was little, every time he started at a new school, it only took a few days for him to be on familiar terms with half the grade. So it wasn’t all that surprising he’d know someone like Wu Jinshan.

“Xiao Wu helps out here from time to time,” she explained, motioning for her son to wait patiently at the door. Then she introduced him to Wu Jinshan. “This is my son.”

Wu Jinshan was in a white lab coat, busy rinsing and organizing the lab equipment. At the sound of her voice, he looked up, briefly startled, but his attention quickly returned to what he was doing.

After not seeing Wu Jinshan for a month, watching this person work so seriously again was like a kind of visual aftertaste for Chen Xiucheng. Wu Jinshan’s movements were practiced, his handling meticulous, his expression focused. Whether it was his upright posture, those broad hands, or his nimble fingertips, every detail left a deep impression on Chen Xiucheng.

When he finished cleaning the last lab table, he reported to Professor Lin about all the equipment and specimens that needed to be checked. Then he changed his clothes, dragged his suitcase behind him, and headed downstairs without saying a word.

Chen Xiucheng followed him all the way out of campus, asking why he had moved out, where he was staying, whether it was safe, how he did on his finals, what his plans were for the summer. It was just like that first day in Dorm 502, when he had bent over backward trying to please him, throwing out conversation after conversation. But Wu Jinshan didn’t say a word, didn’t even acknowledge him.

He couldn’t pry a single sentence out of Wu Jinshan. Feeling more and more disheartened, he suddenly asked, “Do you still want… Chengcheng?”

Even he found the question awkward. When Wu Jinshan had named the little frog, he probably didn’t know that Chengcheng was his childhood nickname. But now that he did, using that name again felt undeniably intimate.

Wu Jinshan stopped walking and finally turned to look at him. His expression shifted subtly, as if trying to confirm what that name referred to. His gaze flickered slightly before he said, “Didn’t I leave it with you to take care of?”

Chen Xiucheng’s heart soared at once. “Don’t you want to see it?”

He unzipped his backpack, eager to show how well he had looked after the little frog. But his backpack was a mess, everything crammed together, and the toy had apparently been squashed to the bottom. As he fumbled through it, Wu Jinshan had already slipped away toward the waiting bus, and a group of classmates had just surrounded him, cheerfully saying their goodbyes.

Chen Xiucheng had once imagined what it would be like if Wu Jinshan stopped fighting with him. Now that it had come true, all he felt was a hollow ache.

It wasn’t that he was a masochist who enjoyed bickering. He had simply come to realize that he liked the old Wu Jinshan better, the one who used to argue with him.

Wu Jinshan had always been quiet, withdrawn, solitary, focused only on his own affairs. Chen Xiucheng, by contrast, was noisy and chaotic, always surrounded by people.

But the truth was, he had always been this way. He had only ever made an exception for Chen Xiucheng. He was afraid of being disliked by him, afraid that he would be the one left behind.

Warmth doesn’t last forever. Wu Jinshan was only human, and he feared loneliness too. He had to keep a little warmth for himself if he was going to make it through the winter.