Arrogant and unruly, yet strangely meticulous and considerate.

That night, Meng Yanxi had the driver send him back to the Meng residence first.

That was the first time Jin Zhao had seen someone’s home that was a garden—covered corridors against wind and rain, small bridges over flowing water, artificial hills and lake stones. Before that, she had only seen ornamental gardens as tourist attractions. You bought a ticket to get in; wherever you went, there were people everywhere. The gardens were planted with many flowers and plants, yet you couldn’t smell their fragrance—the air was filled with the scent of sweat from strangers. In front of beautiful scenery, it was always crowded with people, and you had to be careful not to block others’ photos.

It was the first time she realized that there were still people who could live in a garden. Larger, more beautiful, more exquisite than gardens meant to be tourist sites.

She suddenly understood that perhaps the most valuable thing was private space.

On a distant beauty bench, there was a little girl, looking about ten or so, leaning over it to feed the fish. Seeing Meng Yanxi return, she called out happily yet unhappily, “Ge (Brother)!”

The little girl’s clear, sweet voice carried from far away, once again highlighting the value of private space. After all, only in a quiet home could a voice travel so far; if it were among a crowd, it would be diluted into a single grain of white noise in a vast sea of people.

Meng Yanxi got out of the car and had the driver wait ten minutes before taking her home.

Jin Zhao thought he would come back, but the youth turned around and said to her, “Goodbye.”

A hard-to-describe sense of weightlessness swept through Jin Zhao’s heart.

It was only after the Rolls-Royce drove away from the Meng residence that Jin Zhao vaguely understood Meng Yanxi’s intention. —If those little thugs held a grudge and followed them tonight, then in the end, they would only follow him to the Meng residence.

But just as he had said, let them come find him and try.

That was the first time Jin Zhao glimpsed, beneath the youth’s arrogance and unruliness, a heart that was hot-blooded yet soft.

-♥︎ ྀི◟ ͜ ◞♥︎ ྀི◟ ͜ ◞♥︎ ྀི

Classes at the Affiliated High School resumed with Grade Two, Class Six, for two days of remedial lessons. On the morning they returned, the whole class looked somewhat listless; everyone’s mood was not great, and their only enthusiasm was devoted entirely to rushing homework. Test papers flew around the classroom; many familiar faces would grab any sheet at random and start copying.

For example, Luo Heng—no sooner had Meng Yanxi entered the classroom than he rushed up and grabbed a stack of papers, only to have them intercepted midway by Lu Jingyue, who directly snatched them all away.

Lu Jingyue was even quite polite: “Thanks. If you hadn’t said anything, I’d have forgotten there was homework.”

Lu Jingyue was the typical kind of boy who didn’t like doing homework but was smart; in the end, his grades always managed to pass. In this regard, he was very different from Meng Yanxi.

Jin Zhao hadn’t understood before why two cousins from the same background could differ so greatly in their attitudes toward studying and their ways of doing things. Now she understood. Compared to Lu Jingyue, whose father was strong and mother strong, with nothing to worry about, Meng Yanxi carried an extra measure of responsibility. His high profile was not mere ostentation but accountability; he needed excellence that no one could match or replace to safeguard the position of himself and his younger sister.

So though both had returned from Switzerland, Lu Jingyue took leave directly, while Meng Yanxi came to school as soon as he got off the plane; though both were of illustrious origin, Lu Jingyue often forgot to do his homework, while Meng Yanxi was self-disciplined to the point of severity.

Si Tian turned around and leaned on Jin Zhao’s desk, watching Luo Heng go crazy, patting the desk as she laughed.

In the end, Luo Heng knew how to bend when needed. He borrowed half from Jin Zhao and half from Si Tian, piecing things together from all sides, and finally managed—by the skin of his teeth—to finish copying before the homework was collected.

During the remedial lessons, there was no need to go out to the field for broadcast calisthenics during the long break, but most of the students were still used to going downstairs to take a walk.

Jin Zhao and Si Tian went to the convenience store to buy water. On the way, they ran into girls from other classes. One of them, Wang Jiajia, was Si Tian’s middle school classmate, and the two stopped to chat for a bit.

Wang Jiajia asked Si Tian, “Could you help me with something?”

Si Tian asked, “What kind of help?”

Wang Jiajia said, “I’ve got about twenty-odd test papers and three practice books. Could you help me bring them back to your class and let everyone split them up to do?”

Jin Zhao: “!”

She had thought that someone like Luo Heng, running around everywhere grabbing other people’s homework to copy, was already outrageous enough. She hadn’t expected something even more outrageous here, directly handing it out for others to do!

Si Tian asked bluntly, “Are you crazy?”

“I’m not, the crazy one is my mom!” Wang Jiajia scratched her head in frustration. “You know our family runs a print shop, right? It’s between No. 1 High and No. 2 High, so every time my mom prints test papers and practice books for those two schools, she prints an extra set for me to do… Am I some kind of cheap person? Picking up other people’s homework to do!”

“Hahahahahahahahahahahaha!” Si Tian laughed with undisguised schadenfreude.

Jin Zhao also really wanted to laugh, but she felt she couldn’t kick someone when they were down. She could only hold it in with all her might and quietly turn her face away.

And then, at a glance, she saw Meng Yanxi walking toward them from the opposite direction.

The youth was tall with long legs. Beneath the blue-and-white school uniform, his frame was lean yet powerful. The temperature had dropped these past few days, and many students had already changed into long sleeves, yet he was still wearing short sleeves, his arms exposed—thin muscle, pale and cool—on his right forearm, a vivid patch of bluish-purple.

After two days, the injured area had grown more swollen, the color darker.

Jin Zhao’s gaze tightened slightly, her heart filled with a complicated, indescribable feeling.

She lifted her foot and walked toward him.

The injury on Meng Yanxi’s face was still there as well, but because it was on his jaw, the color was lighter; you couldn’t see it unless you were up close. Seeing Jin Zhao walking toward him, he naturally looked at her.

The youth’s eyes were pitch-black. He stood a head taller than her, and when he looked at her, his gaze slanted down along the outer corner of his eyes.

Jin Zhao’s heartbeat sped up for no reason. She could even hear it—thump, thump. She wanted to press it down with reason, but she couldn’t control it.

If at the beginning her impression of Meng Yanxi hadn’t been good, then after that night, this youth named Meng Yanxi was like a seed—clean and beautiful, brimming with vitality—that had taken root in her heart.

She secretly took a deep breath, lifted her face, and softly explained to him, “Your clothes, I sent them to the dry cleaners. I’ll bring them to you once they’re done.”

The girl’s face was clean and rosy, even the little crescents beneath her eyes tinged with pink. The wind, carrying the fragrance of osmanthus, blew over the two of them, stirring the hem of his clothes and lifting the wisps of hair at her forehead.

Meng Yanxi lowered his gaze to look at her.

“Meng Yanxi.”

Someone called him from ahead. Lu Jingyue and Luo Heng were coming down from the teaching building together.

“It’s fine, no rush.” Meng Yanxi walked past Jin Zhao.

“What are you chatting about? Come on, let’s shoot a few hoops.”

Luo Heng slung an arm broadly over Meng Yanxi’s back, only to have it immediately brushed away in disgust.

“Class is about to start. What hoops?”

“Just shoot a three-pointer and we’ll be back—get it out of our system.” Luo Heng had thick skin and hooked his arm back on again.

One arm over Meng Yanxi’s shoulder, one over Lu Jingyue’s, he hugged left and right, hauling along two top-tier handsome guys toward the basketball court, blinding no one knew how many girls along the way.

Luo Heng seemed to greatly enjoy this kind of envy, jealousy, and hatred—he grinned obnoxiously—while Meng Yanxi wore a face full of disdain.

Only Lu Jingyue looked thoughtfully at Jin Zhao. As he passed by her, he smiled slightly.

The smile looked very friendly, but when Jin Zhao met Lu Jingyue’s clear, transparent eyes, she didn’t know why, but inspiration struck, and she suddenly thought of Luo Heng’s crow-mouth explanation of her name: “Zhao as in blatantly revealed; Zhao as in Sima Zhao’s intentions—known to all.”

What a terrifying curse!

-♥︎ ྀི◟ ͜ ◞♥︎ ྀི◟ ͜ ◞♥︎ ྀི

Si Tian was a loyal person. After listening to Wang Jiajia’s complaints, she immediately dragged Jin Zhao to Class Six and carried out a stack of test papers and practice books from inside.

Jin Zhao: “Are we really going to help? The handwriting isn’t even the same.”

Si Tian: “There’s no helping it. We can’t just watch her go die.”

Jin Zhao: “……”

Well… it wasn’t that scary.

Si Tian was well-liked. Within just a few minutes of returning to the class, she had finished distributing everything, and Jin Zhao ended up with five test papers.

Back at her seat, just as she was about to put the papers into the desk compartment, Jin Zhao felt something hard inside. A sweet, bubblegum-pink envelope, sealed with a heart sticker.

This wasn’t the first time Jin Zhao had seen such a letter. Over the past two months, she had already received several of them. They weren’t for her; they were for Meng Yanxi.

Meng Yanxi had changed seats, but the news hadn’t spread through the Affiliated High in time. There were still girls who didn’t know that the seat by the window in the third row now belonged to Jin Zhao, and so, inevitably, letters were delivered to the wrong person.

Before, Jin Zhao’s impression of Meng Yanxi hadn’t been very good. She didn’t want to pass the girls’ heartfelt feelings on to someone like him—someone with a chaotic private life, aloof and superior, and seemingly without a heart—but she also couldn’t bring herself to privately dispose of someone else’s letter. So she handed them all to Luo Heng. Luo Heng was close to Meng Yanxi; he would pass them along.

But this time, Jin Zhao felt that she had developed a dark thought.

She stuffed the envelope back into the desk compartment. She didn’t give it to Meng Yanxi, didn’t give it to Luo Heng—she kept it.

Because she had done something immoral, Jin Zhao was tormented by her conscience for several days in a row.

Even running into Meng Yanxi on the road and brushing past him no longer felt as pleasant as before. The letter in her desk compartment was like a piece of charcoal. As the autumn chill deepened, that piece of charcoal burned hotter and hotter, until even the seat Jin Zhao sat on felt like it was on fire, making her restless and uneasy day after day.

Someone else who was just as uneasy was Ji Haoxuan.

Jin Zhao hadn’t opened the letter to read it, so she didn’t know that it wasn’t for Meng Yanxi at all—it was for her. It was from Ji Haoxuan.

But she didn’t have the habit of peeking at “other people’s” letters, so she remained completely unaware, silently enduring the reproach of her own conscience.

To make matters worse, Ji Haoxuan didn’t know she hadn’t read it. He thought that all her subsequent odd behavior—sudden blushing, rapid breathing, and flickering eyes—was because she had seen his letter.

He thought their feelings were mutual, and that made Ji Haoxuan’s heart stir with restless anticipation.