I Took Xie Qingcheng's Phone

Wang Jiankang was the director of external relations at Huzhou University, somewhere in his early forties.

The job gave Wang Jiankang an extensive network. He was always meeting people for meals, always entertaining.

Xie Qingcheng had crossed paths with him once or twice and found the man insufferable — after that, he'd taken detours to avoid him. So 'knew him' was the extent of it. Hardly 'knew him well.'

'I don't believe in the supernatural, so if he's dead, it almost certainly ties back to the Chengkang Psychiatric Hospital business.' Xie Qingcheng took another sip of tea, his voice even. 'And to the Jiang Lanpei business.'

He Yu glanced back at the Broadcast Tower. 'Chengkang's made quite a lot of noise. Whatever's behind it is probably more than just a psychiatric hospital.'

Xie Qingcheng already knew that. He Yu didn't need to say it.

Whoever had done this had seized control of the university's Broadcast Tower, illegally pushed the same video to every electronic device within range, and still managed to steal photographs from the Police Force under a city-wide lockdown. The director of the Huzhou Municipal Public Security Bureau was probably being rushed to the cardiac ward right about now.

To pull something like this off and then flaunt it openly — the arrogance of whoever stood behind it needed no elaboration.

And the whole thing had reached into Huzhou University — where Xie Xue worked. That thought settled on Xie Qingcheng like a low, steady ache. He reached for his cigarettes on instinct, then glanced at He Yu, figured he'd have something to say about it, and walked out to the balcony instead.

He Yu heard the soft click of a lighter behind him and turned. In the darkness, a thin thread of flame flickered to life.

Xie Qingcheng brought the lighter to the cigarette. The flame traced the clean line of his profile — his jaw, his long lashes — and gilded the edges of him in a brief, warm rose. Then the lighter was gone, and only the cigarette's ember remained, pulsing in and out of the dark.

Like a firefly.

Xie Qingcheng finished the whole cigarette, stepped back inside with a quiet cough, and slid the glass door shut behind him.

'I'll make something for supper.' Everything was a mess anyway; sleep wasn't happening tonight. Better to eat something and wait it out, see how things fell.

'What do you want?' Xie Qingcheng asked He Yu.

'Caviar and sea urchin sashimi.'

'Get out.'

'...Whatever you're making is fine.'

Xie Qingcheng went to the kitchen.

He cooked the way he did everything else — neat, efficient, nothing wasted, like running through a surgical procedure where every step had its place. The range hood hummed. He Yu sat with his phone in his lap and looked down at the screen.

WeChat had detonated.

Mostly the class group chats — everyone talking about tonight. There probably wasn't a single person at Huzhou University who could sleep. Even the ones sitting obediently in their dorms with their friends had their eyes fixed on the video playing on their phones.

'Who even is Z.'

'Z has to be the initial of whoever they're targeting. My surname's Xu — thank god, I'm safe.'

'Oh god oh god somebody help me I'm a Zhang!'

'It's okay, classmate, I'm a Zhao. I've never hated my own surname this much before. I can't sleep either.'

A few idiots had even spontaneously formed group chats for students with surnames starting with Z or L, announcing they were going to huddle together for mutual comfort and support.

Someone else pointed out: 'The moment the Drop the Handkerchief music starts up again, that means they've locked onto a target and are going in for the kill. Our whole dorm is watching that Drop the Handkerchief video. It's so terrifying...'

News alerts were pushing through to the home screen too.

But when He Yu tapped one, it came up blank — content deleted by the publisher. The internet police were probably pulling an all-nighter scrubbing anything related. He understood why. The situation was uncontained, nobody knew what the next move would be, and the webs of stakes and players were still completely unclear. There was no way the authorities would let information like this spread unchecked online — that was how rumors ran wild and panic set in.

He Yu had a family group chat. Almost no one ever talked in it. He had reasonable cause to suspect his parents and his brother kept a separate three-person chat going, because he'd always been something like an outsider to the family — the volatile one, orbiting at a distance.

But Huzhou University had made the news tonight, and Lü Zhishu had sent a message into the group: 'Your father told me everything. Once you and Dr. Xie are back, let us know.'

He Yu: 'At the dorm.'

He Jiwei: 'Send a photo.'

He Yu sighed. His father thought he was brushing them off, doing a routine roll call.

He stood up and pulled the kitchen door open. 'Xie Qingcheng, my dad wants a photo of you.'

Xie Qingcheng frowned. 'I'll call him in a bit. That's fine.'

That suited He Yu perfectly — he had no interest in dealing with the 'one big happy family' group chat anyway. He tossed his phone aside and wandered into the kitchen. Xie Qingcheng was making noodles. It smelled good.

'What are you coming in here for.'

'Watching you cook. Learning something.'

Xie Qingcheng let that stand and didn't chase him out. He was about to fry two poached eggs, and it was only when he cracked one single-handed and tipped it into the pan that he noticed — mind elsewhere — he'd forgotten to put on an apron.

He could cook, but he hated getting oil smoke on himself. The eggs needed watching. He tilted his head toward He Yu and said: 'Do me a favor — grab the apron and tie it on me.'

He Yu: '...' He'd been fully demoted to personal assistant.

'What are you looking at? Why are you still standing there? Hurry up.'

He Yu had no choice. He retrieved the apron from behind the door — clearly not Xie Xue's; it was clean and plain, the kind Xie Xue would have kept specifically for Xie Qingcheng's visits.

'How does this even tie?'

'...You really have never done a day of housework in your life.'

'I know how to tie it, I've worn one before. I've just never tied one on someone else.'

'Figure it out.'

He Yu figured it out easily enough — it wasn't complicated. He stepped around behind Xie Qingcheng, looped the apron strings around him, and tied them.

Doing it, He Yu noticed again that Xie Qingcheng's waist was narrow. Before he'd only registered it in passing; this time he had the ties actually wrapping around the sides of his waist, pulling snug, needing to be knotted at the back.

He Yu was slightly taller. Xie Qingcheng stood at the stove; He Yu stood behind him, eyes lowered, carefully tying the knot. When he looked back up, he found himself looking directly at the back of Xie Qingcheng's bowed neck.

Very pale. The white of porcelain, almost translucent.

On the side of his nape, a small cinnabar mole.

He Yu had never seen Xie Qingcheng's neck from this angle before. When they were young he'd been shorter and couldn't; since they'd met again, he'd never seriously looked at Xie Qingcheng from behind. It was only now that he noticed how fine it was. Without thinking, he said: 'Xie Qingcheng, you have a mole on the back of your neck.'

He added:

'It's red.'

The voice was very close, right at the level of his neck. Male instinct pricked at Xie Qingcheng — a sudden sense of intrusion — and he turned his head back sharply.

Straight men. Absolute idiots.

His turning was territorial — a reflex to verify safety, to create distance.

But the idiot straight man hadn't thought it through: He Yu's voice was already that close, and his hands were still at Xie Qingcheng's waist tying the apron. If he turned his head at that moment — what kind of distance did he think that left?

He Yu's lips caught the edge of Xie Qingcheng's ear. And because neither of them reacted in time, the warm press of his lips grazed along his cheek as well.

Light as a dragonfly on water. Catastrophic as a wildfire.

Absolutely rigid.

He Yu: '...'

Xie Qingcheng: '...'

The area near the ear is extraordinarily sensitive for most people, and Xie Qingcheng was no exception. Even in that fraction of a second, he'd felt it — the low, slow warmth of a young man's breath, the particular pressure of a young male body crowding too close. He pressed a cold hand flat against He Yu's chest and pushed him back.

For a moment both of them looked terrible. They stared at each other with nothing to say.

Sorry?

Xie Qingcheng had turned his own head. He Yu had nothing to apologize for. And Xie Qingcheng certainly wasn't going to.

What are you doing?

...Obviously. No need to ask. This was the catastrophic byproduct of a straight man's complete absence of spatial awareness.

They stood there stiff for a moment. Then something strange started to smell from the pan.

He Yu snapped back to attention. 'It's burning, it's burning!'

Xie Qingcheng turned immediately. Sure enough, the underside of the egg had gone black.

'...'

He hadn't burned an egg since he was eight years old. This was a spectacular run of bad luck.

Xie Qingcheng swallowed his irritation, moved the pan off the heat, and turned back to He Yu. 'Why are you still standing here. Get out.'

Then he pulled a kitchen wet wipe from the dispenser and wiped the side of his ear and cheek where He Yu's lips had been — expression cold and flat.

He Yu: '...'

This accidental brush was nothing like the deliberate stage-play they'd done before, messing around as a joke.

He Yu was unsettled too. He said nothing else, just walked out with his head down. Back in the living room, something sat wrong in his chest — Xie Qingcheng's expression had been too cold, carrying the clear weight of revulsion and contempt looking down on him.

He Yu didn't like that feeling.

Xie Qingcheng had held him down since childhood. Since university, since running into each other again, He Yu had been slowly correcting the shadow that Xie Qingcheng cast over him from those early years — he'd even, more than once, managed to take the upper hand between them.

But that one look just now had pulled him back in an instant — Xie Qingcheng was still Xie Qingcheng, still capable of watching him with those bayonet eyes, steady and exacting, looking down at everything he was.

Xie Qingcheng still held absolute command.

He was still thinking about it when his phone rang.

He Yu, distracted, assumed it was He Jiwei losing patience and calling directly. He picked up without looking.

'Hello.'

'Hey, gege, I just got off duty, first thing I see is there's been an incident near your school. Gege, hang on, I'm coming over right now, I'm worried about you...'

He Yu pulled the phone away from his ear and realized his mistake. He'd answered Xie Qingcheng's phone.

The caller ID read: Chen Man.

The voice on the line was a young man's — flustered, in a hurry.

Who called out gege with that much ease and familiarity, like it was the most natural thing in the world.

He Yu had actually met Chen Man before. The three of them had shared a meal in the cafeteria once, talked for a good while.

But unfortunately, neither of them had given his name that day.

Enough time had passed, and voices through a phone always shifted slightly — so neither of them recognized the other.

He Yu felt uneasy in a way he couldn't quite name. He glanced at Xie Qingcheng still in the kitchen, scrubbing the pan and starting the eggs over, then stood and walked out to the balcony.

'Gege, why aren't you saying anything? Are you...'

He Yu slid the balcony door shut and spoke very politely: 'May I ask who's calling?'

'What? Is this not gege?' The other person clearly faltered. 'Who are you?'

'I'm a friend of Dr. Xie's.'

'Oh, then put my gege on.'

He Yu's voice stayed pleasant. It got colder. 'Xie Qingcheng doesn't have a younger brother, as far as I know. Which relative are you? He's never mentioned you.'

Chen Man paused. He wasn't slow — he could hear the other person picking a fight.

Officer Chen was a cop, after all. It was always him doing the questioning. Since when did someone come at him like this out of the gate?

And now that he listened more carefully, the voice sounded like a young man about his own age. This time of night, after everything that had happened, a young man who was with Xie Qingcheng — who could that be?

Chen Man couldn't work it out. He'd forgotten all about the cheerful lunch companion from that afternoon a while back.

He turned guarded. 'And who are you, exactly. Which friend? Gege doesn't have that many friends — I should know all of them.'

He Yu smiled. His eyes drifted to the Broadcast Tower glowing deep red, and the color seeped into his gaze, darkening it.

He didn't actually need to introduce himself. He did it anyway. 'My name is He Yu.'

'He's never mentioned you to me.'

He Yu's expression didn't shift. He looked at the tower as if about to say something, then found nothing to say.

He suddenly understood, with some clarity, that his world and Xie Qingcheng's didn't overlap very much.

This person surnamed Chen...

'He Yu, what's going on?' The sliding door opened behind him. Xie Qingcheng stood there.

'...There was a call. I picked up the wrong phone.'

Xie Qingcheng: 'Who was it.'

'Chen Man.'

Xie Qingcheng heard the name and crossed the space in a step, took the phone from He Yu's hand, and went inside to take the call.

He Yu stood where he was and watched.

Xie Qingcheng was a distant person. He didn't come easily to interest or concern for others. Outside of Xie Xue, almost no one held his attention for long.

But Chen Man seemed to be the exception.

He Yu felt worse, and couldn't say why.