Meeting room.
“What’s up with Captain Xu today?” Qiu Zhixiang held a cup of instant noodles, quickly swallowing a few bites to fill his stomach. He hadn’t eaten lunch, busy with the case until now. His eyes curiously peeked towards the bathroom door gap.
In his eyes, Xu Xingchun wasn’t just good-looking on the outside. More importantly, he had substance. Usually, he was incredibly focused and serious when working. His work style, attitude, and ability were all first-class. Except for sometimes being a bit too quiet, he really had no flaws.
Today, something seemed off. Usually meticulous and rarely making mistakes, he had uncharacteristically zoned out several times while reporting the preliminary autopsy. The meeting even had to be paused halfway through.
Shocking.
“Do you know?” Qiu Zhixiang turned to ask a girl from the technical department who was doing trace analysis.
When it came to gossip, everyone relaxed, treating it as a topic of conversation outside of case work. They discussed it enthusiastically, with great excitement.
“Hey, you DNA lab folks, if you have time to chat about gossip here, does that mean the scene analysis results are out? The comparison results are out? The case is solved?” Lin Jin glared at the group, gritting his teeth: “This case is a shooting that occurred in a busy area, and given the victim’s special identity, it has a very bad impact. The higher-ups want us to solve it within 48 hours, and you all still have the mood to chat!”
The others fell silent, nodding quietly and slinking back to their original positions to organize their notebooks and prepare to work.
—
Xu Xingchun cupped a handful of cold water and splashed it on his face. He turned off the faucet and looked down at the dark marble with an expressionless face. His hands gripped the edges of the sink, letting the remaining water splash onto his shirt.
Someone coughed twice, inappropriately. Liu Jingbo leaned nearby, watching Xu Xingchun. He saw the veins bulging on the back of his hands from the effort.
Emotions that were clearly being suppressed but couldn’t be contained. His expression went from teasing to sighing, and he raised his chin, “Look at your state. Who is she?”
Xu Xingchun’s gaze was heavy, staring straight ahead. He held his breath, not saying a word.
“Have you calmed down?” Liu Jingbo sneered disdainfully, and concluded directly, “Just by looking at you like this, I can tell it must be your first love.”
As a qualified criminal investigator, the most important thing is to have a pair of eyes good at discovering, looking for evidence in the details, and judging the truth from the details.
Just from the first glance when Fu Xueli appeared, Liu Jingbo saw his expression and immediately understood – Xu Xingchun must have very special feelings for this woman.
Fu Xueli’s middle school was in Lincheng. That city had old phoenix trees planted on both sides of the roads, lush green leaves in midsummer, intertwining branches covered with snow in winter.
She grew up with her uncle Fu Yuandong since she was young, and had a cousin at home. The Fu family had some reputation in Linshi, and since Fu Yuandong was usually busy with business and didn’t discipline them strictly, the two were even more lawless. Her cousin Fu Chenglin had been forming gangs and skipping class to fight since elementary school, and was a notorious bully.
Fu Xueli had been outstanding in appearance since she was young, and because of her brother, she had always been a “popular figure” in her grade, the number one topic of gossip after class.
Because she often hung out with older students and people from other schools, others were afraid of her, which led to her not being able to make any normal friends. In the eyes of her middle school classmates and peers, the impression of Fu Xueli was:
Rich family, can’t mess with her, poor grades, often sought after by boys and girls from other classes.
In short, she was considered a very bad girl.
In Fu Xueli’s first web drama after her debut, her role was that of a delinquent girl. It was completely typecasting, like a bad girl from an old Hong Kong movie, not dyeing her hair, only wearing short skirts, showing off a pair of straight, smooth legs. Wearing silver bracelets, red strings, waist chains, smoking. Wandering alone late at night drinking beer next to colorful food stalls.
She had an extraordinarily bad temper, yet there was never a shortage of men infatuated with her.
She displayed the flamboyance and rebelliousness she had cultivated since childhood to the fullest. Without acting, she had a natural sense of freedom that seemed innate and unrestrained.
At that time, according to the unwritten rules, bad students wouldn’t actively provoke the good students in the class. Both had their own sense of superiority and default social circles, and under normal circumstances, there wouldn’t be any intersection. Not to mention that Fu Xueli was the leader of this group of bad students, a typical example frequently criticized by teachers in class, even further removed from the good kids.
One day before the first class at noon, eye exercises1 were playing on the broadcast. Fu Xueli was wearing MP3 earphones, idly flipping through a comic book, when she vaguely heard a low voice behind her, “Excuse me.”
She took a bite of an apple and turned another page of the comic in her hand. From the corner of her eye, she saw someone standing beside her.
Fu Xueli continued to focus on her comic book. Her thin red lips bit into the bright yellow fruit flesh, her legs crossed, her slender white arms swaying.
“Can you let me in?”
It wasn’t until that voice sounded above her head again that she pulled out one earbud, slowly raised her head, looked at the person for two seconds, and said a bit impatiently, “What did you say? Speak up!”
He was the new student who had just transferred to their class yesterday or the day before. He looked like a standard good student, and faced with her impatience, he wasn’t annoyed. His words were still gentle and simple, “I want to move my books in.”
In the classroom of that year when they were 14, the noisy bell rang, and the teacher came in carrying test papers. Xu Xingchun stood in the narrow aisle with a stack of books in his arms. His fair face was clean and thin, having just finished copying from the blackboard, with traces of chalk dust still on his fingertips.
The afternoon breeze carried a bit of warm sunlight, whistling through the gaps in his loose white school uniform.
A neat and tidy good boy – this was Fu Xueli’s first impression of Xu Xingchun.
But for some reason, Fu Xueli always felt like she had seen him somewhere before. However, this was just a fleeting thought, quickly thrown to the back of her mind.
After sitting together, Fu Xueli realized that Xu Xingchun was indeed a very easy person to talk to, never losing his temper with anyone.
However, there was one annoying thing about sitting with him: after class, people would always gather around to ask questions. She heard he used to be a famous top student in the grade, and didn’t know why he suddenly transferred classes.
Sometimes when the noise of academic discussions filled her ears, Fu Xueli would get impatient and directly chase everyone away.
Yes, Fu Xueli and Xu Xingchun were completely opposite types of people:
She was lazy and had a bad temper, and her favorite thing was to bully honest people.
Like Xu Xingchun.
Sometimes when he was called on to answer questions in class, she would quietly pull out the chair behind his legs, and after watching him almost fall over awkwardly, she would laugh triumphantly along with those around her. Giggling and covering her mouth, she was as mischievous as a playful little fox.
Later, as it happened more often, Xu Xingchun became very used to it. He could answer questions with a straight face, then turn around to adjust his chair before sitting down, the whole process as calm as still water.
Other times, when he occasionally took a nap on his desk during breaks, Fu Xueli would suddenly lean close to his ear and shout, “The teacher’s coming!” Then she’d retreat to her original position, enjoying the sight of him startled awake, groggy and half-asleep.
When he was younger, Xu Xingchun was thin-skinned and very proper, unable to withstand teasing. But he never lost his temper with her, often just pulling a long face, burying himself in homework, and ignoring her for a long time.
As time went on, Fu Xueli felt that he was actually far from being as harmless as he appeared on the surface. Rather, he was a boy with many thoughts, very self-restrained and repressed. But she couldn’t be bothered to spend effort trying to figure him out.
At that time, good students had many privileges, and changing seats was just a matter of going to the office to find a teacher. However, no matter how much Fu Xueli went overboard, he never actively asked to move away. Even in the following semester, they somehow always ended up sitting next to each other.
According to Fu Xueli’s guess at the time, it was because sitting with her meant fewer people would come to disturb him during breaks, so Xu Xingchun could quietly do his homework.
Everyone was afraid of her.
To be fair, Xu Xingchun had always been good-looking since he was young. But not in a feminine way; rather, his features were clear, and as he grew older, his eyes became deeper and calmer.
At that time, there were girls in the class who liked to write romance novels in small notebooks, with him as the male protagonist. Somehow that notebook ended up in Fu Xueli’s hands, so she would read it aloud next to his ear in a sarcastic tone, word by word.
[It was during a long break, just after finishing the radio calisthenics. Xu Xingchun was still holding the wooden class sign, passing by our classroom door. He was wearing a blue school uniform jacket, his gentle profile cast in shadow, looking lonely yet handsome…]
[Xu Xingchun leaned in, his thin lips slowly approaching her cheek, his breath hot enough to make one’s heart flutter. His sexy Adam’s apple moved up and down—]
Word by word, until Xu Xingchun was blushing furiously, finally putting down his pen and covering his ears tightly with his hands, only then would she stop.
Although she always bullied him, Fu Xueli occasionally showed some sense of responsibility. For example, she tacitly considered Xu Xingchun as someone under her protection.
Moreover, during their student days, boys like Xu Xingchun who excelled in both character and studies, who stood on the flag-raising platform every time as the grade representative to give speeches, who properly wore their school uniforms, clean and gentle, held a special allure for girls of that age.
At some point, he caught the eye of a delinquent girl from another class.
That day was the class committee’s duty day, and after school, only Xu Xingchun was left in the classroom doing his duties. He had just finished wiping the blackboard, still holding the eraser in his hand, when he was surrounded by that group on the podium.
The girl from the other class had light yellow dyed hair and brought her older brother from a higher grade, forcing Xu Xingchun to agree to be with her.
“Be my boyfriend, okay? If you don’t say anything, I’ll take it as a yes.” The girl looked up, leaning in close, smiling as she tried to touch him.
But Xu Xingchun avoided her. He didn’t respond, keeping his head down, his expression very bland, without a trace of a smile on his face. He seemed to ignore their words completely, as if the commotion had nothing to do with him.
“Hey, are you mute? Want to get beaten up?”
The older boy, seeing that he kept silent, got a bit annoyed and reached out to push his shoulder. Just as the others were getting more worked up, the classroom door was suddenly kicked open with great force.
The door slammed against the wall and bounced back. With several loud bangs, it shook violently. Fu Xueli rolled up her sleeves, looked around for something, grabbed a broom leaning in the corner, and started swinging it into the crowd, cursing at the boy who was getting physical, “Are you crazy?! Who are you hitting, you idiot!”
That evening, as the sun was setting, she appeared like a hero suddenly showing up at the crucial moment in a movie, backlit. Xu Xingchun watched, stunned, the tightly pressed corners of his lips relaxing.
The rest of the group was dumbfounded, frightened by Fu Xueli’s momentum. After a few seconds, someone belatedly recognized her. The delinquent girl naturally knew her too, and although she was unhappy, she knew she couldn’t mess with Fu Xueli. She could only force a smile and say, “What’s this, Sister Xueli, is he your boyfriend?”
Fu Xueli didn’t even listen, striding forward to pull Xu Xingchun out of the crowd, and fiercely retorted, “Get lost, you dog-faced thing, who’s your sister!”
Although her attitude was fierce and she didn’t back down at all, they were still outnumbered, and it wasn’t good to confront them head-on now. Without further ado, she dragged him away, running down the stairs. The campus was becoming deserted, and Yang Qianwei’s “Corrosion” played on the broadcast:
“One kiss steals a heart, one kiss kills a person…”
“She loves passionate kisses but never loves anyone…”
The sky was growing dark, the lights dim. The branches of the trees on both sides intertwined, casting moving shadows on the path.
Not knowing where they were heading, carrying nothing with them, Xu Xingchun could hear his own heart beating clearly. He just obediently let her hold his wrist.
How nice it would be to stay like this, not knowing where to go, just the two of them.
Fu Xueli was fuming, walking quickly, as if there were small whirlwinds under her feet. She pulled him along, making him stumble.
All the way, she kept talking non-stop, scolding him out of frustration, “How can you be so stupid? You could have just refused and run away, what could they have done to you? But no, you had to stand there like an idiot. Did you really want to be someone else’s boyfriend? If I hadn’t gone back to the classroom to get something today, what were you planning to do?”
He didn’t make a sound.
Fu Xueli stopped walking and turned to look at him. “Why are you standing there in a daze? Have you gone stupid?”
“Thank you.” After a few seconds, Xu Xingchun actually smiled, his voice lowering, sounding hoarse.
It’s hard to be angry at someone who’s smiling.
Moreover, his innocent and quiet demeanor, along with his smile, had an indescribable attractiveness.
“I can’t believe you’re still able to smile,” she said, still huffing, but her temper had mostly subsided. She continued walking forward, then seemed to think of something and turned back to give him a few suspicious looks.
He didn’t seem that special, apart from being smart. How did he attract so many girls, one after another? She really couldn’t understand…
She pondered silently to herself.
Xu Xingchun noticed, his face tightening as he averted his gaze, avoiding her eyes. However, his hand, damp with sweat, unconsciously tightened around hers.
Under the bright red sunset, the young girl in white dress and black skirt, with bright eyes and skin as white and fragrant as flower petals, her black hair falling unknowingly like smooth silk.
Someone said something softly, but Fu Xueli, immersed in her own world, naturally couldn’t hear it.
It seemed he didn’t want her to hear it either.
So the hair tie she lost that day, he picked up and kept for ten years.
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