I was exposed for adding my female boss to my group of female friends.

Suddenly, she remembered that she had also gone hungry like this before, and Chen Ya had said fiercely that he wanted to punch her in the stomach. Suddenly, she laughed and gave up.

Then, she became sad again.

She parted ways with him.

She walked to the kitchen by the moonlight, opened the refrigerator, and felt the warm light on her face, but the cold air made her feel a little relieved of the emptiness in her heart.

After much deliberation, she selected two pieces of bread and an egg, and decided to make herself a sandwich.

As soon as I opened the bread package, tears dripped onto the bread.

The refrigerator's compressor started up at just the right time, as if offering futile comfort.

Liu Ruyan sobbed, wiping away her tears, feeling both wronged and pained.

Looking back now, Chen Ya was an absolutely wicked person.

她一个人徘徊在湖边，他只是在那边静静看着；她鼓起小肚子，他就想往上面揍一拳；她比任何人都爱着他，他却不辞而别了。

Liu Ruyan sat on the sofa with a sandwich in her hand. With each bite, she recalled the dreamlike, happy days when Chen Ya was by her side.

After finishing her sandwich, she licked her fingers without any manners, gulped down the water in her glass, and slumped onto the sofa.

The sound of water dripping incessantly came from somewhere, and cicadas chirped furtively from somewhere else. Liu Ruyan lay on the sofa, her mind filled with Chen Ya's voice, which seemed to come from nowhere.

The moonlight was exceptionally quiet tonight. As she stared out the window, she felt the wrinkles in her heart being smoothed out slightly.

"The bright moon knows not the bitterness of parting, its slanting light shines through the red door until dawn."

She suddenly remembered this poem, which seemed quite fitting for the occasion.

She walked to the balcony, where buildings stood tall and lights shone from countless homes.

Each window forms a bright square. In each square, there is a man sitting alone under the lamp, a mother and daughter eating silently, a middle-aged man singing loudly, and a woman carrying a child while mopping the floor.

These cubes are like cross-sections of life, cut vertically to reveal their core to Liu Ruyan, who vaguely feels that there may be some enlightenment in them.

Her father used to mutter about Wang Guowei's so-called "three realms," such as "Last night the west wind withered the green trees. Alone I climbed the high tower, gazing to the ends of the earth."

What about the line, "I grow thinner and thinner, yet I have no regrets, for I am wasting away for her sake"?

What about the line, "I searched for him a thousand times in the crowd, but suddenly when I turned around, I found him where the lights were dim"?

Looking back now, wasn't I just like "climbing alone to the top of the tower, gazing at the endless road to the ends of the earth"?

I estimate that in a while, I will be "growing thinner and thinner, yet having no regrets."

When will I suddenly turn around and find him in the dimly lit place?

Liu Ruyan buried her face in her arms.

"Teacher, I miss you."

Perhaps all those who achieve great things in life have experienced a painful love affair.

The first thing Liu Ruyan did the next day was to put a cover on the book "Love in the Time of Cholera".

She knew that this book, as Chen Ya's last gift to her (she wasn't sure if it could be considered one, but let's assume it is), would witness many, many historical events.

Like memories, paper will yellow over time.

Books can be protected with book covers, but how can memories be protected amidst inevitable forgetting?

It seems there is no other way but to repeat those memories over and over again, to ruminate like a cow, and to savor the aftertaste like drinking tea.

For Liu Ruyan now, those things were like slowly cutting wounds into her heart with a small knife.

In this room where she could only touch the air but never see her teacher, any memory was a deadly blow to her sensitive nature.

However, everything related to Chen Ya reminded her of her painful past: his usual gold-rimmed plates, the toothbrush with worn-down bristles, the slippers with holes, and his unique scent that permeated all her clothes and body, omnipresent in the room.

The human brain is very strange. She told herself not to think about him, not to think about him, but when she did so, she was thinking about him.

Longing is like a poison; when the dose is strong enough, she will be overwhelmed by grief and wish she could die in her sleep.

She could only lie on the bed, which was filled with his scent, her arms and legs stretched out endlessly, her slender, white fingers brushing over every inch of the place where he had lain, trying to find the traces he had left behind.

She crumpled the creased sheets even more, tossed and turned, making her clothes even more disheveled. She closed her eyes, stretched out her five fingers, and tried to use the air to simulate the tender, lingering touch of the past.

She had a high fever and couldn't even stand up.

She used all her strength to finally get through to the supermarket downstairs. When the deliveryman brought the food upstairs, he immediately noticed something was wrong.

"What's wrong? Do you need to go to the hospital?"

"unnecessary."

She slammed the door shut and then sat down on the floor.

She suddenly felt extremely helpless, not because she was sick, but because she suddenly thought that Chen Ya, somewhere out there, might have already met all sorts of people and had interactions with different women.

She had no control over it and could only stubbornly believe that she could wait for him to return.

I lay in bed for two days, the fever subsided, and I was mostly recovered, but I was still weak.

She slowly walked to the coffee table. The living room seemed completely transformed compared to before she got sick, with a brand new feel to it.

She picked up "Love in the Time of Cholera" and touched the notes left by Chen Ya on the title page.

This sentence, written by Chen Ya and also a line from the book, was spoken by a woman:

Ultimately, love is an instinct; you either experience it the first time or you never will.

She didn't quite understand this sentence before, but now she seems to understand it somewhat in her confusion: you need to learn how to get along with others, but you don't need to learn how to love someone, it's innate.

Speaking of "Love in the Time of Cholera," it also tells a story about waiting.

That man waited for that woman for fifty-three years, seven months, and eleven days for love.

From the moment he fell in love with her, he upheld that love like a faith for the rest of his life.

There's no need to ask what the benefits are, nor to question why you should do it; that's faith.

Liu Ruyan felt that her love was a kind of faith, even if others thought it was utterly foolish.

She flipped through the manuscript paper that was placed under the book, page after page, filled with memories of Chen Ya.

That was her way of protecting her memories: writing down a little bit of her memories of him every day and reading it over each day, so that she could imprint him more deeply in her heart.

In the past few days, she has had a feeling that something is about to break out of its shell.

Suddenly, she had an epiphany, as if all the energy in her life had been connected by a thread, piecing together a complete shape.

She picked up the pen, pressed it onto the paper, paused, and then wrote a line:

"Offside Cohabitation".

Then, after thinking for a moment, she wrote:

"The story begins in the season when hyacinths bloom..."

……

One morning in March, Liu Ruyan suddenly noticed that the leaves of the hyacinth that Chen Ya had given her had been drooping for quite some time.

Before we knew it, it was hyacinth blooming season again.

But the teacher's hyacinths did not bloom.

She put on gloves and, without much effort, pulled the poor plant up by the roots.

It was undoubtedly dead, and its roots were rotten.

Just then, the door opened, and Chen Ya pushed it open and came in.

Liu Ruyan had imagined many scenarios of their reunion, but she never expected that when she saw him, she would be wearing an apron and holding a rotten hyacinth.

A girl with long black hair stepped out from behind Chen Ya. Upon seeing Liu Ruyan, she wrinkled her nose and said in broken Chinese:

"Is this the woman you insisted on meeting?"

Chen Ya was only focused on Liu Ruyan at the moment, and nodded in a moment of leisure.

The girl with long, straight black hair walked up to Liu Ruyan, pretending to be aggressive, hands on her hips, seemingly wanting to compete in seniority, but also trying to gather information. After racking her brains for a while, she finally asked:

"How long have you and Ya been in love?"

Like Florentino Ariza, the protagonist of *Love in the Time of Cholera*, she had been preparing the answer for every single day and night for fifty-three years, seven months, and eleven days (if her life had lasted that long):

"Forever and ever," she said.

Chapter 64 Reverse Best Friend

Liu Ruyan recounted her story with Chen Ya, half recalling and half narrating, leaving Qin Yun Chu and the others listening in stunned silence.

She didn't go into detail about these things, but only gave brief explanations. Sometimes she would get lost in her memories, a sweet smile on her lips.

After everyone listened to her story in its entirety, He Shiying was the first to express her indignation:

"Isn't he still a scumbag?!"

Gu Yuanzhen nodded solemnly: "From a worldly perspective, that is indeed the case."

"Stop talking about worldly matters, I'm so angry! The woman he brought back later, is that the Japanese woman you mentioned who married him?!"

Liu Ruyan nodded gently: "Mm."

He Shiying hugged her arms: "How could you resist?!"

Liu Ruyan said calmly, "I've already forgiven him!"

"This can be forgiven?!"

“There are some inside stories here,” Liu Ruyan said. “I don’t know the details clearly, and what I do know, I can’t say.”

Qin Yun Chu frowned and asked, "Is he really married?"

“Maybe, but I’ve heard that he and that woman have a deeper relationship,” Liu Ruyan said.

"what?"

Liu Ruyan thought for a moment, then said slowly and deliberately, "She said she was his hostage."

"hostage?"

Gu Yuanzhen slapped her thigh: "Steins;Gate, right? Dudu Lu, right?"

The others couldn't understand what he was saying.

After a spectacular night, everyone was a little tired.

Xiao Qing yawned and said, "My gain tonight is that I'm going to find ten female fans and create a 'Heartbroken Ladies' group to take in."

"Why female fans?" Gu Yuanzhen asked.

Xiao Qing glared at him: "What's the point of men? They're all big pigs."

No matter how talented a man is, in the end he's just a womanizer who falls in love with every woman he meets.

Even the best human males in her eyes are like this.

Therefore, she has completely lost faith in men.

This is what she got tonight.

Qin Yun Chu said, "We should go too, but..."

She leaned close to Liu Ruyan's ear and whispered, "You've exposed so many things about Chen Ya, won't that upset him?"

Liu Ruyan suddenly panicked.

She covered her face with a book: "I got carried away and said too much, what am I going to do now!"

After saying that, she picked up a piece of paper and said, "I'm going to write a self-criticism now, I won't see you off."

Then she ran away in a flash, leaving Qin Yun Chu and the others looking at each other in bewilderment.

After watching Liu Ruyan leave, Qin Yun Chu's expression suddenly turned serious: "Everyone knows how serious what happened today is, right?"

Everyone nodded in agreement.

"I think we'd better keep it to ourselves."

These people are probably the only ones in the known world who know Chen Ya's identity.

If it gets exposed, he might really stop writing.