Don’t Flirt With Me

Published in print edition.

Roguishly handsome & obedient, sweet soft girl.

Secret crush turned real + sweet romance + both pure.

Zhou Jingsi once found a pink love letter inside a math textbook.

The girl’s handwriting was neat and graceful, shy and inexperienced in every stroke. The letter was very short, with no signature, only one line:

“Seeing you today,

I suddenly wanted to take you to Kekexili to see the sea.”

...

Wen Shu has done two unusual things in her life.

First, she wrote a love letter when she was young, but did not sign her name.

Second, she secretly loved Zhou Jingsi for six years, then grit her teeth and repeated a year to get into the same university as him.

She isn’t smart; this is all she could do.

Everyone who knows Wen Shu says she is reserved, beautiful, yet like a handful of ice and snow from the mountains in winter, gentle but cool.

Only Zhou Jingsi knows that coolness is merely her protection color. The girl is timid and guarded, and in a foggy early morning she will squat by the roadside feeding the school’s stray cats.

He has seen Wen Shu trapped in a nightmare, frightened and helpless.

He has seen her, after drinking, clutching his sleeve with wet apricot eyes, so upset it felt as if she had lost the entire world.

With trembling lashes, the girl confessed her feelings in a soft, helpless voice, words choked into a broken sentence: “I-I turned back, but he’s just so good...”

He isn’t good.

Zhou Jingsi thought in a daze. So it was her.

One fall, and he was doomed beyond cure.

Later, he took her to see the sea at Kekexili, knelt on one knee for her, and under the girl’s slightly red eyes gently kissed her ring finger.

At twenty-two, he held her hand on a morning and went to the civil affairs office to stamp their bright red marriage certificate.

# After years and years, she finally saw the end of the road, and here she was finally able to glimpse the light of day