AUS Chapter 17: Liu Jiang, Please Like Me

I knew there had to be something strange about this room.

Like everything else in this world, it appeared calm and harmless. So, my first step into the room was confident, but I became cautious with the second, and by the third, I was treading carefully, even suspecting that the ordinary carpet beneath my feet might turn into an abyss.

However, nothing happened.

Suspicious, I turned to look out the door. The bellhop stood with his hands clasped in front of him, looking at me politely. Just as I was about to ask him what he was up to, the carpet beneath my feet suddenly gave way.

The last thing I saw was his smiling face. He even closed the door behind me.

With a click of the lock, I opened my eyes.

I was still sitting on the edge of Liu Jiang’s bed, my hand on my still-adolescent arm. Behind me was the unlit room, and I was sitting amongst a pile of Liu Jiang’s messy clothes. Looking up, I met the gaze of my younger self in the full-length mirror.

Just then, I heard a knock on the door, followed by Liu Jiang’s voice: “Are you done changing? You’ve been in there for almost twenty minutes!”

I snapped back to reality and looked down to see that I was still holding the four-figure price tag short-sleeved shirt that sixteen-year-old Liu Jiang had specifically bought for me. He was waiting for me to try it on.

I quickly replied and slipped the shirt on.

Sure enough, the quality of expensive clothes is different.

The door opened. Liu Jiang seemed to be standing too close to the door, and we almost bumped face to face, but we both reacted quickly and took a step back.

Liu Jiang quickly recovered his usual spirited and somewhat nonsensical expression, saying to me: “It fits perfectly! Looks like I have good taste.”

However, I caught the fleeting look of panic in his eyes, but I pretended not to notice.

I looked down at my chest, then up at him and asked: “Are you sure?”

This shirt was indeed the same brand as the one I tore, but it was completely different from the style my mother chose. Not only did it violate my usual principle of dressing simply, but it wasn’t even my usual dark color.

The shirt was creamy white, and right at my eye level on the chest was a large-eared bear, somewhere between human and not, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses. It looked much more youthful than I did.

I took a few steps back to the full-length mirror. It actually looked alright.

Liu Jiang’s face appeared from behind the mirror frame, his tone very certain: “I told you, you should wear more clothes for our age group.”

He was right. My stubborn, disdainful face actually clashed quite well with the youthful style of the shirt. The only flaw was that the sleeves were a bit loose, not filled out by my yet-to-develop muscles.

I rolled up the sleeves a couple of times on each side and looked up.

Wow, I looked frighteningly handsome.

Liu Jiang must have thought so too, because he clapped for me. I told him to stop messing around, or I’d catch a cold from the draft.

It was a joke I thought was quite lame, but he actually laughed, and quite heartily too. Looking at myself in the mirror, I was actually slightly infected by his mood, but even if I wanted to smile, my face couldn’t manage it.

I asked him, “This was expensive, wasn’t it?”

He replied: “As if yours wasn’t expensive.”

I said: “That’s different. I can spend my parents’ money freely, but your money is your own. You shouldn’t spend it carelessly.”

He argued: “That’s looking down on me – I can earn this back with two gigs!”

I didn’t know if he was telling the truth. In any case, I picked up my school uniform and put it back on. Seeing this shirt again would only make me feel more like I was handling a hot potato.

I asked him: “Aren’t you going to see your brother these two days?”

Liu Jiang, who had been staring blankly at my feet, looked up at my question.

“Oh,” he said, “it’s not a big deal. I have a gig with a local band in a while, and I want him to help me correct my fingering again.”

That’s it?

After putting aside my worldly perspective and clarifying the issue, everything seemed remarkably simple and innocent.

I said: “Then I can leave early. It won’t be too late for you to go find him tonight, right?”

He scratched his head again: “Since you’re already here, I can’t just kick you out, can I? Stay for dinner. My grandma is making spicy stir-fried seafood today.”

I wasn’t particularly fond of spicy food, but he seemed to enjoy it, as well as sweet things. Yet he always had fair skin and never had to worry about gaining weight. It was a kind of gift.

“What are you doing before dinner?” I asked about his plans.

“Practicing bass,” he flopped back onto the bed, making a token effort to put his clothes away in the closet. “The local band contacted me after seeing a video of me playing bass.”

I had to admit, the local band had a good eye. Liu Jiang’s temperament was perfectly suited to the bass. It had a touch more wildness than the guitar and a bit more elegance than the drums. No matter where he stood on stage, it was hard not to follow him with your eyes.

“What about you?” he asked me.

“I’ll keep you company. No one else is here today anyway.” After saying that, I felt that just keeping him company was a bit strange, so I added, “I can study my vocabulary words next to you.”

“Study vocabulary words?” Liu Jiang scoffed at my good student habits. “You’ve heard how loud the bass is.”

I accepted the challenge: “If you don’t believe me, find someone else to play drums with you. I can still study.”

He was speechless, pouting as he got up from the bed, grabbed his bass from the stand, and went with me to the practice room in the corner of the second floor.

The room felt quite spacious when it was empty. He kicked aside the tangled wires on the floor and went to the corner near the window. I stopped in the opposite corner, and we each occupied a side of the room, diagonally across from each other.

He must have been concerned about whether I would actually study, because after tuning his bass, he didn’t make any big movements. I looked down at my vocabulary book, a piece of scrap paper next to it for writing down the words. I knew he looked up at me every two strums, and to dispel his doubts, I deliberately made an effort to study whenever he looked up.

Actually, high school level vocabulary was a piece of cake for me. I was thinking about something else entirely.

My thoughts about Liu Jiang had gone from “He must have feelings for me,” to “He seems to treat everyone the same,” to “He might just like my type,” and finally back to “He really seems to have feelings for me.”

He really seems to have feelings for me.

From the time I entered the As-Usual plan until now, I’ve been judging everything based on my past memories of him. But now, stepping outside of the past and looking at it from an outsider’s perspective, he really did seem to treat me differently.

Not to mention being willing to bring me home on the first day we met, or spending money on me when we weren’t even that close, the very first moment I stepped out the door just now, he had a fleeting look in his eyes.

It was a brief, dazed expression. He was only an inch or two taller than me now, so we were almost at eye level. In that instant, his expression was like all the spirit had been drained from him, all his emotions revolving solely around me.

But he snapped out of it quickly, immediately returning to his usual expression, then casually commenting on how good the clothes he picked for me looked.

When did the Liu Jiang of the past fall for me?

Our first meeting wasn’t as simple as this time. The split lip I gave Liu Jiang took a week to return to its normal color. According to him, he couldn’t even use a straw to drink milk tea during that time, because the edge of the straw would catch in the wound and reopen the newly healed cut.

But speaking of a specific moment of attraction, I did seem to have discussed this with him.

It was when I was in college, I think it was the day after we had a fight in the small garden behind the library. I had classes all morning, but I skipped them.

We were staying in a budget hotel one stop away from the school, in a room with a double bed. The receptionist at the front desk never looked up from her computer screen when we checked in, probably because she had seen all kinds of college students come through and was used to it. But when she handed us the room key, she glanced at Liu Jiang, then looked down at the documents in her hand, and then looked up at him again.

Liu Jiang was eye-catching, especially after he turned eighteen.

Walking down the extremely quiet corridor, I confirmed that the hotel had good soundproofing, which put me at ease.

Closing the door, not turning on the lights, it was him who initiated it the first time. That day, my senses were sharper than usual, and I wasn’t just focused on breathing. After a creak of the mattress, the overhead light turned on.

I frowned and squinted at him. He lowered his voice and said he thought I was in pain. I didn’t want to waste words and bit his upper lip. His tongue stud hit my upper teeth, causing a momentary numbness, and all sorts of sensations exploded within me.

Later, it was my turn. I kept the lights on the whole time, and he didn’t hold back his sounds as usual. Later, I got tired of hearing it and covered his mouth with my hand. He licked my palm ingratiatingly, and I brought my face very close to his, our lips touching through my palm, our eyes meeting.

I liked him like this.

I’ve digressed, and these memories shouldn’t be appearing for me, who is currently physically sixteen. I forced myself to skip over them and pull my memories back to the next morning.

I woke up first the next morning. After washing up, I returned to his side.

He was awake too, aimlessly playing with his phone. Seeing me come out of the bathroom, he groggily took a cigarette from his bag, saying he was going out for a smoke and to buy breakfast.

I didn’t know when he started smoking. Marlboro Citrus.

I didn’t smoke and didn’t know much about that brand, but the box was nice-looking, silver with a yellowish-green gradient, which somehow gave me a feeling that it suited Liu Jiang.

I didn’t let him go buy breakfast alone and said I would go down with him. With me there, he became lazy and collapsed back onto the bed. I waited for ten minutes and finally couldn’t help but urge him. He groggily got up and looked for his underwear on the floor.

But I had already tidied up the pile of clothes he had thrown everywhere. I pointed to the luggage rack, and he stumbled over and finally found his underwear.

Watching him curl up his knees to put on his pants, I suddenly asked a question on a whim.

I asked him: “When did you start liking me?”

He stood up to look for his cobweb-like large-collared sweater and answered without hesitation: “Not long after you transferred here. It was probably when you handed me your homework.”

He never seemed afraid to express his affection for me.

I had no memory of what he was talking about. Later, when we were eating breakfast downstairs, he recounted the events while munching on a mushroom and rapeseed-filled bun.

Not long after I transferred, the physics teacher also recruited me. Under the physics teacher’s and my tyrannical rule, the students in the class suffered.

This was specifically manifested in the impossibly difficult homework assigned every day after class, followed by individual criticism of the students who couldn’t solve the problems.

That day, Liu Jiang received his third ultimatum after handing in a blank homework assignment. I was collecting homework and came to his desk. I actually opened his notebook before the physics teacher, and after finding another blank page, I pulled out my own homework from the bottom of my notebook.

“Copy the first and fourth problems. Those two are easy.” I threw my notebook on his desk. He was sitting with his legs apart, raising his eyebrows at me.

The implication being – it’s not surprising that you could solve such simple problems.

“Because of that?” I asked him while pouring vinegar into my wonton soup.

“What else would it be for?” He frowned at my vinegar-filled wonton soup. “The accomplice of the most powerful force in the class actually betrayed the organization and sided with me.”

I see.

My attention returned to my vocabulary book, my pen pointing at a word – doubt.

It’s a verb, meaning to suspect, to disbelieve. Is this a word high school students need to memorize?

I flipped back to confirm that I had the college entrance exam English vocabulary book, mentally calculating how long ago Liu Jiang’s initial moment of attraction for me was.

Good news, I had the college entrance exam vocabulary book. Bad news, the moment of Liu Jiang’s affection for me, according to my memory, seemed to have already passed.

… Shit.

Because in the previous level, I mistakenly took my resistance to worldly expectations as resistance to authority, I wasn’t in the student council now, nor was I the physics class representative. I had no opportunity to collect homework, and even less of a chance to throw my notebook on his desk for him to copy.

The “he has a crush on me” that had been stirring in my heart just now had died down. I placed my pen next to the book and looked up at Liu Jiang as if casually.

Liu Jiang wasn’t too focused on practicing either. He was currently looking out the window through a crack, holding his bass but showing no intention of playing it.

At this moment, the phone in my school uniform pants pocket beeped. I didn’t know who was texting me, or if it was my dad trying to persuade me to apologize to my mom sooner.

I took out my phone. It was a message. The sender wasn’t a number but two words – System.

[System: Entering Level 2-1. Hint: “Give him the possibility to like you.”]