kingnovel Chapter 1273 Yun Rui's sincerity: Ordinary people
Chapter 1273 Yun Rui's sincerity: Ordinary people
Yang Xiaotang nodded, the corners of his mouth slightly raised, revealing a somewhat stiff smile.
The two walked side by side on the street, their shadows sometimes overlapping and sometimes separating under the street lights, as if foreshadowing their unknown fate.
Snowball in the cat cage became quiet, curled up into a ball, and occasionally let out a few faint purring sounds.
At this moment, Gu Yunxi turned into a quiet alley.
She leaned against the mottled brick wall, unable to hold on any longer, and slowly slid down to the ground.
Tears poured out, dripping onto her black coat, blurring out into dark flowers. She bit her lips, suppressing her crying, and her shoulders trembled violently.
Once, she thought she was rational enough to let go of her feelings for Qi Ruixiang, but today's encounter made her realize that that love had long been like a vine, tightly wrapped around her heart, and could not be easily let go.
The electric wires above the alley made a whimpering sound in the wind. The neon lights in the distance shone through the alley entrance, casting brilliant yet illusory light and shadows on the ground.
Gu Yunxi raised her head and looked at the light and shadow, her eyes full of confusion and helplessness. She didn't know how to get out of the dilemma of this relationship, nor did she know what kind of darkness and unknown was waiting for her ahead.
At the other end of the street, Qi Ruixiang and Yang Xiaotang gradually merged into the night. The sound of their conversation was carried away by the autumn wind.
This encounter on an autumn night is like a huge rock thrown into a calm lake. The ripples it stirs up will not only linger in the hearts of the three people for a long time, but will also set off a huge storm in the days to come, completely changing their fate...
The morning mist in Cambridge was like a ball of damp cotton wool, and a thin layer of frost condensed on Lin Xu's fingertips as he held the postcard.
The clock tower of St. John's College struck the time, and he looked at the ink stain on the letter paper. His pen paused for the third time after "Dear."
The pot of drooping green ivy on the windowsill suddenly shook. He stood up suddenly, but only saw the corner of the experimental report blown by the wind - it turned out to be just a draft.
"Today...when I suddenly remembered that the ventilation fan in the laboratory always makes a sound similar to the chirping of cicadas."
The tip of his pen rustled across the paper, and he deliberately avoided the areas stained with coffee.
"The teaching assistant said that my technique was like embroidery, but the direction of those blood vessels is really delicate, just like... Never mind, you are probably the only one who understands this boring metaphor."
Having written this, he hurriedly crossed out the last half of the sentence with such force that it almost pierced the paper, and the debris fell on the three words "very much like" like a fine layer of salt.
The afternoon sun slanted into the attic, and Lin Xu counted the creases on the thirty-seventh postcard.
The newly-made scones from the bakery on the corner had a cinnamon aroma, and he suddenly choked when he took his first bite - they were too sweet, so sweet that it reminded him of the sourness of the last pack of lemon candies in the convenience store on a rainy day when they were passed between their palms.
At this moment, he stared at the blank postcard in a daze, until the ink solidified into a dark brown scab under the setting sun, and then he scribbled: "The shape of the cloud is very strange, like crumpled experimental data."
The desk lamp cast a shadow on the wall late at night, and Lin Xu's eyelashes cast a trembling butterfly shadow under her eyes.
He stared at the dusty glass jar on the tenth row of bookshelf, which contained ginkgo leaves he had picked last fall.
The pen hovered above the words "sorting out old things today", but in the end it drew a crooked sunflower - that was the plant that Gu Yunxi always said he wanted to plant but could never keep alive.
Hearing the humming of a drunk in the distance, he suddenly turned over the postcard and began to write down the chemical equation he had just memorized, but he missed a number in the balance symbol.
The mailbox was looming in the fog, and Lin Xu's thumb stroked the teeth marks on the edge of the postcard.
An old man jogging in the morning passed by him, and the sound of his running shoes breaking through puddles startled the pigeons under the eaves.
He suddenly turned around and stuffed the half-written postcard into the inner pocket of his windbreaker. Amid the rustling sound of the fabric, he could hear his own heartbeat like a drum.
In the pocket of the white coat in the laboratory, there were already twelve pieces of waste paper that were written on and crossed out, and the corners were stained by sweat.
As rain slanted across the library's stained glass, Lin Xu drew the skyline of Cambridge on the back of a postcard.
The outline of the tower was crooked, and he circled the spire of King's College Chapel with a red pen and quickly painted it a glaring red.
The rain outside the window was getting heavier. He counted the raindrops racing on the glass and suddenly remembered that Gu Yunxi always liked to bet on which rain streak would reach the window frame first. At this moment, he placed a bet in the corner of the postcard for some reason and bet on the third one from the left, but wrote the date as last month in the signature.
The smell of burnt coffee wafted through the attic late at night, and Lin Xu opened the iron box filled with postcards for the umpteenth time.
The moonlight climbed up the back of his hand, illuminating the repeatedly traced words. Some places were rubbed with erasers, revealing rough edges.
He pulled out the one at the bottom and read the smeared handwriting in the moonlight. He seemed to be back in a similarly quiet night. Across the half-meter-wide laboratory table, he saw the reflection of the reagent on Gu Yunxi's eyelashes, which was brighter than the stars in Cambridge.
When the corners of the 100th postcard were folded, Lin Xu drew a crooked rainbow at the end of the letter.
The cherry blossoms outside the window are falling, and the pink and white petals are stuck to the glass, like unfinished words.
He stuffed the postcard into the deepest part of the drawer, underneath the faded movie ticket stub. The moment the metal lock closed, it seemed to seal the secret of the entire season.
At this moment, thousands of miles away, Gu Yunxi was standing in front of the floor-to-ceiling window, looking at the same moon. From the pet hospital to the corner alley and then to her home, her family was still embedded in the palm of her hand.
Yang Xiaotang held the cat cage, her eyes revealing tenderness that could not be concealed. When Qi Ruixiang looked at her, there was a gentleness in his eyes that she had never seen before, like a thorn, piercing her heart.
She tried to tell herself that she shouldn't care, but when she turned to leave, tears still flowed uncontrollably.
The autumn wind blew up her hair, blurring her vision and Qi Ruixiang's gradually receding figure.
Why am I so sad when I clearly never really owned Qi Ruixiang?
The clock at home was ticking, and time was passing by, but Gu Yunxi's thoughts were always on that encounter. She thought of the Buddhist beads dangling around Yang Xiaotang's neck and the plain ring on her wrist. The simple decoration revealed a temperament that made her flustered.
That kind of naturally expressed gentleness was completely different from her own, and it made her feel deeply uneasy for the first time.
In the silence of the night, Gu Yunxi's cell phone screen suddenly lit up. It was a message from Gu Yunqian, reminding her of the family gathering tomorrow.
She mechanically replied with an "OK" and looked out the window again.
The moonlight was still bright, but her world seemed to be shrouded in dark clouds, dim and dark.
She began to unconsciously recall every moment she spent with Qi Ruixiang. Those vague ambiguities, those casual glances, were now magnified in her mind.
She recalled a time at a business cocktail party when Qi Ruixiang walked through the crowd just to hand her a glass of her favorite champagne; she recalled the admiration and trust in his eyes when he looked at her during a company project discussion.
She originally thought that these were just ordinary intersections, but now that Yang Xiaotang appeared, she cared so much.
The wind outside the window suddenly picked up, making the curtains rustle.
Gu Yunxi shuddered, turned and walked towards the sofa, wrapped himself tightly in the blanket, but still couldn't dispel the chill in his heart.
She picked up the magazine on the coffee table and tried to divert her attention, but after flipping through it again and again, she only saw densely packed words and couldn't read anything.
The scene of Qi Ruixiang and Yang Xiaotang together kept appearing in my mind. They might have more and more frequent contact because of the cat named Snowball, stroll on the streets at sunset, and share each other's joys and sorrows.
Thinking of this, Gu Yunxi's heart was clenched into a ball. Emotions such as jealousy, sadness, and unwillingness intertwined together, making it almost hard for her to breathe.
She laughed at herself, she once thought she could face love in a carefree manner, but when she really got into it, she found that she was just an ordinary person...