To Covet (GL) - Chapter 71

The water gave a sense of being embraced, a feeling of security.

“Yu Keyi, stop licking…”

I tried to ignore the shameful sucking sounds. Her body was pressing down on mine. I wanted to push her away, but my arms were bound. The more I struggled, the tighter the taut rope would constrict.

She lifted her eyes to look at me, half-lidded, as if I were the one who had ruined her fun.

I moved my shoulder. She wrinkled her nose, seemingly hurt, and pressed closer to me, kissing me gently.

With my hands tied, I couldn’t push her away.

Or perhaps, I didn’t actually want to refuse.

“Yu Zhouwan.”

It was Mom’s impatient urging.

“Have you finished fooling around?”

My heart sank. I shivered as if waking from a dream, only to realize it was auditory hallucination. Staying in such an excessively hot and humid place for too long made my mind feel overly fuzzy.

To put it another way, ever since Yu Keyi arrived, my life has become a mess, and I’ve fallen into it without even fighting back.

I thought of the Elsa rose bouquet.

After dinner that night, they said they wanted to go shopping. As it happened, a flower shop was having a discount. On a whim, I took a liking to it.

Yin Si’en was still complaining to others about the nineteen-yuan-ninety-cent daisies being an exorbitant price, then turned around and saw me paying. She cast me a gossiping look.

“I like flowers lately,” I cut off her overthinking. “I’ll put it on my desk. It cheers me up.”

“Really?”

As one of the few people who had kept in touch with me since childhood, I almost thought Yin Si’en had figured something out.

“I don’t believe you,” she poked me with her index finger, pressing for an answer. “Tell me, is it that person?”

“Who?”

“The one who delivered food to you last time.”

“I didn’t even eat it, and I don’t know that person,” I couldn’t remember who it was. “Didn’t I ask you to help return it?”

“Oh…”

She was a little disappointed, having nearly grasped a clue but forced to let go due to lack of evidence.

“Have you ever dated, Sister Yu?” She gave up on the slightly wilted small daisies. “Don’t tell me you’ve never dated anyone… I won’t believe it.”

“You guess.”

I answered vaguely to put her off, chose a wrapping paper, and asked the florist to trim the stems short.

“Our Sister Yu, of course, has to focus on studying…” She bought a box of nut chocolate with the money she had planned for the flowers, and mocked me while checking her phone navigation. “Oh, right, I have some gossip for you.”

“Mhm?”

“Remember Teacher Xiao Feng?”

“Ah, I remember.” I tensed up out of habit.

“She seems to be a lesbian…” She lowered her voice. “That’s what I heard. I don’t have her WeChat, though. You check quickly. Don’t you have her as a friend? She posted what looks like an official photo with her girlfriend on her Moments.”

“I haven’t added her.”

“Huh? I thought you had her. Weren’t you two chatting every day? You don’t even have her WeChat.”

Yin Si’en went to line up for bubble tea. I swiped through my list, opened Feng Jia’s Moments. The most recent post was a travel vlog from more than half a year ago.

Based on my understanding of her, she probably dumped me into some restricted group where I couldn’t see anything after we parted ways.

My WeChat top contacts included a family group that never had messages except during the New Year, a class group with thousands of unread messages, and Yu Keyi’s ugly profile picture—a fat, white cat with large, mismatched eyes wearing a red bow tie.

She was unusually quiet today. I didn’t know what she was busy with.

After buying the bubble tea, Yin Si’en dismissed the others and dragged me to the park, ostensibly for a walk to clear our heads, yet her every move was secretive, constantly looking at pedestrians walking in our direction.

“Who are you meeting?”

Yin Si’en was unusually shy. After much pressing, she admitted she was meeting a netizen.

We waited until dark but never saw the person she was supposed to meet. Instead, we ran into the jogger… I forgot his real name, let’s call him the Delivery Guy for now. He chatted with Yin Si’en and me, and even asked where we were going with the flowers.

“We’re going to confess, of course,” Yin Si’en said with a giggle. “It’s graduation season. If we don’t make a move, we’ll lose the chance.”

“What kind of person does Sister Yu like?” Yin Si’en propped her chin on her hand. More people were passing by, but she no longer looked up to search.

“Me?” I couldn’t think of anything for a moment. “Anyone is fine.”

“I thought you would have many requirements, like being a lookist, or…” She narrowed her eyes. I knew what kind of dirty thought was popping into Yin Si’en’s head. I rolled my eyes at her, called her boring, and changed the subject.

It was difficult to abstract any specific qualities from Yu Keyi.

Taking a step back, I couldn’t even tell what my attitude toward her was.

The other person clearly just treated me as a tool for releasing desire, yet I willingly and eagerly accommodated her.

I couldn’t get anything of value from Yu Keyi—except for the devout and pitying look when she kissed the ligature marks on my hands, and her vague but undeniable demand when she held me and cried:

“Sister,” I could imagine her teasing eyes as she bit her finger and said those words, “I want it.”

“Sister?”

Seeing no reaction from me, Yu Keyi bent down and waved her hand in front of my eyes.

She had said in her message that she couldn’t make it, but she still came to see me.

“Let’s go, it’s time to go home.”

“Why are you still out this late?” Her hands were tucked tightly in her pockets.

Yin Si’en had left an hour ago, but I had been sitting here until very late. The people walking in the park had also thinned out.

Yu Keyi put her scarf around my neck and asked where I had been.

While I spoke, her eyes kept glancing at the bouquet. I deliberately said it was a gift from someone else and asked her if it was pretty. Her look instantly changed from appraisal to disdain.

“It’s alright.”

I wondered how much she had calculated in her head after my vague answers. She was so convinced that receiving flowers meant a declaration of love, and she looked annoyed yet pretended not to care. Sometimes, she was quite a little girl.

“Actually, I saw the person, but they look… hard to describe. Not my type,” Yin Si’en had sent me dozens of messages within an hour, complete with a string of emojis. “I’m a lookist. I’d puke if I saw someone who wasn’t attractive.”

“Anyway, they’re just an online friend.”

I saw her endlessly funny emoji faces and tried hard not to laugh.

Yu Keyi’s style of dress had finally changed a bit recently. She no longer wore the ill-fitting school uniform with rolled-up sleeves, but a short sweater and pencil pants, looking much more pleasant than before.

Noticing me watching her, Yu Keyi buried her face in the sweater collar, looking back and forth at the flowers, muttering that confessing with flowers was insincere.

I was a little embarrassed.

Seeing her earlier attempt at folding a crooked Sato rose out of scrap paper, I thought she might like this kind of gesture.

However, watching her worry and fret about my non-existent “crush,” I suddenly felt that whether or not there were flowers wasn’t that important.

After the long and sticky bath, I tossed her a towel and sent Yu Keyi out.

She didn’t seem to have had enough fun. After untying the rope, she kissed me on the lips, but to prevent lingering too long and having Mom burst in, she sensibly wrapped herself in a bathrobe quickly, tied up her wet hair, and slipped out like an eel, toothbrush in mouth.

I ran head-on into Mom’s gaze. Lately, she often talks to me. Whether it was the time I came back with flowers or this brief moment after I finished my bath, she always has endless things to pour out to me.

I listened to her lambaste the unreliability of a cooperating company while blow-drying my hair. She suddenly jumped to Dad—although the title felt a bit strange, he was biologically my father, so I’ll call him that for now—complaining that he was middle-aged with zero accomplishments but still acted self-important.

“That little girl he brought is cut from the same cloth as him.”

She doesn’t allow unexpected variables in her life. I am one, and Yu Keyi is another.

Mom told me she initially wanted to get an abortion but was later scared by the doctor, who said that forcing an abortion at a late stage could lead to infertility. Only then did she steel her heart and give birth.

“So you know, Yu Zhouwan, I really risked being judged when I gave birth to you. Your grandparents were so angry they didn’t even visit me during my confinement period.”

I mumbled “Mhm.” She had talked about the same topic the day I came back with the flowers.

“Sometimes I’m especially afraid that my daughter will go down the same old road. Some things have no turning back once you step into them. There are so many kinds of people out there, Mom has been in business for so many years and can easily be cheated. You’ll definitely encounter these tricks when you go to college.”

That’s why she keeps a close watch on me. She must know the ins and outs of any boy or girl in my social circle—their academic performance, family background. Except for Yin Si’en’s parents, with whom she had some business dealings and felt somewhat relieved about, all other children were invariably deemed flawed in her eyes. That’s why I rarely have close friends from childhood.

As for Yu Keyi, she probably feels that every time the girl appears in front of her, it reminds her of her husband’s previous marriage, like a worm in an apple—you won’t eat it, but it disgusts you. So, she adopts an attitude of ignoring her.

A classic case of an obvious blind spot.

I quietly tossed the bundle of rope hidden in my hand into the backpack by my feet.

“Mom, I won’t,” I promised readily to reassure her. “I’ll stay far away from boys.”

“Don’t stay too far away… still be selective. Find someone with shared interests and who studies hard, preferably a boy with good family background. It’s not like there aren’t any.”

“That’s all for the future. I don’t want to think about it now.”

She was satisfied with my reply.

“I have something else to discuss with you,” she hurriedly opened her phone and showed me a screenshot of an email. “You have exams coming up, right? Your Teacher Yang’s daughter runs a study abroad agency. The students she guided before all got pretty good offers, and some of them had worse grades than you. You should interact with her more and ask her how to go about it.”

I didn’t seem to have a reason to refuse.

Everyone was busy at this juncture. All the things in life were suddenly piled up together.

During these few days that I was running back and forth for my studies, Yu Keyi passed the preliminary round of the competition. Her team leader seemed very hopeful about her chances of winning an award and was taking her to various training camps in other cities.

Life suddenly returned to its former calm. There was no tension of stolen pleasure, nor was there a channel to vent desire.

I would resort to masturbation to alleviate the emptiness, or try rope bondage on myself without telling Yu Keyi, documenting the most near-suffocating moments with my camera, just as before.

The slightly shameful thing is that when I did the former, I would imagine Yu Keyi grabbing my hand and forcing me. With the latter, there was a sense of excitement from violating the rules of our game.

Yu Keyi, on the other hand, was completely unaware. She often remembered to send me messages, but they were all about trivial matters. She genuinely seemed quite worn out by the training.

The only time she asked to call me was to ask me to sing her to sleep. She was currently suffering from severe insomnia, and as soon as she closed her eyes, her mind was full of complex math and physics formulas.

I felt a little disappointed, though I couldn’t pinpoint why.

Perhaps it was because when I heard her say “I want to hear Big Sister’s voice” in the voice note, I couldn’t help but clamp my legs together.

I asked Yu Keyi when she would be back. She vaguely said she had several more exams and would probably only return at the end of June at the earliest.

Mom was working overtime on files in the living room and sent me a message urging me to go to bed early.

I suddenly realized that Yu Keyi’s tone when she said “Sister” was different from her pronunciation of other words. Initially, I thought it was just deliberate sculpting under passion, giving a hint of the erotic to a term that only belonged to kinship.

But it was more than that.

“Sister, rest early,” Yu Keyi yawned.

“You’re allowed to think of me while you sleep, you know.”

After being apart for these few months, she had become increasingly proficient in cheesy, affectionate words.

“Will you miss me?”

“I will.” A little bit.

I thought about it, but still swallowed the “little bit.”

Why would I?

Perhaps it’s love.