Xie Qingcheng didn't seem to have any intention of saying anything else to He Yu, and he just asked, "Didn't Xie Xue tell you?"
"No."
"Then he probably thought it was a private matter."
He Yu remained silent for a moment: "Didn't you and Li Ruoqiu get along?"
Li Ruoqiu was the name of Xie Qingcheng's ex-wife.
He Yu had a deep impression of the woman who had put the knot around Xie Qingcheng's neck and felt that there must be something wrong with her, so much so that he could enter the tomb of marriage with a patriarchal and cold man like Xie Qingcheng.
In his mind, Xie Qingcheng seemed to have no desire, and he should be sitting at his desk in a neat white robe, with a voluminous shelf full of books behind him and the smell of medicines on his body.
He Yu found it difficult to believe that Xie Qingcheng loved someone, and even more difficult it was to believe that someone loved Xie Qingcheng.
But Dr. Xie got married.
He still remembered that on the wedding day he went to pay his share of the money, as his mother had asked him. And he was so carefree that the school uniform had not even been changed. When the driver took him to the hotel, he entered with his school backpack on one shoulder, his white sneakers on and his hands in the pockets of his sports pants in the school uniform.
Xie Qingcheng was there welcoming the guests.
The wedding team had put some makeup on him and was standing in the middle of the crowd, with his body upright and worthy, the dark eyebrows that seemed to fall with the stars. The master of ceremonies was telling him something, but there was too much noise and Xie Qingcheng was too loud to hear him, so he bent over so that the master of ceremonies could speak near his ear. There he could see the face he showed to others. It had a striking whiteness, like a fine porcelain illuminated by a spotlight, which even a slight touch would break it, and the color of the lips is a little lighter, as if the blood were freezing under the ice.
His skin was like an icy landscape, and his lips like red plums in the icy snow.
Although He Yu didn't like men, he was an aesthetically beautiful man.
At that time, she had the feeling that the woman named Li Ruoqiu was also very beautiful, but to be fair, He Yu thought that if she and Xie Qingcheng were together, the image of the proposal must have been something like this:
Xie Qingcheng must have been dressed in white, with his usual pen and fountain pen hanging from the jacket, standing with his hands in his pockets like a flower on a high hill. And then, in an exasperated tone, he must have told the girl
"I'm going to marry you, so get on your knees and say thank you."
Although of course, he is very good at dressing up, he won't tell the truth.
He Yu, who was carrying a shoulder bag, smiled and approached. He stood in front of the handsome boyfriend and the beautiful bride and said, "Congratulations, doctor, sister-in-law."
Li Ruoqiu: "This is..."
Xie Qingcheng introduced him to his wife: "The son of a friendly family."
I had an agreement with the He family that I wouldn't say that He Yu was a patient.
Li Ruoqiu congratulated him: "So beautiful, what a beautiful boy."
He Yu bowed her body in an educated, gentlemanly bow, her deep black eyes smiling, "No, sister-in-law, you are the one who is really beautiful."
While saying that, the teenager took out the sealed red envelope from his canvas school backpack, which was very thick, and said softly: "I wish you and Dr. Xie a hundred years of good luck."
One hundred years of happiness, my ass.
At that time, he thought that there was no one who could put up with a man like Xie Qingcheng, but he never thought that this marriage would be so ephemeral. Does it now turn out that you have the ability to curse with thought?
He Yu contained his gloat and asked without moving a muscle: "Why did you get divorced?"
Xie Qingcheng didn't say anything.
"I remember that she was very fond of you at the time. She came to my house after you and she got married, and at that moment I had no one in my eyes except you."
Xie Qingcheng spoke and said: "He Yu, this is really a personal matter for me."
He Yu raised his eyebrows slightly.
He observed the lonely appearance of Xie Qingcheng and suddenly felt that many things had changed in the man he had seen again after returning abroad for a few years.
It's just that he was simply not curious about Xie Qingcheng's changes, so he gave one last smile: "Forget it then, good luck on your blind date."\n
Xie Qingcheng took a superficial look at him and, without thanking him, turned around and left.
The bedroom door closed behind him.
Because He Yu mentioned his ex-wife, on the way Xie Qingcheng could not help but think about his own marriage to Li Ruoqiu. It could be considered an extreme failure.
In fact, Xie Qingcheng knew why Xie Xue hadn't mentioned it to He Yu.
The reason for his divorce was scandalous: Li Ruoqiu loved him, but he stopped loving him later.
She had been unfaithful to him.
This was something that Xie Qingcheng could not accept. He was a man who did not know what love was, but he did know what family responsibilities were, and on some points, he was very conservative in his thinking.
But she was different.
She believed that the most important thing in marriage was love, not responsibility, so in the end, they still separated. She fell in love with a married man, and after the incident, she cried and accused him that she only had work in her eyes and heart, and that being married to him was no different from being married with a cold work schedule.
The accusation was not unjustified. Xie Qingchen knew he was an unsentimental person.
In this relationship, Xie Qingcheng didn't really feel any love. She chased him for several years, and later, he also felt that she was also suitable. They left for a period of time, and then got married.
After marriage, he did not avoid doing all the things that a husband must do, and fulfilled the obligations that a husband must fulfill.
But that wasn't the kind of marriage she wanted.
Xie Qingcheng was very responsible, but he was not romantic and had a bad temper. He even managed to stay calm and rational in bed, without getting lost, without becoming obsessed. As if he were doing a job he had to do after starting a family, but without any enthusiasm. As if it were a duty.
His heart cooled down little by little.
Disillusioned, she turned to him and said: "Xie Qingcheng, you are a man without a heart. You don't understand it until today. What I want is to have love, not just a marriage."
But what is love?
Xie Qingcheng only felt his head hurt, and he didn't know how much strength he needed not to hit the table with rage. He looked at her for a long time, and finally spoke numbly, with a voice as calm as stagnant water: "Does that man like you? He has a wife and a daughter, how much do you think you really mean to him?"
When she asked her this question, she raised her head. His gaze burned with something that Xie Qingcheng simply couldn't understand.
"...... I don't care if he has a wife and children. All I know is that when he hugged me, he at least felt warm. He could hear the beating of his heart accelerating. Unlike you, Xie Qingcheng, you are cold, and you have never felt any passion. You give me your money and your house, but your heartbeat for me is like the electrocardiogram of a dead man. Even after so many years of marriage, it has never been more than a straight line."
"Life is only a few decades on earth, he was tied up by an unfortunate marriage and so was I. Now I want to go free. I don't need status, money, or even fame. Others may call me a whore or a broken shoe, but I just want to be with him."
Xie Qingcheng closed his eyes, the cigarette in his hand almost burned his fingers: "Li Ruoqiu, you've gone crazy, haven't you? There is no love in this world. Love is only the effect of dopamine on the human body and hormones causing problems. But in this world there are responsibilities and there is family. Are you so confused and want to be with him, but is he willing to divorce and live with you?"
There was a deep silence.
Then the fire in Li Ruoqiu's eyes burned even deeper and more madly. And in the end, with tears in my eyes, and a stubborn stubbornness, I answer him: "I just don't want to repent."
"Xie Qingcheng, there is love in this world. It may be treacherous and go against decency, it may even be dirty and prohibited, but it exists and has nothing to do with hormones and dopamine."
"I'm sorry, I can't live with you anymore, because now I know what love is. I love him even if he's wrong."
After all these years since his divorce, Xie Qingcheng still feels absurd when he thinks about this conversation.\n
If that so-called love is what makes a person continue, even knowing that he will have to break until he bleeds, let him persist in his mistakes knowing that he is taking a step into the abyss, and that he will end up obsessed and ignoring everything, despising morality, life, and going against every baseline. .. and yet they ignore everything. So, in his opinion, this is probably not a type of love, but rather a kind of disease.
I couldn't empathize with that.
But even if he has a hard personality and is a heterosexual and somewhat macho man, his wife cheated on him and escaped with a married man. So in the end he was injured.
For some time after the divorce, Xie Qingcheng continued to work, write articles and take care of the students. His routine continues to be the same. But everyone around him could see that he was losing weight quickly, that his cheeks were slightly sunken and that his voice was hoarse when he spoke.
For fear that "if he were to hang up, the school would be on the news," the leader kindly asked him with some concern: "Professor Xie, if you don't feel well, take some time to rest at home, don't overwork."
Who would have thought that Xie Qingcheng was going to throw him with a lot of compressed power point packages that belonged to the conferences of the last year, the content of which was so detailed and systematic that he wondered if even himself, when he was at his most lucid and strongest moment, could have even completed such a project in such a short time?
"Do you want me to retire?" Xie Qingcheng leaned over his office chair, with his ten fingers intertwined, as thin as a piece of paper, as thin as the smoke trail of a cigarette, but the eyes I raise to look at it were still clear, it could even be said that they were cold and sharp.
"Yes, I would like to rest, but please make sure that for the first part of this course there is someone else who can do it this way, besides me."
There was no one else who could do it like that, of course.
The leader also saw in the brightness of his eyes that his school would not be in the news in some near time: it was not the kind of look that someone who is going to die would have.
But almost no one knew that, in order to be able to do a good job and bury his broken emotions deep down, Xie Qingcheng sat and smoked whenever he got home, smoking and coughing until he almost blackened his lungs and turning his house into a playground for nicotine.
It was hard for Aunt Lai, a neighbor, to see him like that.
At first, the Xie family was doing very well, economically speaking. His parents were both very high-ranking police superintendents, but then they made a major mistake in one case and both were demoted to a low level. At that time, Xie's mother fell ill again and, in order to provide her with medical care, they sold their large house and lived in a small alley in the old town of Shanghai. They lived in poverty but made friends with many good-hearted neighbors.
When Xie Qingcheng's parents died, Xie Qingcheng was not yet an adult and had to take responsibility for being the head of the family, so the neighbors took pity on the child and took care of them. Among these people, the closest to Xie Qingchen was this Aunt Li.
Aunt Li was a little younger than Xie Qingcheng's mother and loved children, but she never married or had children of her own. He almost treated the Xie brothers as if they were their own babies, especially after the death of Xie's father and mother. This is a good-hearted woman and these two children whose parents had abandoned them found in each other something they could not abandon: immense affection.
When Xie Qingcheng divorced, Aunt Li was crying for a while and then tried to introduce him to some girls as if she were a kind of worried old mother.
He also went to all those dates so as not to hurt Aunt Li's feelings, but in reality he limited himself to complying with a staging, and for those girls it wasn't a good game either...
When Xie Qingcheng first married, his conditions were quite good. He was handsome, tall, a doctor in a tertiary care hospital, in his twenties, in the prime of life and with a bright future. The only flaw to find was that it did not come from a high-cradle environment and had no money.
Now, however, in a second marriage, his salary as a university professor is no longer as high as when he was a doctor, and he is no longer so young, so his defects have become unusually harsh and notorious. A man divorced in just four years, without a good house or a good car, and with an unmarried sister who needs her help even to drag a bottle.
A pretty face is a good start, but since he is not an actor, that doesn't pay the bills.
How could the girls' parents not care?
Unlike when there is love and affinity, getting to know each other on a blind date often revolving on the general conditions. So the talk often ends as follows:
"You have a good job, does it leave you time to enjoy the family?"
"No. Since I am a professor at a medical school, the content of the lectures has to be very meticulous, you can't make mistakes, students also have a lot of questions, and I often work overtime. "
"Oh...... then you have a good salary, don't you?"
"It will probably cost me another three more years of teaching before getting a promotion. But I'm not sure if I will stay in college after three years."
"Then. ...... Do you have other relatives?"
"......I have a sister."
"Married?"
"Not yet."
......
Their answers were often sharp and direct like knives that dissected the hopes and longings of the other person and crushed their initially hopeful smiles.
Aunt Li knew it and got nervous: "Hey, dating is to show off oneself! It's a rule of the game, everyone else boasts about themselves, but you are the only one who goes and says that you are worse than you are.
Xie Qingcheng originally meant, "I don't want to get married again."
But when he found Aunt Li's anxious and sad eyes, he changed his words to: "...... I'm used to it. I'm sorry."
Aunt Li stared at him and, in doing so, choked a little: "My child, you are so good, how come Buddha doesn't bless you? ...... I burn incense and pray every day, just to pray to God to find another good marriage for my treasure. If so, I would be so happy that I could die immediately and I would not have any regret..."
"Aunt Li, don't say that nonsense."
"I am an old woman who is no longer afraid of anything, but you, you are different, you are still young. If you don't have a good life in the future and I leave before I see you realized, with what face will I see your father and Mu Ying ......?"
Aunt Li insisted on looking for all kinds of girls for him, always in the hope of entering into a marriage.\n
Xie Qingcheng felt very uncomfortable. He was an arrogant and tough guy, who refuses to lie or be disturbed, and for some reason his heart is in a completely different place from what he was when he met Li Ruoqiu, and he is quite sure that he will not spend the rest of his life with anyone.
But with his character as a man of the house, how could he endure his friends and family grieking and shedding tears for him? He could only accept that they lived happily under his protection and care.
So, even if the result were predictable, I would agree to go to those blind dates frighteningly similar to job interviews just to make Aunt Lai happy.
.
Her date this time was a very young girl named Bai Jing, whose family has a relative who teaches at a university and who also studied at a well-known medical school, as she had heard. She herself worked as a counter girl for luxury goods in the most fashionable shopping malls in Shanghai.\n
The most interesting thing in coastal cities are the billionaire owners, and if a girl spends the day at the luxury item counters, listening to the men and women who come and go, inevitably creates the illusion that she is also very noble and cool. You learn to look at people with their heads held high, taking a look at the clothing brand first, and stamping on all those guys who wear Adidas or Nike with a burning steel that says POOR right in the heart. The least she can accept is a Prada before they can talk to her.
When Xie Qingchen arrived at the cafe, Bai Jing was on the phone with her best friend: "Oh, yes, you don't know. I can meet that kind of fool every day at work. Today two mothers came with the children looking for I don't know what. I think it's a Taobao product. If it weren't for my professionalism, I would have rolled my eyes. Hey, better why don't you go to the Taobao counter?\n
A small diamond on her thumb moved from side to side in which she stirred the coffee in the small cup, while Bai Jing heard her best friend say something on the other side of the phone and hid her mouth with fun.\n\n
"What else can I buy?" A pair of slippers at our counter would probably cost you half a year's salary. And I'll tell you something, baby, do you know what that boy told me when he got up? He told me: "Do you sell baseball caps here? My mother likes sports and today she turns years old and I want to buy her a baseball cap."\n\n
Bai Jing laughed and trembled.\n\n
"I answered him directly: 'I'm sorry, oh, we've never had baseball caps of this brand, don't you know our brand, sir?' Hahahaha, you would have seen his face! It was wonderful ...... oops, wait a minute, it seems that the man I met for a blind date is already here, I'm going to hang up for now. I'll see you in Bulgari for afternoon tea together, honey, I love you! Wow! "\n
Unfortunately, the coffee was noisy and Xie Qingcheng was looking for someone who didn't know what it was like, so he didn't hear her talk.\n\n
When Bai Jing saw him looking around, he fit with the description given to him by his matchmaker of "hea tall, handsome, peach blossom eyes, but very cold" and immediately greeted him: "Hello!\n\n
Xie Qingcheng approached, "Yes. Hello."\n\n
Bai Jing looked at him from top to bottom, and finally his eyes were fixed on his simple T-shirt, and suddenly he smiled, his voice even whispered in an octave: "Hello, my name is Bai Jing."
Minitheater.\nCharacter tokens~
The author has something to say
Oh, men like Xie-ge are made for young people to fuck; their long legs are not only very beautiful, but they look very well wrapped around someone's waist; not only are their fingers very manly, they are very beautiful when they scratch someone's back. Forget about blind dates, hurry up and get fucked! Hurry up! [heaval breathing].
Xie Qingchen
Gender: Male\nAge: 32\nHeight: 180cm\nProfession: Doctor. Professor at the University of Medical Sciences.\nFavorite dish: None, I just eat it.\nLess favorite: None, just don't spoil it.\nPreferred color: None\nI don't like it: All extravagant color schemes\nFavorite animal: dogs\nHe doesn't like it: silly animals\nWould you like to have a partner right now?: no
Highlights\nWhen Xie Qingcheng worked in a hospital, he once returned from a visit to a room and saw that the cup of coffee on his table had moved and there was a piece of paper underneath that said "Doctor, are you from one?" I didn't know what he meant by "of the one", so he casually asked an apprentice from the same department and received a subtle look from the other. After understanding the meaning, he wore a mask for several months during outpatient clinics. Later, a white, beautiful and long-legged male orthopedic surgeon was confessed to him, who also shyly and gently asked him if he was one's.\nThis was the first time that Dr. Xie had to face the idea that there were gay people around him. Xie Qingcheng is conservative, stereotyped and heterosexual to the point of tiredness. Although as a doctor you know that homosexuality is a normal phenomenon, as a person you will never be able to accept this group, much less these beautiful young children.\nHe Yu: ...... Does the last sentence refer to me?
Translator's note\nBailian (white face/pretty boy) means cute, white boys, with a somewhat effeminate beauty.