CH 90

Chapter 90: Ineffective Desensitisation

The moment he decided to come out to his parents, Song Yu was calmer and more relaxed than he’d imagined himself being.

He contacted Song Jin and Lin Rong, telling them he had something important to talk to them about, and asked if they would be home that night. They answered, yes.

After driving home, it was Lin Rong who opened the door. Her eyes were red and teary, looking as if she’d just cried. A bad feeling grew in Song Yu’s heart, but Lin Rong didn’t say anything.

“Xiao Yu, you’re back.”

Song Jin was sitting on the sofa and didn’t look at him, only asking why he was coming over so late.

Song Yu first clearly and orderly stated his plans for changing his graduation thesis topic. He was met with Song Jin’s questioning. Song Jin said, “Even if Professor Zhang agrees to you switching topics, it’s already so late. The semester’s about to finish — are you sure there are still professors who’ll take you?”

“Which is why I can also push back my graduation. I’ve had enough of Professor Zhang using my private life to pressure me and to block me from graduating. Even if I stay in his research group, as long as I don’t agree with his decisions, he still won’t let me successfully graduate. I may as well leave first.”

Song Jin was silent for a very long time before saying quietly, “If you really aren’t interested in Ms Zhang, we won’t force you.”

“Not only am I not interested in Ms Zhang, I am not interested in any future Ms Li or Ms Wang that may appear. I may never want to date any girl that everyone thinks is suitable.” Song Yu stood ramrod straight. “Dad, Mom, even though you always say I’ve never disappointed you, I actually can’t fulfil the expectations of a son. It’s just that I’ve never been able to tell you.”

“I like men, and I already have someone I’m dating.” Song Yu openly said, “So I won’t create a family with a girl. I can’t lie to myself, and I can’t deceive and hurt other people. I know your constant encouragement for me to date isn’t because you really want me to continue the Song family bloodline; it’s just that you think I’m too lonely. But can you guys imagine how painful it would be for a girl to marry someone like me?”

“I won’t do something like that, so please give up on those thoughts. Even if I have to live by myself in the future, I can still live very well.”

Hearing his words, Lin Rong finally couldn’t hold back anymore. She cried as she asked, “Really? Do you really think like that?”

Song Jin grabbed a paper from the sofa, throwing it to Song Yu. The paper, as thin as the edge of a blade, fluttered and swayed as it sliced through the heavy air. It finally landed next to Song Yu’s legs.

He lowered his eyes. Seeing the opening, he understood.

Song Jin’s voice was trembling, but Song Yu couldn’t tell if it was because of anger or grief.

“Song Yu. Don’t tell me that the person you’re dating… is your brother.”

He’d thought he wouldn’t feel anything, but cutting open and giving his parents a look at his difficult past as it dripped with blood was truly even more unpleasant than he’d imagined. He was very grateful for his father’s teachings; it was what stopped him from saying things like ‘don’t you feel disgusted’.

“Yes,” Song Yu said. “It’s Yue Zhishi. But he’s not my brother. We have a normal relationship, it doesn’t break any laws.”

“You’re boasting like that? Song Yu, what are you thinking? Other than not being related by blood to you, there’s no difference between him and your real younger brother! You watched as I brought him back home!”

Faced with rage, Song Yu’s face prickled with pain. He told himself to not feel anything, to go numb, but he knew what he’d said wasn’t so easy to accept. In his parents’ eyes, Yue Zhishi truly was no different from a true born son — and because he was the orphan of a close friend, they were even more protective of him. He had essentially stepped on his father’s most inviolable bottom line.

When he heard his father stand up, shaking, when he saw his father look at him with his eyebrows drawn and say, his voice angry yet weak, “Song Yu, wake up”—

—the tranquil look on Song Yu’s face finally splintered.

“Dad, it’s been so many years. Have I not been sober enough?”

Had the manual, hidden in his computer, really been written for Yue Zhishi’s future partner?

It hadn’t been. It was simply a warning Song Yu had written to himself during his most lost, most desperate times — a reminder to himself that someone was definitely going to appear next by Yue Zhishi’s side in the future, a reminder that he needed to remember his status and his boundaries. No matter how well he wrote it, the signature at the end could only be [Yue Zhishi’s older brother].

And that person in the future didn’t actually need a ‘dating manual’; as long as they obtained Yue Zhishi’s love, it would be enough.

“How many times do you think I’ve edited that letter?” Song Yu calmly said, “I have eleven drafts.”

He did his best to control his emotions so that he could appear more composed; after all, it was already in the past.

“Whenever I thought I couldn’t endure anymore, I would see Yue Zhishi and think, I like him so much — why can’t it be me? Every time that happened, I wouldn’t be able to sleep. I’d open that document and edit it, deleting some lines that couldn’t — and shouldn’t — be left in there. I’d try my best to make sure that letter would look more like it came from a normal older brother. And then I’d tell myself: this is what I should be doing. All of those feelings were like useless drafts; they shouldn’t exist.”

A rueful smile hung on his wan face, and he looked towards his parents.

“You should have looked for all of them and printed them out. You should’ve read it from the first draft to the eleventh — what a magnificent sight that would’ve been.”

“After reading through all of them, you would’ve thought — wow, Song Yu’s so noble.”

The manual filled with various warnings lay soundlessly on the cold floor, colourlessly bearing the weight of Song Yu five years ago after he’d amended his words once again. He’d changed the words that had left a younger him with a face full of tears and a heart full of pain; he’d deleted the hostility he’d felt towards Yue Zhishi’s future partner and the entrustment that had crossed boundaries — all just so he could learn how to calmly accept the appearance of a him or a her.

Over many sleepless nights, he’d learned how to say at the letter’s beginning: Hello, I’m very glad to see you. He’d learned how to gift at the ending: May the two of you be happy for a very long time.

And then, as he edited the letter again and again, he’d learned how to slowly accept the signature at the very end.

The printed lines looked the same as Song Yu himself: neat and orderly, calm and free from any emotions. It gave that youthfully ignorant him from the past the dignified and mature shell an adult should have. But all the many Song Yus of all those years passed — they all seemed to stand here at this moment, staying with him as he weathered through this explosion.

And Yue Zhishi, who’d existed in every single draft yet had never been allowed the reading list, was also stunned where he stood. The quarrelling and arguing that had stopped him from moving seemed to be hammering heavily onto his chest, but the letter was the true dagger. It was too sharp, which was why it didn’t hurt the moment it slid in; it was only when he realised, too late, that he felt the piercing pain boring into his heart.

Large drops of tears splattered on top, almost enough to blotch those cold and detached printed words; he wanted to peel away the fragile soul hidden within the paper and let him be free.

“Le Le, what’s wrong?” Lin Rong messily wiped away her tears and stood up, looking at him. “Why did you come over like this? Are you sick?”

Hearing those words, Yue Zhishi felt even more pain.

He struggled to hold himself back from shaking. He composed himself a bit, and then he lowered the hand holding that piece of paper and also rubbed off the tears on his face. He looked at them.

“Uncle Song, Aunt Rong. I’m sorry.”

Yue Zhishi thought, if he knelt down right now, it might seem more like a kind of coercion — and so he gave them a very deep, very formal bow.

“I’m not saying I’m sorry to express my apologies. I’m saying it because I truly have let you guys down. I’ve failed to live up to the love and care you’ve given me since childhood. Aunt Rong, do you remember last time when you came to university to visit me because I was sick? It was then. I confessed to Song Yu using my sickness as my excuse.”

He closed his eyes and then opened them again, each word and sentence leaving his mouth full of certainty. “So this entire matter belongs to me. I started it. If you really want to say there was someone influencing the other, then I was the one who influenced everything Song Yu did. In this relationship, Song Yu has actually been the passive one.”

Yue Zhishi’s eyes were red, his lips free of any colour, but his eyes were very bright, steadfast and calm. “I’ve had a very strong separation anxiety towards Song Yu since I was a child. I’d get so anxious to the point it was no longer normal, which was why I did so many improper things growing up. Such as forcing him to sleep on the same bed as me, wanting to hold hands with him, wanting to hold him; even wanting to kiss him back when he was still just my brother. I gave him my so-called confession when I was suffering from a fever and was crying in pain. Tell me — during a situation like that, how could Song Yu have rejected me?”

He pulled all of the responsibility onto himself. The cause was him, the source was also him; Song Yu had nothing to do with anything.

“Because Song Yu used to keep wanting to keep his distance from me, to stay away from me, my requests towards him are actually slightly pathological.”

As he spoke, he unexpectedly smiled. “Just like an allergy. Doctors say you can’t eat this and you can’t eat that because you’re allergic, you might die if you eat them. Fine, I won’t touch them. Even though I’ve been very obedient the last ten-plus years, sometimes, I actually particularly wanted to eat them. And now that I want to be together with someone, I can’t do that either. I’m almost about to go crazy from wanting to stay by his side.”

“I don’t understand. Liking someone clearly doesn’t make me allergic, but why are there still so many adverse reactions?”

“When I realised I liked him, I really did suffer. I completely couldn’t think about how I should act if Song Yu one day got together with someone else. But once Song Yu and I became a couple, I was tormented again. I didn’t dare come back to see you, didn’t dare to give you a phone call. Someone like me would be a burden no matter which family I was in — I was so hard to take care of, and yet I’m still so selfish. You’ve raised me like your own son, and yet I’ve done something like this.”

His hands unconsciously clenched, the paper wrinkling from his grasp.

Neither Song Jin and Lin Rong could speak as they watched their perpetually smiling younger son say those words through gritted teeth.

“I’ve actually thought about it before.” Yue Zhishi just barely managed to give them a smile, using a relatively relaxed voice to tell them what he’d previously planned. “At the beginning, I thought Song Yu was forced to agree to my confession, so I thought — I needed to really, really treasure this period of time with him. And then, when… when he one day has had enough, I would leave this family. I’d go to a place where no one knows me and do my best to earn money. And then I’d sneakily transfer the money to the family’s bank cards.”

Lowering his head, Yue Zhishi groped out his phone in a bit of a panic. He searched through it, his words starting to grow messy. “I, I’ve calculated it before, all… all the money I’ve spent since I was a child. But, but I only started to record it down during third year of junior high. I could only find a general estimate online for the expenses for the years before, but I’ve recorded down all the years after. I, I wanted to multiply that sum several times over and then, once I started to earn money, I’d leave enough for myself to eat and rent a place. Everything else I would send back. Of course, I wouldn’t be able to fully repay all you’ve given me, and I wouldn’t be able to make up for wasting your feelings. But it’s always better to try than to not try at all.”

Song Jin sat back on the sofa in a daze after hearing these words. He mutely shook his head.

But Yue Zhishi didn’t stop; he pulled out the plan in his phone and lifted it high for them to see as though he was discussing a joyful family holiday trip. “I’ve looked at many suitable places for me to stay — I have places both inside and outside the country, and I have their house prices, their costs of living, as well as how much it would cost to rent a place to live. I’ve already made plans for all of these things.”

“Look, I actually planned it out well, haven’t I? A place like Yunnan would be very nice; Yunnan’s really pretty and is really far away from here. I feel like it’d be a good place to hide myself away. When I’m there, I could rent a small house and raise a cat. Or maybe I’d stay at one place for a period of time and then keep moving around like a secret agent. It’d be so cool, but I might earn less that way, it wouldn’t be enough to pay you back…”

The small dog wandering on the street might not actually be a stray dog. The world was so large, he could take any place for home.

It was only after he’d been warmly raised and then had lost that home that he would become a true stray.

Every single word and every single sentence that left Yue Zhishi’s mouth stabbed onto the hearts of the two parents. Neither one had thought that within this wonderful and peaceful home, both of their children had been living underneath the weight of a burden that could collapse at any given moment.

What they couldn’t have imagined even more was that Yue Zhishi had been calculating the burden he’d brought onto this family every day, hoping there would be a day he could clear away his debt.

Lin Rong finally couldn’t keep listening anymore, interrupting him with her face covered with tears. “Le Le! You… How could you think like that?”

Yue Zhishi breathed and breathed; he wanted to smile, but it felt like he cried when he eventually smiled.

“Because I don’t want to see Song Yu with someone else.”

“Aunt Rong, I really do particularly love him.” Yue Zhishi stubbornly held back his tears, worried they’d continue rolling down and make him look not sincere or steadfast enough. “And it was only after we got together that I understood Song Yu really loves me as well — he can’t be without me. Did you know? Sometimes when he’s by himself, he can’t fall asleep at all. He’ll eat so many tablets as though he was sick. I’m so afraid.”

He murmured, “I’m truly really afraid,” and kept repeating again and again the two words of “I’m sorry.”

“Uncle, Aunt Rong, I know I’ve committed something really wrong. I really do. But if he could be even the slightest bit happier when he sees me, then I don’t mind not dating as long as I can stay by his side. I don’t care at all about what other people say about me or how they look at me; I’m actually not even afraid of being thrown away. To you, a trust like that might seem very blind, but the only thing I’m afraid of is Song Yu not living well. Of him not being healthy and not being happy.”

Yue Zhishi’s mouth and fingers were trembling. He lowered his head, a bit upset about how he hadn’t been able to control his own emotions. He must’ve looked so vulnerable.

“Honestly — there are so many good cities in this world, but I have nowhere to go.”

“I only want to stay by Song Yu’s side.”