“You made this?” Qin Zui asked.
“You happy?” Jiang Chu went back to admiring his cake… no, more like admiring the various “Qin Zui” characters he had written all over it, before sticking on the “18” candle he’d specially gotten from the shop.
Qin Zui watched Jiang Chu’s profile as he carefully lit the candle, said nothing, and went to the kitchen to cook himself a bowl of plain noodles.
By the time he came out with the bowl, Jiang Chu had already pulled all the cushions off the sofa and piled them up on the floor in front of it. He was sitting cross-legged on them, munching on a duck claw while watching a movie.
“Come here.” He patted the cushion beside him, gesturing for Qin Zui.
Qin Zui sat down, placed his bowl in the middle, and pulled out a beer from the pile lined up next to the coffee table.
“Hey,” Jiang Chu tossed the duck claw into the plate, wiped his hands, and snatched it away quickly, “Those are just for show, I didn’t actually expect you to drink them.”
“What’s wrong?” Qin Zui looked at him.
“You’ve got school tomorrow, I have work. Tonight’s not for drinking.” Jiang Chu got up, got two bottles of drinks from the fridge, couldn’t find a bottle opener, so he just handed them to Qin Zui. “Use your teeth.”
Qin Zui looked a bit speechless holding the drink Jiang Chu had given him: Vita Soy Milk. He made a couple of “crack” sounds and very neatly bit the cap off.
“Set it aside, we’ll drink after midnight. Let me finish this first.” Jiang Chu picked up the duck claw he’d been eating and continued, even nudging Qin Zui’s ankle with his foot. “You seen this movie before?”
“No.” Qin Zui grabbed another bottle of beer, bit its cap off too. “You drink that one. It’s fine if I have beer.”
Even though Jiang Chu knew Qin Zui could down Erguotou like it was water, a few bottles of beer would be like orange juice to him. But remembering he had school the next day, he still couldn’t help but remind him, “Go easy. Just have a little, enough to be polite.”
“Mm.” Qin Zui agreed. “Drinking more wouldn’t turn me into you anyway.”
“Turn me into what?” Jiang Chu’s reflex kicked in.
As soon as he said it, they both remembered the scene from yesterday, when Jiang Chu had kissed him and promptly thrown up.
Qin Zui remembered it in even more detail, seamlessly connecting it to the memory he’d been interrupted from earlier in the room.
Now they were sitting shoulder to shoulder, staring at each other, eyes wide, their distance almost the same as yesterday.
“You know what.” Qin Zui tilted his head back, taking a swig of beer, and fixed his gaze on the TV.
“Hey.” Jiang Chu tossed the bone aside and laughed. He’d been a bit dizzy yesterday. Now that he was sober and thinking about it, it was still a little awkward.
Mainly because it was embarrassing to have just kissed and then immediately thrown up.
He conscientiously drank his soy milk. “Can’t compare to your capacity.”
“Does it need to compare with me?” Zhou Teng scurried over and crouched by Qin Zui’s feet. Qin Zui wiggled his ankle, nudging its little paw. “Give it two bottles and it wouldn’t end up like you either.”
Zhou Teng raised a paw and swatted at him.
“Got a lot to say now that you’re happy, huh? Would kissing me really lose you a piece of flesh or something?” Jiang Chu clicked his tongue and tapped his soy milk bottle against Qin Zui’s beer bottle. “It’s midnight, time to ditch the glass slippers and make a run for it.”
Qin Zui stared at Jiang Chu for a while, reaffirming his opinion of him. This guy could be really amazing sometimes.
“Thanks.” A hint of a smile appeared in his eyes as he said quietly.
Jiang Chu was about to reply with “You’re welcome,” when Qin Zui’s phone rang.
Liang Xiaojia’s name automatically popped into his head.
Sure enough, Qin Zui took the phone and went to the balcony for another ten-plus minutes.
When he came back, Jiang Chu had almost finished off the cumin lamb he’d brought back from Jiang Liantian’s at noon.
“Your friend? Wishing you a happy birthday?” Jiang Chu asked, tossing the remaining few pieces of lamb into Qin Zui’s bowl and stacking the empty plate aside.
Qin Zui hummed in agreement, but his expression wasn’t happy. In fact, it seemed a bit serious.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you. You talk to this friend like they’re your girlfriend, one phone call a day. Pretty clingy.” Jiang Chu pretended not to be particularly interested.
He was genuinely a little curious about this Liang Xiaojia. Not even with Da Ben or Fang Zi was he anywhere near this close. The total phone calls from all his ex-girlfriends combined weren’t this frequent.
And grown men calling to say happy birthday? Unless they were drunk and shooting the breeze, or borrowing money, they wouldn’t even last five minutes.
If he didn’t know Liang Xiaojia was a guy, he wouldn’t have believed Qin Zui if he said she wasn’t his girlfriend.
Qin Zui didn’t say anything. He tapped his phone screen quickly, sent Liang Xiaojia a WeChat message, tossed the phone onto the sofa, and took another gulp of beer before speaking. “Let’s not talk about him.”
“Then let’s talk about your mom.” Jiang Chu stood up and stretched, looking for his own phone.
Qin Zui leaned back against the sofa, one leg bent, arms crossed, watching him.
“You reacted pretty strongly today,” Jiang Chu said. “When you first came and your mom just dumped you at my place, you didn’t seem to have that big a problem with it.”
Jiang Chu was going to say that if it was because she’d written the wrong name, it seemed a bit unnecessary; mistaking a birthday wasn’t impossible either. When Jiang Chu was in seventh grade, his mom even went to his elementary school for a parent-teacher conference.
There were a lot of things you really only understood when you grew up: business, family, parents, children, yourself… the things adults have to remember every day were way more than you could imagine.
He wasn’t at the stage of being sandwiched between caring for young and old yet, and just running a small, crappy company and taking care of himself often left him feeling overwhelmed and flustered.
Hadn’t he even forgotten about Qin Zui on his first day of school?
But the words were on the tip of his tongue. Thinking about it, it wasn’t just about writing the wrong name or mistaking a birthday between mother and son. He couldn’t just analyze that one incident and sound preachy.
“And before I left, your mom asked me to apologize to you for her. Said she really didn’t react properly today.” Jiang Chu couldn’t find his phone, but found the cigarettes instead. He lit one up and leaned against the dining table.
“So, were you ever called that name?” he asked Qin Zui. “Then you changed it to ‘Qin Zui’ later?”
Qin Zui was silent for a long time. He had no expression, wasn’t as irritable as he was at noon. He just stared at the TV in silence.
Jiang Chu had already smoked a cigarette down to the filter and thought Qin Zui wasn’t going to say anything. He was about to change the subject and move on when Qin Zui finally spoke. “Didn’t she tell you guys?”
“If she did, would I be asking you?” Jiang Chu tossed the cigarette and lighter to Qin Zui. “One stick. You already owe me a whole pack from lunch.”
“She got pregnant with me because my dad got her drunk. She’d already found a job here and decided to get a divorce.” Qin Zui lit a cigarette with the one in his mouth, his voice flat. “It was basically rape.”
Jiang Chu was stunned.
This guy either keeps his mouth shut, or says something that leaves you speechless.
“She always looked down on my dad. I don’t know why they even got married in the first place.” Qin Zui stared at the TV, completely numb to these stories he’d heard since he was a kid, from neighborhood gossip and his dad’s drunken ramblings.
“My dad thought that if she had a kid, she wouldn’t run away, wouldn’t be so ‘wild at heart,’ that she’d accept her fate and settle down.” A bit of ash fell on his pants. Qin Zui flicked it off. “Maybe she tried to ‘accept her fate’ for a few years. But she hates me.”
“She gave me that name. My dad wanted to make it up to her, so he let me take her surname,” Qin Zui continued. “When I was little, I didn’t understand. Later I thought about it, maybe I should be glad she didn’t just name me ‘Crime’.”
Jiang Chu’s throat moved. This was just too fucking messed up. He was shocked and immediately regretted asking.
“And your current name…” he asked, frowning.
“I changed it myself.” Qin Zui looked at him. “When I was 16. A birthday present to myself.”
Jiang Chu felt like a little hand had suddenly clenched around his heart, squeezing it painfully.
“I can understand why she hates me. Why she never wanted to see me again after she left.” Qin Zui paused. “But I don’t think it’s my fault.”
“Of course it’s not,” Jiang Chu said.
“I didn’t want to be that ‘crime,’ and I didn’t like the name she gave me.” Qin Zui continued, staring at the TV. “When she suddenly said she’d celebrate my birthday, I thought it meant she was trying to accept me. But looking at that cake, maybe even she doesn’t know if she can ever really accept it.”
Qin Zui’s voice stopped there. The living room was left with only the noisy background noise of the movie and the crisp sound of another beer bottle being opened.
Jiang Chu frowned, staring at Qin Zui’s profile. The TV’s light and shadow played across his just-turned-adult youthful face. Cool, good-looking, handsome. But it left Jiang Chu completely speechless.
The amount of information was a bit more than he’d expected. The kind of plot you usually only see on TV or on your phone had suddenly stepped into his life, right beside him, and the main character had become his “brother.”
If this was just news, Jiang Chu might have scrolled past it while mentally commenting, “Why have a son? The hard-won rapist ex-husband is dead, the cursed offspring is already an adult with functioning limbs, so he comes back to keep sucking the blood? Does his mom think she’s Mother Mary?”
But looking at Qin Zui right in front of him, he couldn’t judge anyone’s right or wrong for the moment. He could only silently curse “Fuck!” and mentally call Qin Zui’s biological father a fucking animal.
And the animal was already dead, leaving Qin Shuman and Qin Zui, mother and son, with a nearly twenty-year stalemate that couldn’t be resolved by “motherly love.”
“Good thing you changed it!” After holding it in for so long, this was all Jiang Chu could manage to say. And he said it loudly, almost startling Qin Zui.
He went over, patted Qin Zui’s shoulder, and sat down beside him. Feeling frustrated and annoyed, he finally grabbed the beer bottle from Qin Zui’s hand and took a swig.
“I already drank from that.” Qin Zui looked at Jiang Chu. His gaze moved from Jiang Chu’s lips, wet with beer, up to his eyes, and he said, meeting his gaze.
“I told you I don’t mind. So much useless talk.” Jiang Chu impatiently grabbed another bottle of beer and shoved it into Qin Zui’s hand. “Open it yourself.”
Qin Zui smirked, bit the cap off, and clinked his bottle with Jiang Chu’s.
Usually, Jiang Chu would fall asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow after drinking. But it didn’t work tonight.
At two in the morning, he was still tossing and turning in bed, replaying Qin Zui’s expression, tone, and eyes when he’d said those words.
Like he was trying out for a play, he tried to put himself in both Qin Shuman’s and Qin Zui’s shoes, and the more he did, the more he felt this was just fucking impossible to solve.
Qin Shuman had tried to “accept her fate” for a few years. Qin Zui came to find her, and she forced herself to celebrate his birthday. She must have been struggling too, telling herself the kid was innocent.
But who wanted the child in the first place? She was about to get a divorce. It was Qin Zui’s dad’s fault.
And Qin Zui? He was practically born as an innocent combination of innocence and “crime” itself.
And then his alcoholic dad raised him to be a boozer. He could cook, he could clean, he hardly ever spoke. Jiang Chu wondered how he’d managed to raise this kid, kind of like a stray dog.
“Ah!” Jiang Chu, irritated, rolled over and grabbed his phone, which was charging on the nightstand.
That’s when he saw two new WeChat messages.
One from Chen Linguo, sent at 1:40 a.m. Dunno what it was, she’d unsent it.
Jiang Chu ignored it and tapped on Da Ben’s profile pic, sending him a “Fuck.”
Da Ben: What’s up? Didn’t like the gift?
Jiang Chu: Why are you awake?
Da Ben: Got up to pee. What’s your problem?
Da Ben: Quick, I’m dying to know how our little bro reacted to the gift.
Jiang Chu: Tell you tomorrow.
Da Ben: Damn
Da Ben: You’re such a jerk.
Chatting shit with Da Ben cheered him up. Jiang Chu sent him a sticker pack, then scrolled through his Moments.
When he scrolled past Qin Second Tone Qin Zui’s profile picture, he didn’t react at first. He’d scrolled halfway down before he went back and looked closely at the name. It was definitely Qin Zui.
He clicked on it. The kid’s Moments finally had content.
It wasn’t anything special. Just an emoji of a tiny bottle of alcohol.
Jiang Chu had a weird intuition. This was for him to see.
He smiled and commented with a “cheers” emoji.
The next morning, Jiang Chu woke up because he had to pee.
Whether it was from the half bottle of beer, or Da Ben’s “got up to pee” comment before he went to sleep, he’d spent the whole night dreaming about looking for a toilet.
Struggling back to reality from his dream, he opened his bedroom door, his hair a mess. Qin Zui happened to be at the entrance, bag over one shoulder, changing his shoes. He glanced up at Jiang Chu, leaning against the wall.
“What time is it? Leaving so early today?” Jiang Chu squinted, looking at the time.
“I’m on cleaning duty.” Qin Zui’s gaze paused as it took in Jiang Chu’s lower half, clad only in his boxers.
“Take it easy then. Don’t forget to eat.” Jiang Chu yawned, grabbed the door handle, and started to head into the bathroom.
Qin Zui suddenly let out a soft whistle at him.
Jiang Chu almost peed himself from the shock. He shivered, lifted his leg to kick Qin Zui in the ass. “You’re something else now, huh? Whistling at your big brother?”
Qin Zui laughed, opened the door, and tilted his chin toward Jiang Chu’s crotch. “Pretty big.”
He slammed the door shut and was gone. Jiang Chu stood there for a second, stunned. Then he realized what happened and rubbed his morning wood through his boxers. He was both exasperated and had to laugh.
What a grudge-holding little shit.
