Chapter 40
No one dared make a sound, afraid they might disturb the two people in the distance, so all they could do was cling excitedly to the tree trunks.
The not-so-thick trunks swayed dangerously for a moment.
In the distance, after Qin Ye blurted out everything he wanted to say in one go, he finally stopped.
Perhaps because he had been stunned by so many words crashing over him, Shu Lin did not speak for quite a while.
Qin Ye looked at him eagerly, his fingers curling tightly with nerves.
“A-Lin, tell me.” He kept his voice low. “During that one year of contract dating, did you really not feel anything for me at all? Not even a little?”
Shu Lin’s breathing suddenly caught.
—How could he possibly have felt nothing.
Even before the contract relationship had begun, the moment he received Qin Ye’s audition file, his feelings had already slipped beyond his control.
So many years had passed. Shu Lin had thought he had long since forgotten the other man, and that they would never cross paths again.
But Qin Ye’s sudden reappearance had smashed apart the illusion he had carefully built for himself.
Shu Lin closed his eyes. His lips moved twice, but no sound came out.
Qin Ye keenly caught that moment of hesitation.
Realizing something, his eyes suddenly lit up. “You did, didn’t you?”
Shu Lin said nothing.
Qin Ye stepped forward, and Shu Lin stepped back—until there was nowhere left to retreat—
[Waaah wow wow wow——]
From a distance, Lin Zhiqiao let out an excited scream in his heart: [Good, good, good! Yes, this pose exactly! The classic wall pin! Young Master Qin, get him! Kiss him hard!!!]
Everyone held their breath and stared wide-eyed. The not-so-thick branches kept swaying precariously.
The next second, Qin Ye lowered his head—
[Aaaaah!!! They kissed, they kissed, they kissed, aaaah!!!]
“Ahhh, my Harp couple is back! [screaming and crawling.jpg]”
“I refuse to believe they can still break up after this! If they don’t get back together and get married on the spot, that would be way too much!!!”
Several suppressed gasps sounded all around.
At last Ji Yuan could no longer restrain a photographer’s instincts. She raised the communicator phone the show had given them and started snapping away like crazy.
Even more intense than Ji Yuan was the cameraman who had been following Shu Lin and Qin Ye the whole time.
Shu Lin was trapped between Qin Ye and the tree trunk and couldn’t break free.
But the kiss didn’t last very long. Qin Ye released him, his eyes as red as if he had just been crying.
“You obviously do like me.” Qin Ye stared at Shu Lin’s misty eyes. “Then why did you reject me?”
Shu Lin closed his eyes.
Just when Qin Ye—and everyone else behind them—thought that Shu Lin would once again choose silence, he suddenly spoke.
“It wasn’t me who rejected you.” Shu Lin said, “Qin Ye, have you forgotten even this? Back then… the one who rejected me was clearly you.”
Qin Ye froze, his whole face written over with utter confusion.
“Me?” he said in disbelief. “Rejected you?”
The melon-eating crowd hiding behind the trees was equally dumbfounded.
[Qin Ye rejected Shu Lin?] Lin Zhiqiao sucked in a cold breath. [How is that possible?]
Unfortunately, after saying that one sentence, Shu Lin refused to speak any further, no matter how Qin Ye pressed him.
Qin Ye’s “forgetfulness” seemed to have disappointed him to the extreme. He no longer wanted to continue this meaningless tug-of-war either.
Qin Ye was frantic.
The others were equally frantic.
The gossip had only been eaten halfway, and now the two owners of the gossip were about to go cold—
[Holy crap, holy crap?! So the script Director Shu and Young Master Qin were holding this whole time was actually— the white moonlight I’ve been jealous of for all these years… was me all along?!]
Everyone’s eyes turned in unison toward Lin Zhiqiao.
Even Qin Ye in the distance stopped his emotionally charged tug-of-war with Shu Lin and turned to look toward where Lin Zhiqiao was.
[Shu Lin and Young Master Qin attended the same high school but were in different classes. When Shu Lin transferred to the school in his senior year, he went through a long stretch of campus bullying, until one day Qin Ye from the class next door happened to see it—]
[Back in high school, Young Master Qin’s grades weren’t good. His mind wasn’t on studying, but he had lots of friends, and in a certain sense his influence in school was enormous.]
[The day he saw Shu Lin being bullied, Qin Ye took on all five of them by himself! From that day on, the whole school knew that Shu Lin had backing! ]
[Waaah wow wow wow! The classic hero-saves-the-beauty opening! So this was actually mutual first love at first sight?]
Lin Zhiqiao was so deep into shipping the couple that he completely failed to notice everyone else’s urging looks—
And then what? What happened next?
At exactly which step did such a perfect pure-love beginning turn into the current melodramatic script of “my white moonlight turned out to be me”?
Lin Zhiqiao took a breath, then continued.
[Through that entire senior year, Shu Lin and Qin Ye were secretly paying attention to each other, but neither dared disturb the other.]
[It wasn’t until after the college entrance exams ended that Director Shu finally gathered the courage to write Qin Ye a letter and slip it into Qin Ye’s desk.]
[But what Shu Lin didn’t know was that the moment the exams ended, Qin Ye had already boarded a flight overseas and never went back to school at all!]
[That thank-you letter written for Qin Ye was spotted by one of the people who had bullied Shu Lin before. They secretly took it away, tore it to pieces, and threw it into the river—]
[So the remains of the torn letter Shu Lin saw in the river… were never torn up by Qin Ye at all!!!]
[Damn, damn, damn! So that’s where the misunderstanding came from, aaah!]
[Sure enough, every melodramatic script has that one misunderstanding that’s obviously tiny, yet somehow can never be untangled.]
Lin Zhiqiao couldn’t help complaining, [Such a good person, so how did he not know how to use his mouth! ]
[Such a simple misunderstanding! Something that could have been cleared up in a few sentences! And yet it dragged on and on for all these years!!!]
The others felt the same pain. Their gazes at the little couple who had circled around each other for so many years were full of heartache.
Fortunately, the Shu Lin who couldn’t use his mouth had run into Lin Zhiqiao, who would use it for him.
Qin Ye had just been force-fed the full story of that year and stood there stunned.
“You—you—I, you—” he stammered, but after half a day he still couldn’t manage a complete sentence.
Even Shu Lin was frozen, as if someone had hit pause on him. His whole body had gone rigid.
If what Lin Zhiqiao said was true, if Qin Ye really had never received that letter back then—
Then the emotional knot he had carried for all these years was too much of a joke.
Shu Lin felt like his brain had completely stopped working.
Only after a very long time did he barely recover a trace of awareness. “Back then…” his voice was very light, “that letter…”
“You really wrote me a letter?” Qin Ye spoke almost at the exact same time. “What did you write?”
The person he had secretly loved all through senior year had written him what sounded very much like a love letter. Not only had he never received it, it had been secretly torn up and thrown into the river by someone else—and because of that, the person he loved had misunderstood him for a full ten years!
Qin Ye felt so wronged he was about to cry.
Was there anyone in the world more miserable than him?
Lin Zhiqiao sighed in sync, [Too tragic. Young Master Qin is way too tragic!]
Qin Ye pressed on, “So the person you liked all along was actually me, not someone else, right?”
Shu Lin fell silent again.
But this time it wasn’t because he refused to speak. His mind had completely crashed and couldn’t process the information in front of him.
Shu Lin’s original family hadn’t been a good one. This personality of his—enduring everything in silence, bottling everything up, always preferring to suffer alone rather than speak a single word—had already been formed back when he was still a child.
No one had ever taught him how to correctly express what was in his heart.
Whenever anything happened, Shu Lin always chose to deal with it by himself, habitually sealing himself inside a small world that contained no one but him.
In his dictionary, words like asking for help and sharing seemed never to have existed at all.
For all these years, Shu Lin had never really thought there was anything wrong with that part of his personality.
Until now—
Now he felt stupid to the extreme.
There could not possibly be a bigger idiot in the world than him.
Shu Lin stood there motionless. Sunlight fell through the gaps between the sparse leaves, though much of it was blocked by the tall figure in front of him. Even so, the glare still felt blinding.
His already chaotic mind began to swim, dizzy wave after dizzy wave washing over him until he could barely stay standing.
Yet the person before him was so immersed in overwhelming joy that he hadn’t noticed Shu Lin’s subtle abnormality at all.
“So you never liked anyone else? Right?”
Qin Ye’s eyes were shining. The invisible dog tail behind him seemed to have shot straight into the sky, wagging so fast it might as well have been running on triple-speed like a propeller.
“I’m so happy, A-Lin!!!”
He bent down and hugged Shu Lin. Then, as if that still wasn’t enough to express his joy, he wrapped both arms around Shu Lin’s waist, lifted him up entirely, and spun him around several times on the spot.
“A-Lin, do you know this? Before my family sent me abroad after the college entrance exams, I actually thought about writing you a letter too!”
“I wanted to tell you I had liked you for a long time. I wanted to ask if you could wait for me to come back from overseas.”
“But your grades were so good, and you were so outstanding. I was afraid that doing that would be too selfish and would disturb your life—”
Qin Ye regretted it so much he could die. “If I’d known you wrote me a letter too, then I should have written one to you back then!”
He kept holding Shu Lin and spinning him around, yet got no response at all.
His excitement gradually cooled, and unease began thumping in his chest. Carefully, he set Shu Lin back down.
“A-Lin…?”
The next second, the moment Shu Lin’s feet touched the ground, his legs went weak. With his eyes shut and his face deathly pale, he collapsed straight into Qin Ye’s arms.
Qin Ye’s face changed drastically. “A-Lin? A-Lin—”
Shu Lin had fainted.
Qin Ye didn’t have time to think. He bent down, scooped Shu Lin up bridal-style, and ran at full speed back toward the tent, not forgetting to shout over his shoulder at the cameraman, “Doctor! Get a doctor, now!!!”
Qin Ye ran fast while carrying Shu Lin.
The cameraman ran behind them, his legs moving so quickly they almost left afterimages.
And behind him came the entire melon-eating crowd, led by Lin Zhiqiao.
Every guest from Celebrity Deserted Island was there, even Zhou Zenian following along among them.
The doctor traveling with the production team arrived very quickly. Inside the large tent, only Qin Ye, Shu Lin, and the doctor remained. None of the others dared rush in and disturb them, so they could only secretly peek through the narrow gaps in the tent fabric.
Lin Zhiqiao was full of worry: [Oh my god, this development… don’t tell me we’re heading straight into some melodramatic terminal-illness forced bad ending?!]
[No! I refuse to accept it! This is the first real couple I’ve finally managed to ship with my whole heart!!!]
Inside the tent, Qin Ye—who could hear Lin Zhiqiao’s thoughts—went completely pale.
“Doctor, how is he?”
The doctor’s expression was grave. “The equipment on the island is limited. It would be best to leave the island as soon as possible and take him to a major hospital for a full examination.”
In other words, even the doctor couldn’t determine what exactly was wrong with Shu Lin.
Qin Ye’s vision darkened. He bent over Shu Lin and burst into tears. “A-Lin——”
At the exact same moment as his sobbing voice, another familiar sharp shriek exploded in everyone’s ears—
[Dear god almighty! Director Shu—]
[He’s pregnant!!!]
