Chapter 1

Chapter 1

When I saw the floating comments, Gu Xiaojing and I had just finished a round of exercise.

I was lying on my side, breathing hard, only just coming down from the afterglow of pleasure. My body was soaked through with hot, sticky sweat in the stifling heat.

Gu Xiaojing had his arms around me, his head resting against the back of my neck.

I blinked, but those rows of comments were still there. I reached out and pinched myself. The pain made me realize they were real.

I sat up and said softly, “I’m going to take another shower. It’s too hot.”

Hearing that, Gu Xiaojing got up to prepare a change of clothes for me. Then he took my hand and walked me to the shared bathroom.

He stood at the door like a guardian statue, keeping watch.

Gu Xiaojing and I lived in a chaotic shared apartment. Our room had nothing but a bed and a wardrobe. Even the bathroom was communal.

My father died when I was five. My mother died when I was ten. When I was seventeen, my grandmother, the only family I had left, died too.

I was the only person listed in my household register. From childhood to adulthood, I scraped together my tuition by working part-time jobs. After graduation, ending up in a place like this didn’t surprise me at all.

What did surprise me was that someone was here with me after graduation.

Gu Xiaojing and I had known each other since high school. He was the school’s famous rich second-generation heir.

He had a private car picking him up and dropping him off wherever he went. His three meals a day were prepared at home and delivered by the butler. He wore designer brands from head to toe, and every inch of him, from his hair to his heels, carried an air of pampered nobility.

He was kind, gentle, and generous, and he got along well with everyone.

Compared to me, someone like him seemed born for a life of ease.

I always thought we weren’t the same kind of people, so even though we were in the same class, we rarely spoke.

Only occasionally, when I was doing little business deals at school, he would buy things from me a few times-things he had no use for.

Most of my time outside of class had to be given over to work, so being late or leaving early was normal for me.

As for my grades, I forced them up through sheer grit. I was never especially gifted at studying to begin with, and since most of my time went into keeping myself alive, of course my grades weren’t that good. Still, at least I got into college.

Then I began a new round of part-time jobs.

Gu Xiaojing and I didn’t attend the same university, but we were in the same city.

The first time we really talked was probably when I was shaking drinks at a milk tea shop off campus, and he happened to come in to buy one.

After that, he became a regular there.

Later still, he took my battered secondhand phone and entered his contact information. We started interacting more and more, until one day, after he confessed to me with his face flushed red, I nodded and agreed.

Gu Xiaojing was very clingy. Maybe it was because he had been spoiled too much by his family since childhood, but there was always a gentle innocence about him. When he was with me, he was always imagining unrealistic fantasies.

For example, getting married right after graduation.

From the moment I got together with him, I knew we could never make it that far.

The gap between us was too wide.

I didn’t agree to date him because I liked him, either. It was because, in my heavy and oppressive life so far, I had never experienced this kind of way of living.

Putting a stranger I needed to learn about into my lonely existence.

According to the path Gu Xiaojing’s life was originally supposed to take, after graduation, he should have gone to work at his family’s company.

Even if he knew nothing, he could have followed the sunlit road his parents had paved for him and enjoyed a lifetime of comfort.

Not to mention he was a smart person.

But for some reason, he insisted on courting death by introducing me to his parents and saying he wanted to marry me.

He and his parents had the worst argument of his twenty-some years of life. His parents, who normally couldn’t bear to say a harsh word to him, even raised their hands against him, all to make him give up the idea.

Watching what they did, I only felt that their whole family was frighteningly naive.

Even if Gu Xiaojing hadn’t liked me all that much in the beginning, after all that, he might very well have developed the urge to oppose them out of spite.

They had raised Gu Xiaojing too innocently. That was why, in this murky world, he could still cling so firmly to the belief that love came above all else.

Ignoring his family’s objections, he threw himself into hardship without hesitation and moved with me into a remote shared apartment.