Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Two more days passed before I asked Zhou Tingshen to meet me in a secluded corner of the school where hardly anyone went.

When I got there, I kept glancing around, afraid I might spot someone I knew nearby.

Zhou Tingshen arrived late.

When he saw me, he didn’t ask why I hadn’t messaged him these past few days, nor did he care what I’d been doing.

“Ye Xingchun, what did you want to see me about?” Zhou Tingshen said coolly, stopping two steps away from me. “I already have plans with my teammates later.”

Zhou Tingshen had teamed up with some classmates for a competition.

If I remembered correctly, one of those teammates was the beauty his roommate had mentioned before, Du Xuanning.

I lowered my eyes, remembering how Zhou Tingshen had brought her up before. He’d said she was a very lively classmate, and that he found her noisy. So the signs had been there all along.

“Zhou Tingshen, there’s something I want to discuss with you,” I said, looking at him with complete seriousness. “I’ve thought it over, and I don’t think we’re that suitable for each other after all. Could you… pretend we never dated?”

Not break up. Revoke the relationship.

I truly couldn’t accept such a terrible first love.

A flicker of impatience crossed Zhou Tingshen’s face. “What kind of stunt are you pulling now?”

He didn’t take me seriously.

Back when I was pursuing him, my confessions had been relentless.

I was always telling him I liked him, always pestering him to chat, even timing things just right so I could ask him out to eat-to the point that Zhou Tingshen thought it was all just a tactic I was using to get his attention.

But I really didn’t want to keep tangling myself up with him, so I decided to be even more direct:

“I’m not making a scene. Just take it as me begging you. I can’t let my friends know this is the kind of relationship I’m in. They’ll laugh themselves to death. It’s way too humiliating…”

I meant that sincerely.

After we started dating, I kept it from my former high school classmates, but I still bragged about it to a few childhood friends.

I told them I was dating a tall, handsome top student, and I even said I’d introduce them to him after some time.

If they found out I’d been dating someone who never took me seriously, wouldn’t that become a black mark on my record?

Ten years from now, they’d still be digging it up to laugh at me.

I was vain. Back when I pursued Zhou Tingshen, yes, I liked him-but of course part of it was that having him on my arm made me look good.

Compared to men, I like myself more.

Putting up with his coldness and avoidance was, at its core, looking down on myself.

Love that comes at the price of belittling myself isn’t worth having.

“Ye Xingchun, are you done yet? I’m busy. I really don’t have time to play these childish games with you. If you insist on breaking up, then fine, let’s break up.”

“It’s not breaking up,” I corrected. “It’s pretending we never dated.”

Zhou Tingshen gave a cold laugh. “Sure. As you wish.”

He turned to leave after saying that, but I stopped him. “Then… then can you delete our chat history too?”

He was probably furious, because right in front of me, Zhou Tingshen not only cleared our chat history, he deleted me as well. Even as he left, he still carried himself with that same proud, composed air.

It seemed he really had never liked me.

Still, I felt relieved. Fortunately, I’d never written anything too embarrassing on the gifts I’d given him before, or I’d have to shamelessly ask for them back now.

I cleared the chat history and photos on my phone too.

Now there was no evidence left that Zhou Tingshen and I had ever dated.

I still felt a little wistful inside, but that trace of melancholy vanished completely when I heard that Zhou Tingshen had stayed alone in the lab with one of his admirers until late at night.

Good thing I revoked the relationship. If other people found out my boyfriend had done something with so little sense of boundaries, how humiliating would that be for me?