Then I started to recite a very affectionate text that Mu Chenghe had taught me. I have a good memory, and after he taught it, I usually remember it almost exactly after reading it several times.
The title of the article is "My Hometown - Beijing".
To increase credibility, I replaced the word "Beijing" with "City A".
“Мой родной город.Я родилась и выросла в городе… ”
I went back and sat on the sofa and told Mu Chenghe what happened during the day.
"And then?" he asked with interest.
"Then, after I finished reciting, he said to me: 'Your Russian is as fluent as your English.' He also notified me to retake the test next time." I chuckled.
Mu Chenghe couldn't help laughing.
I tilted my head to look at him and found that he was staring at me without saying anything.
His gaze stayed on my face for so long that I couldn't help but feel strange. I wiped my face and asked, "Is there something on my face?"
"No." He retracted his dazed eyes and turned his head away.
"You don't believe it?" I said, "If you don't believe it, I'll show you again."
I moved a stool and sat directly opposite him, acting out the interview scene during the day: тво.это город… ”
He smiled slightly, and recited with me halfway through. After reciting the last sentence "Тамвсемнедорого" in unison, we smiled at each other.
I was worried that we would feel awkward living under the same roof, but after I finished reciting the text, things suddenly became harmonious. At night, I lay in bed and recalled this scene, feeling something in my heart that I wanted to grasp, but I couldn't figure it out.
Mu Chenghe never mentioned Liu Qi, and even when he asked me to come to his house, he didn't ask. Until one afternoon when we were having dinner, he suddenly said, "Don't girls like shopping? I rarely see you go out."
"It's hot outside," I said.
"Aren't you going out with Liu Qi either?" He asked casually while picking up some food.
"Uh..." I was stunned for a moment, then lowered my head and whispered, "He was transferred to the county." But I didn't tell him about my breakup with Liu Qi.
"Why didn't you tell him?" Bai Lin asked me.
"I feel like this is the only way we can feel like we are equal," I said.
"How's your job search going?"
"It's so difficult. The people I like don't like me. And the people I like don't like me."
"Take your time. There's a famous quote that applies to you."
"What?"
“First start a family, then start a career.”
"… You're boring."
"Don't like it?" Bai Lin asked, "Then let's put it another way: It's better to marry well than to work well."
"… "
"There's one more thing to tell you."
"What?"
"Senior brother said that he met Liu Qi on the street yesterday."
"oh."
"He saw Liu Qi walking with a woman." She glanced at me.
"Um."
"It feels quite intimate." She added, fearing that I didn't understand.
"Well, that's good." I continued.
"Are you really breaking up?" Bai Lin asked.
"real."
"Didn't you say last time that he asked you to consider it for a month? It's not even a month yet."
"It's better this way, so I don't have to feel guilty." I murmured.
After really getting along with Mu Chenghe, I found that he had so many habits that I didn't know about.
For example, when he is doing something, he is basically 100% committed. Sometimes, after talking to him for a long time, I find that he is burying his head and his attention is completely not on me. This is a very frustrating experience, and it happens again and again.
For example, he is very picky about food, but he prefers any dish that is slightly sweet.
He always works late into the night.
Occasionally, he would sit alone in the dark, not speaking for a long time.
I encountered this several times when I was groggy and went to the bathroom alone.
The first time I saw the shadow on the sofa, I turned on the light suspiciously. The light suddenly shone on his face, and he looked so lonely, completely different from the usual smiling Mu Chenghe. He looked like a disturbed little animal, with a flash of panic in his expression, but he returned to normal in an instant.
From then on, I never dared to turn on the light abruptly.
Later, we were watching a movie on the movie channel at home. In the movie, I pointed at the laughing Johnny Depp and said, "Why do some people look different from their true selves?"
He stared at the screen without saying anything.
The scenes in the movie switch between the vast ocean and the clear blue sky.
"Xue Tong, do you like the sea?" he asked.
"Like it."
"Look at the sea. No matter how deep it is, it always looks calm on the surface." Mu Chenghe said, "Deeper than the sea is the human heart. Sometimes smiling doesn't mean you're not in pain, afraid, or desperate."
I'm referring to him.
But he was pointing at me.
Suddenly, I realized that Mu Chenghe and I might be the same kind of people at heart, which is why he attracts me so much.
The next day, it was drizzling, and I rushed back in a hurry, took off my shoes, quickly put down my bag, and prepared to hang my umbrella on the balcony of the living room. Halfway there, I found that Mu Chenghe was actually at home, standing on the balcony at this moment, with a pot of Clivia at his feet.
Because it was raining, the air outside was particularly fresh and pleasant.
There is a tree in the yard, which is more than ten meters tall, with lush branches and leaves, standing out among a group of low-growing sycamore trees. It is very close to the building where Mu Chenghe lives, and the branches of the nearest tree basically reach the balcony. There are still water drops hanging on the leaves at the top of the branches. I saw Mu Chenghe reaching out to catch the water drops on his fingertips, with a mischievous look on his face, while the other hand hung at his side, with a cigarette between his index finger and ring finger.
Mu Chenghe played with the raindrops on the leaves, raised his hand to take a puff of cigarette, and then saw me.
He was stunned.
I was embarrassed by my peeping and said hastily, "You... continue."
He smiled and said, "How was your day?"
"I got a cold shoulder." I unconsciously glanced at the cigarette in his hand.
He immediately understood something, walked back to the living room, and put out the cigarette butt in the ashtray on the coffee table. Before, I always thought that the ashtray was just a decoration.
"I thought you didn't smoke." I've never seen or smelled cigarettes on him.
"I smoke one or two occasionally. I don't smoke when I'm in class or at work," he smiled sheepishly, "and smoking is harmful to your health."
In the evening, there was nothing left at home, so we went out to eat together and met Liu Qi on the way. He was going down the escalator on the opposite side, while Mu Chenghe and I were going up the other side. A thin girl stood next to him on the same step and was talking to him softly.
When I saw Liu Qi, he also saw me.
I smiled at him, but he became uneasy instead. It seemed that he wanted to call me, but he had reservations. In the end, no one called anyone else.
Liu Qi called me in the evening and I went to the balcony to answer the call.
"Xiaotong, I..." Liu Qi stammered.
"I see."
"What do you understand?"
"We are not suitable. And we broke up last month."
He sighed: "You know I'm assigned to a new post now, and I don't know if I can be transferred back. Our director usually takes good care of me. His daughter is our junior schoolmate and she's a very nice person. I..."
"Liu Qi, I'm really not angry." I said.
"Xiaotong, did you break up with me because of that person?" he asked.
I agree.
"It seems that I am still relatively slow. I should have seen it earlier. I always thought that I was not working hard enough, so I was waiting for you to really pay attention to me, but... it's too difficult." Liu Qi said.
"I'm sorry." I said, biting my lip.
"I don't have the willpower to wait forever, so..."
As soon as I hung up, Song Qiqi called me from long distance.
"I heard that you and Teacher Mu are living together." Song Qiqi said with a wicked smile.
"Bai Lin is so gossipy that he even passes information to you from such a far distance." I said.
"I went on a blind date today."
"Okay, how does it feel?"
"The conditions are OK." Song Qiqi said, "But they are not suitable for me."
"You..." I hesitated.
"It's not because of what happened in the past. I just simply felt that his personality was not suitable for mine." Song Qiqi said, "In fact, I'm very open-minded now. I used to think that I would never forget him and I would never be able to love anyone else in this life. But less than a year later, I found that reality was not quite what I imagined."
After chatting with Song Qiqi for a few words, I closed my phone and returned to the living room. Mu Chenghe was working at his desk. The room was so quiet that I could hear the swish of his pen across the paper. I sat back on the sofa and recalled the expression on Liu Qi's face when he said "Because you are cute" to me in the library, but I couldn't remember it.
If Bai Lin knew, he would definitely scold Liu Qi for being an ungrateful person. But I was wrong first, I was the one who used him first.
I thought of Song Qiqi and Xiao Zheng again, and remembered Song Qiqi crying and saying to us in the office of Building 4, "I fell in love with him when I was seventeen, and until now, he has never lied to me from the beginning to the end." It was so heartbreaking, but now she says that she has changed.
Maybe I looked stupid when I was thinking about this. Mu Chenghe glanced at me, stood up and turned on the TV: "You can watch TV." After that, he returned to the table and continued to do his work.
"Will it affect you?"
"No." He answered without looking up and continued to work.
Mu Chenghe was facing the TV diagonally, but no matter what program I changed, he never really looked at it. During this time, he frowned deeply, wearing glasses, fiddling with the three-dimensional graph on the computer while concentrating on modifying the data next to it.
"If you're not watching TV, why are you watching me?" he asked.
"Uh..." I tucked my hair behind my ears awkwardly, "I didn't find any good shows."
"How about going online?"
"There's no point in surfing the Internet. I'd better continue watching TV." After saying that, I sank my whole body into the sofa, pressing the remote control non-stop.
After I flipped through more than 70 channels four or five times, he finally couldn't help but ask, "Do you have anything else to do tomorrow?"
"No. Why?"
He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose: "I'll take a day off tomorrow and take you out to play."
In the morning, he reminded me to bring sunscreen, and I realized that he really wanted to teach me how to dive. After driving more than 30 kilometers, we arrived at a shallow bay in the suburbs of City A.
Because it had been raining for the past few days, when it suddenly cleared up, the sea was boundless and could be seen very far away.
"The Big Blue!" I couldn't wait to take off my shoes and ran to the beach to exclaim, then turned around and said to Mu Chenghe, "Have you seen this movie?"
""blue sea, blue sky"?"
"Yes! Every time I see the blue sea, I will think of these four words and the pictures in it."
"If I knew you were so happy, I would have brought you here earlier." Mu Chenghe followed me with a faint smile.
"But I'm afraid of water, so I can't swim. Every time I go to the beach, I just step on the water and go back."
"Then let's try something different this time," he said.
There were several cars parked in front of the diving club, and everyone seemed to be very familiar with Mu Chenghe.
"Why are everyone else so tanned and you are the only one who is white?" I asked.
“It means I don’t work as hard as they do.”
"I didn't expect you to be quite rebellious at heart."
"Why?" he asked after returning with the oxygen tank and diving suit.
"How is it not rebellion that you insist on doing something the doctor doesn't want you to do?"
"Who said that? I have always been an obedient child since I was young."
"The kind that never comes in late, never talks, never slacks off, finishes homework on time every day, and always gets full marks on exams?"
“Not entirely,” he said.
I gave him a look that said "that's it", then took the wetsuit he handed me and went to the locker room to change.
Before entering the water, he repeatedly said: "When you wear diving goggles, your nose will be clamped. You have to give up your nose and breathe through your mouth."
"We can't talk after we go down, we can only use gestures." He clenched his four fingers together with his thumb pointing upwards. "If you feel uncomfortable, give me this gesture, which means go up. When the thumb is pointing downwards, it means you can continue going down."
"I'm always here, don't be afraid, this has nothing to do with swimming, you have an oxygen tank."
Even though I had memorized these words by heart, I was still very nervous when I went into the water.