"You don't know, right now in this world, at this moment, what I fear most is actually you." She said, "I'm afraid that after I get you, I will find that you are not what I dreamed of, just like Yu Yi. Last night, on the way to see Yu Yi, I suddenly realized that to me, you are more important than Yu Yi. Even if I never see him again in my life, I don't want to see you sad and silent, so I ran back to find you. Do you feel that I have fallen in love with you? Ai Jingchu, I think I have fallen in love with you. But give me some time, okay?"
Zeng Li held the cell phone in one hand and placed the other hand on his chest. His heart was still beating, but it was only temporarily placed here.
In fact, ideals are beautiful, but reality is cruel. Zeng Li’s travel plan was a bit bad.
Her first destination was to see the sea, but due to weather reasons, the flight was delayed for nearly three hours, and it was almost late at night when she got off the plane.
When she finally arrived at the beach hotel with her luggage, the front desk clerk smiled and said, "Ma'am, your reservation has been cancelled."
"Why?" Zeng Li was dumbfounded.
"Your reservation does not specify when it is reserved. We usually only reserve it until 6pm."
"But my flight was delayed, so I arrived late."
"I'm sorry, but we couldn't contact you and another guest came to request a room, so it has been cancelled."
"Is there any room left?"
"No more." The front desk customer service continued to smile.
She dragged her luggage and walked in this rainy, wet coastal city. She asked several hotels around her, but they were all fully booked because it was the weekend. After coming to this conclusion, she suddenly felt a little regretful. She didn't dare to take a taxi back to the city, and didn't dare to pin her hopes on the taxi driver.
There was a small cigarette shop with orange lights on the side of the street, and he looked like a kind old man. After hearing her question, the old man spoke in unclear Mandarin and pointed to a tall building across the street and said impatiently: "Isn't that a place to live?"
Zeng Li looked in the direction he pointed. The five golden stars under the hotel sign were enough to scare her away.
Finally, she took out her cell phone and searched for nearby hotels online. After a few minutes, her cell phone indicated that it was running out of battery. She could only shamelessly carry her luggage into the lobby of the five-star hotel. A doorman came to ask her enthusiastically, and she shamelessly asked to sit down, avoiding the probing eyes and questioning gazes, and moved to the sofa in the corner of the lobby, found a place to plug in the power supply, and charged her phone while looking for another place to stay.
After she finally found an acceptable hotel to stay in, she called Ai Jingchu and reported her safety as he requested.
"Stayed?" he asked.
"Um."
"Why so late?"
"The flight was delayed for a long time."
"Everything else went well?"
"It went pretty smoothly," she replied.
"Go to bed early, I'll call you tomorrow," he said.
Zeng Li took a shower, sent text messages to Ma Yiyi and Wu Ying, and then went to bed.
She was a bit attached to her bed, and whenever she turned over, the mattress would make strange noises, so she didn't sleep well the whole night. The other rooms next door were probably from the same tour group, who got up before dawn to check out and talked loudly in the corridor from time to time, disturbing her again. She was almost always in a state of sleeping and waking.
It was still raining when Zeng Li went to the beach. The sea breeze was cold and wet, freezing her to death and blowing away all her excitement of seeing the sea for the first time.
She had no choice but to go back to the hotel, eat something quickly and take a nap.
Perhaps it was because her physical and mental fatigue had accumulated to the extreme. She slept very deeply and woke up at dusk. She walked around the neighborhood alone with an umbrella for a few laps and then went back to the hotel to rest.
Ai Jingchu called her in the evening.
"What are you doing?" he asked.
"Watching TV," she answered. "It's been raining all the time."
"Did you see the sea?"
"Hmm." Turns out it wasn't that great.
On the third day, when the sun was high in the sky, Zeng Li was almost pried open by the golden sunlight outside the window. She jumped up from the bed, and was a little excited when she opened the curtains. She quickly washed up, and without bothering to put on a hat or apply sunscreen, she put on slippers, picked up her bag, and ran out.
At night, Ai Jingchu's call arrived as expected.
"Is it sunny today?" He just checked the weather in Zengli's place.
"Yeah, it's suddenly very hot, and it would be fatal if I didn't use the air conditioner."
"How was the sea today?" he asked.
"It's beautiful and spectacular, completely different from when it rains." Zeng Li couldn't hide his excitement, "I like the sound of the waves."
Ai Jingchu smiled faintly.
On the fourth day, Zeng Li took another flight to another destination.
After she settled down in the ancient town, she hurried to see the famous river valley. They were taken there by a Toyota SUV with an extra row of seats. There were also some individual travelers, including an elderly couple, a couple and a few young students. Zeng Li thought that this combination would be safer, but on the way back, the driver said that they bought too little at the designated shopping point and he could not get much commission, so he had to charge each person a service fee. The passengers protested unanimously, so the driver kicked them off the car halfway and drove away.
"Those people went too far." In the evening, when Zeng Li recounted the situation to Ai Jingchu on the phone, he could not hide his inner anger and spoke with gritted teeth.
"and after?"
"Later we hailed a passing bus and took it back to the city, and we also called the police."
"You went too?"
"Yes." Zeng Li nodded.
"Aren't you afraid of the police?" She was afraid to drive when she saw traffic police on duty in the middle of the road.
"But I was really angry, and everyone went there. How could I escape alone without any sense of responsibility? Besides, I am also a very righteous person," said Zeng Li.
"Yeah. Very just." After saying that, he smiled.
On the fifth day, Zeng Li honestly wandered around the ancient city, following the map and travel guides from fellow travelers, and visited all the fun and delicious places. In the afternoon, he found an aunt who made embroidered shoes and spent the entire afternoon selecting shoe upper patterns in the shop.
At night, she didn't go anywhere. She just sat in the small patio of the inn, swinging on a rattan hanging chair while answering Ai Jingchu's call.
"I thought Ma Yiyi likes pink and Wu Ying likes blue, so I'll go with red." She nags about embroidering shoes. "Also, I saw that they have that kind of beautiful fabric in their store. I want to use it to cover the coffee table, sofa and dining table."
At this point, Ai Jingchu suddenly remembered that there were many magazines about home decoration in her living room. "You bought a house and are planning to renovate it?"
"No ah."
"Then why do you collect so much information?"
Zeng Li paused, and murmured, "After they divorced when I was a child, I either lived in school or lived with my stepfather. Later, I rented a house and moved around, so I always wanted to have my own home. Although it cannot be realized now, looking at those things and looking forward to it, I also feel very satisfied."
On the sixth day, she found a local farmer's market and bought a lot of unusually fresh fruits to satisfy her appetite. In the afternoon, she continued to sit on the roadside drinking tea, daydreaming, watching people coming and going, watching how small vendors ripped off foreigners, and later she was attracted by singing and went into a small bar.
"That singer sings so well. If he could sing in my cafe, it would definitely attract more people." After dinner and a shower, she ate an apple, rocked back and forth in the rocking chair with her bare feet up, and said to Ai Jingchu on the other end of the phone.
"Male or female?"
"A girl," she replied. "I really want to take her home."
"The girl is okay." said Ai Jingchu.
On the seventh day, Zeng Li went to his aunt's house to pick up the custom-made embroidered shoes and met a young fellow villager. Zeng Li asked the little girl a few questions, and the little girl told him the bloody story of how she flew from home to here yesterday.
In the evening, Zeng Li talked to Ai Jingchu about the little girl and confessed his embarrassment on the first day.
"Were you scared at that time?" he asked.
"One thing, especially when I was alone in the hotel late at night, I couldn't sleep the whole night." After a pause, she asked, "Have you ever been scared?"
"have."
"What is it?" Zeng Li was curious.
He thought for a moment before saying, "When I was a resident doctor in the maxillofacial department, I once worked with my teacher to perform maxillofacial surgery on a girl, and the result was..."
"Failed?"
"Halfway through the operation, malignant hyperthermia occurred and the patient died on the spot."
“What is malignant hyperthermia?”
"Complications from general anesthesia," he said.
He paused for a moment, as if trying to sort out his emotions, and then said calmly, "I was standing next to her. The last words she said to me when she was alive were while she was lying on the operating table before anesthesia."
"what did you say?"
"I don't know. I wasn't paying attention." The background on the other end of the phone was very quiet. After a long silence, he repeated, "I wasn't paying attention."
Her heart also began to feel uncomfortable.
"That was the first time, the second time was about you," he said.
"I?"
"The day you had the car accident, I drove you to the hospital. You sat next to me with your eyes closed, not moving or speaking. That was the time." He spoke slowly, with a hint of intoxicating charm in his voice.
Her heartbeat paused slightly as she listened to the words spoken by this voice.
He certainly didn't know how much she loved his voice.
When he was cold, slightly annoyed, indifferent, when he looked back on his life calmly, when he comforted and encouraged the other person, and when he said he loved her, every tone of his voice was so intoxicating.
These days, calling each other every night has almost become a habit for both of them. She would talk a lot, and he would sometimes ask a few questions, sometimes just respond with "hmm" or "hmm", and sometimes he would be amused, but most of the time he would just listen. At this moment, Ai Jingchu slowly told her these past events a thousand kilometers away, and they were about her, which was particularly thrilling.
She missed him a little.
On the eighth day after leaving City A, which happened to be a Saturday, Zeng Li ended his journey and boarded the flight home.