But for Zhou Qichen, "like" is a luxury word.
He fell in love for the first time when he was fifteen. At that time, his family lived in a small county town near Shenyang. A girl in his class named Xu Susu with twin ponytails kissed him. Xu Susu was also a class beauty and had many devoted suitors. One of them was a boy from the same school named Chen Teng, who also had a bad temper. After hearing about it, he came over to fight with Zhou Qichen. The winter in Shenyang was very cold. Five or six boys were watching. They took off their cotton coats and sweaters and rolled on the concrete floor. He only remembered that his body and breathing were very hot. Chen Teng was actually one year older than him. Adolescent boys grow a lot every year. Zhou Qichen was not as tall or strong as him, but he fought with a fierceness and pressed Chen Teng under his body so that he could not move. He remembered that his eyelashes were very long, longer than Xu Susu's, and they fluttered under his body with a red face. More than ten years have passed. He can't remember Xu Susu's specific appearance or the feeling of the kiss, but he remembers Chen Teng's fluttering eyelashes. "Desire" is an invisible and intangible word. It was the first time that Zhou Qichen gave this word a concrete image.
That night, fifteen-year-old Zhou Qichen learned several things. His father, Zhou Chenghai, who was laid off and an alcoholic, found out about the fight with Chen Teng at school. He was so angry that he slapped him fifteen times, saying that each slap corresponded to one year of age when he got into trouble. He knew that his existence in this family was unwelcome. At that time, his sister Zhou Qirui had just turned one year old, and she finally stopped crying and fell asleep in the inner room. He was going to make a scene with his father, but in order not to disturb his sister, he took fifteen slaps. He learned what it means to have a sister in life. That day, his friends who played with him saw it and asked him what happened to his face. He said he fell down. He also learned to lie for the sake of face.
But the most important thing was probably that he was in bed, thinking about the fight they had, and felt hot and unbearable, and then he instinctively touched himself, thinking about Chen Teng's red face and heavy breathing under his crotch when he gave him an orgasm for the first time. He finally understood why he was not excited when a girl kissed him, why he didn't feel anything when he blinked at Xu Susu's beautiful big eyes. He realized that he liked boys.
When he was eighteen, the first thing that changed his life happened. The Shenyang Air Force Military Region came to recruit soldiers, and he was recruited without a second thought. At that time, the family relied on Zhou Chenghai's meager subsidy after being laid off and his mother's salary from the textile factory, plus Zhou Qirui, and they really couldn't make ends meet every other day. Zhou Qichen was not very good at studying, and was the king of children in school that even the teachers couldn't control, but because he was good at sports, joining the army was a natural choice. As for the fact that he had feelings for boys, after the age of fifteen, every year, every month, every moment of repression forced him to almost successfully ignore the existence of this matter psychologically - his thoughts at that time were simple and immature, like putting a passbook in a safe, I have a secret, I sealed it tightly in the box, locked it, put it far away, and take it out when it is convenient. He didn't expect that liking this kind of thing is very close to people's hearts, and no matter how well he hides it, one day it will always be exposed.