Chapter 152: Sleeping With You
This translation was originally posted on https://love4baihe.blogspot.com please read it there. and check out other stories too.
"This is even more impossible, stop talking nonsense." Ruan Yesheng’s neck felt like it was burning, and she lowered her voice more and more on the phone, speaking softly.
Though, she did… want to.
But she knew this was only something that could happen in a dream. She didn’t dare to have extravagant dreams.
What made her more depressed was that she had never even had such a dream before. This morning, she finally had one about kissing Xi Mo, but the scene went crazy and ran off in the wrong direction, first scaring her half to death, then making her laugh until she almost passed out.
If it was any other time, Ruan Yesheng might have just gone along with Yan Tinghuan’s words over the phone and joked back a little. But now Xi Mo was standing right beside her, able to hear everything she said. Even if she is shameless, she didn’t dare to say a word like “sleep” in front of Xi Mo. That word was way too hot. She could only cover it up vaguely.
Luckily, Xi Mo couldn’t hear Yan Tinghuan’s voice. Otherwise, she wouldn’t know how to end this at all.
On the other side, Yan Tinghuan laughed hard, her voice dripping with gossip. "Looks like Xi Mo’s watching you close. Just look at you, being all careful when you talk."
Seeing Ruan Yesheng busy on the phone with Yan Tinghuan, Xi Mo stepped aside and checked her suitcase to see if she had missed anything.
"We’re only leaving tomorrow. Where are you staying tonight?" Ruan Yesheng stopped the pointless chatter and asked her, "Are you staying at my place, or going back home?"
Yan Tinghuan’s voice turned sweet and soft, with a little bit of begging in it, though you could still hear the laughter behind it. "I’m not going home, and I’m not staying at your place. Can I stay at Xi Mo’s too?"
Ruan Yesheng: “…”
"No, you're dreaming." Ruan Yesheng secretly glanced at Xi Mo and spoke right away.
Yan Tinghuan looked heartbroken: "How is it dreaming? Just with my friendship with you and Xi Mo, tomorrow we’re even going to Sichuan together, staying one night at Xi Mo’s house, wouldn’t that be more convenient?"
Ruan Yesheng stayed unmoved and said in a low voice: "Stop pretending pitiful, don’t I know you? This isn’t for convenience, you clearly just want to come watch our fun, afraid the world is not chaotic enough."
"Tsk tsk." Yan Tinghuan clicked her tongue: "So heartless."
She slyly turned her words: "But whether I can stay or not, it’s not up to you, it’s Xi Mo. How can you just say I can’t? What position or identity do you have to refuse me? This is Xi Mo’s house, you’re not her girlfriend. No, even girlfriends don’t have that right, only wives do."
Ruan Yesheng: "..."
She knew Yan Tinghuan was just talking nonsense, she wouldn’t really stay over. If Yan Tinghuan really wanted that, she would go talk to Xi Mo, not fool around with her here.
Yan Tinghuan finished her hometown business, now she’s just bored.
Ruan Yesheng thought anyway Xi Mo could only hear her side, these words didn’t connect, Xi Mo surely wouldn’t know she was chatting with Yan Tinghuan. So she vaguely retorted: "Even if I’m not now, if I work hard, maybe I can be in the future."
She actually didn’t dare think that way, it was only acting along in front of Yan Tinghuan.
Yan Tinghuan almost fainted from laughing. Her Ruanruan really dared to say it, she just enjoyed chatting with Ruan Yesheng for fun. She said: "You’re only daring because she can’t hear, acting flirty all you want. If you are that brave, go say it in front of her."
Ruan Yesheng lightly snorted.
There was a hint of sadness in her eyes.
...She didn't have the courage to tell these jokes in front of Xi Mo.
But she felt Xi Mo only saw her as a close friend who had once swapped bodies with her and gone through life and death together.
The line between that kind of gentleness and real love was blurry, it could easily make people overthink.
She had to hold back the burning in her heart, keep her words measured, or else she might be swept away by this kindness.
If she said something like a storm, she might scare Xi Mo, this universe's straight girl, and in the end Xi Mo could avoid her.
Yan Tinghuan laughed and said:
"Wait until she really sleeps with you, then you can talk about the future."
She seemed to think of something even funnier:
“But I doubt someone like Xi Mo even knows how to sleep with you.”
Ruan Yesheng: “…”
“…Stop talking about this.” Ruan Yesheng said softly.
She felt that even as a joke, there must be a limit. If Xi Mo knew, she would surely be unhappy.
Thinking of this, Ruan Yesheng felt a bit ashamed, thinking she should not take such private advantage with words. After saying it, she even felt like she had profaned Xi Mo.
They clearly had no such relationship, how could she imagine it to that point. Yet sometimes, in her subconscious, she could not help but have some secret thoughts toward Xi Mo.
Xi Mo turned her face to look at Ruan Yesheng.
She found that when Ruan Yesheng was on the phone before, she was still smiling and talking, but now her face had changed a bit, her brows drawn.
Yan Tinghuan understood Ruan Yesheng’s meaning, so she stopped joking, chatted about other things, then said she would stay at Ruan Yesheng’s place and meet them at the airport tomorrow, and ended the call.
Ruan Yesheng put away her phone and also went back to the suitcase.
This translation was originally posted on https://love4baihe.blogspot.com please read it there. and check out other stories too.
“What’s wrong?” Xi Mo hesitated a moment, then still asked: “You were talking fine before, but now you seem unhappy?”
“I’m not unhappy.” Ruan Yesheng smiled: “You know Tinghuan often speaks without restraint, I was just acting along in front of her.”
Her feelings were hard to put into words.
Ruan Yesheng’s eyes fell on Xi Mo’s neck.
Xi Mo wore a low-cut shirt today, the skin on her neck delicate and white, and the collarbones beneath showed before Ruan Yesheng’s eyes. Looking at it made her face heat up for no reason, and she felt a bit ashamed, so she subconsciously turned her eyes away.
But she had just listened to Yan Tinghuan saying all that nonsense about sleeping, so her eyes grew hot, and as if under some spell, they turned back again, still fixed on that neckline.
Xi Mo seemed to notice where her gaze had fallen, and she also looked a bit uneasy. Her fingers almost instinctively fiddled at the collar, looking like she was arranging the hair falling on her shoulder.
Their eyes met.
Ruan Yesheng: "..."
Xi Mo: "..."
The atmosphere quickly turned awkward.
Ruan Yesheng quickly squatted down, kept packing, and asked Xi Mo if she needed to bring anything else. Xi Mo casually said a few things.
Then Xi Mo called her again: "...Yesheng."
Ruan Yesheng felt a shiver in her heart.
"Do... do you want to see the drawing?" As if to turn the strange mood, Xi Mo spoke first.
"Drawing?" Ruan Yesheng’s mind turned fast, she quickly understood what Xi Mo meant: "The one driver Zhang Dongyang drew?"
"Mm." Xi Mo nodded: "I said before, when you come to my house, I’ll show it to you. You were curious, right? Now that you’re here, do you want to see it?"
"Okay, when we finish packing, we’ll go." Ruan Yesheng said quickly.
When the luggage was ready, Ruan Yesheng followed Xi Mo to the study.
Xi Mo’s study had many framed leaf specimens. She took one frame, opened the back panel, and pulled out a piece of paper folded many times.
“You hid it here?” Ruan Yesheng was surprised.
But then she felt this really was Xi Mo’s style.
“It’s safer here.” Xi Mo said. “There are many of them, and they don’t stand out.”
Ruan Yesheng sat on the soft sofa, smiling at her: “The less eye-catching the place, the better it is for hiding something important. After all, if a thief sneaks into the house, the first thing he thinks of is the safe. The most important thing can’t be put in a safe.”
Back then, the paper Zhang Dongyang used to draw in the nursing home was just ordinary A4 white paper, very thin. Xi Mo had followed her father Xi Ji to the nursing home while she was in college and found it under Zhang Dongyang’s hospital bed.
Now many years had passed, and the paper had already turned yellow with age.
Xi Mo carefully unfolded the paper and handed it to Ruan Yesheng.
Ruan Yesheng took it and saw the whole sheet almost covered in black ink.
But it wasn’t made of blocks of ink, it was countless thin black lines clustered together, tightly tangled, layered and twisted into one dark mass.
After Zhang Dongyang was pulled from the truck that killed Jian Yuan, he went insane, and many of his actions turned strange.
In the nursing home, he drew every day, but it was actually just scribbling, dragging the pen tip back and forth on the paper, scratching, making harsh rustling sounds. Xi Ji would have people watch him and collect his drawings every day.
Sometimes he scratched the same sheet for twenty or thirty minutes, and from rubbing so much, the paper even tore.
Ruan Yesheng looked at it closely.
Sometimes she lifted the sheet to the light, flipping it back and forth to look.
“Do you see anything?” Xi Mo asked.
Ruan Yesheng shook her head: “It’s too messy, I can’t see it. It’s just random scratching, no pattern at all.”
Xi Mo frowned: “If it really had no meaning, my dad wouldn’t have told people to keep Zhang Dongyang’s drawings. He may be insane, but his subconscious still held many impressions of the crash. My dad must’ve hoped to see if his drawings showed some subconscious memory.”
Maybe thinking of her mother Jian Yuan’s tragic death that day, her face suddenly turned cold.
Ruan Yesheng knew what she was thinking but didn’t know how to comfort her. She put the paper on the sofa for now and went to grab the water cup from the desk to give Xi Mo.
When she came back, her eyes glanced casually and landed on the sofa.
Her pupils narrowed slightly, and her steps froze.
She quickly walked to the sofa, handed the water cup to Xi Mo, and picked up the drawing again. She held the A4 sheet a little farther away, her eyes narrowing even more, dreamy.
“Yesheng?” Xi Mo noticed something was off and thought she had seen something.
Ruan Yesheng looked back at Xi Mo and said, “You know, when someone squints their eyes and looks at something at a distance, it kind of becomes simplified, right?”
Xi Mo nodded: “Yeah.”
She understood what Ruan Yesheng meant by “simplified.” It’s a term used in drawing. Even though neither of them drew much, they knew some basic art concepts.
Simplification is sketching the outline of objects, skipping the messy details, leaving just the blocks.
Ruan Yesheng handed the paper to Xi Mo: “Look at it like I just did. What do you see?”
Xi Mo held the paper a little farther away, eyes slightly squinted.
With this way of looking, the tiny pen strokes on the A4 sheet were no longer clear. Instead, they looked like big merged blocks of ink. Xi Mo ignored the tangled lines and focused more on the variations in the ink’s depth.
Because of the pressure of the strokes and the repeated scrubbing, each area of the paper had a different darkness. People can’t fill a sheet evenly with a fine pen tip, there’s always variation.
By changing the way she looked, the depth differences became roughly visible as ink blocks.
Xi Mo noticed the two black blocks in the center were darker than the rest, as if Zhang Dongyang paid special attention to them, rubbing over them repeatedly with the pen tip. It was like a student writing the wrong two characters, then scrubbing over them until they became two little black blobs.
“Did he sketch these two blocks first, then cover them, and fill the surrounding area with strokes to make it look messy and hard to read?” Xi Mo asked Ruan Yesheng.
Ruan Yesheng, standing beside Xi Mo, looking at the paper not far away, said: “Probably.”
"What do you think these two blocks look like?" Xi Mo actually already knew, but she wanted to hear Ruan Yesheng's opinion.
"Like two people's upper bodies, round heads on top, bodies below." Ruan Yesheng's voice was a bit cold. "As for around them, he is deliberately circling these two blocks, like a car windshield."
"…Yes, that's his subconscious," Xi Mo said. "At that time in Zhang Dongyang's truck, there might have been two people, and another was in the passenger seat."
"But you said back then, the cab only had Zhang Dongyang, no other corpse." Ruan Yesheng felt a chill. "Did someone escape?"
"I need to find this person," Xi Mo took back the paper, slowly refolding it along the previous creases, eyes dark like night. "If he's still alive, he witnessed everything."
Ruan Yesheng understood her feelings.
Like her father Xi Ji, she still couldn't let go of Jian Yuan's death.
They knew Jian Yuan's death was suspicious, and all these years, they've been trying to uncover the truth.
"I… can I help you?" Ruan Yesheng thought carefully. "I mean, if you need my help."
She wasn’t sure if it was appropriate to ask. After all, this was Xi Mo's private matter, and such an important one about Jian Yuan's death. As a friend, she feared overstepping.
Xi Mo turned to look at her for a long while. "I hope you'll be with me."
Ruan Yesheng froze slightly.
Even though she knew in her mind that Xi Mo meant for her to help investigate the truth,
her heart still skipped a beat at "be with me."
"You helped me a lot just now," Xi Mo said seriously. "Yesheng, I need you."
Ruan Yesheng: "…"
Her ears warmed, and she glanced at the wooden floor.
Xi Mo seemed a little slow to realize her own awkwardness, looking at the floor. "I mean, I need your… observational skills. Without you, I probably wouldn't even have a clear direction for the investigation."
After speaking, Xi Mo quickly went to the leaf frame and put the paper back in place.
She stood there a moment, as if calming herself, then returned with a composed expression.
"I will help you," Ruan Yesheng said, regaining calm, smiling. "Zhang Dongyang is a good starting point. If there really were two people back then, we can insist there was someone in the passenger seat and see how he reacts."
"There's not enough time," Xi Mo lowered her long lashes. "We have to wait until we get back from Sichuan."
"It's okay. The variety show recording won’t take long anyway." Ruan Yesheng noticed Xi Mo was a bit anxious, and comforted her. "Your dad is watching Zhang Dongyang’s side, he can't run. Next time, I’ll go with you to the sanatorium."
"Okay." Xi Mo seemed soothed by her words and nodded.
Both of them prepared everything they needed.
They stayed another night at Xi Mo’s house, and the next morning went out to meet Yan Tinghuan at the airport, then flew to Sichuan.
Author's Note:
The driver part of the plot is very important, you can go back to the earlier chapters to check.
Going to Sichuan to film the variety show, at this point in time it clearly connects with my other book, Exploring the Empty Tomb - Modern Times. If you know the timing here, you’ll know Luoshen is about to appear. I wrote about this in Volume 5 of Exploring the Empty Tomb - Modern Times and even did a timeline there. The two books are intertwined.
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