Your Distance

26- Choose One

After class, Bai Changyi was surrounded by several students with queries as he walked out of the classroom, and Ting Shuang could not find a chance to return the pen.

Song Xin walked to the first row of tables and asked, “Ting Shuang, are you going to the library?”

Ting Shuang said, “Oh, no, I forgot to bring my backpack.”

Song Xin said, “What’s the matter with you? How could you even forget your bag for school.”

Ting Shuang said, “I just… left the house in too much of a rush.”

“Okay, then I’ll go to the library first.” Song Xin thought of something, and added on, “You sure did it today, dude.”

“Did what?”

Song Xin glanced at the door to confirm that the professor had really left, and then continued in a low voice, “You actually dared to plead for everyone’s lives. You really tanked for everyone there, complaining about how the exam’s too difficult in front of the professor.”

In his heart, Ting Shuang thought: If I told you that I even called the professor stupid right to his face, wouldn’t you be surprised to death?

Wait.

Ting Shuang thought over it again. That actually wouldn’t be too terrible. If he told Song Xin that he had just spent two good nights with Prof. Bai, Song Xin would probably die from shock.

“It was okay,” Ting Shuang responded casually.

Actually, after Bai Changyi announced that the difficulty of the exam would be appropriately lowered, all the way until the end of class, he had been a little flustered inside. It was a fact that the exam was too difficult, and he did bring it up, but he didn’t expect Bai Changyi to consider this opinion seriously.

This came after Bai Changyi made the teaching assistant print lecture notes for everyone, and it seemed like he was making an exception for Ting Shuang again. That was not a democratic victory at all, but…

Spoiling–

Cough, stop.

It was favoritism.

Earlier on, he had just told Bai Changyi that he didn’t want to make their relationship so complicated. But now that Bai Changyi did that, he kept feeling like Bai Changyi had, in the end, showed favoritism towards him…

He didn’t know how he could pay him back.

He was feeling like one butt wasn’t enough to use.

His bottom started to hurt slightly.

He didn’t have class afterwards, so Ting Shuang took a bus to Freesia, where he worked part-time on Saturday, and rode his bicycle home, the one he had parked in front of the cafe over the weekend. After arriving home, he sorted out the day’s lecture notes and the notes he had made previously, and then lazily leaned back on the chair, propping his feet up on the desk.

He suddenly saw the fountain pen on the desk.

The pen’s black and blue body, and its gold and silver nib.

He picked it up and looked at it for a while, then placed it above his upper lip as if he had nothing better to do. He sandwiched it between his nose and his upper lip, and remained in that posture as he sent a message to Bai Changyi with his phone.

Frost: Anata.

Frost: Do you have time for a date today?

Frost: I have something to tell you.