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Shen Jiu didn’t really believe in love.
He kind of believed in it when he’d been a little child growing up in an orphanage and his best friend/self proclaimed older brother told him they’d be together forever; he’d been sort of numb to it before, believing it wasn’t really for him, but something about Yue Qi’s promises made him feel like maybe, just maybe, he might have a chance.
He stopped believing in it when Yue Qi was adopted and never called again like he’d promised.
“I’ll call you every day,” he’d said, but then he hadn’t even called every month.
He didn’t believe in it when he’d been 15 and some girl from his high school confessed to him and he definitely didn’t believe it when he was 17 and Qiu Jianluo tried to drag him into an empty room at the end-of-year party he sorely regretted attending in the first place.
Love was all around him, or so the songs said, but Shen Jiu couldn’t say he’d ever particularly experienced it.
Maybe, he thought, love was meant for other people.
Love was meant for people like Yue Qi, whom he later ran into again at college and was clearly surrounded by people who blindly looked up to him just because he was smart and he had that dumb smile; love was meant for people like Shang Qinghua, who usually tripped over his own feet even when he was sitting and who had a tendency to attract weird, brooding guys like Mobei Jun, who glared at everyone (including Shang Qinghua himself).
Love, however, was not meant for people like Shen Jiu, who’d been given away by his mom the moment he’d been born and had no parents listed in his birth certificate. But that was okay, because Shen Jiu was moody and selfish and greedy — so greedy — and he was sure if someone ever loved him, they would only end up consumed by him wholly and desperately.
When he met Liu Qingge, he was only further convinced of this fact.
Liu Qingge was in the year below him but somehow ended up being assigned as his roommate. Liu Qingge was only in his first year, but all of his previously assigned roommates had asked to switch. Shen Jiu was in his second year, but he’d refused to room with all of his previously assigned roommates as well.
“This is your last chance,” the university’s admin office had told them. “We’re not switching either of you again,” so they’d kind of been stuck together for the year.
It was naturally a disaster.
Many people talk about love at first sight, but in their case Shen Jiu was sure it was annoyance at first sight. Liu Qingge thought Shen Jiu was stuck up and vapid; Shen Jiu thought Liu Qingge’s brain was so empty he probably didn’t even know how to tie his own shoelaces. Neither of them knew how they would be able to handle sharing a dorm room for an entire year, but neither was willing to back down either.
Even when both of them swore they couldn’t handle a single more day with each other, time still passed.
Fall gave way to Winter and soon they were too elbow deep in studying for their exams to pay too much attention to their shared animosity. They bickered as they always did, with Shen Jiu not-so-politely asking Liu Qingge even if he even knew how to read, whereas Liu Qingge settled for asking Shen Jiu how his exam cheating preparation was going, but they achieved a sort of truce during exam season.
By the time Shen Jiu’s final exam came around, he was exhausted.
He’d already gone through four exams and, even worse, he’d decided to give extra tutoring lessons during exam season since there were more people interested than during the semester itself, which meant he was much busier than he’d ideally be when his main focus should be on studying.
“It’s 11pm,” Liu Qingge said, cutting through the intense focus he had on the same page he’d been staring at for the past 15 minutes.
“So?” he asked, flatly.
They were both in their dorm, Shen Jiu at his desk and Liu Qingge lounging in bed with his headphones on, watching a riveting documentary on the history of tennis. Liu Qingge had finished his exams that day, but instead of being out to celebrate with his fellow 1st years he was at the dorm.
Shen Jiu would think it was kind of sad if he wasn’t also the exact same way. Everyone tended to avoid them both.
“I haven’t seen you eat yet,” Liu Qingge said.
“Why are you even paying attention to that?” he asked, not really expecting an answer as he tried to focus again on the page.
Liu Qingge didn’t answer, but Shen Jiu heard the rustling of the bed behind him and then Liu Qingge’s steps as he left the dorm room. Good. Maybe he wasn’t as hopeless as he’d thought after all and had gone to bother someone else.
He put Liu Qingge firmly out of his mind for the next hour and a half, and by the time he was done revising he had a crick in his neck and what seemed like a hole in his stomach. Liu Qingge had been right – he’d forgotten to eat, too engrossed in his studies to notice anything else.
It was when he was idly starting to wonder where Liu Qingge could possibly be that he turned a corner into the shared kitchen and quickly got the answer to his question.
“Liu Qingge?” he asked, wholly surprised by the sight in front of him.
Liu Qingge was… cooking? At least that’s what it looked like.
The kitchen was empty save for them, there were dried up lumps of dough scattered across the countertop and flour spread everywhere, and right in the middle there was Liu Qingge with his phone propped up against the wall watching a Youtube tutorial on how to cook scallion pancakes.
“Shen Jiu,” Liu Qingge said, barely glancing at him as he tried not to burn the pancake he was cooking.
“What are you doing?” he asked, even though it was pretty obvious. He’d gotten hungry and he was making dinner. Thing was, he’d never actually seen him cook. As far as he was aware, Liu Qingge survived solely on rice, chicken and broccoli, or on the homemade meals he sometimes brought and froze from the odd weekends he went home to visit his parents.
Liu Qingge didn’t answer. He finished cooking what appeared to be the last of the scallion pancakes, which were stacked neatly in a plate, turned off the heat in the stove, closed the Youtube video he’d been learning from, and finally approached Shen Jiu with the plate full of pancakes.
“Eat,” he said, thrusting the plate in his direction. “I made these for you.”
“You– what?”
Shen Jiu was so flustered he didn’t know what to do. All he could do was take the proffered plate and bring it with him to the table, where he proceeded to stare at it for a very long minute as he felt his useless face heat up.
Unfortunately, Liu Qingge decided to sit right across from him with his arms crossed like he was a cop in a bad detective show.
“Eat up,” Liu Qingge repeated. “It’s late and you haven’t eaten anything since lunch.”
“How do you know that?” he asked, too surprised to use his usual tone with him.
Liu Qingge shrugged. “You always forget to eat when you’re studying for an exam. And you had a tutoring session earlier today too.”
Shen Jiu was too stunned to say anything, so he didn’t. Instead, he settled for shoving scallion pancakes as elegantly as possible into his mouth, hoping his blush would subside and his heart would stop racing in his chest.
He was so used to going unnoticed by most people in his life that he hadn’t even realized there’d been one person noticing him, and not just the terrible parts of him.
It wasn’t love, but it was enough to warm his chest almost uncomfortably. He wasn’t used to anyone being so nice to him, least of all Liu Qingge, but he was ready to call it a day and forget all about it in the morning once he had to go to his exam.
Predictably, once exams were over, Liu Qingge and Shen Jiu went back to their usual routine.
Their bickering went back to its usual intensity, Liu Qingge kept outrunning him when they went out for jogs in the morning, and Shen Jiu kept smugly pushing his perfect scores in Liu Qingge’s stupid face.
Except, even as Shen Jiu tried to act as though Liu Qingge hadn’t unexpectedly done something so confusingly nice for him, Liu Qingge kept surprising him at every turn.
When Shen Jiu had a day packed full of classes followed by tutoring sessions, Liu Qingge would heat up some of his homemade meals and share them with him; when Shen Jiu was even more snappish than usual because Yue Qi had tried to call him twice in one night to talk Liu Qingge would go and get takeout and accidentally order extra; and when Shen Jiu was so engrossed in a deadline for a paper or a quiz that he forgot to eat since breakfast, Liu Qingge would make scallion pancakes.
Shen Jiu tried to tell himself Liu Qingge was a brute who thought he was stuck up, but over time it became harder and harder to deny to himself that maybe, just maybe, Liu Qingge was his only friend.
So, despite himself, Shen Jiu allowed himself to relax around Liu Qingge.
“What is this?” Liu Qingge asked, the first time Shen Jiu made breakfast for two instead of just for one.
“Breakfast,” he answered, even though it should have been obvious. “Eat it.”
“I have breakfast right here,” Liu Qingge said, pointing towards his stupid nutribullet filled with some sort of green milkshake.
“That’s not enough,” he said, before firmly setting a plate in front of him. “Eat.”
One time, when Liu Qingge went back to their room scowling and complaining that none of his classmates wanted to pair up with him for a class project, Shen Jiu sighed and pirated the latest sports documentary Liu Qingge had been raving about wanting to see but hadn’t been released yet in any streaming platform and then watched all 2h36 of it with him.
It wasn’t until Spring started to give way to Summer and final exam season was upon them once again that Shen Jiu realized he’d probably relaxed a little too much around Liu Qingge.
They were in the shared kitchen together. Their final exam had fallen on the same day and everyone else in their building had either already gone back home or was out celebrating. Liu Qingge and Shen Jiu were, instead, cooking dinner together.
Foregoing their usual scallion pancakes, that day they’d decided to learn how to make wonton soup together. Neither of them was particularly adept in the kitchen, and Shen Jiu was having too much fun trying to cover Liu Qingge in as much flour as possible, and it was as Liu Qingge laughed – a full body laugh, the kind where you open your mouth so much and you’re so impossibly loud that everyone else around you hears you – that Shen Jiu suddenly realized that, somewhere along the way, he’d seemingly started believing in love.
It wasn’t an earth shattering moment and there were no fireworks in his head or butterflies in his stomach; instead, he looked on as Liu Qingge laughed and the only thing on his mind was, “Oh. I love him.” And that was that.
“What’s wrong?” Liu Qingge asked, but Shen Jiu merely shook his head.
Maybe love was for him after all. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe Liu Qingge was too dense to even know what romantic feelings felt like, much less feel them for him.
In any case, this was something he was happy to keep to himself. At least, well, for a little while longer.
They had time, after all.