Chapter 4 - Only Virgos Could Do Something Like This
“What’s going on?” Sun Ziyuan was downstairs and heard the noise, and he hastily stood up. “Did you quarrel with Dad again?”
“Don’t bother me. I want to ask you something.” Sun Zinan smiled coldly. “Is it because you’re securely living through every day, so you can’t resist rubbing some sand into the old man’s eyes? You’re really generous.”
This was said casually, without thinking. He did not care if Sun Ziyuan could even understand his meaning, and angrily flung his hands out as he walked away.
Sun Qi peeled at a mandarin, grumbling, “He was arguing with Grandfather, why would he turn his fire towards you? So weird.”
Three vertical lines appeared between Sun Ziyuan’s brows as he looked almost apprehensively towards the tightly shut door upstairs. He muttered lowly, “Shut your mouth, don’t talk nonsense!”
Sun Qi was a little sullen at being scolded; he didn’t understand why his father was suddenly behaving so erratically.
In recent years, Sun Zinan had always come home to eat his meals with a stomach full of anger. There was already an established process of lighting, burning, then extinguishing the fire. He dropped his useless and inconsequential assistant off at the nearest subway station before driving himself to a bar owned by one of his friends.
There was a saying that “raising a cup to release your sorrow will only make your sorrows greater.” Today, for some reason, maybe because of the series of rotten eggs being thrown at him, the three glasses of cold wine mixed unpleasantly with his burning stomach. Instead of calming his impatience, the alcohol only brought him a new problem. Just as Sun Zinan, who was frowning from the pain, was about to pay the bill and leave, a graceful figure sat down beside him. The flowery fragrance of Bvlargi perfume, along with the faint scent of smoke, drifted over. “Yo, Boss Sun, what a rare sight.”
“Why are you moodily drinking by yourself? What’s troubling you?” The slender, elegant beauty charmingly played with their hair, propping a hand on the bar counter. “Want to vent a little? I won’t charge you.”
“No need, your presence is my loss.” Sun Zinan covered his nose and said in a low, muffled voice, “Get up, go away. You smell.”
The scent of perfume made him dizzy. Of course his good friend had to be a crossdresser who liked to wear perfume—this had made their friendship teeter dangerously across the edge of a cliff over the years.
“Qie, don’t pretend to be courteous.” Xie Zhuo lazily put out his cigarette and returned to his normal voice, a low baritone, to tell the waiter, “Give him a cup of hot water.”
The ‘beautiful woman’ with long hair and red lips was actually a man. Sun Zinan and the waiter were both used to it, but the customers nearby showed expressions of disillusionment. Xie Zhuo took a sip of his whisky. “As long as there is life, there will be endless troubles. Suppressing it will only make you miserable; it’s better to let it out. This way, you won’t be like a powder keg in the future, not knowing when you’ll explode with a bang.”
Sun Zinan, “What’s the point of talking about it? If moving my lips a few times would solve it, then I would have become a chatterbox a long time ago.”
“The first step to solving a problem is to face it directly,” Xie Zhuo said. “If you don’t even have the courage to expose the wound, how can you expect it to heal?”
“Exposing a wound won’t make it heal; it’ll only lead to infection, causing complications, and eventually deformities.” Sun Zinan took the hot water from the waiter and said, “Do you have any common sense?”
Xie Zhuo, “Then just smother it within yourself, don’t talk about it. I hope it smothers you to death.”
Sun Zinan shook his head, and gave a snort of laughter.
In their attitudes towards life, he and Xie Zhuo were polar opposites. Sun Zinan was exceedingly restrained, while Xie Zhuo expressed himself as freely as possible. Although it seemed like their personalities would clash, they actually complemented each other quite well. Their friendship was completely due to the discretion of some higher being. They both were the type of men with acquaintances from all walks in life, but had few close friends. Most probably, the last time they were caught up in sentimental sincerity was in their youth; in adulthood they covered up their personal feelings so tightly it was difficult to make any intimate friends.
Xie Zhuo was Sun Zinan’s high school roommate. In the first year, the two of them basically ignored each other; although most of the students were either rich or of high standing, the two of them seemed to have neither the interest nor the motivation to make friends or interact with anyone. Sun Zinan got up early every day to attend class with his frightening self-discipline while Xie Zhuo loitered about freely, sleeping in until late morning every day and skipping class as a habit. No teacher dared reprimand him.
Xie Zhuo’s father was in the real estate business and had profited greatly when the industry was in full swing. However, not even a year after his mother had passed away from cancer, his father married another woman. Xie Zhuo fought with his father until everything was a complete mess. In a fit of rage, his father sent him to boarding school. Once he was out of sight, out of mind, his father sweetly had a child with the stepmother.
Provoked by his father and stepmother, the youthful Xie Zhuo developed a sense of ‘love’ that was different from other people’s.
Even to this day, Sun Zinan still clearly remembered that spring afternoon. The weather was fine, the breeze warm, and the peach blossoms on campus had bloomed into splendid, rosy clouds. After his tennis class, his clothes were completely soaked in sweat, so he had made a detour back to his dorm to shower and change before going to class.
The entire building was quiet. He swiped into his dorm room but had only opened the door halfway when he heard the crisp sound of glass bottles falling onto the floor.
Xie Zhuo had been startled by the sound of the opening door and turned around. He was wearing a pomegranate dress that perfectly accentuated his slender waist, but the design of the dress could not hide his flat chest. A bottle of nail polish rolled by his feet, spilling a pool of scarlet onto the light flooring as striking as the awkward silence that followed.
Sun Zinan’s first reaction: Good thing I don’t like women.
He had never seen such an expression on Xie Zhuo’s face. The young master who had proclaimed himself to be a good-for-nothing was still capable of nervousness. His eyes were filled with despair, as if he was a small white rat waiting to be dissected—Sun Zinan was the one holding the knife.
Was that really necessary? He wondered to himself. I won’t do anything to you just because you’re wearing a woman’s dress.
He closed the door expressionlessly. As he took a change of clothes from his closet, he said to the dazed Xie Zhuo, “Stop spacing out. Hurry up and wipe the floor—it won’t be easy to clean up when it’s dry. While you’re at it, open the window. The smell is too much.”
Xie Zhuo, “...”
His mind was completely blank, completely losing the ability to think. He could only follow Sun Zinan’s directions and obediently wiped the floor clean. When Sun Zinan came out of the bathroom, he found Xie Zhuo sitting at the table with his head bowed, his clothes unchanged. The wind blew in from the window.
Despite the fact that temperatures were rising again, it was still early spring and Sun Zinan was afraid he’d freeze to death. He could only walk over to the window and close it again. “Aren’t you cold?” He looked down at the floor and said with a frown, “The cracks between the floorboards aren’t clean...forget it, let’s have the cleaning auntie do it tomorrow.”
Xie Zhuo sat there, transfixed for a moment, then said off-topically, “Are you a Virgo?”
Sun Zinan said, “Yes.”
Only Virgos could do something like this!
“Then...” Xie Zhuo worried anxiously for a while, and finally gathered his courage to say with difficulty, “If you feel that...it’s disgusting, I can change rooms...”
Sun Zinan rearranged the things on the table for a moment, pondering. “I don’t. As long as you agree that you won’t leave nail polish all over the floor in the future and open the window to air it out immediately, and keep good hygiene, then you don’t have to change rooms.”
He spoke with absolute sincerity. To a mysophobic virgin, the daily habits of someone like Xie Zhuo, who didn’t like to exercise and sweated easily without moving, were definitely not desirable. Besides, it wasn’t like wearing dresses was a sin; it was better than wandering around naked every day.
“Won’t you mind?” He asked in a panic. “Living with a pervert...”
Sun Zinan frowned deeply. Xie Zhuo felt like he was watching a sanitary inspection.
“You really should study more,” Sun Zinan said. “Even if you dress like a lunatic, that’s still your choice. If this will get you called a pervert, then there won’t be many normal people under the heavens.”
“I don’t have any opinions about what you wear. Your hobby has nothing to do with me, so why would I have any right to judge? Likewise, no one has the right to force you to only wear men’s clothing and not women’s clothing.” He picked his backpack up from the desk and turned to leave. “That’s all. I’m going to class.”
The heavy wooden door clicked shut—the soundproof walls prevented him from even hearing Sun Zinan’s footsteps. The room was silent, leaving only his quiet sobs.
Xie Zhuo wiped his face. He found that at some point, his entire face had become covered in tears.
In his despair in the darkest parts of his heart’s abyss, when he was prepared to lose his reputation, this normally cold, unsociable roommate showed an uncharacteristic tolerance. He had even reassured his anxiety with just a few words, creating a firm, unchallenged respect, and lightly pulled him back to the ground.
Xie Zhuo had a good cry in his soundproof room. After crying, he washed the makeup off his face, changed into his school uniform, and walked into the classroom during the evening self-study.
Of course, the Sun Zinan in the classroom didn’t even bother lifting an eyelid towards him.
After that, Xie Zhuo unilaterally declared that they were good friends on the grounds that they had a shared secret. On the other hand, Sun Zinan felt like Xie Zhuo was being very unreasonable, as if this small trifle could break through his reserved nature. Being friends with a roommate he never spoke with could really show how cheap his friendship was.
But he didn’t reject Xie Zhuo.
After all, he had heard the bawling from outside the door. With his moral integrity, if he refused this friendship, he would probably go jump off a building.
Later on, Xie Zhuo changed his idle habits and fervently worked hard. He went on to attend a good university, and the two of them kept in touch when Sun Zinan went abroad. The day he returned, Xie Zhuo had insisted picking him up in person, so the Sun Zinan who had been experiencing hardships abroad was met with the biggest shock of all time—he could not have imagined that the beautiful, long-haired and graceful sister in front of him was actually his once flat-chested and rebellious high school classmate.
To this day, the two of them were still good friends. Sun Zinan jumped through the hoops to become a talented, successful young man, while Xie Zhuo, with his father’s help, opened up a bar and dressed as a woman all day. Fortunately, he wasn’t the type of person to be easily taken advantage of. He had spent these years among all sorts of customers and was wise in the ways of the world. He had set aside his hidden scars and found the correct path to take in the world.
So even though Xie Zhuo didn’t seem too reliable, Sun Zinan was still willing to talk to him about his troubles.
“The old man wants me to go on a blind date.” He gently shook the cup of hot water, pretending he didn’t care as he said, “With a guy.”