Azalea and Ye Jun were playing Toc Toc Woodman while Wu Wang was reading a book at the side. But his reading was mostly disturbed by both kids around him.
He discerned that both Azalea and Ye Jun were like little kids spoiled by their respective elders. When he apprehended that reading was not an option, Wu Wang went back to the car to bring his sketch board.
Closer to where Azalea and Ye Jun was, Wu Wang sat down leaning against the tree. He darted his eyes around to look for a scene to sketch when his gaze fell on a lonely figure clad in a white dress sitting on a rock near the river.
From where Wu Wang was, he couldn’t see her face because her hair had covered most of her face but he could see the eyes of that girl. There was an intense yearning in those eyes as she looked at the kids playing around her happily.
From her eyes, she looked familiar to Wu Wang but he didn’t ponder on that idea for long. He focused on capturing her longing on his blank paper.
After about an hour, Azalea came around Wu Wang’s side after winning from Ye Jun plenty of times. "Wow! Wang-Ge is really amazing," she remarked while looking at the sketch. She darted her eyes to see what exactly was he capturing and that’s when she saw the girl herself.
At the same time, Ye Jun said, "Ah! What is Qi-Qi doing here?" Azalea frowned and looked at Ye Jun who was looking in the same direction as her.
"Jun-Ge, that’s your cousin? Zhou Qi?" Azalea inquired casting a sideways glance to Wu Wang whose hand halted at the mentioning of that name.
"Yup! That’s her for sure!" Ye Jun was resolute.
"What is she doing here?" Azalea questioned again cautiously.
"I’m not sure..." Ye Jun tapped his chin in a thoughtful manner and said, "But I think that she’s here on a picnic with those kids again."
Azalea saw the way Wu Wang’s body stiffened at the side when Ye Jun mentioned ’kids’. She dry coughed. "Those are her kids?"
Ye Jun gave her an odd look saying, "Have you gone crazy? Of course not! Those are kids from the welfare center. She likes to take those kids out to play."
Wu Wang’s body relaxed a bit at the explanation while Azalea frowned. "She likes kids?"
"Yeah... She likes kids a lot actually." Ye Jun retorted.
"Does she have a boyfriend or husband or a fiance?" Azalea probed trying to get as much information as possible.
Ye Jun scowled. "Boyfriend? Husband? Fiance?" He snorted. "I wish she had one of those but she doesn’t."
"She’s single?" Wu Wang’s ears perked up exactly like Azalea’s curiosity.
"From the past 8 years, she’s single. I remember the last time she had a boyfriend..." He took a pause. "She was really happy during that year and she especially told me that she was deeply in love with him. But..." He sighed.
"But? What happened?"
Ye Jun shrugged his shoulders. "I don’t know what happened. When I asked her about it, she said, ’He is an amazing person, Jun-Ge. And he deserves a better person than me in his life.’ I never understood her meaning but I do know that after that year, I haven’t seen her the way she was."
Azalea pursed her lips thinking deeply about this strange matter. ’She loved Wang-Ge and yet broke his heart in the worst way? That doesn’t make sense at all.’ While thinking, her gaze fell on Zhou Qi whose face displayed a sad smile when she lifted her hair from the face. ’Unless something happened back then which broke her first.’
"Should we go to say hi?" Azalea suggested to Ye Jun who naturally agreed. Both of them went up to Zhou Qi leaving Wu Wang alone with his complicated feelings.
Azalea and Ye Jun brought Zhou Qi along with them and when Zhou Qi looked at Wu Wang, for a moment, she was shocked. An immense feeling of pleasure gushed into her heart and all of sudden changed into a bitter one. She didn’t dare to look straight at Wu Wang in fear that she might not be able to hold her tears back.
At the moment, she wanted to escape but in the next moment, she wanted to stay. A constant battle of running away and staying brewed inside her.
While in the meantime, Wu Wang stared straight at her lowered face. For some odd reason, he wanted her to look up. He wanted to look into her eyes. He wanted to see whether her eyes held the same contempt in them as she did when she left him alone or there was slight regret in them now.
More so, he wanted to see whether her eyes could mask the same pain that he was holding in his heart even until this day. He spent years trying to hate her and he believed that he did hate her but looking at her now, Wu Wang wasn’t even sure about this hate anymore.
Perhaps, it was never the hate that grew in his heart. It was his love that grew with each passing second but he kept lying to himself that it was hate for her.
"Zhou Qi, that’s my big brother Wu Wang," Azalea introduced like she had no clue about their previous entanglement with each other. Then she turned to Wu Wang and continued, "And Wang-Ge, this is Jun-Ge’s cousin sister Zhou Qi."
Wu Wang didn’t say a word and neither did Zhou Qi. But the awkward silence was broken by Ye Jun, "Qi-Qi, didn’t you take those kids to the amusement park last week?"
Zhou Qi pursed her lips and nodded. "You must like spending time with kids a lot," Azalea commented with her gaze on Wu Wang who pretended to be busy with his sketching but his entire attention was towards Zhou Qi’s reactions.
Azalea made sure that neither Zhou Qi could run away nor Wu Wang.
Sneaking a peek at Wu Wang’s side profile, a memory floated in Zhou Qi’s mind: "How much do you love me?" She had asked back then.
He chuckled and replied, "Just go the ocean and look at the waves."
"Why?" She frowned.
"Because with every passing wave, you’d hear the water talking to you and telling you how much I’m in love with you."
She had chosen this place for the picnic because she was missing him badly and also because she wanted the water to talk to her again and tell her that her Wu Wang was still in love with her.
Ocean tides might have brought the message of his love to her once but now she was left with love bites that hurt her badly.
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