Oral period

On Monday, during the lunch break, the office was abandoned on the rooftop.

Finally finished drawing the scheduled chapter before twelve o'clock, and after confirming with the editor that it was correct, the young man closed the computer, leaned back, and collapsed into the sofa without any image, with his overly long forehead hair hanging down to cover his eyebrows and eyes , It also blocks the thick dark circles under the eyes.

The comics that were originally due on Wednesday, due to the urgent advance of the supplement to noon on Monday, caused him to work overtime last night and catch up all night. He was half asleep after listening to the class in the morning, and he didn't have time to eat lunch. He still didn't feel tired when he was stretched, but when the work was over, the backlog of tiredness surged at the same time, almost making him fall asleep just like that.

Hearing the sound of the computer shutting down, the boy occupying the other half of the sofa raised his head, glanced at his companion who had sunk into the sofa like a dead fish, and put down the novel in his hand: "Did you finish the drawing?"

Xia Jingzhe nodded weakly, suddenly remembered something, and dragged his voice again: "It's too late to order takeaway, there are instant noodles in the drawer, let's make do with it, and make a bowl for me by the way..."

Zhen Xiao sat up, took a piece of chocolate from the corner of the table, tore open the package and broke it in half, and handed half of it to Xia Jingzhe's mouth——ever since he fed the sweet-scented osmanthus cake at the dessert shop on Saturday, he seemed to have discovered Like a new toy, he started to be keen on feeding the other party, and found Xia Jingzhe's awkward face and forced to open his mouth to eat it very interesting.

But now someone who is exhausted doesn't even have the strength to be awkward. When something is handed to his mouth, he opens his mouth unprepared and eats it. After symbolically chewing twice, he forgets to chew again. There is a small bulge on the side of his cheek, like a small animal receiving food.

"By the way," Zhen Xiao withdrew his hand, and took out an envelope from the pages of the novel - it was much more delicate than the one he made himself before, and it seemed to still have a faint fragrance - and put it in Xia Jingzhe's arms , "Here, I just picked it up."

Xia Jingzhe touched it casually, and his voice was lazy and vague: "Read..."

Zhen Xiao raised her eyebrows, amused by his young master-like behavior, couldn't help teasing him: "I don't."

"It doesn't matter," the young master threw the envelope back to him, turned over, pulled the baggy school uniform to cover his face, and buried the second half of his sentence in the cloth, muffled, "Go to instant noodles, hungry gone."

Feng Shui turns.

Zhen Xiao exaggeratedly sighed, put the envelope aside, got up and went to make noodles.

"The feeling of kissing... Hey, pillow, do you know what it's like to kiss?"

The person named was eating noodles slowly. Hearing this, he choked on the heat and coughed several times before regaining the ability to speak: "How would I know?"

Not to mention kissing, he could count on one hand the opposite sex he had spoken to, and half of them could not be named.

Xia Jingzhe was silent for a second, then realized that she had asked a stupid question: "That's right."

Probably really hungry, the drowsy person was quiet for a few minutes, then opened his eyes when he smelled the aroma of instant noodles. Opened the new commission letter.

The content is not long, and the handwriting is beautiful, and it can be seen that the client is a girl—"My boyfriend wants to kiss, but I am a bit of a clean freak, I can't understand this kind of behavior like exchanging saliva, and I can't accept it...but he thinks this is not enough to like I said that if it is really unacceptable, I will stop here. I also checked a lot of information on the Internet, and there are different opinions. It’s just how it feels to kiss, I’m sorry”, the content of the letter is roughly like this.

"Speaking of it," Xia Jingzhe put down the letter paper, drank a sip of orange juice, and said without a word, "I seem to have received a commission before, saying that my girlfriend can't accept intimate behavior, and even holding hands would be so nervous that I would repel it..." I don't know if they are the same pair."

"Really, that should have made a lot of progress, at least this time the question is about kissing," Zhen Xiao agreed lightly, swept over the thick black eyes under his eyes, and landed between the two buckets of instant noodles on the table, talking Turn around, "Aren't you tired?"

Unexpectedly, such words close to concern could come out of his mouth, Xia Jingzhe was stunned for a moment, and his tone was a little unnatural: "...not tired, okay, just a little sleepy."

"Sleep when you're sleepy, why waste time on this kind of problem." ——Personal factors account for a huge proportion, and it's thankless.

Xia Jingzhe frowned, as if she couldn't understand the result of his rational analysis, and said sternly: "A problem that is serious enough to endanger their relationship is not a waste of time."

"But lunch breaks are only so long..."

"I don't like perfunctory people."

Zhen Xiao met his gaze, was startled, and couldn't say what was on his lips.

Compared with the personality that becomes familiar after a little while, Xia Jingzhe's expression is actually not so rich, most of the time it is always light, a little cold, like a knife, usually the blade is outward, which makes people stay away, but when the mood is happy, the back of the knife It is not so sharp and terrifying when it is shown to others—it is such a knife that is turned over and over again, so that Zhen Xiao can only observe his emotions from the subtleties, such as the occasional red ears, frowning when he is irritable, or other things. .

He used to think that this person was very contradictory, his nature was clearly hot, passionate and irritable, anyone could see it, but he just wanted to cover himself with a layer of ice, maintaining that nondescript indifference, which melted at the first touch, like It is self-deception.

Later, he realized that it was the other party's protective cover, a layer of spikes outside the hedgehog's soft body, and his doubts were relieved, and gradually turned into some more complicated strange emotions, entangled in his heart.

Perhaps because of staying up late to catch up with work, Xia Jingzhe's expression today is even paler, and there is always a thin layer of tiredness--when he said this, his tiredness sank, and something else emerged, since he was as deep as an inkstone. And Yun's eyes flickered, also unfamiliar.

In Xia Jingzhe's world, there are some things that he has never seen before, which are beyond the scope of reason, and cannot be deduced logically, let alone conclusively.

Persistence, earnestness, meddling in other people's affairs, running around for other people's irrelevant desires, unilateral reconciliation, and his cartoons, some absurd and inappropriate dreams...

"Please tell me the meaning of living alone" - now there is a set of answers placed in front of him, which came unexpectedly and enlightened.

He subconsciously wanted to ask something, but found that there was no way to ask. Before the sudden and disordered thoughts formed, the mobile phone beside him suddenly sounded a notification. Xia Jingzhe glanced at it and smiled softly: "It's interesting."

"Huh?" The plastic fork fell into the bowl, splashing a few drops of hot soup, and Zhenxiao was startled, as if suddenly returning from a short dream, and it took a few seconds to remember the topic they discussed earlier.

"Look at the things she forwarded in Moments." Xia Jingzhe picked up the phone and shook it in front of him, explaining with a smile, "It's either a teacher or a staff member—I don't think high school students will transfer things like employee benefits in Moments .”

Zhen Xiao glanced at it, turned her attention back to the entrustment in front of her, and said cooperatively, "Well, I think so too."

The friend application was approved, and the other party sent an emoji, which seemed to be full of expectations for the answer to the question, but Xia Jingzhe felt a little embarrassed after realizing it.

This time the commission is also a bit out of line for himself - he can't understand his feelings, and he himself is not necessarily better. It is nothing more than drawing manga and accumulating some experience. He is a giant in theory. Once the problem goes beyond the theoretical scope , need to use actual experience to answer, he will be at a loss what to do.

What's more, his situation is even more special-at least Zhen Xiao doesn't have to consider the issue of sexual orientation.

"Zhou Xiao, you should think of a way..."

The person who was named returned to reality from a fugue, still entangled in his mind with distant and great questions such as "the meaning of life", and his tone was also illusory: "I don't know."

After all, she is a suspected single mother with low self-care ability and lack of manners, so she really shouldn't have too much hope for her.Xia Jingzhe sighed silently: "That's right, it doesn't look like you can find someone like you."

Zhen Xiao paused holding the plastic fork, and all the distant and great questions were suddenly dismissed by this comment.

"Yeah," he stared at the clear noodle soup, as if he was competing with some sliced ​​scallion, "I'm not you—anyway, you can find it, just try to find one and you'll know, why bother me."

"Do you think falling in love is a math problem? It's not that simple." Xia Jingzhe couldn't figure out where his sudden resentment came from, so he could only interpret it as an ordinary bickering and didn't bother to argue with him, "Even if you find it, it won't be a day. In two days, you can—well, you can kiss."

To popularize the feelings between men and women for fools who don't understand the world, it makes me blush.

"Is it."

"Of course, first of all, we must respect the wishes of girls, and then we need to do this kind of thing step by step...Damn, why am I telling you this?"

Zhen Xiao was finally willing to look up at him, and asked back with the thinking of doing math problems: "Then can't you tell her like this-you must respect the wishes of girls, her boyfriend forced her to the point of entrusting strangers, and the other party Or maybe it's her own student...not a good person, just break up."

"You..." Xia Jingzhe was speechless. He felt that what he was dealing with was not trouble, but a childish straight man. "People came to us to solve the problem, not to end it."

"Is there a difference?"

"Of course!" Asking such words with an innocent face is really annoying. Xia Jingzhe scratched her hair irritably, took a sip of orange juice to suppress her anger, "If you make me angry, I will try my best to not let you down." Know how to reconcile, go to someone to ask—although there is no such person—then they tell you not to think about it, I am not a good person to quarrel with you, just break up the relationship... What do you think?"

Returning to the previous question by mistake, the young man narrowed his eyes slightly dissatisfied, and answered irrelevantly: "Is that why you don't like me..."

The tone was deliberately softened, with half-true grievances, it sounded a little pitiful.

As soon as Xia Jingzhe met his gaze, most of his impetuous anger was extinguished, and the remaining point was only enough to support him to look away, and denied in an awkward tone: "It's just a hypothesis... I mean, she will ask me It means that she still has feelings for her boyfriend, but there is a conflict, so it is meaningless to try to solve it, and persuade her to break up. Besides... we don't know what kind of person her boyfriend is, just relying on this It's too irresponsible to rashly conclude that he's not worth dating with a few words..."

Every time he was nervous and awkward, he would say a lot of irrelevant words to cover up the unnaturalness in his heart—Zhou Xiao looked at him with interest, and the subtle jealousy was appeased, and only the slightest bit of jealousy remained. Teasing desire: "Then what do you mean, if there is a conflict between us, you will still have feelings for me and try to mend the relationship?"

It was so preposterous that even the relationship between the host and the guest was reversed, but Xia Jingzhe was caught in a trap by him, and his brain was slow because of sleepiness. He couldn't react for a while, so he cleared his throat without embarrassment: "Hmm..."

"Does that mean that I am quite attractive to you?"

"Hmm...wait a minute, stop being so fucking sentimental, I just, cough, at least I don't hate you."

Zhenxiao smiled noncommittally, got a satisfactory answer, and stopped embarrassing him—although the evaluation of "people like you can't find a partner" still has some grievances, but the evaluator's own admission of "like" subtly filled the gap. Let’s forget about this loss for the time being—he reminded him in a friendly manner: “Aren’t you going to catch up on sleep, you still have class in the afternoon…”

There is still an hour until the end of the lunch break.

"Well, I'll sleep for a while." Xia Jingzhe yawned as if some switch had been flipped by his words, and his voice was vague, "It's okay to ask someone else when you wake up, although it may be a bit embarrassing to ask my mother this kind of question , and an editor I know..."

Before he finished speaking, he was submerged in the sound of steady breathing.

Zhen Xiao looked at his appearance of "falling asleep in a second", blinked slightly in surprise, suspecting that the energy of his chatter just now might really be a flashback, and stretched out his hand to check his breath in a rigorous manner, to confirm the other party's steady state. The sound of breathing was not an illusion, so I stood up, spontaneously picked up two bowls of instant noodles, and planned to go out to pour out the remaining soup.

He still prefers the other party's fresh appearance, not covered by the ice of self-deception, revealing the soft inside, with whatever thoughts written on his face... It's very interesting.