Attempted first love

When setting off firecrackers, there will be a pungent smell in the air.Xia Yan vaguely remembered that it was said in junior high school chemistry class that it smelled like sulfur dioxide.

At that time, his chemistry grades were good and bad, and he could remember this lesson probably because a fat boy in the class stood up and spoke, saying that he thought the smell was good.

The other students in the class unanimously said "Huh—" to express ridicule and disapproval, and concluded in a low voice that this was an abnormal quirk.

Xia Yan sat behind that boy, saw his red ears and neck, and then hurriedly sat down without raising his head for the whole class.

After all, there is some scientific explanation for this, he thought so, and decided that if his parents came back this summer, he must ask clearly, and then tell everyone that this is normal after school starts.

It's a pity that my parents didn't come back that summer vacation as promised. They dedicated their efforts to more difficult and magnificent rare metal issues in a certain research institute in the northwest of the motherland, and it was difficult to take into account the small questions of a junior high school student.

Until the boy transferred to another school and left, Xia Yan failed to solve his doubts and uphold justice for him.

His chemistry grades plummeted, and it was uncertain whether there was a vengeful mentality. During another summer vacation, I finally had the opportunity to show my single-digit report card to my parents.He remembered his father's furrowed brows that quickly relaxed, pushed his thin-rimmed glasses, and asked him gently if he had any other interests that he would like to develop.

Literature, history, a foreign language, or a certain classical instrument, they suggest several robust paths to choose from.

Xia Yan pointed to the TV advertisement: "I want to go to New Oriental to learn to be a chef."

A Basque cake was served in the center of a white carved china plate with a silver fork.

The hand of the end plate has well-defined joints, and the nails are trimmed just right. The phalanges on the inner side of the middle finger of the right hand and the outer side of the little finger are slightly protruding, with a thin layer of calluses attached.

There are also two cocoons on Xia Yan's right hand at the same position.

Has the clerk ever learned to draw? He thought, his eyes followed his fingers, climbed over his strong forearm, and saw Lu Zhouyu lowering his eyes and straightening the metal fork.

"Ah." He suddenly came back to his senses and realized that he had recalled it inappropriately. There are no firecrackers here, and there is no pungent sulfur dioxide smell.

"Ah." Lu Zhouyu responded with a funny face, sat back in the seat, and rolled up the loose cuffs, "The clerk has been asking you to pick up the cake, and I saw that you were in a daze, so I took it."

Xia Yan said thank you, got up and went to the counter to get another fork, and pushed the porcelain plate into the table, "Would you like to try it?"

"Too sweet."

The expected answer, he would not insist on it under normal circumstances, but today he didn’t know the motivation, so he explained patiently: “The Basque in this store uses pumpkin and chestnuts instead of white sugar, which should be acceptable to you Sweetness."

Lu Zhouyu also seemed a little surprised, paused for a moment, missed the opportunity to refuse again, took the fork with his callused hand, cut off a corner of the cake and put it in his mouth.

"It's really not too sweet, but I still can't do it." He chewed a few mouthfuls, put down his fork, and took a gulp of the black coffee at hand.

Xia Yan pulled the plate closer, and put his desire to share it as a thank you to Lu Zhouyu for helping to take the cake. Since he was rejected again, he took the delicacy to himself with peace of mind.

The round table in the coffee shop is not big, but the gap between the sofa and the table is too wide. When digging the cake, you need to lean your upper body forward.

After Lu Zhouyu finished his coffee, he lowered his head and replied to the message on his mobile phone. Seeing that he was not paying attention to himself, he no longer cared about table manners, picked up the porcelain plate, and sank back into the sofa to taste slowly.

After the last bite, Lu Zhouyu just finished replying to the message.

The sunset glow has reached the extreme, whether it is as a partner or an old classmate, it is time to say goodbye.

I don't know if it's an illusion, but after talking about trivial matters ten years ago, they still stay at an appropriate social distance, but the atmosphere is much more relaxed.

So Xia Yan didn't use the polite ending, but put the plate back on the table and said, "My dream was to be a pastry chef, and I went to study for a few months."

He once revealed it to a few people half-truthfully, but no one believed it, and almost everyone's reaction was: don't lie.

As time passed, he couldn't tell whether it was a short memory he fabricated.

Lu Zhouyu smiled under Xia Yan's gaze, and did not raise any doubts, but said: "If you open a store in the future, give me a discount too."

Xia Yan laughed and said, "You don't like sweets."

"It's still necessary to cheer for friends."

Unexpectedly, Lu Zhouyu would take the initiative to define their relationship.

Friends, it seems that the relationship is one step closer, but it also seems to stop here.

With his good appearance and good personality, Xia Yan has long cultivated a good relationship, and every artist he has worked with can eventually become friends.He has no shortage of friends, but he doesn't mind having one more.

"Okay." He also smiled, and wiped off the cake residue on his fingers with a paper towel, "I hope this cooperation will be pleasant."

After reaching a consensus, they walked out of the coffee shop one after the other.

The autumn wind in Haicheng is very capricious and unpredictable. At this moment, it finally shows its shape in the fallen leaves on the roadside, fresh and jumping.

From the corner of my eye, Lu Zhouyu turned around and said something.

"What?" Xia Yan shifted his attention from the fallen leaves to his lips.

"It's going to rain." Lu Zhouyu repeated.

In fact, there are always signs before it will rain, such as thick and thick cumulonimbus clouds, and dragonflies circling at low altitude.

But Lu Zhouyu can always predict the rain in advance from the smell of wet soil.He used to be more accurate than the weather forecast when sketching on the mountain.

Xia Yan looked up at the sky, and there were cirrocumulus clouds like fish scales all over the sky, thin and transparent, which was a harbinger of sunny days.

He thought for a while and said, "Maybe your nose is not working."

Lu Zhouyu didn't argue when he heard it. He closed the neckline that had been blown away by the wind, and it was blown away again immediately. He didn't care about it. He narrowed his eyes and asked, "Do you want to bet?"

"Yes," Xia Yan was aroused, took a step forward and stood side by side with him, looked sideways at him and suggested: "This is not interesting, otherwise we exchange, I bet it will rain, you bet it won't, how about it?" ?”

"Yes." Lu Zhouyu agreed indifferently, without asking about the bet.

After the boring gamble was settled, the two waved goodbye at the door of the coffee shop, and neither of them asked the other about the next itinerary.

Xia Yan drove to Ji Qilin's residence to report on the progress of the exhibition, showed him the draft plan, and then recounted and summarized the ideas discussed in the afternoon. After the report, he was able to escape after listening to him praise Lu Zhouyu for half an hour.

Before going out, Ji Qilin took out a kraft paper bag from the refrigerator and handed it to him, saying that it was picked by his family when they went to the mountains to collect wind.

Xia Yan took the heavy bag, and first smelled a familiar sour smell. The refrigerated kraft paper bag felt very fragile, like paper glass.

He held it in his hand and opened it carefully, and inside was a bag of red hawthorns.

"You don't like eating candied haws, so take it back and make it." Ji Qilin said.

Haicheng's climate is not suitable for planting hawthorn trees, so there are very few candied haws sold in autumn and winter. Xia Yan only bought them a few times. I don't know how Ji Qilin could see that he likes to eat them.

He took it with both hands, probably because his expression of emotion was extremely obvious, and before he could reveal it, he was pushed out by Ji Qilin and rushed home.

"Thank you, thank you, you have cooperated with Xiaolu to set up the exhibition, I will be thankful."

"Hey, definitely."

After waiting for the red light, Xia Yan turned on his mobile phone, searched for how to make candied haws, and then drove to a large supermarket to buy soft white sugar and bamboo sticks.

After paying the bill, I realized that there seemed to be no pots at home, so I had to go back and buy two new pots.

It was already dark when I got home, I opened the window at noon to diffuse the smell of smoke, and forgot to close it when I left. The two thin curtains were full of wind and bulged high.

Xia Yan walked over to close the window, the curtains shrank together with his determination to make candied haws.

Do it tomorrow, he thought, slumping down on the bed.

It's only eight o'clock, and it's almost time to go to bed after watching a long documentary.Xia Yan buried his face in the pillow, screening suitable films in his mind.

After thinking for a long time, my mind was still empty, as if I had put a handful of feathers in it and couldn't grab any of them.As time passed, he felt that he would also become a feather, squeezed out along the crack of the window and blown back and forth by the wind.

His consciousness was getting weaker and weaker. He tried to open his eyes and return to reality. Although he lacked sleep all the year round, he didn't want to go to bed so early. Sleeping too early always felt like a waste of time.Eyelids trembled and trembled, and finally closed heavily.

This feeling was surprisingly smooth, if it weren't for the early morning thunder that suddenly broke out on the ground.

The chaotic dream is like a softener, softening the thunder that shakes the earth into a movement similar to a needle point poking a balloon, but it is also enough to wake people up.

Sure enough, it was going to rain, Xia Yan moved slightly, thinking about the bet with Lu Zhouyu.

Immediately, he felt that there was no familiar whiteness on his eyelids when he was pierced by the light.

He opened his eyes somewhat cautiously, and found that the surroundings were pitch black, and even the lights in the ecological fish tank were off.

I realized that the power outage was probably caused by thunderstorms. Haicheng is rainy, humid and warm all year round, as if it is always summer.

But awareness and feeling are two different things.While soberly using cognition to calm his mood, he uncontrollably felt that everything was peeling off and collapsing in the darkness.

The ground is sinking, the roof is falling off, and maybe the moon can be seen when you look up.

Xia Yan got up in a panic to find the emergency light, but kicked over the kraft paper bag next to the bed, and countless hawthorns rolled out.

Accidentally stepped on a few, and the sour taste surged up.

He gradually calmed down, fumbled for the cell phone that had fallen on the bed in the dark, and finally found it under the pillow.

It turned out that it was only eleven o'clock, and there were already a lot of news on the phone page, including weather warnings, power outage notices at the property, travel advertisements for the National Day, and a message from Lu Zhouyu 10 minutes ago—it was going to rain.

Turning on the flashlight of the mobile phone and finding the emergency light from the locker, the room was lit up again.

Hawthorns flowed on the floor, like a magma eruption was frozen in an instant, and it was red.

The taste buds are stimulated, and a puddle of water is secreted from the mouth to the chest cavity.As mentioned in the biology class, this is a normal conditioned reflex, and almost everyone has it.

It's just that Xia Yan's reflection effect on this smell is more than others.

He first thought of setting off firecrackers when he was a child, there would always be a few squibs mixed in, but adults repeatedly told him not to pick them up, because he couldn't tell which one would explode.

He has always kept it in mind, so when he recalled the past with Lu Zhouyu in the coffee shop in the afternoon, he unconsciously avoided potential dangers.

Stimulated by the smell of hawthorn at this moment, without any defense, he remembered that the scene of two people sitting on a tree in his impression was not a movie scene, but that he and Lu Zhouyu were sitting together on a hawthorn tree many years ago.

The trunk was not thick, and the two sat tremblingly, so they jumped down and lay side by side under the tree, their bodies crushing the hawthorns that fell to the ground, and the surroundings were filled with a sour smell.

The m4 in Lu Zhouyu's hand was playing "Heartbeat", and they both wore a pair of white earphones with looped earphone cables.

For many years later, he couldn't remember what the ending of the movie was about, because he didn't want to watch it at the time.

At the end of the movie, when the protagonist held hands, he and Lu Zhouyu were kissing.