Chapter 2

I want to have my chest reduced.

Xu Xieyi tried to hide her embarrassment, keeping her voice steady enough. “It feels a little obvious like this.”

The sudden, direct gaze swept down from her collar. Xu Xieyi instinctively tensed and drew her chest in. A faint flush rose to her cheeks.

Lin Sheng lifted his eyelids and looked back at her face. Seeing how sensitive and shy the girl was, he stopped sizing her up.

“How old?”

Xu Xieyi’s face heated. She mumbled an honest answer: “D...”

Lin Sheng, who had seemed so casual a moment ago, froze for a second. “I mean your age.”

“...”

Xu Xieyi stared blankly.

Then her face went crimson, and she said in a tiny voice, “I’m... seventeen.”

Good heavens. She had misunderstood him.

Lin Sheng lowered his eyes.

The coffee table was especially clean, with a stack of files, a fountain pen, and a medical caliper laid out beside it.

Xu Xieyi’s hands rested on her knees, fingers twisting in small, nervous circles. She watched his expression in secret, embarrassed yet unwilling to give up, hoping hard that Lin Sheng would say something.

But after waiting so long and reading his face so carefully, he remained as unmoving as a mountain.

Xu Xieyi grew a little restless. “Brother Lin, I know your time is valuable. Could you just tell me straight?”

Lin Sheng looked up.

“Is the surgery risky? Does it hurt? And how much does it cost?” Xu Xieyi bit her lip. “I don’t have much money...”

Seeing that he finally seemed about to speak, she hurried on, “But breast reduction is just removal, right? If there’s no implant, shouldn’t it be a little cheaper? Or... since we used to be neighbors, could you give me a discount?”

Lin Sheng had not taken it seriously at first, but hearing that string of words almost made him laugh.

This child was not old, yet she certainly knew how to think.

Xu Xieyi, who had grown up in a sheltered world, naturally did not know that Lin Sheng had already seen through her and had made his own decision.

“You’re too young, Xieyi. At your age, you’re still growing. Surgery isn’t appropriate.”

Xu Xieyi had long prepared herself for that kind of answer. “I’m almost an adult now, so I’m not really that young. Or you could...” She resisted the flush on her face. “You could examine me first. Anyway, please don’t refuse me so quickly, Brother Lin.”

She bit her lip and said, word by word, “I really want the operation.”

She did not like having a large chest. She wanted it smaller, ideally so unremarkable that she could blend into the crowd.

Seeing how determined she looked, Lin Sheng lowered his eyes and thought for a moment. His calm manner made Xu Xieyi even more awed; her palms were damp with sweat, yet she still refused to give up. “Brother Lin, is that all right?”

Lin Sheng lifted his eyelids. There was nothing severe in his expression, but to Xu Xieyi, the quiet, composed look carried the gentle authority of an elder: “You have to be eighteen before you can sign your own surgical consent. At your age, even if you were to have the operation, a guardian must sign for you. Do you understand?”

Xu Xieyi froze.

“A guardian?”

“Yes. In other words, your parents must agree, and they must sign for you.”

Struck as though by lightning, Xu Xieyi sat on the sofa, her delicate brows knitted tightly. She looked at Lin Sheng, hesitated, and said nothing.

Watching her wilt, Lin Sheng’s lips curved slightly. It was only the faintest smile.

He had guessed long ago that the girl had come in secret.

---

The bars on High Street belonged to the more upscale leisure district of New City. Along the tree-lined curb, parking spaces were often filled by luxury cars. Wealthy young people especially liked to come and go from this area.

Night had deepened, and the bar was in full swing.

In the lounge area, a circle of finely dressed young men and women were drinking and chatting.

Chu Yuefei swirled his glass and gave the stiffly seated man beside him a nod toward the stage. “That girl’s been looking at you the whole time, Brother Sheng. At least give her some kind of response.”

Lin Sheng leaned back on the sofa and idly toyed with his glass. “And how would you like me to respond?”

Chu Yuefei spread his hands.

They were childhood friends from the same military compound, so of course he understood Lin Sheng. For women he was not interested in, Lin Sheng would not even spare them a glance. He was courteous and gentle, yes, but not toward everyone.

Chen Xia clinked glasses with him. “Ah Sheng, when did you get yourself a little neighbor sister? I never heard about it.”

“There’s something fishy about this,” Chu Yuefei said.

Fu Xiaoyin frowned and kicked Chu Yuefei with her high heel. “Will you two ever stop? You’ve only just finished making a fuss over the dancer, and now it’s a neighbor sister? How many women do you want to assign to Brother Sheng before you’re satisfied?”

It was no secret in their circle that Fu Xiaoyin liked Lin Sheng. She was not especially close to his inner group; her brother was more familiar with Chu Yuefei, so she often came along with them. There had been rumors that she and Lin Sheng had once had a brief affair, though no one knew whether it was true.

Lin Sheng had been the center of this group of childhood friends since they were small. Who would dare ask the “boss” about old private matters? Were they trying to get themselves killed?

“Don’t guess blindly,” Lin Sheng said, glancing at them. “Just a little girl with a problem who asked me for help.”

“How little?” Chu Yuefei asked.

“High school.”

Chu Yuefei and Chen Xia exchanged a look, finally realizing they had been the ones with the dirty minds.

Fu Xiaoyin also let out a breath of relief.

The conversation moved on to other things. Lin Sheng was a little tired and did not join in. With his eyes half-lowered, he looked at the phone on the table, as though waiting for a message.

At last, with a ding, a text came in.

Lin Sheng picked up the phone.

“Brother Lin, I’m home. Thank you for taking me to the station. Xu Xieyi (⊙w⊙)”

Lin Sheng gave it a casual glance, then was drawn by the strange little emoticon, especially those round eyes.

He found it amusing.

These children truly did have all sorts of thoughts. A seventeen-year-old trying to get plastic surgery.

He sent a reply and let it go.

He had not even considered operating on her. Sending her to the hospital had simply been his way of striking her over the head and knocking the idea out of her, so she would not go looking elsewhere. Students were so naive; if they ran into a shady clinic, they would surely be fooled.

The young waitress who came to change the decanter was a girl.

As she approached, she happened to see the man seated at the center of the group. His long legs were crossed at ease, the top buttons of his shirt undone, a cigarette hanging lazily between his fingers.

He was the sort of man who looked clean and refreshing, courteous, and well brought up.

She had been watching him for so long that he noticed. She hurriedly lowered her face, her hands trembling with nerves. In her mind remained only the eyes he had turned on her.

How to describe them? Not merely dark. It was as though starlight had fallen into a black whirlpool. They were deeply alluring.

---

Click. Click-click.

Xu Xieyi pressed the switch over and over, but the little dog-head lamp still would not light.

She tilted her face to look at the tube. Her hair brushed back and forth against the desk edge. With practiced ease, she patted the lampshade, and only then did the blackened bulb flicker and finally glow white.

The lamp wiring was old and often did this.

Xu Xieyi first pulled out the chair, then sat down slowly, unhurriedly taking out her pencil case, homework, and the English weekly paper from her backpack. She spread the paper over the homework book and wrote a few multiple-choice questions, but her mind soon wandered.

Just then, the “ding-ding” of a text message rang out. She immediately put down her books and opened her phone to look.

“Okay.”

A message from Lin Sheng.

Only one word. No other information.

Xu Xieyi felt deflated.

“Are adults all this busy? So brief...”

Outside the bedroom door, her mother and father were arguing over trivial household matters.

Recently, her parents had been doing business outside. They only came back on weekends when she returned home; on ordinary days, they had no time to look after her.

Xu Xieyi rested her chin in her hand and glanced around the simply furnished room. Hearing her parents’ habitual bickering, she let out a soft sigh.

If, hypothetically speaking, their family supermarket had not gone bankrupt, then in a small place like Ze'an, she would probably still count as the kind of “rich and beautiful” girl everyone envied.

When she was young, her family had ridden the wave of national support for rural counties and townships, and their chain supermarkets had spread across every township in Ze'an.

Ze'an was a county-level city. Government revenue mainly came from tourism at Ze'an Mountain and from a few major local factories. The county seat was prosperous and beautifully built. Urbanization was limited, and many people lived in the towns and villages.

In those years, their chain supermarkets were everywhere in Ze'an, thriving, and the family lived quite comfortably.

But her parents’ education had been limited, and they did not understand modern management. Her father appointed relatives left and right, and somehow those relatives began embezzling and skimming money. The management problems grew worse and worse. By the time she was in eighth grade, the supermarkets had collapsed completely and filed for bankruptcy.

Now her family was in debt, while the relatives were all rolling in money. That was how her parents described it when they argued. It seemed all the wealth had been skimmed from the supermarkets, and her family had been the ones to pay for it. That was why the relatives hardly stayed in touch anymore.

Over the years, with her parents busy running about, Xu Xieyi had learned independence. After so much upheaval, her personality had become a little more mature than most children her age.

Her parents told her to study hard, but she did not seem to have much talent for it.

She studied seriously enough, but her grades had always remained average.

The argument outside finally ended with someone saying, “Lower your voice. You’re affecting the child’s studies.”

Xu Xieyi took a passbook from her savings jar. More than ten thousand yuan was recorded in it. She had saved it for a long time, intending to use it for the surgery.

It was, in a sense, the last extravagant wish of a former rich girl.

After the lights were turned off at night, the house grew very quiet. Xu Xieyi lay on her bed, remembering what Lin Sheng had said, and tossed and turned without sleep.

She touched the two swelling mounds on her chest, growing irritated.

Even in her dreams, she wanted them to deflate, so that she could walk among other girls and blend into the ordinary crowd.

No strange, lingering looks. She could run or jump however she liked.

Unable to sleep no matter how she thought about it, Xu Xieyi simply rolled over and lay on her stomach, taking her phone from under the pillow. She switched it on, opened the message box, and looked at Lin Sheng’s “Okay” again and again.

Her brows slowly drew together as she muttered to herself, “He even took me to the station... If I look at it this way, Brother Lin must still be a pretty easy person to talk to. Just like when we were little.”

Asking her parents to sign a surgical consent form? Impossible.

They’d be lenient if they didn’t scold her to death.

If her parents had been that open-minded, the family business would never have gone bankrupt like that.

Xu Xieyi hugged her pillow and sighed into it. In the dark, the phone screen cast a small square of light, illuminating the girl’s collagen-soft face. Seventeen was the age of just beginning to bloom; the lines of her face and neck still held a little youthful roundness.

She looked at Lin Sheng’s contact again and again, murmuring to herself, “If only Brother Lin could make an exception and help me. Just once... only once...”

Really, as long as Lin Sheng nodded, and there were a knife and a couple of quick cuts, it should be a very easy thing for a doctor to do.

But...

This brother seemed to have a strong sense of principle and would not be easy to persuade. She was still under eighteen; how could she get a signature?

“Haah.” Xu Xieyi rolled over onto her back and thought hard. No, the key was not that Lin Sheng had principles. It was that they were not familiar enough, wasn’t it? They didn’t even know each other well. Why should he help her?