Found You - Chapter 4

I shoved Ye Lin off the bed.

He hadn’t expected me to move and fell straight to the floor with a tremendous bang.

Then the room sank into deathly silence.

I froze for a moment. When I came back to myself, I leaned over the edge of the bed and looked down.

Ye Lin lay sprawled on the floor. He must have landed headfirst. His neck appeared broken, limp and bent ninety degrees to one side.

All warmth fled my hands and feet.

A massive wave of belated fear rolled over me.

“Ye Lin…?”

No answer.

I stumbled down the ladder and went to him.

His head rested against his shoulder at a grotesque angle. His eyes were still open, but the black pupils no longer moved. They stared fixedly at me.

It felt as though all the blood in my body had frozen and my heart had stopped beating.

“Y-Ye Lin, don’t scare me.”

“I-I didn’t mean to. Who told you to climb into my bed in the middle of the night carrying all that stuff? I really didn’t mean to push you.”

Looking at Ye Lin’s lifeless face, I was nearly in tears.

He couldn’t be dead, could he?

How could anyone still be alive looking like that?

A vision flashed through my mind of spending the rest of my life in prison.

I swallowed and reached out with a shaking hand to check his breathing.

Before my fingers reached him, he caught my hand.

Ye Lin’s eyes moved. Light returned to them, and his gaze settled on my face once more.

“You don’t like them?”

“You don’t like those things?”

He asked it again and again.

“You don’t like them?”

I let out the shrillest scream of my life.

Ye Lin was strange.

I had thought so from the first day of university, the moment I met him.

That day, I dragged my suitcase through the dormitory door and found him standing blankly beside the bed.

He looked bewildered, as if he couldn’t make sense of his surroundings, like a high school student who hadn’t yet adjusted to being a college student.

The noise I made caught his attention.

He looked at me, and his silent black eyes instantly filled with dazzling light. He watched me with extraordinary excitement.

I had social anxiety, but under such an ardent gaze, I gritted my teeth and awkwardly offered my hand in greeting.

“Hello. I’m your roommate, Jiang Qi’an.”

He stared at my hand without taking it.

Instead, he repeated my name over and over in a strange way, like a student memorizing vocabulary. A smile even spread across his lips.

My hand hung there in embarrassment. Just as I was about to pull it back, he finally clasped it.

Although it was still hot in early autumn, his hand was icy.

His fingertips kneaded my palm several times, then slid up my arm like a fish and around my back. In the same motion, he hooked an arm around me and yanked me into his embrace.

Both arms wrapped octopus-like around my waist, holding me so tightly it seemed he meant to press me into his body.

He buried his face in the hollow of my neck and sniffed me like a dog, then released a contented sigh.

My entire body went numb. I stiffened and instinctively tried to push him away, but he only held me tighter.

…What kind of social interaction was this?

Terrifying.

As I struggled, his low murmur sounded beside my ear.

Perhaps it was my imagination, but his voice seemed touched by a barely perceptible delirium.

“At last, I’ve met you.”

“Mine.”

“Mine.”

“Mine.”

“M-mine.”

…