A Heart-Racing Dare - Chapter 7

Lately, I often visited Zhaobei’s studio. I was there again on the eve of our wedding. His photos and portraits let me piece together moments I had almost forgotten, though he had remembered every one.

This time I found a frame at the back of a drawer. Unlike all the other pictures, it held a photo of us together.

I thought for a long time before I dredged up a memory of it. It had been a small art competition, little more than an event organized by people in our circle to curry favor with the Shens. I hadn’t known that at the time. I did remember my entry: a painting of a sunflower.

The comments suddenly grew noisy.

[She finally found the key item! Once we unlock their first meeting, that’s the end!]

[They’ve been through so much. Our couple finally gets a happy ending!]

[Flowers for the finale! And please, can I see the scenes they cut?]

I stared at the unremarkable photograph. This was the fabled key item? Well, I might as well try it. I handed it to Zhaobei. His eyes lit up.

“Xiaxia, do you remember?”

Oh. Was I supposed to remember something before using it? With him looking at me as eagerly as a puppy about to pounce, I wished I had ten extra heads to think with.

Then a memory flashed. Yes, there had been a boy a little taller than me. He watched me finish painting the sunflower that day. I was at the age when I loved to show off, and I asked him triumphantly, “Do you know what sunflowers mean?”

“What?”

“A love that stays silent.”

## Shen Zhaobei’s Extra Story

Shen Zhaobei knew there was something wrong with him. Ever since childhood, whenever he loved something, he used every means at his disposal to possess it and then destroy it. Possess it. Destroy it. Again and again.

Eventually he began to wonder where that compulsion had come from. Perhaps it began with his parents’ endless fights when he was small, when each tried to push the duty of caring for him onto the other. Perhaps it began on the snowy night his mother abandoned him for good. Or perhaps it began when he first met Jiang Xia.

Zhaobei had accompanied his mother, a judge, to an art competition. He had no interest in painting, but it was her career, and the path she wanted him to take. To him, a painting was merely a few colors scattered over white paper.

There were quite a few entrants. At his mother’s strict command, he sat copying one of the better paintings, irritated and restless.

A girl’s voice sounded beside him. “Don’t you like painting? If you don’t, find a way to run away.”

It sounded like an offhand remark. Before he could react, she was gone. He checked the list of contestants and found her name: Jiang Xia. A lovely name.

He found her area. She looked a little younger than him and was wholly absorbed in her work. It wasn’t finished, but he could already tell it was a sunflower.

Puzzled, Zhaobei touched his chest. For the first time, he felt what it was to simply like something. It was new. So love did not always arrive with a need to control and destroy. This was the one time he wanted to hold something close without breaking it.

But could that really be possible?

He smiled bitterly. From that day through the decade and more that followed, he never fell in love with painting.

He fell in love with painting her.