Congratulations on Your Wedding - Chapter 7

Chapter 7

Song Chenzhi appeared while Jiang Li was rubbing sunscreen onto my back.

“Are all women this afraid of getting tan?” Jiang Li sprayed the mist across my skin, then smoothed it in with his fingertips. He cleared his throat softly. “This is my first time helping a woman—”

“Xixi.”

An icy voice cut him off.

I raised my head. Song Chenzhi stood on the beach not far away, his lips pressed into a cold line.

I looked away from him.

“Are you done?” I asked Jiang Li.

Jiang Li’s gaze moved from me to Song Chenzhi and back again. He smiled mildly.

“All done.”

“Then I’m going for a swim.”

I said goodbye to Jiang Li, walked past Song Chenzhi, and entered the sea.

Jiang Li followed. When he reached my side, he asked with an amused smile, “Ex-boyfriend?”

I tipped my face above the water. “Enemy.”

“Enemy.” He rolled the word around as though savoring it. “My sister calls her ex-boyfriend her enemy too, but she still can’t forget him.”

He glanced at me quickly, as if afraid I might misunderstand.

“My biological sister.”

I raised an eyebrow.

He seemed about to say something else when I suddenly grabbed his strong arm.

“Jiang Li.”

“I think my leg is cramping.”

His expression changed. He slid one arm behind my neck and the other beneath my knees, carefully lifting me out of the water.

He carried me past Song Chenzhi, who had been staring at us, and returned to the shade of the beach umbrella. Then he slowly massaged my knotted calf, his voice inexplicably husky.

“Does it still hurt?”

I stared absently at the crown of his soft black hair. It reminded me of the puppy Grandma used to keep, so I rubbed it without thinking.

“Not anymore.”

That evening, I messaged Jiang Li to say the hair dryer in my room was broken and asked if I could borrow his.

In his room, we shared a long, ardent kiss.

I emerged with a flushed face to find Song Chenzhi standing outside my door, pale as a ghost.

“It’s been six months, and I still can’t forget you.”

“I haven’t seen Chen Qing once in all that time.”

“You’re the one I love.” His breathing deepened. His eyes fixed on my swollen lips, and every word seemed to cost him. “Xixi, don’t be with anyone else.”

I looked at him coldly.

“Song Chenzhi, you don’t love me. I was only the regret left over from your youth.”

“Once you finally had me, I stopped mattering.”

“No. It wasn’t regret.” His voice sank to a ragged whisper.

“We studied together. We fed stray cats together. I knew you loved sweets and couldn’t stand chili because your stepsister once filled a cake with chili powder to torment you. I was the only person you ever sketched. Later, when I agreed to pose for a boy who was practicing his drawing, you sulked and ignored me for days. We even promised to attend the same university. We understood each other so well. Everyone said we belonged together. How could that not have been love?”

“That day, you kissed me while you thought I was asleep. You whispered, ‘His lips are so soft.’ I blushed, but you thought I was hot and ran to turn on the studio’s air conditioner.”

“I planned to confess properly the next day. But you never came to school. A week later, our teacher told us you had gone abroad.”

“Grandma came all the way to the school to explain that you had no choice. Your stepsister wanted to study music overseas, but she was afraid to go alone, so your family forced you to accompany her. Grandma said you had almost no voice in that house. One demand from your stepsister, and you had to leave every friend and familiar place behind for a country you didn’t know and didn’t even want to visit. That was when I decided I would wait, no matter how long it took, until you came back.”

For the first time in months, my heart ached. Tears slipped down my cheeks.

“But you didn’t wait.”

I looked up at him.

“Song Chenzhi, you didn’t wait for me.”

“Chen Qing was the one beside you all those years. You grew accustomed to having her there. That was why you could never refuse her.”

His lips trembled.

“I never loved her. I only thought she was exciting.”

“Exciting?”

“Three years ago, I was in a terrible car accident. I almost died. Before I lost consciousness, I called you overseas, and you hung up without mercy.”

“My phone had been stolen at the time,” I said, lowering my eyes.

Song Chenzhi swayed where he stood. After a long silence, he continued.

“When I recovered, I went to the studio and drank too much. I don’t know when Chen Qing followed me there. I mistook her for you.”

“That was when it began?”

“At first, it was only that one night.” A flash of agitation crossed his face. He seemed to want a cigarette, but stopped himself. “After that, she watched every post you made. She copied the way you dressed. Even the angle of her smile began to look like yours.”

“But none of that mattered. In my heart, there could be any number of substitutes. There was only one you.”

“She was uninhibited. She would laugh and ask whether I wanted to smear paint over her body and soil her. You were different. To me, you were clean and fragile, a pure princess. I couldn’t even bring myself to grip your waist too hard.”

Song Chenzhi closed his eyes. His voice held an emotion I could not name, perhaps self-loathing.

“On the day of our wedding, after she threatened suicide and I went to her, she threw me onto the sofa. She ripped at the tie you had fastened that morning. While kissing me, she complained that you had tied it too tightly.”

“At that moment, I thought that if you knew, you would cry until your makeup was ruined. Maybe a princess with tears streaking her makeup wouldn’t look so clean anymore.”

His voice suddenly broke.

“I regret it.”

“Today, when I saw Jiang Li carrying you and saw you gently stroke his hair, it felt as if needles were piercing my heart and wheels were crushing it. It hurt worse than the accident.”

“We had been so close. We were almost married.”

“I even found myself wishing Chen Qing had never existed. Wishing she had truly killed herself that day. If she had, none of this would have happened.”

His eyes red, he dropped to his knees.

“Xixi, give me one more chance. Forgive me.”

My tears fell calmly now.

“Jump from here. Go see Grandma. If she forgives you, then I will.”

He only looked at me in grief.

Contempt twisted my mouth.

“You want my forgiveness. Why are you afraid?”

“Song Chenzhi, I don’t love you anymore. Even hating you makes me sick.”

“Maybe one day I’ll be with someone else. Maybe I’ll build a family. But it will never be with you.”

“From the moment you abandoned me on the way to our wedding, from the moment Grandma died, there could never be an ‘us’ again.”

I wiped at my tears, but they came faster. The suffocating anguish I had buried for so long seemed to collapse over my heart all at once.

“Do you know what Grandma went to the studio to fetch that day?”

“Plum wine. Your favorite plum wine.”

“She thought we’d only had an argument. She wanted to bring the wine out so it would be ready when we returned for the traditional ceremony.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

Song Chenzhi covered his face. Tears ran between his fingers, and his shoulders shook like a dying leaf at the end of autumn.

“Never appear in front of me again. I don’t want to see you.”

I shut the door.

For a while, I lay with my eyes closed.

I no longer loved that man, but he had spoken of the past that belonged to me too. Those memories were a gentle knife, stabbing sharply one moment and grinding deeper the next. Somehow, that was more painful than a swift, clean death.

After some time, I sent the recording of my conversation with Song Chenzhi to Chen Qing.

For the past six months, she had been hounded online and harassed by an obsessive follower who tried several times to assault her. People who encountered her in public said she looked distracted and unstable.

Every time Song Chenzhi sent me another declaration of love or long plea to take him back, I forwarded it to her—just as she had once sent her taunts to me.

What went around came around.

I had never intended to let her live in peace.

But I did not expect that recording to be the final straw.

At noon the next day, while I was checking out of the hotel, Chen Qing charged toward me with a fruit knife.

“Xixi!”

My vision went dark as someone threw his arms around me.

There was a wet sound as the blade entered flesh, followed by a familiar muffled groan.

The security guards finally reacted and restrained Chen Qing, who stood frozen in shock.

Panic erupted around us. Some people called the police. Others summoned an ambulance.

I stared at Song Chenzhi on the floor, too stunned to move.

Blood welled between the fingers pressed to his abdomen and soaked across his white shirt. He seemed to try to say my name, but the pain robbed him of his voice.

Slowly, his eyes lost focus.

His hand fell.

Song Chenzhi survived, gravely wounded. Chen Qing was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to ten years in prison.

Later, I heard that she fought with another inmate. One of her eyes was put out, and she was beaten so badly she could barely speak coherently afterward. Her life was ruined.

Song Chenzhi spent more than half a year recovering. The knife had injured his spinal cord, leaving his lower body paralyzed. He might spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair.

When I heard the news, I looked at him unconscious in his hospital bed and said calmly, “You brought it on yourself.”

His eyelashes seemed to tremble, but he did not wake.

I felt no gratitude because he had saved me. Only disgust, and a sense that he deserved it.

I could have dodged Chen Qing on my own.

Over the following six months, Jiang Li and I occasionally visited him at the hospital.

Jiang Li was now my boyfriend.

Whenever we came, Song Chenzhi was usually reading in silence. He showed no despair over his paralysis. He seemed to have accepted it calmly.

He almost resembled the aloof, self-possessed boy from my memories, the one who had always stood at my side.

Only now and then would I catch him staring blankly at his legs.

But never for more than a moment.

The day I told Song Chenzhi that Jiang Li and I were getting married happened to be the day he was discharged.

He stood speechless for a long time.

“When?” he finally asked.

“Next Saturday.”

“Why so soon?”

I rested a hand on my belly and smiled.

“I’m pregnant.”

He fell silent even longer.

Jiang Li called my name from outside. I turned to leave, but Song Chenzhi stopped me.

“Xixi.”

I looked back. “Yes?”

He lowered his eyes and did not look at me.

“I dreamed about Grandma last night. It was the first time she was willing to appear in one of my dreams.”

“Mm.”

“I asked her a question. I asked if she would forgive me.”

I paused.

I remembered the words I had once thrown at him: If Grandma forgives you, then I will.

“What did she say?”

Song Chenzhi raised his head. Grief broke through the smile he forced onto his face.

“She won’t forgive me.”

I nodded and turned away.

He called after me again.

“But Grandma asked me to give you a message.”

I did not look back. I straightened my spine and walked toward the door one step at a time.

“What message?”

Silence lingered behind me.

Then Song Chenzhi’s voice came softly.

“Congratulations on your wedding.”