Chapter 3

Once I discovered that Jiang Suiye’s scent helped me sleep, the quality of my sleep shot up.

No matter how exhausted or irritated I was during the day, all I had to do was come back, lie down, and breathe in that agarwood scent. I’d sleep like the dead.

But I noticed another problem, too. His scent seemed to be growing stronger.

At first, I could only smell it when I was close to him. Later, being in the same room was enough.

Eventually, even when I sat at the back of a classroom and he sat at the front, with eight or nine rows of people between us, I could still catch a hint of it.

And I seemed less and less able to do without it.

One afternoon, he was out at an electrical lab class.

I was lying on my bed, scrolling on my phone by myself, when something began to feel wrong.

Something was missing. I couldn’t get comfortable.

I rolled from side to side. No position helped. It felt as if a cat were clawing at me from the inside.

Then I knew what was missing.

Jiang Suiye’s scent.

I missed Jiang Suiye so much…

So much…

After more than half an hour of restless fidgeting, I found myself getting up and stopping beside his bed, as if some unseen force had led me there.

He’d made it neatly. His pillow sat at the head, his thin quilt folded at the foot.

I stared at the pillow for a few seconds. Then my hand reached for it, all on its own.

Pick it up. Bury my face in it. Inhale.

The agarwood seeped out of the fabric. It was faint, nowhere near as strong as the scent on him, but to me it was rain after a drought.

I stood there clutching his pillow, greedily drawing in breath after breath. Only then did I begin to relax.

Then I heard the dorm room door open.

I froze with Jiang Suiye’s pillow in my arms and my face still buried in it.

He stood in the doorway, one hand on the handle, the other carrying two takeaway meals.

His eyes moved from my face to the pillow and back again, a teasing look in them.

“I… I was helping you dust off your pillow.” I scrambled to put it back.

He came in, set the food on the desk, and took the pillow from my hands.

I hung my head like a primary school kid caught doing something wrong.

I’d expected him to call me a pervert. Instead, he only smiled.

“What’s so good about a pillow? If you like the scent, you can come straight into my arms and breathe it in.”

Then he pulled me into a hug.

My face burned, but that scent really did keep drawing me in.

Reason told me this couldn’t go on, so I blurted, “Who—who wants to smell you!”

I wanted to die of embarrassment.