Chapter 9: Video Call

On the bus, Zhou Zhuang held his girlfriend, already drunk out of her mind and barely conscious, and stared hard at Su Shiyi across the aisle.

After what happened that morning, he didn’t dare let her sit in the back again. It was safer keeping her right where he could watch her.

They had already worked together to pack up everything at the camp.

He had to carry his girlfriend, and all three bags ended up on Su Shiyi’s shoulders. By the time they reached the bus, both of them were half dead from exhaustion.

Luckily, She Yujun handled her liquor pretty well. She didn’t shout, make a scene, or keep fidgeting, otherwise they’d still have been dealing with trouble.

This was one of the few moments today when the two of them actually interacted normally.

It was already getting dark. On the old bus, the dim lights flickered on and off, mixing with some unidentified creaking noise. Nobody spoke. The atmosphere felt a little strange.

Zhou Zhuang suddenly thought of those bus ghost stories, the kind about a late-night passenger who boarded halfway through the trip and made the whole bus disappear, only to reappear strangely years later on the exact same route.

And the people on the bus still acted like they were living in that decade from years ago.

He shivered.

"Hey, what are you thinking about?" Su Shiyi’s voice rang out, and he jolted all over.

"Nothing. Random thoughts. Have you ever heard any ghost stories about buses before?" He hugged the girlfriend in his arms a little tighter. After drinking, her body was warm, and that warmth pushed back some of the unease from just now.

"Yeah, I have. But I feel like this bus is a little weird..." Su Shiyi said thoughtfully. She pointed at a female passenger who had just boarded and said to him in a shaky voice, "Do you see that? Doesn’t it look like she doesn’t have any feet?"

"What?!" Zhou Zhuang’s pupils instantly widened. The woman in front was dressed all in black, and beneath the hem of her skirt was a black emptiness.

The legendary female ghost! Once she got on the bus, nobody would survive!

When the bus passed a spot under a streetlight, he looked carefully in the light and realized her shoes and socks were black too, blending into the dim surroundings.

His terrified expression turned to confusion, then to irritation at her giggling.

That damn girl really needed to be guarded against at all times.

"Just kidding. Don’t make that face. Who told you to be so cowardly? Even I’m not scared, and I’m just a girl."

Seeing that he still wouldn’t answer, she changed the subject.

"Are you tired? Want me to hold her for a bit?"

"No." He gently hugged his girlfriend again. The strong smell of alcohol on her breath made his heart ache, and at the same time it made him think of some bad possibilities.

"Did you deliberately get her drunk?"

"She chose the game herself, and she drank on her own after losing."

"Wasn’t it your booze to begin with?"

"I just thought it tasted good. I’m not a god. How would I have thought of all that?"

Su Shiyi answered so calmly that Zhou Zhuang couldn’t find a flaw in it, so he had no choice but to let it go.

"Fine. I’ll trust you for now."

"Actually, I’m kind of jealous of Yujun," she said out of nowhere. The passing streetlights outside the window kept flashing over her face, making it alternately bright and dark.

"She has a boyfriend who loves and cherishes her, and I have nothing..."

"So you wanted to..." Zhou Zhuang blurted out, but then he saw her finger pressed to her lips, signaling him not to speak, and he shut up.

"I can tell she loves you, just like I love him."

She looked at the sleeping She Yujun, her eyes complicated.

"Promise me that no matter what happens later, you won’t tell her about our agreement."

"Does that count as your first request?"

"No. Our agreement hasn’t started yet."

"Aren’t you afraid I won’t agree?" The words were out before he could stop them, and then he realized this was wrong. Starting from the moment he lied with his honest words, he had no reason to expose her anymore.

Was that her goal...

To force him onto a dead-end road, tie him to the same ship of thieves, leave him nowhere to retreat, and make him walk all the way down the dark path with her?

She didn’t answer, as if she no longer cared what he thought.

As the bus entered the city, the streetlights grew denser, but Zhou Zhuang’s heart only grew darker.

Even though his girlfriend was pressed close against him, he felt as if a mountain now stood between them.

It was all because of a secret, a promise, and a lie.

Was it worth it...

In that eerie, silent air, every turn of the wheels was torture. At last, Zhou Zhuang got off first with She Yujun, leaving Su Shiyi to head to the next stop alone.

With a quiet sigh of relief, he carried his girlfriend home and delivered her to her house. It was She Guowei who opened the door, and the moment he smelled the alcohol, his brows knotted tightly.

"What happened?" The middle-aged man’s crisp, clear tone carried obvious displeasure.

"We went out with friends. Yujun played a game and accidentally drank too much." Faced with She Guowei’s questioning, Zhou Zhuang didn’t dare say much.

"How did you let her drink? She’s a girl. It’s dangerous for her to get drunk."

"I tried to stop her, but..." He instinctively tried to argue back, but then thought that if he said she’d insisted on drinking herself, she’d probably get scolded again tomorrow when she woke up. So he fell silent.

"Hmph, forget it. At least it was you," She Guowei said, calling his wife over to carry She Yujun back to her room.

He didn’t care much about Zhou Zhuang’s conflicted, half-finished expression either.

He had watched the boy grow up, so he trusted his character pretty well.

"Wait a second. Answer me one question first." She Guowei stopped Zhou Zhuang, who was about to leave, and said with earnest seriousness, "Are you willing to take care of Yujun for the rest of your life?"

"Uncle, why are you asking me that all of a sudden?" Zhou Zhuang was taken aback by the abrupt question. His relationship with his girlfriend was obvious, and both families knew it. Why was there still a second confirmation today?

"Don’t worry about that. Just answer me. What are you thinking?"

"Of course I am."

"Mm. Go back. We can talk about this later when we have time." She Guowei nodded at him with satisfaction, then shut the door under Zhou Zhuang’s puzzled gaze.

When he got home, Zhou Zhuang took a shower first. Wrapped in a bath towel, he went into his bedroom and heard the computer pinging nonstop. When he unlocked the screen, it turned out to be a QQ video call from Su Shiyi.

His mouse hovered back and forth over the red and green buttons, and in the end he clicked accept.

"You finally picked up. Huh? Why is there no image? No camera?" The video showed Su Shiyi in a thin nightdress, her lovely figure faintly visible, though the picture quality was blurry and he could only make out a rough outline.

"If you’ve got something to say, say it. If not, I’m hanging up." He only had a microphone on his computer, the same one he used to game with friends on YY. He didn’t even have any need for a camera.

He had no intention of explaining it to her. The fact that he could still put up with her for a few words was already more than enough.

She shifted onto the bed. The pink bedsheets and a plush teddy bear taking up half the mattress appeared in the frame.

A bedroom full of girlish charm, and it didn’t match her vibe at all. Zhou Zhuang silently judged it that way.

"I want to tell you something. My goal today still wasn’t accomplished, and I’m not happy." She settled into a comfortable pose and dropped a bombshell on him through her phone.

"Huh? What do you mean?"

The astonished tone in his voice clearly pleased her. She lightly licked her lips and kept going.

"I mixed some brandy and whiskey into that bottle. Strictly speaking, it was a cocktail. In my plan, by now we should either be out in the wild or fooling around drunk in bed."

There was no image on his end, so she couldn’t see his expression. That cut Su Shiyi’s fun in half. When he still didn’t answer, she even thought his signal had dropped.

"Why didn’t you say so on the bus just now?" Half a minute later, Zhou Zhuang’s voice finally came through again.

"I’m only telling you. Just like you lied to her, this is a secret between the two of us. What if she wakes up and hears it?"

"Were all those things you said today fake?"

"Does it matter whether they were fake or real?"

Does it matter...

Zhou Zhuang fell silent. He had lied today too. Once you crossed that line, there was no going back.

After you make a mistake and don’t correct it, everything else is just an excuse to keep sinking deeper.

Ironically, among the three of them, only She Yujun naively believed in the rules of the game, and she was the one who drank the most.

Do good people never live long, while troublemakers live forever? Is it only people like Su Shiyi, who refuse to obey the rules, who get to live comfortably?

"It got interrupted today, so you didn’t cum. Isn’t that frustrating? Should we keep going?"

Zhou Zhuang was still lost in his own thoughts when Su Shiyi’s sweet, soft voice drifted into his ears. When he looked back at the video, the blood-rushing scene made it impossible for him to think straight.

She had already stripped off every piece of clothing. Her snow-white, enticing body was naked, as if she were a display item in a shop window, there for anyone to admire, with only him as the customer.

"Pretty, isn’t it? Other than my boyfriend and you, nobody else has seen it." She held up the phone and slowly moved it over her cherry-colored breasts, her flat, smooth belly, and the lush, secret garden below.

Her hand moved to her clit, rubbing it lightly. The thin stream of moisture between her folds announced her arousal. A suppressed moan slipped from her lips, and her skin started to flush red.

"Zhou Zhuang... let me tell you... one more secret... open your bag... mm... inside... inside there’s a present I gave you."

Her words came out in broken pieces, cut apart by the overwhelming rush of pleasure. Zhou Zhuang almost didn’t understand what she was saying.

He wasn’t paying attention to her words at all anyway. Breathing hard, he stared at the fullness of her breasts and the pink pussy in the screen.

The bodies and hidden parts of actresses in videos couldn’t compare to the shock of seeing it live like this.

What was more, he was the male lead in her mouth. The stimulation and excitement made his cock harden uncontrollably, standing straight up.

"You... found it?" Her voice came again, and only then did Zhou Zhuang, his own erection tenting the towel, open his bag and pull out something he knew all too well.

Her stockings from today?! When had she stuffed them in there...

No wonder she’d still been bare-legged that evening... he had somehow not noticed...

"Zhou Zhuang... let’s finish... what we didn’t finish today... I want you... to fuck me..."

The computer kept sending out one sweet, seductive moan after another. Trembling, he pressed the stockings against his cock. The slick texture dragged his mind back to the absurdity of the morning.

He turned off the lights. Without a camera, darkness was the best cover. The desire that had been teased all day was no longer something he could suppress. Staring at her filthy, dripping garden, he stroked himself feverishly, imagining the fingers that would replace hers entering a forbidden place of his own that had never been touched before.

The two of them seemed to share the same mind and didn’t speak. Each of them touched their own most sensitive place with rising arousal. Aside from the intermittent moans from her and from him, there was no other sound.

The man’s heavier breathing in the microphone was the best aphrodisiac for her. She was already having trouble holding the phone steady. With both the emotional and physical pleasure surging through her, she called out to him in a trembling voice, wanting him to take her to heaven with him.

"Zhou Zhuang... Zhou Zhuang... mm... harder... mm... I’m almost there..."

Then came a long, lingering cry of pleasure. She couldn’t control herself, twisting her body as she reached the peak of desire. The arousal trickling out of her vagina soaked a large patch of the bedsheets, an unmistakable proof that she had flown up into the clouds.

On Zhou Zhuang’s side, that moan that seemed to ring right beside his ear hit him head-on. His seal broke, and the accumulated fluid from the past few days shot out in bursts, all of it splashing onto her stockings.

Black and white, the sharp contrast drew his eyes.

The milky semen on the black stockings looked like twisted, tangled talismans, and with his exhausted breathing after climax, it kept shifting and changing, as if it wanted to etch the messy entanglement between them today into his memory.

How the hell did I end up masturbating with her?!

In the sage-like clarity after orgasm, Zhou Zhuang regained his senses and felt utterly annoyed with himself. Lying to his girlfriend was already unforgivable. Now he had even joined forces with the very culprit who had seduced him.

He had originally planned to toss the stockings into the trash like post-sex tissue, but the instant his hand closed around them, countless thoughts flashed through his mind, and in the end they all turned into a faint sigh.

He took a bag and put the stockings inside. Then he locked them in his cabinet.

Inside that cabinet were his childhood toys, beanbags, marbles, the test paper from the first time he scored 100, and so on. Today, it had gained a new member.

A new member that looked completely out of place no matter how you looked at it.

"Zhou Zhuang, are you done?"

Her voice came from the computer again.

By now she was already dressed again, so it seemed she had also gone to clean up after herself.

Even so, the flush still lingering on her face and her languid posture showed that the afterglow of her climax had not completely faded.

"No."

"I heard everything. You still want to lie to me."

Only then did Zhou Zhuang awkwardly realize that, even though there was no camera, he had forgotten to turn off the mic just now. She had given him one passionate video call, and in return he had given her a passionate voice call.

"Just this once. No next time!"

"If you want it again later, just video call me. Or... call me. I can come to your place. My phone number is..." Ignoring his stubborn denial, she smiled to herself and tossed out another rather tempting offer.

"Honestly, I really can’t understand you." He gave a bitter smile and didn’t take the bait, instead shifting to another topic he had wanted to bring up for a long time.

"Oh? Then tell me why."

"You know perfectly well that Yujun and I love each other, and you still love your boyfriend. So why are you humiliating yourself and trying to seduce me?!"

"Don’t you think that, once you cast off the restraints of society and let yourself go, the feeling of enjoying life is pretty great?"

"I don’t. Right now all I feel is regret for agreeing to your bet."

He took a deep breath and went on.

"Without rules there’s no order. If everyone chose to indulge themselves, how could our society stay stable and keep moving forward?"

"Looks like you still haven’t figured it out."

"Weakness and ignorance have never been the reason someone gets destroyed. Arrogance is."

"The moral high ground you think you have is the basis for that smug way you judge me."

"What if you were the one being stepped on and criticized by everyone else?"

"You don’t know what I’ve been through!"

"I’ll make you understand!"

Her machine-gun burst of words didn’t leave Zhou Zhuang any chance to argue. By the time he wanted to say something, the computer was already making a beep-beep-beep sound.

She had hung up.

Tonight was destined to be another sleepless night.