Early in the morning, the shrill sound of the doorbell shattered Jiang Xu’s sleep. He yawned, rarely did he get a morning off, but now, before eight o’clock, this uninvited guest had woken him.
Who on earth was coming to his place this early?
Expressionless, every eyelash brimming with irritation, Jiang Xu opened the door. Standing outside was a young man in black pants and shirt, holding a big bag of items and a clipboard with a form. Cautiously, he asked, “Is Professor Shen here?”
Jiang Xu turned his head and called into the apartment, “Shen Fangyu!”
No reply.
Jiang Xu resisted the urge to roll his eyes.
Shen Fangyu’s sleep patterns were utterly baffling. You’d think he slept lightly, these past few nights, whenever Jiang Xu got a cramp, all he had to do was toss the pink rabbit under the bed, and Shen Fangyu would instantly wake to massage his leg. But at times like this… he was impossible to wake.
“I’ll sign for him,” Jiang Xu said. “What is it?”
“Some lab equipment. Pipettes, measuring cylinders, beakers, that kind of thing.”
No wonder the logo on the bag had looked familiar. His lab and Shen Fangyu’s were next to each other; sometimes when Shen Fangyu’s group ordered supplies, Jiang Xu would run into the delivery. In the labs, staff were usually addressed by title, so the guy had called him “Professor Shen.”
Jiang Xu signed, carried the package inside, and dumped it in the living room. Then he went to the bedroom and gave Shen Fangyu a couple of sharp kicks. “Why are lab supplies being delivered to my place?”
Shen Fangyu opened his eyes groggily. “They’re not for the lab. I paid for them myself, they’re for you.”
“What do I need that stuff for?” Jiang Xu asked. “Planning to open a new lab in my apartment?”
“It’s so I can make you late-night snacks. That way you won’t have to live on instant noodles.”
“You make midnight snacks with beakers, cylinders, and pipettes?”
“Precise measurements,” Shen Fangyu replied, eyes still closed, hair tousled across his forehead, looking lazy and comfortable. “There should be an electronic balance in there too. My student who just graduated taught me, said cooking and doing experiments are basically the same. Don’t believe me? I’ll show you tonight.”
Jiang Xu immediately understood. “So basically, you can’t cook.”
“Give me some trust,” Shen Fangyu said, brushing him off while rubbing his eyes and checking his phone. After a moment, he swore. “Damn it, Jiang Xu, my student’s paper got rejected again.”
Jiang Xu patted his head coolly, like petting a dog.
“Seriously, how can reviewers be this heartless?” Shen Fangyu grumbled. “I’ve spent three months revising that paper with him, hand in hand, even sent it to several different journals. By now, my student can barely recognize it as his own paper and still it didn’t pass.”
So early in the morning, the young Dr. Shen suddenly seemed weighed down with age. He forwarded a few memes of advisors going bald editing theses, then stroked his still-thick black hair with relief and sighed. “Teaching students is harder than doing the work yourself.”
Jiang Xu offered a dry piece of advice: “If you’d just written it all yourself, it might’ve gotten accepted.”
Shen Fangyu tossed his phone aside, stretched, and groaned, “Why did I ever choose clinical medicine? Being a doctor means juggling research, teaching, and clinical work all at once. Even the workhorses in the old production brigades had it easier than me.”
“You forgot administration,” Jiang Xu added.
“Oh, right. Research, teaching, clinical, and admin, four jobs at once.”
Shen Fangyu buried his head into the pillow. “I was up past three last night reading papers. Should’ve just gone back and inherited my second uncle’s two acres of farmland. Remember Liu Tong from our class? The one who switched to basic science, then did a postdoc at the agricultural college next door? Every other week he sends me photos of himself drinking homemade wine in the fields, living like Tao Yuanming.”
“They don’t convert urban household registrations to agricultural anymore,” Jiang Xu said, glancing at him. “You wouldn’t qualify to inherit.”
“There goes another dream down the drain.” Shen Fangyu sighed. “Right now I’m just pinning my hopes on the grant results next week. If I don’t get it, might as well pack it in.” He said it theatrically. “Which day are they announcing again?”
“Tuesday.”
“Right.” Shen Fangyu nodded. “I’m planning to ask my mom to go to the temple this weekend and pray. Want me to have her pray for you too?”
A single coin can stump even a hero, research couldn’t function without grants. No matter how brilliant you were, whether a top scorer in the college entrance exams or the pillar of your department, the moment you stepped into academia, you couldn’t escape the fate of wracking your brains over grant proposals.
The larger the grant, the harder it was to get. And the one both Shen Fangyu and Jiang Xu had applied for fell into that category: highly competitive, extremely low success rate.
Listening to Shen Fangyu babble nonsense this early in the morning, Jiang Xu had intended to cut off the meaningless small talk. But as his emotions slowly settled, he unexpectedly felt a trace of something he couldn’t quite put into words.
A leisurely morning, a rare day off, and bits of idle chatter scattered here and there, somehow, it unexpectedly filled Jiang Xu’s usually quiet home with a rare trace of everyday warmth, the kind of ordinary “smoke and fire of human life.”
Ever since leaving his hometown for university, Jiang Xu’s life had been consumed by study, work, patients, and the hospital. To him, an apartment was more like a hotel, just a place to sleep. This was the first time he had felt even the slightest sense of “home” in City A.
Shen Fangyu mistook his sudden silence for modesty, and laughed: “Don’t be shy, it’s no trouble at all.”
Because of that subtle thought lingering in his mind, Jiang Xu’s expression grew a little unnatural. He tossed a pillow at Shen Fangyu. “It’s all feudal superstition. Get up already.”
Hugging the pillow, Shen Fangyu gave him a sideways grin. “Let me touch the baby, and I’ll get up.”
Jiang Xu shot him a glare. Ever since their conversation that night, Shen Fangyu had stopped mentioning compensation or selling his apartment. But whatever he had taken away from Jiang Xu’s words, he’d begun to push his luck in other ways.
Like insisting on taking his days off to match Jiang Xu’s. Or constantly trying to sneak a touch at his belly.
“Then you’d better stay lying there forever,” Jiang Xu said mercilessly, before walking straight out of the room without sparing him another glance.
Of course, Shen Fangyu wasn’t going to stay in bed forever. He hugged the pillow, rolled around on the thin mattress for a while, and eventually got up, moving lazily. Since it was a rare day off, when he saw Jiang Xu about to make instant noodles again, he couldn’t help but say, “Put that down.”
Jiang Xu shot him a puzzled look, only to see Shen Fangyu pulling out an electronic balance, pipettes, and an assortment of beakers and cylinders from the bag, filling the kitchen counter with lab equipment.
“There’s no food in the fridge,” Jiang Xu reminded him.
“And you have the nerve to say that.”
Shen Fangyu opened the fridge, and Jiang Xu saw that the refrigerator, which had been completely empty yesterday, was now packed full of food. Shen Fangyu had really gone all out with his “experimental” spirit, vegetables and meat portioned neatly into separate packs.
“I went to the supermarket after work last night,” Shen Fangyu explained. “You were on night shift.”
Ever since Jiang Xu had smashed the bathroom mirror that night, Shen Fangyu had started walking back with him after work. They still drove separately, but aside from nights when one of them was on shift, the stretch from the parking lot to their front door had become their closest daily interaction.
Once home, Jiang Xu would usually work a bit longer while Shen Fangyu washed up; then when he took his turn working, Jiang Xu would go wash up. Sometimes they talked about work, sometimes they bickered over trivialities. But most of the time, they were both simply tired and busy. A calm, leisurely morning like this was something they hadn’t had since Shen Fangyu moved in.
“You’re really going to use that stuff to make breakfast?” Jiang Xu looked again at the kitchen cluttered with lab equipment, half-convinced whatever came out of it would be toxic.
But Shen Fangyu seemed firmly convinced by the “cooking is like experimenting” mantra his unreliable student had given him. Under Jiang Xu’s look of barely concealed horror, he even tied on a flowery apron he’d bought with the groceries. With full confidence, he turned on the gas stove, only to nearly get blown away by the sudden burst of flames.
Startled, Shen Fangyu stumbled back a step. With a loud whoosh, the flame flared once, then suddenly died, plunging the stove back into lifeless silence.
“What the hell was that?”
Jiang Xu calmly replied, “It’s been at least half a year since I last used it.”
Normally, the only people who cooked in his apartment were his parents. But with Jiang Xu always busy at work, and his parents not yet retired, their visits were rare. So the gas stove sat unused for ages, prone to all sorts of problems.
Shen Fangyu was aghast. “You really are a pampered little princess, never lifting a finger in the kitchen.”
His own cooking skills weren’t great, but compared to Jiang Xu, who didn’t even light the stove at home, he looked like a professional chef.
He tried again to ignite the burner, but this time it wouldn’t light at all. After a few failed attempts, the acrid stench of gas filled the kitchen, making him cough.
“Don’t tell me there’s a gas leak?”
“It’s not that bad,” Jiang Xu said evenly.
Shen Fangyu: “…”
He pulled off the apron, grabbed the keys from the entryway, and said, “I’ll go buy breakfast and find someone to fix the stove.”
Jiang Xu glanced at him and reminded, “Go to the street on the left. Don’t let the locksmith from the other day see you again.”
Otherwise, he really would start to worry people might think there was some horror show going on in his home, first the doors breaking, now the stove exploding.
The stove repairman was quick. By the time they had finished breakfast, the stove was already fixed. The repairman then handed Shen Fangyu a thick stack of business cards, grinning. “Mr. Shen, I remember you, you had our guy Xiao Liu fix two doors the other day.”
Shen Fangyu and Jiang Xu exchanged looks. Before Jiang Xu could start questioning him, Shen Fangyu rushed to explain: “I did go to the left-hand street.”
“Oh, haha,” the repairman said cheerfully. “The guys on both streets are from our company. We keep records of all frequent repair calls in Yuefeng Community. Whenever there’s work, we share it around.”
He pointed at the business cards he handed over. “Unclogging toilets, fixing lightbulbs, repairing appliances, we do it all. Call us again and you’ll even get upgraded to VIP status. Next time you need something fixed, remember us. We’ll be waiting for you!”
With that, he winked, typing on his phone as he walked out of Jiang Xu’s apartment.
In that moment, Jiang Xu couldn’t help but suspect he was sending a message in some work chat group: ‘Unit 1202, Building 3-4, Yuefeng Community, two suckers. Two doors and one stove broken in a week. Almost VIPs now!’
“To be honest, I don’t really want to be a VIP,” Jiang Xu said.
“Me neither.” Shen Fangyu nodded, flipping through the colorful stack of repairman cards. He sighed. “And now I suddenly feel like all those times I gave out hospital parking cards… I wasn’t any different from them. Pretty damn annoying, huh?”
“…” Jiang Xu said, “I’ve given them out too.”
The two of them looked at each other, seeing the same deep self-reflection mirrored in the other’s eyes.
“Next time, maybe we should give something else?”
Shen Fangyu pointed at the newly fixed stove. “Like a meal I cook myself?”
Jiang Xu gave him a look and remarked, “In that case, I think the parking cards might actually be better.”