Hidden Under the Rain

Chapter 4: The Last Meeting (4）

When his eyes met mine, my breath caught.

Those eyes were the same as before. Deep black pupils, like two obsidians soaked in water. When they were cold, they were ice. When they were warm, they were fire. I remembered these eyes gazing at my face late at night, finding me accurately in a crowd, turning red as if about to bleed when I said I wanted to break up.

Now, those eyes were fixed on me, unmoving.

"Shen Zhi," he spoke.

His voice was deeper than before, like a cello string tuned down a notch. But the timbre hadn't changed. That unique Gu Shen quality, a little raspy, like a rusty blade scraping across glass, making every pore on my body open up.

"Mm," I replied.

No small talk. No "long time no see." No "how have you been." Between us lay five years of blank space, over eighteen hundred days and nights, during which so much had happened that any polite phrase would have felt false and superfluous.

Gu Shen pushed a glass of water in front of me. His fingers were long, his knuckles defined, his nails neatly trimmed. I noticed a simple silver band on his left ring finger, very thin, almost unnoticeable unless you were looking closely.

My gaze lingered on that ring for half a second, then quickly moved away.

"Where are you going?" I asked.

"Switzerland."

"For how long?"

"I'm not coming back."

An old song was playing in the café, the volume very low, as if drifting from very far away.

"Why the sudden move?" I asked again.

Gu Shen was silent for a few seconds. He lowered his head, his fingers tapping lightly on the table twice. A nervous habit he hadn't changed in five years.

"There's an opportunity there. Neuroscience research. I applied for a long time and finally got approved." He paused. "I'll settle there permanently."

"What about your mother? Did she agree to you going so far away?"

Gu Shen's expression flickered slightly, very subtle, there and gone in an instant. If I hadn't known him so well, I wouldn't have noticed.

"She passed away last year."

My fingers tightened sharply around the glass.

"What?"

"Liver cancer. By the time they found it, it was already terminal. It was less than three months from diagnosis to the end." Gu Shen's voice was very flat, flat as still water, but I saw the hand holding his cup trembling slightly. "She went peacefully. She ate a bowl of noodles I made for her in the afternoon, and by the evening..."

He didn't finish.