Ahe had barely opened her game when a message from Miss J popped up.
Are you okay now? Feeling better?
She knew what that meant: was she over the bad mood yet? But the concern didn’t feel entirely innocent. Sure enough, the next message arrived immediately after:
So you can organize badminton again, right?
I’m still stuck working overtime on documents...
Ahe’s fingers hovered over the keyboard and typed, almost by reflex:
Want the truth? I actually don’t like playing badminton at all...
In the end, she deleted it one character at a time and replaced it with something harmless:
It’s Friday today...
Miss J had been Ahe’s last crush. After three months of getting closer, the confession and the rejection had both felt inevitable. Miss J had handled it as if nothing much had happened.
You’re such a nice person, she had said. You’ll be sad for a couple of days and then you’ll be fine, right? We can still be good friends, right?
Maybe she had seen this kind of thing too many times and found it ordinary. Maybe that only made Ahe seem dramatic by comparison. But friendship was never the point. Ahe had complained bitterly before: I’m not short on friends. I’m short on a girlfriend.
What had really been bothering her lately, though, wasn’t Miss J. It was the realization that she seemed to fall into crushes too easily.
That was exactly why she had opened the game just now: to stop herself from staring at a certain someone’s chat window.
There was nothing wrong with having a crush. Emotional highs and lows were better than total stillness. Attraction and infatuation could feel like brief, vivid sparks in the dark—fleeting, bright, and genuinely joyful. But this particular kind of dizzy obsession, this feeling of being completely bewitched, was too hard to control. It was as if all her emotions had been handed over to another person. In practice, that meant checking her phone 150 times a day, getting restless if there was no reply for more than ten minutes, feeling her whole mood hinge on a typing bubble that never came.
It was a little too much.
Her older sister had once given a brutally simple diagnosis: you’ve been single for too long. It’s hormones, that’s all. Casual hookups are easier. Less overthinking.
There was a certain logic to that, Ahe had to admit. Still, after thinking about it, she tried to defend herself.
The problem is, I only have emotional needs.
That, of course, was the least useful thing a person could say. Nobody really cared about emotional needs. What people did care about—eagerly, tirelessly—was setting other people up. Crushes were rare. Blind dates were not.
By the time Ahe sat down in the café, she had already scanned the room once. Hardly anyone was there, which was good. Fewer witnesses to discomfort.
She checked her phone. No new messages.
She opened the chat anyway, just to make sure. Still nothing. The conversation remained stranded on her own dry lunchtime greeting, and there didn’t seem to be anything natural left to say after that.
She shook herself and tried to focus. She only needed to wait until half past two. But by then, the other person was already fifteen minutes late. Normally Ahe didn’t mind waiting. Waiting could be useful; you could think, observe, waste time productively. But this time she felt especially irritated.
Maybe because the whole setup was absurd.
This was one of those blind dates where neither person seemed particularly interested, yet everyone insisted it should happen anyway.
Ahe was not fundamentally opposed to blind dates. Most of them followed the same script: add each other on WeChat, exchange a few polite greetings, run out of things to say, then remain permanently in each other’s contact lists as strangers who would never speak again—until one day, during some random digital cleanup, one person quietly deleted the other. She had been through that often enough.
But meeting one-on-one, in person, was different. Being in close contact with a stranger was stressful enough already. Add a practical agenda on top of it, and the pressure doubled.
So she looked around the café again.
It was a bad habit. Whenever she got nervous, her eyes drifted automatically, scanning everything except the thing directly in front of her. She couldn’t help it. Sometimes even with someone sitting across from her, her gaze still wandered. People had pointed it out before.
It’s rude, they said. And it makes you look timid.
As if social anxiety and ordinary anxiety could be fixed by being told that.
She checked her phone again for what felt like the tenth time. No messages. It was 2:20. She looked around again.
Two new customers had just come in. One glance was enough to tell they weren’t a couple. The atmosphere between them was so stiff it practically announced itself to the whole café. They sat facing each other, taking turns asking and answering questions like they were conducting a census. Even the barista behind the counter couldn’t help glancing at them.
Maybe that’ll be me in a minute, Ahe thought. Actually, maybe worse. At least they both know why they’re here. At least they both agreed to this.
Then the automatic door opened again. This time it was a pair of students, a boy and a girl, hands clasped, clinging to each other like separation would kill them. They stayed stuck together even while ordering.
Disgusting, she thought. Shameless happy couple.
At 2:29, Ahe picked up her coffee and drained it in one go, just as she was about to let out a long breath.
The door opened again.
A tall woman in a short black skirt walked in. At the exact same moment, Ahe’s phone started ringing.
The woman glanced around the café and immediately spotted her.
Sorry, I’m late...
Everything happened so quickly that Ahe nearly forgot how to breathe.
Hi! I’m—
And then she froze halfway through the sentence.
Which name was she supposed to use? Which version of herself had the matchmaker introduced? She realized, too late, that she had never even asked. That was how little she had cared about this meeting beforehand.
Luckily, the other woman didn’t seem to notice the awkward pause. She gave an embarrassed smile.
I’m Q. You’ve been waiting a long time, haven’t you?
You’re half an hour late, aren’t you aware of that? Ahe swallowed the thought.
She gestured for Q to sit down instead.
Did you come by subway?
The moment the question came out, Ahe hated it. It had the same desperate, scraping-for-conversation quality as her equally awkward attempts at chatting on WeChat. She sneaked another glance at her phone.
Yeah, straight here by subway, Q replied.
Then nothing.
She didn’t seem especially good at conversation either.
So Ahe had to keep it going herself.
That must’ve taken quite a while, right?
Fortunately, the server arrived with coffee at exactly that moment and rescued the exchange before it died completely.
Q checked her phone and suddenly said, We should take a picture and send it to Xiao K. She’s really concerned.
Xiao K was the overenthusiastic matchmaker who had more or less bullied them into meeting in the first place—threatening friendship itself, if necessary. She was almost certainly messaging Q already, asking how the date was going. Even Ahe’s earlier dating profile had been written under Xiao K’s relentless persuasion. Ahe didn’t like her friends interfering too much in her personal life, but unless something touched a real principle, she usually avoided refusing too directly.
Oh, right, Ahe said. She’s been saying for ages she wanted to introduce us. And then she mentioned you’d broken up with X not long ago...
The words were out before she could stop them, and she immediately regretted being so blunt.
Right, right—you know X too, don’t you? That was my ex-girlfriend.
The mention of an ex changed Q instantly. The reserve she had shown at the beginning vanished. She became unexpectedly animated and started pouring out the whole story at once.
Ahe listened in mounting disbelief.
Wait. This can’t be right, she thought.
We’ve just met. This is our first time seeing each other.
And this is supposed to be a blind date.