AM Chapter 9

09 After Drinking

Lying was commonplace for Chen Mo. Although Chen Mo didn’t think he always lied intentionally, a lot of the time he lied out of situational necessity, to protect himself.

For example, when he was in the first grade of elementary school, he had a minor argument with a classmate—

It started when that classmate bumped his desk while chasing in the aisle. Chen Mo, annoyed, went to the other person’s desk before class and bumped it back, and then the two of them started arguing. Even though the bell had already rung and the teacher was about to arrive, their dispute directly affected the start of the class.

After class, Chen Mo was taken to the office for questioning because everyone in the class had seen him walk towards that desk first. Chen Mo’s own desk was four rows away.

“Why did you go and mess with someone else’s desk?”

Faced with the homeroom teacher’s question, Chen Mo didn’t shout and retort like a typical kid, “He messed with my desk first.” Maybe it was because there were too many teachers in the office, and the atmosphere in the office was much more serious and quiet than in class, so under the increased pressure, Chen Mo stammered, “I just… saw his desk was crooked… and wanted to help him move it.”

Why could he remember so clearly something that happened in the first grade of elementary school more than a decade ago? Probably because even to himself, who was already sensible at the time, the lie seemed absurd—the desk he claimed was crooked was right against the wall.

Chen Mo had told many similarly absurd lies, mostly when he was in the lower grades of elementary school:

He saw a brand-new mechanical pencil, which teachers had strictly forbidden bringing to school, fall on the ground. He picked it up, put it in his pencil case, and secretly used it himself. Later, when the original owner of the pencil found out and told the teacher, Chen Mo said, “I thought my mom bought it for me. It just suddenly appeared in my pencil case.”

Also, he got into an argument with a classmate and, imitating a character in a cartoon, “spit” at the other person several times with disdain. The person actually ran to the teacher crying and complained, “Chen Mo spat on me.” Chen Mo’s response was, “I thought he seemed hot, so I wanted to blow some air on him…”

Having lived for twenty years, Chen Mo had told countless lies, but most of the ones that made him blush and feel dizzy when he recalled them happened when he was young.

By the time he went abroad to attend university, his lying skills were already perfect, especially when dealing with those foreign classmates. They were all as straightforward, enthusiastic, and gullible as Jiang Jinhao. They would believe anything he said and even express support and approval, which sometimes made him start to believe his own lies.

But there were always some lies that he couldn’t believe himself, couldn’t deceive himself with, and even left a deep claw mark in his heart after he said them. Every time he thought of them, he would feel an unbearable itch.

In the second week after Liang Jingren and Shen Qing returned to China, Chen Mo, who was temporarily single, was dragged by Lucas to a party. Chen Mo’s mood was so-so; it wasn’t good, and it wasn’t bad. In any case, he wasn’t in the mood to dance with anyone, so he quietly found a corner to drink by himself.

While he was drinking alone, many people came to talk to him, but he always managed to politely dismiss them with a few words. So when Lucas, who had been playing so hard that his face was red, saw him, he was sitting alone in a corner under the dim light, his long eyelashes drooping as they reflected the glow of the phone screen, as if separated from the bright and lively party by a barrier, appearing especially lonely.

Lucas felt that it was wrong to just have fun himself and leave his roommate all alone, so he felt a surge of sympathy and specially brought over some wine to console him.

Lucas moved a bar stool to sit next to him and realized that he had actually been drinking. Maybe it was the effect of the alcohol, but that day Chen Mo actually took the initiative to talk about Liang Jingren—that step-father, step-mother he hated so much.

Chen Mo asked Lucas, “He should have bought a new phone and gotten a phone card, right? Why haven’t I received a single call yet?”

“Did he change his number? Could it have been filtered out when he was blocking spam calls?”

“Could it be that he didn’t save my number? He doesn’t remember my number at all…”

Lucas didn’t know how to respond.

Liang Jingren had sent him a message to let him know he was safe shortly after the plane landed, using Shen Qing’s number. But from what Chen Mo was saying, Ren-ge seemed to have only told him that he was safe.

But didn’t Chen Mo hate Liang Jingren? Didn’t he want to “kill him”? Would he care about Liang Jingren’s calls and messages?

Lucas saw him staring at the contact list on his phone, completely unable to understand him. After shaking his head, he drank his own wine and sighed, “What kind of person is Ren-ge to you, anyway…”

“Ren-ge, he… is very handsome.”

Lucas suddenly turned his head to look at him—Chen Mo just said… “Ren-ge”?

“Oh, no, I mean Liang Jingren.” Chen Mo seemed to realize his slip of the tongue and immediately corrected himself.

But Lucas wasn’t as dumb as Jiang Jinhao and didn’t easily let it go. He teased, “You don’t like Ren-ge, do you?”

Chen Mo picked up the wine bottle next to him and shook it. “What makes you think I like him?”

Lucas thought to himself, “He’s not going to smash me with the wine bottle, is he?” But his mouth still couldn’t help but be a little mischievous and said, “What’s the saying? Hate stems from love?”

Surprisingly, unbelievably, Chen Mo didn’t get angry at him and even admitted it to some extent! Chen Mo looked down at the wine bottle in his hand and said, “Maybe.”

Lucas felt like he had stumbled upon some truth and “wow”-ed in his heart. Looking cautiously at Chen Mo, who kept his head down, he realized that Chen Mo seemed to be about to fall asleep.

Lucas gently touched the bottle in Chen Mo’s hand with his own, smiling and saying, “Alcohol is really a good thing~”

But no matter how gently they touched, the sound of glass bottles was always especially crisp. Chen Mo seemed to wake up with a start and suddenly raised his head and blinked.

Lucas smiled awkwardly, thinking, “It’s good that he’s awake, so I don’t have to carry him back later.”

“Ah, alcohol is indeed a good thing.” Unexpectedly, Chen Mo picked up on this sentence after perking up.

“But Ren-ge doesn’t touch alcohol at all.” Now that Chen Mo had confessed, Lucas could mention Liang Jingren to him without any burden.

Chen Mo narrowed his eyes and said, “You took him to a bar?”

Lucas scratched his head, “There’s nothing else fun around here…”

“Oh, so he doesn’t drink now…” Chen Mo said softly, tilting his head back and taking a swig from the bottle.

Lucas said, “He ordered sparkling water at the bar. A girl offered him a cocktail, but he asked if it had alcohol and pushed it to me when he found out.”

“He used to drink,” Chen Mo said. “He even worked as a bartender, well… actually, he was the boss. He ran a bar, but it reportedly went bankrupt quickly.”

Lucas’ eyes widened. “I’ve never heard of that!”

Chen Mo raised his lips triumphantly. “There’s no need to tell outsiders these things.”

“Oh~ you really know him well~” Lucas teased him in a deliberately disgusting tone.

Chen Mo didn’t care, but he suddenly thought of something and smiled secretly, as if he had hidden some treasure but was pretending to be nonchalant. It made Lucas feel itchy with curiosity and kept asking him what he was smiling about.

Chen Mo cleared his throat. “I know the reason why Liang Jingren quit drinking—”

He stopped halfway through his sentence, which made Lucas anxious to death, almost grabbing him by the collar.

Chen Mo drank the last drop of wine from the bottom of the bottle, his eyes filled with a hazy drunkenness. He continued, “He’s especially, especially awful when he’s drunk… He turns into a sex-crazed maniac who’s indiscriminate with gender…”

“Especially, especially crazy…”

In fact, Chen Mo didn’t like Liang Jingren’s appearance after he got drunk, especially on the night of his eighteenth birthday.

The events of that night changed the relationship between the two and directly reversed Chen Mo’s life trajectory—all because Liang Jingren got drunk.

Although whenever he recalled it, that late night seemed very beautiful.

The dizziness brought on by the hangover lasted until noon the next day. Chen Mo, who had a poor appetite, slapped his head hard on the apartment balcony, as if trying to shake all the water out of his brain.

—He really thought his brain was filled with water!

He had actually confided in Lucas about Liang Jingren last night, so much so that Lucas dared to mention Liang Jingren to him openly and brazenly in broad daylight and even said he was going to call Liang Jingren! Their daytime meant that it was already evening on Liang Jingren’s side!

“Alcohol really isn’t a good thing, tsk.”

The hangover medicine in the apartment was running out, and Lucas, the skilled medicine transporter, was about to go out again.

Before leaving, he specially went to Chen Mo and teased him, “Everyone says ‘truth comes out after drinking,’ it’s so true!” Lucas said with emotion.

But this saying didn’t really work on Chen Mo. He didn’t just speak the truth after drinking; he mixed truth and lies together so that everything seemed real.

In fact, because Chen Mo became quiet and listless after drinking, people thought he had good drinking manners, mistakenly believing that he was a very honest person and was telling the truth.

Anyway, Lucas believed it.

In the past, Lucas had secretly contacted Liang Jingren behind his back. Since that day, it was confirmed that Chen Mo’s hate stemmed from love and that he still had feelings for Liang Jingren in his heart, to the extent that they wouldn’t be strangers for the rest of their lives. Chen Mo even seemed to be vaguely expecting Liang Jingren to contact him. Therefore, afterwards, Lucas directly and openly had voice calls and video chats with Liang Jingren in front of Chen Mo to provoke him.

As a result, the backlash arrived. One day, his phone bore the brunt of everything and suffered the tragedy of falling from the fourth floor.

Chen Mo had installed a special plug-in on the phone he replaced for Lucas, basically meaning that the person using it would have no privacy at all. The poor Lucas used it for two years without knowing, fortunately, Chen Mo wasn’t interested in most of his privacy—he only monitored the calls and messages from across the ocean.

After the busy graduation season passed, time seemed to suddenly slow down. Lucas and his friends went on a road trip, and the air in the apartment became quiet as a result.

This morning, Chen Mo lazily got out of bed and slowly made himself a cup of oatmeal coffee.

He picked up the mug, and with his other hand, he swiped through the schedule on the tablet. He still needed a few necessary materials to finalize his graduate school spot, and there was Professor Tom’s project… and the domestic real estate transaction issues. Although he had found a lawyer with a good reputation through alumni connections to help, it was still a cross-border transaction, so he had to pay attention to it.

The phone placed next to the vase suddenly displayed an incoming call—the caller’s name was a string of gibberish.

Chen Mo frowned slightly, thinking, “Liang Jingren is calling Lucas at this time?”

He answered the phone a little late, a few seconds later than Lucas, so he didn’t hear what the other side said, only Lucas’s startled cry:

“Ren-ge had a car accident—!?”

The oatmeal coffee tilted, and the blue pompon chrysanthemums, the most durable flowers in the white vase on the dining table, withered at this moment.