The Maid Outfit and a Lingering Gaze

Jiang Chen’s gaze sharpened on the disheveled figure on the track, and his lips twitched involuntarily.

‘This one is risking life and limb to avoid the Lolita costume.’

‘Avoid it? No way! He clearly planned this whole thing!’

Clutching the package, Zhou Yi gritted his teeth. ‘Even after he finishes the three-thousand-meter run, he won’t escape my wrath! I’ll be waiting for him at the finish line!’

Yet, even after the sports festival concluded, the awards ceremony disbanded, and the crowd dwindled, Zhou Yi still hadn’t managed to corner those two rascals.

Fuming, he carried the package—a delivery of warmth that had failed to reach its intended recipients—all the way back to his dorm. The moment he stepped inside, he slammed it onto his desk with a resonant thud.

The more he dwelled on it, the angrier he became, and the more bitter the feeling turned.

‘Fine, so both of you want to play a game of vanishing into thin air, do you?! Just you wait, I’ll find a chance to make sure those maid outfits end up on you! If you’re so brave, then don’t ever come back to the dorm!’

Leaning against the doorframe, Jiang Chen watched his roommate, whose face was puffed out with indignation as he paced the room in circles, and a helpless smile touched his lips.

Yet, as his gaze settled on Zhou Yi’s profile, made exceptionally vivid by his anger, Jiang Chen’s thoughts drifted uncontrollably. They returned to that fleeting instant on the track, to the fragmented memory that flashed before his eyes.

The delicate brush of falling confetti, the fervent warmth of the applause from the stands, and the yielding softness of the body in his arms… every single detail was too vivid to be a mere dream.

More crucially, he had finally glimpsed “her” in her entirety.

Her long hair shimmered with a soft luminescence under the spotlight, her profile exquisitely delicate, and her eyes curved like crescent moons when she smiled.

It was undeniably clear.

Far more real, and infinitely more captivating, than anything he had ever been able to conjure or piece together in his countless midnight dreams.

Since that inexplicable surge of emotion had first appeared, this was the first time—from then until now—that he felt as though he had personally lifted the veil of mist shrouding his dreams, allowing him to touch the elusive “reality” up close.

Yet, what followed was an even profounder sense of confusion and sheer absurdity.

Why would that girl—with her shoulder-length hair, flowing skirt, and radiant smile—share a name with his current roommate, a person with short, neat hair, dressed in baggy sportswear, and currently fuming and stomping his feet?

He lifted his gaze, observing his roommate, who was now unboxing the package with his back turned. That slender figure was slowly, inexorably, beginning to merge with the image of the girl from his memory.

‘Could it be…’

A conjecture so audacious it bordered on the utterly bizarre had just revealed the barest tip of its iceberg in his mind.

“Chen Ge!” Zhou Yi suddenly spun around, holding up the pink maid outfit he had just shaken from the package. “You know, if I were to stuff this into Chen Hao’s locker…”

His words abruptly trailed off.

Jiang Chen was staring at him with an gaze so profoundly complex and inscrutable it was impossible to decipher.

The depth of that gaze was unsettling, as if it sought to pierce through to his very soul.

“What’s wrong?” Zhou Yi asked, a sudden, inexplicable guilt seizing him as he subtly tucked the maid outfit behind his back. “I—I was just kidding around…”

“Zhou Yi,” Jiang Chen suddenly uttered, his voice taut with an unspoken tension.

“Hm?”

Jiang Chen opened his mouth, the questions surging to his lips—

‘Have you ever used jasmine-scented shower gel?’

‘Did you ever have long hair?’

‘Did we receive a strange award together at some point?’

Yet, as his gaze met Zhou Yi’s eyes—eyes that were currently wide with innocence, confusion, and a faint flicker of unease—not a single question managed to escape his lips.

“It’s nothing,” Jiang Chen finally said, shaking his head. He forcefully extinguished the chaotic thoughts swirling in his mind and turned towards his desk. “Tomorrow, the entrepreneurship class teacher expects us to preview the cases from Chapter Three. Don’t forget.”

At Jiang Chen’s words, Zhou Yi clapped his hands over his ears with a groan of anguish.

“Shouldn’t we be celebrating the end of the sports festival by giving students a day off to recover?” he lamented. “Why are there still classes? Is this a distortion of human nature or a complete decay of morality?!”

Saturday morning dawned bright and sunny, a perfect day that should have been dedicated to sleeping in until one naturally awoke.

‘What about a student’s basic human rights?’

Zhou Yi struggled to sit up, clutching his quilt. The familiar, heavy, dull ache in his chest returned, shadowing him, forcing him to pause as his complexion paled further.

“Hiss…”

He drew a shallow breath, resolutely forcing the discomfort back down.

“Perhaps the counselor believes,”

Jiang Chen, already impeccably dressed, was meticulously fastening the top button of his shirt. “Entrepreneurship demands no rest,” he stated. “Rest is for failures.”

Zhou Yi was utterly choked by this capitalist declaration, left speechless. All he could do was roll off the bed, a picture of indignant sorrow.

****

By the time the two of them ambled into the classroom, there were still ten minutes remaining before class began.

It was still early. In the tiered classroom, designed to accommodate over a hundred people, only a sparse dozen students were scattered about—a mix of the exceptionally diligent and the undeniably unfortunate.

Zhou Yi’s eyes swept across the room like radar. Chen Hao… still hadn’t arrived. Zhao Lei… wasn’t here either.

‘These two rascals…’

‘It seems they’re dead set on avoiding him to the very last.’

Though he failed to spot the two he sought, his gaze instead landed on Han Yan. As always, Han Yan sat in his customary corner, enveloped in an aura of calm, as if protected by an invisible barrier.

He occupied his usual window-side seat, his gaze behind the gold-rimmed glasses remaining perfectly calm and unruffled.

What was different, however, was that his desk, in addition to his laptop, was currently laden with several items that seemed utterly out of place:

A steaming cup of coffee, a sandwich meticulously wrapped in parchment paper, and a small container of freshly washed strawberries beside them.

And the girl he had seen on the sports field yesterday was now seated right beside him.

“Holy crap…”

Zhou Yi nudged Jiang Chen beside him with an elbow, whispering, “Is the Study God being kept as a sugar baby?”

Jiang Chen followed his line of sight, a flicker of surprise causing his eyebrow to arch slightly.

The girl, dressed in a creamy knit sweater with her long hair cascading over her shoulders, carefully nudged the coffee on the table closer to Han Yan’s hand. “If you skip breakfast in the mornings, you’ll easily get stomach pains…”

Han Yan’s gaze finally lifted from his screen. He glanced at the breakfast and coffee on his desk, remained silent for two seconds, then spoke.

“Lin Wei,” he uttered, calling her name.

Lin Wei’s eyes instantly brightened, fixed intently on him.

“You really don’t need to do this,” he stated, before shifting his gaze back to his laptop.

Lin Wei’s eyes immediately dimmed again. “I—I just happened to be passing by…” she stammered. “It’s no trouble at all…”

Zhou Yi watched, his eyebrows twitching involuntarily.

The entire scene felt incongruous and awkward, no matter how he viewed it.

Remembering Han Yan’s unequivocal rejection of that girl under the streetlamp the other day, it became clear this was the same Lin Wei.

Comparing that memory to Lin Wei’s almost humble persistence now, Zhou Yi felt an intense wave of secondhand embarrassment, making him want to sink into the floor.

It wasn’t until the class bell rang and the professor entered the classroom that Han Yan finally closed his laptop.

He turned to the girl still stiffly seated beside him. “Lin Wei.”

“Hm?” The girl’s head snapped up, her eyes wide with eager anticipation.

“I drank the coffee,” he said, picking up the now lukewarm cup from the table and taking a symbolic sip. “But starting tomorrow, you truly don’t need to bring it anymore.”

A simple sentence, yet it instantly reddened Lin Wei’s eyes. She quickly lowered her head, her long hair falling to obscure most of her face.

With tightly pressed lips, she silently gathered the breakfast items, one by one, and placed them into her canvas bag.

Just then, the classroom’s back door was suddenly pushed open a crack.

Two furtive figures, one after the other, slipped inside. Taking advantage of the professor turning to write on the blackboard, they swiftly darted to the empty seats in the back row.

It was Chen Hao and Zhao Lei.