It was during that period that I truly understood a principle: if you mess around, you’ll have to pay for it sooner or later.

One day, Ben got dumped and lost his job at the same time. In the dead of night, he came to me to pour out his heart. That sounds a bit too subtle—in reality, this guy was a total animal. He basically crashed at my place, eating, drinking, and smoking for free for two months straight, even making a dent in my living room sofa from sleeping on it.

Less than two months after he arrived, I broke up with her. She felt that having a hot-blooded young man suddenly appear in our world of two ruined the mood, but at the time, I didn’t think there was anything wrong with it. Many years later, I realized that there’s really no such thing as losing something for someone else; it’s just that our values were different.

Later on, I thought, maybe everything in this world really is connected by fate. For example, if I hadn’t relied on Ben’s help to buy that train ticket that day, I never would have met her, and none of what followed would have happened.

So, by that logic, everything is predestined.

But if you believe in fate too much, people start to feel weak and powerless.

When I turned thirty, I suddenly felt lost, not knowing whether I should accept fate or not.

Sorry for rambling about my feelings for Sao Rui—let’s get back to the airport. In the next few trips to the airport, nothing exciting happened, no romantic encounters, no fantasies—everything was as bland as my married life.

Until this afternoon, when my luck was no longer so ordinary.

In front of me was an aisle, and on the chair across the aisle sat a woman. To put it plainly, we were sitting face to face, just a few meters apart. I’m being long-winded mainly to make the scene sound a bit poetic: I was on this side, she was on that side.

These days, a lot of women look twenty-seven or twenty-eight with makeup, but thirty-seven or thirty-eight without it. Because of that, I couldn’t really tell how old the woman across from me was—my guess was about twenty-seven or twenty-eight with makeup. Actually, what caught my attention wasn’t her age, but her black spring suit and black stockings.

Even sitting down, I could tell she was tall. As for her figure, there was no need to guess—you could see it at a glance. Especially those long legs, enough to stir up a lot of long stems.

She leaned back in her chair and fell asleep.

That last sentence sounds a bit heartless, but it’s just stating a fact. Whether she was too tired or suffering from altitude sickness, she just sat right across from me and fell asleep.

Falling asleep was one thing, but she shamelessly spread her legs wide open.

What a fitting scene—let’s recall the first ten words of this story:

A woman closed her eyes and spread her legs.

Seeing this, I was instantly furious.

Sitting right across from me and daring to spread your legs—do you think I don’t exist?

Anger welled up inside me, and with evil thoughts at the ready, I immediately pulled out my glasses from my bag.

Why did I pull out my glasses? Because I’m mildly nearsighted!

I quickly put on my glasses and looked straight between her legs.

To be honest, I bought glasses for two reasons: one, they add a bit of cultured, beastly, artistic flair to my look; two, they help me see more clearly when I’m checking people out. This goes back to a painful experience: back in high school, a few bad friends and I snuck onto a rooftop to peep at a young woman taking a bath. They all saw clearly, but I could only see a blur. I was so frustrated that the next day I got myself a pair of glasses, even though I haven’t worn them 95% of the time in the years since.

I never expected that even with glasses, there would be times when I still couldn’t see.

Like now—I stared hard, but what I wanted to see just wasn’t there.

After a couple of minutes of pondering, I figured out the problem. The woman across from me wasn’t just wearing black stockings—add two more words: black pantyhose. I never realized before how vicious pantyhose could be—they can block out even what shouldn’t be blocked.

All I saw was darkness; when I closed my eyes, it was night.

Damn it, I hate black stockings!

Chapter 002 Then

“Be sure to control your emotions.”

Over the past year, I’ve been getting inexplicably irritable. The above is a warning from a psychologist. Even though I always felt that doctor wasn’t very skilled—everything he said I could find online—sometimes I still can’t help but remember his advice.

I used the simplest deep-breathing technique to control my emotions, trying not to care whether I could score with the black-stockinged beauty across from me. Since I already had my glasses on, it seemed a shame not to keep looking, so after checking out her lower half, I started to observe her upper half.

Her upper half was far less lethal than her lower half. Her chest, somewhere between a B-cup and a C-cup, wasn’t particularly impressive. Instead, it was her face that gave me a sense of déjà vu.

Speaking of her looks, I have some experience.

Back when I was writing, trying to create a female protagonist, I racked my brains and used all sorts of flowery language, even coming up with lines like “comparing West Lake to Xizi.” I wrote thousands of words, but readers still couldn’t picture what the heroine looked like. If I ran into a hot-tempered, old-school reader, they’d curse me out for padding the word count.