LCP Ch 1

Liang Ce managed to win Chi An over in just three weeks. He personally believed it was mostly due to his good looks.

They met for the first time on a snowy day. Liang Ce was wearing a new-season Saint Laurent haute couture overcoat, wrapped around a pinstriped shirt and a throat turned red from the cold. The snow acted like a massive reflector board, highlighting his crimson lips, bright white teeth, and strikingly handsome features. His eyes held a look so intense and affectionate he could look at a dog with deep passion—and then, he actually saw a dog.

To be precise, it was a Border Collie. Smart-eyed, sturdy, and clearly well-cared-for, though it wore no collar. Nearby, a blonde-haired man was leaning down to look at it, seemingly just as curious why a dog like this was out alone in the snow on the coldest day of the year. The man’s hair slipped past his ears and draped over his face, obscuring most of his features. Just as he reached out to pat the dog’s head, the large Collie suddenly pounced, knocking him over, pinning him firmly to the ground, and barking fiercely.

Liang Ce stepped forward briskly, deftly raising his arm to let his leather laptop bag land stably on the ground. He bent down and extended a hand: “Are you okay?”

Worrying about triggering the Collie, Liang Ce kept his voice extremely soft. But by then, the dog had stopped barking, stepping off the man to stand beside him, looking a bit guilty for causing someone to fall. Through the dog’s erect ears and the falling snow, Liang Ce finally got a clear look at the man’s face: he seemed to be in pain, his brow knit together; his lips were slightly parted, revealing pale, smooth teeth; his high nose bridge turned toward Liang Ce, and he grabbed Liang Ce’s hand, pulling himself up as he said he was fine and thanked him.

The man no longer needed support, yet he didn’t let go of Liang Ce’s hand. With his free hand, he tucked the fallen hair back behind his ear and smiled at Liang Ce.

Liang Ce blushed. He was very certain it wasn’t from the cold this time.

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They say love at first sight is essentially just physical attraction, and they aren’t wrong. That very night, Liang Ce dreamed of Chi An.

Chi An was the blonde man’s name. He said he was a vet, and if the owner couldn’t be found, he wanted to adopt the dog.

Liang Ce and Chi An took the dog to the vet clinic together, watching Chi An expertly run various checks on the Border Collie. There were small scars on Chi An’s palms and the backs of his hands—some freshly scabbed, others already healed flat—looking like animal scratches and bites. He slipped gloves over hands like those, using his fingertips through the latex to stroke the Collie’s chin. Standing to the side, Liang Ce felt like the dog was being rewarded while he was being punished. With his mouth drawn down and his broad shoulders wrapped in black, he looked a bit cold and aloof, but under his chest, his heart was beating like a drum.

The checkup finished; the pup was very healthy. Chi An said, “Thank you so much for today, Liang Ce. Let’s add each other on WeChat”—Chi An’s voice saying his name sounded so nice, but it was different from the dream. In the dream, the other man could only gasp out his surname: “Liang…” followed by raspy breath, restrained submission, ungrammatical words of passion, and chaotic touches—making Liang Ce want to try harder, so Chi An could never calmly say the word “Ce” again.

Liang Ce woke up with a start. He was already 27 years old, yet he felt ashamed, like he had desecrated something. They had clearly only met once.

Liang Ce wanted to see Chi An a second time right away. Using helping the dog find its owner as an excuse, he printed some lost-pet flyers and distributed them with Chi An around the neighborhood. He also reached out to an acquaintance who was a pet influencer, asking them to post a Xiaohongshu note. Although many people sent direct messages over time, none of their descriptions matched the pup’s traits. Five days later, Chi An posted a photo with the pup on his WeChat Moments. His eyelashes curled upward, the dog was grinning, and his caption announced: 【I have a dog now!】

That photo was taken by Liang Ce. At that exact moment, he was sitting on the floor of Chi An’s apartment under the guise of seeing the dog, catching a glimpse of Chi An replying to comments in his peripheral vision. He liked Chi An’s post.

“It’s almost dinner time. Want to grab a bite together?” he asked.

Chi An didn’t seem to find the invite abrupt at all, naturally saying yes.

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Liang Ce had read a few romance novels. He noticed that the protagonists in them could be poor, have terrible personalities, or even have bad stomachs, but they could never be ugly. Liang Ce thought that perhaps the prerequisite to being loved really was being attractive, and right now he desperately needed that prerequisite, so he made sure he looked stunning for this meal.

He took off his leather jacket and sat down in a plain button-up shirt, rolling his sleeves up to his forearms in the Northern indoor heating. Some men wore shirts that looked empty on them, but he filled his out completely; his flared deltoids filled the fabric at the shoulders, and a brown ribbon around his neck extended down inside the shirt on one side while dangling behind his back on the other.

He saw Chi An pick up a glass and take a sip of water.

Liang Ce hadn’t always been this good at dressing up. Before his sophomore year of college, he had a buzz cut, wore round resin glasses, had a weak build, and got top grades. When his younger brother, Liang Chen, slicked his hair back with gel and skipped tutoring to go on a date with an online lover, Liang Ce would bring the last dish out of the kitchen and place his report card showing his ranking next to his mother’s bowl, waiting for his mom—who was nagging about Liang Chen moving up two places—to notice whose name was next to the grade’s number one spot.

His mother noticed. She said the ribs were a bit bland.

During his sophomore year, some things happened. His mother kicked him out of the house, cut ties, and stopped paying his tuition and living expenses. Liang Ce had to take whatever jobs he could find. He washed dishes, delivered food, and tutored on nights without class, so that touch of noble pride exclusive to nerds vanished. Liang Ce was no longer weak; prominent calluses formed on his pen-holding hands. Later, while moving boxes backstage at a musical, he met a content creator who was shooting footage.

The creator was hiring an assistant and took a liking to Liang Ce. Liang Ce knew Final Cut Pro, took good care of people, was handsome, and could step in front of the camera when needed. In one year, he turned Liang Ce into a well-rounded executor, got him into weightlifting, taught him how to style his hair, and even how to curl his eyelashes with an electric curler. Later, when Liang Ce graduated and finished his part-time work, he used the contacts and business resources he gained from the creator to get recommended for a big tech firm, before being headhunted by an MCN as a Business Director. After working for a few years, he ran into Lu Xi, who came to the company to negotiate a contract termination.

Lu Xi had taught makeup and done menswear content, and was looking for someone to start a business with. That day, timing it right, Liang Ce walked down to the side door of the lobby. Though he never smoked, he had a pack of Treasurer cigarettes ready to hand out at any moment, which he placed right in front of Lu Xi: “They want you to pay 80 million? I can make you pay half of that.” He offered his terms calmly. Lu Xi looked up, observed him for a few seconds, and put his own cigarette back into his pocket.

The long, slim black cigarette burned down, and by the time it finished, their conversation was done.

A month later, Lu Xi paid 200,000 plus three ad obligations, terminating a contract that had five years left. Nobody knew how Liang Ce pulled it off. Two years later, Liang Ce had built him into the biggest live-stream sales host on the Douyue platform. The live-stream channel even carried a family-relatable name: Uncle & Brother-in-Law.

If a live-stream sales host with a “brother-in-law who calls everyone sister” persona ranked first among the least sexually attractive professions in romance novels, Liang Ce’s ranked second: he was Lu Xi’s manager and a partner in his digital media company. When Chi An asked him mid-meal, “What do you do?”, Liang Ce really didn’t know how to make his job sound appealing in just a few words. After thinking it over, he stretched the truth slightly: “Just think of me as an executive secretary who owns company shares.”

Chi An smiled upon hearing this, holding out a hand: “Hello, Secretary Liang.” Liang Ce held it back. He didn’t know how tightly he had the right to hold, and he worried it might already be too tight, because Chi An’s index finger curled back slightly, the pad scraping past Liang Ce’s palm as if shrinking back a little.

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Chi An was pursued and won over by Liang Ce in three weeks. He personally believed it was mostly due to his own perseverance.

He owned a Border Collie he had raised for three years—extremely smart, capable of anything. When Chi An said “jump up”, the 40-plus-pound dog would jump into his arms like a baby to be held.

Chi An walked this dog every day along Liang Ce’s route home from work, wearing a bright scarf and overcoat, exposing his fingers and wrists, letting a few strands of his newly dyed hair rest inside the scarf and on his cheekbones. Chi An’s casual beauty had been grandly rehearsed 18 times, right up until it snowed that day.

Spotting Liang Ce walking over from afar, he quickly bent down, pressed his finger, twisted his wrist, deftly unbuckled the Collie’s collar, hid it in the snow in a few quick moves, leaned close to the pup, and gave the secret command: “Jump up!”

The Border Collie jumped into his arms as trained, but Chi An loosened his grip and didn’t catch it this time. Instead, he let himself fall backward, getting pinned to the ground by the dog. He let out a weak, pathetic groan:

“Ouch… that hurts…”

The dog: ?

The Border Collie had lived with Chi An for three years; it could shake hands, play Turtle Soup deduction games, and fluently master 72 button-dialogue prompts. But looking at its owner pretending to be in pain on the ground, it barked wildly, swearing that this was the dirtiest it had ever cursed.

If random occurrences are the true essence of beauty, then Chi An never wanted Liang Ce to discover that their meeting actually lacked any natural beauty at all—it had all been orchestrated by Chi An, who had been in love with Liang Ce for a very long time. Before Liang Ce ever had an erotic dream about him, Chi An had already suffered through many nightmares about Liang Ce: dreaming of Liang Ce tightly holding a short man with chestnut-colored curls, repeating over and over, “It doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t hurt.”

Where on earth did that person hurt?! Chi An felt bitterly aggrieved. That embrace looked so comfortable—who would feel pain inside it?

Chi An would always wake up gasping for air, wanting to grind his teeth against the hole left behind after taking out his lip ring, but he held back. He wanted the hole to heal quickly so he could go back sooner. After all, constantly thinking about one’s first love really wasn’t a healthy thing.

In Chi An’s eyes, a mentally healthy person secretly liking someone is called a crush; a mentally unhealthy person secretly liking someone is called being a creep. Five months after the nightmares began, the doctor told Chi An he could stop taking his medication. He printed out a picture from Liang Ce’s high school ID card and, for the first time, said to a friend: “I have a crush on him.”

He brought his dog back to the country, looked for a job and rented an apartment around Liang Ce’s company, and finally “bumped” into him on that snowy day. You all know what happened next: Chi An caught Liang Ce running over out of the corner of his eye and refused to let go of his hand; then he added Liang Ce on WeChat, invited him to look for the dog’s owner together, and casually agreed to go out for dinner. At the dinner, Liang Ce unbuttoned his outer layer, and Chi An affectatiously took a sip of water; Liang Ce held his hand, and he scratched Liang Ce’s palm with his pinky finger—he thought this was a form of seduction, but why did Liang Ce loosen his grip instead?

Chi An was a total beginner at the act of seduction, because creeps don’t know how to seduce, …A creep would only say, “Fuck me.” So when Liang Ce came over to his place to see the dog, Chi An cranked the radiant floor heating up to 35°C (95°F) and opened the door for him barefoot, wearing only a white tank top and jeans. His friend Mo Fan said this didn’t look like the start of a romance story—it looked like the first five minutes of a porn video that people fast-forward through. But when Liang Ce appeared in Chi An’s scene, he crouched down to take a photo of Chi An and the dog, his hand so steady and his eyes looking at Chi An so intently that Chi An suddenly really wanted to put on a pair of slippers.