Your Distance

After Ting Shuang moved back into the house, he spent more time with Zhu Ao.

He talked to Bai Changyi about the changes in his relationship with Zhu Ao, mainly using two old sayings. The first saying was: The tiger and his canine son.(1)

That was what he and Zhu Ao used to be like.

The second saying was: The tiger left his mighty hills and ended up trapped on the plains, where even a dog could bully it.(2)

That was them now.

Hearing that, Bai Changyi felt like laughing, “What did you do?”

“I didn’t do anything.” It was autumn. Outside the window, falling leaves were being blown around. Ting Shuang leisurely poured himself a cup of coffee and put his feet up on the table, “When I was young, he always refused to let me eat what I wanted, like ice cream. He also didn’t let me play games with my classmates. So now, he also can’t go out to eat, drink, or play cards with his friends, just like me when I was a kid. He has to eat healthy and try his best to learn – he’s recently been practising walking, though most of the time he still sits in a wheelchair.”

At a certain point in life, the distribution of power between father and son would suddenly change.

Most fathers and sons would go through that.

At this point, an inevitable war would occur between father and son. After the war, the son would then realise that his father had become an old man, or in other words, returned to being a child.

The war between Ting Shuang and Zhu Ao had taken place in the hospital ward. Ting Shuang had swapped places with Zhu Ao in that battle. Just like how he’d let Zhu Ao see his tears when he was a child, he also saw Zhu Ao’s tears in the ward. Now, he even had to watch as Zhu Ao practiced walking, speaking, and holding chopsticks and his pen.

Everything had been reversed.

“I feel like I’ve become the head of the family.” Ting Shuang concluded with his feet propped up.

Bai Changyi said, “I’ve already envisioned what my life would look like in the future.”

“Really?” Ting Shuang imagined himself being domineering around Bai Changyi, “Dear, when I go back, can I be the head of our family?”

Bai Changyi laughed, “I thought it was always you.”

Ting Shuang was just about to say something when there was a knock on the door behind him.

“Who is it? The door’s locked, wait a minute.” He held his phone as he got up to open the door.

“It’s me.” Zhu Ao’s voice sounded from outside the door.

Ting Shuang originally intended to hang up before opening the door, but on second thought, his dad couldn’t avoid seeing Bai Changyi forever. Now just happened to be a good time for his dad to get familiar with Professor Bai Changyi’s alternative identity.

“You’re not hanging up?” Bai Changyi asked.

Ting Shuang said, “When I was a kid, my dad always made me try my best to get used to his partner. Now that the tables have turned, it’s time for him to try his best to get used to my partner. Besides, my partner is much better than his.”

Bai Changyi laughed, reminding him, “Don’t go overboard.”

“I know.” Ting Shuang opened the door and saw the nurse pushing Zhu Ao around, “Dad, what’s the matter?”

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“I’m calling you out for dinner.” Zhu Ao looked at Ting Shuang’s phone screen, “What are you doing?”

“I’m video calling my–” Ting Shuang had always called Bai Changyi ‘my professor’ in front of Zhu Ao as he was afraid that Zhu Ao would feel uncomfortable hearing other names, but now he felt like it was better to openly refer to him as how partners usually would. Because it was natural, and deliberately avoiding those taboos made him appear even more guilty, “Partner.”

Sure enough, Zhu Ao found it redundant, “Ting Shuang, did you forget how to speak Chinese after studying abroad?”

“Dad, you want to hear the Chinese version?” Ting Shuang grinned, looking very innocent, “I said, I’m video calling my husband.”

The expression on Zhu Ao’s face did not change, and his gaze just slowly moved from Ting Shuang’s face to Bai Changyi’s face on the screen.

Husband.

Storms and rough waters? Zhu Ao had gone through them.

Homophobia? Zhu Ao had overcome that.

His son finding a man twelve years older than him to marry? Zhu Ao had accepted it.

Now, right in front of him, his son was calling his brother Bai ‘husband’.

9,000 kilometers away, Bai Changyi felt the tense atmosphere through the screen, and called out in a warning tone, “Ting.”

Ting Shuang replied, “Yes.”

Zhu Ao turned his head and said to the nurse, “Bring me back to my room, I have a headache.”

The nurse: “Then dinner…?”

Zhu Ao: “I won’t be eating anymore.”

Ting Shuang followed behind the wheelchair for two steps, and whispered to the nurse, “Bring the food to my dad’s room. Remember to check his blood pressure.”

After the nurse pushed the wheelchair away, Ting Shuang said to Bai Changyi, “I seemed to have gone a little overboard. But I think the overall idea isn’t wrong. You can’t go about this matter with logic alone, you have to get used to it from continuous exposure. I’ll shock him once every two or three days, and he’ll slowly grow desensitized.”

Of course, he couldn’t just give him shocks.

He had to send him some warmth too.

The next day, Ting Shuang took out the shoes he’d bought at the airport when he returned to China, and asked Zhu Ao to try and see if they fit him. Zhu Ao was wearing slippers and sat in the wheelchair, his expression screaming uncooperativeness. The word ‘husband’ was too powerful, and he hadn’t gotten over it yet.

Ting Shuang put the shoes in the shoe cabinet and said, “Forget it, you have a lot of shoes anyway. I’m going to work.”

Only when Ting Shuang left the house did Zhu Ao ask the caregiver to bring the shoes over. After trying them and seeing that they fit, the shoes never left his feet since.

After being discharged from the hospital, except for rehabilitation under the guidance of a rehabilitation doctor, Zhu Ao generally stayed at home. After this illness, his life had slowed down suddenly, as if he had retired. In the past, he didn’t care about what was added to or thrown out of the house, and he didn’t notice any changes either. Now, even an extra postcard couldn’t escape his eyes.

The nanny accepted the packages and letters that had been mailed to them and brought them in, putting them on the table.

At a glance, Zhu Ao caught sight of the postcard from Germany. The front of the postcard was a picture of the Cologne Cathedral, and the back was full of words, but aside from a sentence saying “I wrote two more sentences as requested” and the address being in Chinese, the rest were in German, and Zhu Ao couldn’t understand a single word.

The content of the postcard was out in the open, so it wasn’t anything private. With nothing to do, Zhu Ao was bored and curious, so he asked the nurse to look for a German-Chinese dictionary on Ting Shuang’s bookshelf.

He flipped through it, and it was incredible. The first word meant baby, my heart, and dear.

Zhu Ao immediately put the dictionary aside, and decided not to read any of Ting Shuang’s postcards ever again.

A proper distance should be kept between father and son.

But his son didn’t let him do so.

For example, when they ate breakfast together as a family, Ting Shuang would say, “This bread isn’t as good as the ones Changyi bakes.”

Or he would say, “Where did you buy this jam? Dad, I’ll send you homemade ones in the future. Changyi and I planted some blueberries.”

Zhu Wenjia also echoed, “My sister-in-law is really capable.”

When Zhu Ao was reading a scholarly magazine, Ting Shuang would come over and say, “Dad, are you reading? I read this article yesterday and it was very well written.”

Zhu Ao was about to ask for Ting Shuang’s opinion, but Ting Shuang’s next sentence was, “It quoted an article published by Changyi last year in ‘International Journal of Robotics Research’.”

Zhu Ao put the magazine aside.

Ting Shuang picked up the magazine and turned it over while saying emotionally, “Dad, it’s such a blessing for you to have such a half-son.”

Zhu Ao repeated, “Half-son.”

“That’s right.” Ting Shuang said, “I don’t think it’s very appropriate to call him your son-in-law or daughter-in-law. Dad, what do you think?”

Zhu Ao: “So, you think half-son is appropriate?”

Ting Shuang: “It’s a compromise, you can call him whatever you want.”

When he said this, Ting Shuang continued wearing a gentle smile, which rendered Zhu Ao unable to protest.

From time to time, there would be little things added to the house.

First, it was a book signed by Bai Changyi on the coffee table. Second, it was a machine that helped to flip books automatically. Ting Shuang said that Bai Changyi bought it, so Zhu Ao wouldn’t have to turn the pages by himself.

One day, Zhu Ao looked out the window to see Ting Shuang and two workers planting an unusually tall and handsome-looking cypress tree in the yard.

When he finally realised what Ting Shuang was up to(3), Zhu Ao realised that he had really become accustomed to the fact that Ting Shuang and Bai Changyi were together.

One early Sunday morning, he waited for Ting Shuang and Zhu Wenjia to have breakfast in the dining area, and was getting ready to tell Ting Shuang, at the dining table, that he could stop sending him pictures of two certain people and one dog all day long. He had seen enough.

After waiting for a while, neither Ting Shuang nor Zhu Wenjia had left their bedrooms. Zhu Ao guessed that the two sons wanted to sleep in, so he ate by himself. It was boring eating by himself, so Zhu Ao asked the nurse to turn on the small bluetooth speaker on the table.

Ting Shuang had bought the speaker two days ago, and it looked like the old radios that Zhu Ao used to listen to when he was young. He liked it very much.

The nurse turned on the speaker and was about to help Zhu Ao link it to his mobile phone to listen to the morning news or something, when the speaker sounded, “Connected to Bluetooth.”

The nurse was surprised, “I haven’t connected–“

As he spoke, Bai Changyi’s low voice came from the speaker, “Ting, tilt the camera further down, I can’t see it.”

That voice sounded much more sultry than anything Zhu Ao had ever heard before.

Tilt the camera further down, I can’t see it.

That professor, no, that beast, what did he want to see?

He was undeserving of his title as a professor.

The nurse glanced at Zhu Ao nervously, “This…”

At the same time, in the bedroom, Ting Shuang said to Bai Changyi through the screen, “Why can’t I hear your voice anymore? Let me see… It seems like it’s connected to another device via Bluetooth. I just turned the Bluetooth off. Okay, what did you say just now?”

Bai Changyi said, “I said, tilt the camera further down, I can only see a bit of the top of the tree.”

“Oh… I didn’t realise…” Ting Shuang reduced the angle of the phone camera facing the courtyard outside the window, “Can you see the whole cypress tree now?”