The next morning, the Lin family atmosphere dropped to freezing point, as if the air itself had solidified into a thin layer of frost.
Yu An did not appear at the breakfast table. Yu Han stared at the slice of toast that had gradually gone stale and untouched, her heart feeling as though a damp lead block had been stuffed inside, so heavy that even breathing felt laborious. Yu Xi, unusually silent, chewed her cereal with a dull, flavorless sound. Before leaving, Yu Xi swept a penetrating, icy, almost cruel gaze over Yu An’s tightly shut bedroom door, then leaned close to Yu Han’s ear and whispered:
「Some things, even if you pretend not to see them, will still grow there, Big Sister. They might even grow teeth and swallow us all.」
At school, Yu An’s seat remained empty all day.
Yu Han sat in the classroom, the teacher’s voice on the podium muffled and distant as if behind a thick pane of glass. Her mind kept replaying Yu An’s words from last night: “I hate that we share the same blood.” That sentence was like a rusty scalpel, brutally slicing open the facade of a “warm family” she had carefully maintained, revealing the raw, twisted flesh beneath.
After school, a steady drizzle began to fall again. Yu Han did not go home or to cram school. Holding an umbrella, driven by an intuition she found unbelievable yet strangely fated, she boarded the bus toward their old suburban home.
It was the old apartment they had lived in before turning ten. The rooftop had a leaky little terrace that once served as the triplets’ secret hideout for playing hide-and-seek and sharing confidences.
When she pushed open the rusty iron door with a piercing screech, she saw that figure.
Yu An sat at the edge of the terrace, legs dangling over the several-story drop. His thin uniform was half-soaked by the rain, clinging to his stubborn, lonely spine. He held the old camera but was not taking photos, merely gazing blankly at the city swallowed by gray mist in the distance.
「I knew you’d be here.」 Yu Han folded her umbrella, letting the fine rain fall on her as she walked step by step behind him.
Yu An did not turn around, his voice hoarse from the rain and tinged with self-mockery: 「You shouldn’t have come. You should be enjoying that person’s pursuit, or being the dazzling top student in class.」
「An, come home with me.」 Yu Han reached out to grasp his shoulder, only to be startled by the cold dampness emanating from him.
「Home? Which home?」 Yu An spun around abruptly, the force nearly sending the camera tumbling. He stood up, rain streaming down his face into his collar. His eyes, identical to Yu Han’s, were now filled with shattered pride and madness. 「Back to that cage that reminds me every day ‘you’re my sister’? Or back to the home where I can only watch you from behind a mirror, like a thief?」
「This isn’t your fault, An… We’re family; that’s an undeniable fact…」
「It’s precisely because we’re family that it makes me feel the most disgusted!」
Yu An stepped forward, cornering her against the moss-covered wall of the terrace. He gripped her shoulders tightly, as if trying to imprint his fingerprints into her bones: 「Do you know what I think every day when I watch you take care of me and smile at me? I wonder why this face has to look exactly like mine. Why did you have to come out of that womb together with me?」
「An, calm down… You’re scaring me…」 Yu Han was shaken by his frenzy, her eyes instantly reddening with fear and heartache.
「I can’t calm down!」 Yu An’s roar was drowned by a distant thunderclap. Seeing the tears sliding from the corners of Yu Han’s eyes, that extreme pain finally transformed, at this moment, into an impulse on the brink of collapse.
He suddenly lowered his head, pressing his forehead heavily against hers.
Two nearly identical faces overlapped in the cold rain. Their breaths intertwined between each other’s lips and teeth; that familiar yet unfamiliar scent made the air feel thin.
「If we weren’t triplets…」 he murmured, his tone carrying a despair close to pleading, 「If I were just some random stranger you met on the street, if my face didn’t look so much like yours… would the way you look at me today be even a little different? Would there be… even a little desire?」
Yu Han felt his tears, mixed with rain, fall hotly onto her face. She gazed at this mirror image she had seen all her life, now radiating not familial warmth but the aggression of an adult man and pure despair.
She did not push him away; she even forgot to breathe.
This silence amid the thunderstorm, like a wordless complicity, became the most deafening answer in this forbidden ritual.
#RuoFeng #EroticLiterature #TabooNovel