A few hours later, Gu Shangyan was sitting in a roadside restaurant. He was on his sixth drink. He looked at the person sitting in front of him and said in a slurred tone, “I feel happy. I feel free. I feel miserable too.”
“You will be fine, “Shen Yue said with a sigh.
“How do you know?” Gu Shangyan asked her.
“I was not in a nine-year-long relationship but mine was pretty long too, “Shen Yue said with a smile. “I thought I would die if we ever broke up but look at me, I’m happy and living the best of my life. You will too. You have a good family who will walk heaven and hell just to see you happy.”
“In my case, love died. Why did you break up?” Gu Shangyan asked. He had heard that Lu Mingze and Shen Yue were dating. He did not understand why they broke up.
“In my case, he was a jerk, “Shen Yue chuckled.
“He was a jerk to you?” Gu Shangyan’s voice was loud and angry.
Shen Yue shook her head. “He was good to me. He is still good to me. But he was a jerk to himself. How could I stay with a man who doesn’t even value himself? The love between us was unconditional but it was not right. Have you ever heard about meeting the right person at the wrong time? That’s what happened in our case.”
What about him and Yoona? Gu Shangyan began thinking about it. He and Yoona were the two right people. They fell in love at the right time at the right pace but they fell out of love eventually. Sometimes, he wondered if both of them were right for each other. No doubt that both of them were right people on their own but were they right for each other?
“Did he cheat on you?” Gu Shangyan questioned.
“He did not, “Shen Yue smiled.
“Will you tell me what happened between you?” Gu Shangyan asked.
“Why do you want to know?” Shen Yue inquired.
“I don’t know why but I want to know, ” Gu Shangyan asked.
Shen Yue stared at him for a while and then said, “We went to the same university. We got together in the first year of university. We fell for each other fast and hard. Everyone who knew about us thought we would marry straight out of university but he got busy with his career in the third year of university. His popularity was at its peak. I never minded that his agency didn’t make it public that he was in a relationship because I know everything was hard for him.”
She was telling him the part of her story that only a few people know about.
Gu Shangyan was listening to her story with great interest, “We were happy in our bubble. But bubbles always burst, don’t they? In my case, it burst when we left university.”
He could hear sarcasm and sadness in her tone.
Shen Yue added, “It was when my internship ended in Orchid groups and I got a permanent position there… I began noticing changes in him. We didn’t fight. We never do.” She took a small pause as if she was reminiscing about something. “One night, I decided to surprise him at his work and I found out the trouble he was in. He was taking drugs… I never knew about it.”
Gu Shangyan’s eyes widened in disbelief and she went on saying, “I told him many times to quit drinking or bring it under control…I never knew that he was an alcoholic because he would not drink in front of me. Sometimes, I wonder if I was too busy with myself that I never noticed all those signs. When the agency found out, naturally it was livid. He was about to lose his career. I tried to help him…for more than a year I tried.”
Shen Yue felt as if she had reached the past and was going through the same thing all over again. “It was a difficult phase of our relationship and I wanted to overcome it with him. Because it was the right thing to do. Couples don’t leave when one of them is in trouble. They help each other. I wanted to help him and he began improving. Or that’s what he showed me.”
She continued, “A year later, he asked me to accompany him on his tour. I said yes because I wanted to help him and smoothen the knots in our relationship. I thought he was clean because he promised me that he would not touch drugs again. I knew he drinks sometimes… it’s not easy to leave everything at once. I was trying to be understanding for his sake. I toured with his band for two weeks and one night I found him intoxicated in his room.”
Looking up at Gu Shangyan, she said with a sad smile, “He was doing drugs again. His agency had no idea. I didn’t know what to do at that time. We fought. We shouted at each other. We said all those cruel things to each other that we should not have. In my defence, I was afraid that drugs would kill him. He left me in the hotel crying and the band was supposed to fly to another place that night. He thought I needed time to cool off and that it would be better if I stayed in the hotel. I was alone and broken. The lies he told me were coming to the surface and I was so afraid.”
Lu Mingze had never tried to quit drugs. He never thought that his drinking habits were a problem. He thought his agency was making a mountain out of a molehill. He believed that it was his shitty agency that was filling his girlfriend’s ears. How could Shen Yue stay with him when he was not ready to accept that he was wrong there?
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A/N: I know you all want a mass release. I will try to write some extra chapters.