double promise

The food and drinks were delivered to the box one after another. Xie Guan and Huo Mingjun took a wine glass and a white porcelain bowl filled with sweet soup. They clinked glasses nondescriptly: "Congratulations."

"Thank you."

Xie Guan drank half a glass of wine in one gulp, and Huo Mingjun got a headache when he saw him drinking like this.However, the two finally had a meal together, and he noticed that Xie Guan was not in a good mood, so in order not to spoil the fun, he had to urge him to eat a few mouthfuls of vegetables to pad his stomach, so as not to drink too much and make a temper tantrum.

Huo Mingjun has almost no temper towards Xie Guan now, he is very stern and majestic outside, it is not easy to show a point in front of Xie Guan.It's also fortunate that Xie Guan is not the kind of character who is in control of heaven and earth, although he occasionally makes mistakes, most of the time he is reasonable.He never took Huo Mingjun's claim to coax him into his heart, he just thought that he treated him very well, so he also wanted to treat Huo Mingjun better.Both of them were conniving and giving in, but they didn't feel any respect to each other. Instead, they seemed more "sticky" than ordinary friends.

"Didn't you keep looking for reasons not to see me before, what stimulated you today?" Huo Mingjun asked.

Xie Guan lifted his eyelids and glanced at him: "No. I just want to see you, can't I?"

Huo Mingjun gave him the last shrimp with his serving chopsticks: "Of course. But you have the four characters 'I have something on your mind' written on your forehead. Come and share. I can be a guest spiritual mentor on a voluntary basis."

Xie Guan ate the shrimp silently, raised his wine glass, and Huo Mingjun touched him with a small bowl knowingly.Xie Guan raised his head and drank the full glass of wine in one gulp.

"Drink less," Huo Mingjun couldn't help telling him, "This drink has a strong aftertaste, be careful of headache tomorrow."

"Huo Mingjun," Xie Guan lowered his eyes, calling him by first and last name as if drunk, "Isn't it good that we are doing this now?"

Huo Mingjun's heart skipped a beat, but the expression on his face remained unchanged like a piece of marble: "'Now this' is like that?"

Xie Guan said: "It's this kind of relationship where we eat together occasionally, see each other once in a while, care about each other occasionally, no matter how long the interval has been, when we meet again, we can talk and laugh happily... There is not much concern, no need to share secrets, and it is not necessary to be in a relationship because of the relationship. Rupture is... um, it hurts.”

Huo Mingjun let out a sigh of relief.He raised his hand to straighten his neckline, thought for a while, and said calmly: "The relationship between most people is like this. But if you ask me this way, it means that you know in your heart that we You can't do that between them."

"You may have been frightened by what happened before. You are afraid of repeating the same mistakes again. You don't want to get too close to people. It's normal and it's okay. That's why I want to explain the ins and outs to you clearly. Don't let you have any doubts in your heart. pimple."

Xie Guan remained silent, although he didn't say it explicitly, his attitude was already tantamount to acquiescence.

Huo Mingjun took a sip of the soup to moisten his throat, and said, "Sometimes, the depth of a relationship can't necessarily be measured by friendship, and it may not even be something we can control."

Xie Guan looked up at him.

Huo Mingjun said: "That incident happened ten years ago... No, it should be 11 years ago to be precise. Back then, a man died accidentally trying to save me. Ten years later, I met a man who looked very similar to him. So I treated him as that person's substitute to make up for it... Just listening to this, do you think that I have a deep relationship with that person and have a good friendship?"

Xie Guan gave a "hmm" and said, "Even the stand-in has been set up, can the relationship be bad?"

"You also know his name, Cheng Sheng." Huo Mingjun's lips curled up slightly, but there was a bit of bitterness in his smile, "He is from Chengjia Village, Pingpo County, H Province."

"I was 22 years old when I met him. Before that, I had never been to Cheng's Village, and I didn't know Cheng Sheng at all. I didn't get along with him for more than five days, and I couldn't even talk about friendship, but it was this person. I took a bullet and I got hit by a car and fell off a cliff."

"You..." Xie Guan's pupils shrank slightly, he couldn't help lowering his voice, and asked very carefully: "What happened?"

Huo Mingjun looked into his dark eyes, feeling as if he was being stared at by some kind of small animal, and his heart softened for no reason: "I was kidnapped to Chengjia Village that year."

"The specific reason involves family ugliness, so I won't go into details. In short, due to various obstructions, the Huo family did not carry out rescue in the first place, so I was taken out of City B and hid in Cheng's Village in Daxing Mountain."

"The kidnappers locked me in an old house in the village. The yard was surrounded by high walls, and the outside was a wilderness with few people. He wanted to do something to me, but his mental state was very poor, and when he was about to collapse on the third day, a child suddenly jumped in from the outside courtyard wall."

"He came in to help people pick up balls, and he was not afraid to see a big living person tied up in the house. He looked at the window for a while, then ran away."

Xie Guan smiled for his adjective: "Rural children are courageous."

"It's not an exaggeration, Cheng Sheng is really a bit stupid." Huo Mingjun stretched out his finger to his temple, "It may be some kind of developmental delay. He was fourteen or fifteen years old at the time, and his intelligence was obviously lower than that of children of the same age, and his reaction was slow. , It takes a long time to understand one thing. These are what I discovered when I talked to him later. He picked up the ball and left that day. "My lord" luck. Who knew that after nightfall, he actually climbed over the wall and came in again. He also...brought me a steamed bun."

Huo Mingjun seemed to be smiling when he said this, but his eyes were soon covered by disappointment: "There used to be an old blind man living in that room. Cheng Sheng often secretly brought food to the old man, and the old man would tell him stories. Later, the old man He passed away and the house was deserted, but he still kept running here until that morning when he saw someone inside, he probably regarded me as a new 'old blind man'."

"I knew at that time that I might not be able to wait for others to rescue me, and Cheng Sheng happened to be by my side, so I broke the matter up and explained it to him bit by bit, hoping that he would help me escape. After planning for four days, Cheng Sheng wandered around in front of the yard every day. The kidnappers saw him as a silly boy with a bad mind, and they were not wary of him. They often asked him to run errands to buy cigarettes and alcohol. I carried a bottle of home-brewed sorghum wine. The two kidnappers were knocked down by the bottle of wine, Cheng Sheng went in and stole the key for me, and took me to the road outside the village to escape."

"I can't believe the people in the village, and I don't have the experience of living in the wild. I can't hide in the mountains, so I can only hope to stop the car on the road for help. That night, there was the worst rainstorm in the local area in more than ten years. Cheng and I The two of us were walking down the mountain along the highway, and none of the cars would stop. The kidnappers in the village somehow woke up, found me running away, and drove after me.”

Xie Guan listened with trepidation: "Then you..."

Huo Mingjun finally couldn't maintain his steady expression all the time, and a trace of pain that he was trying to suppress slowly emerged.Years of midnight dreams and heart-pounding pain seemed to weigh a thousand pounds, but finally fell to the ground into a light sigh.

"—desperate."

"I was just thinking about not being chased by those guys, but I forgot they had guns."

The kidnappers were all drunk and driving, the first shot was not aimed correctly, and the sound of the gun was covered by the sound of rain. Huo Mingjun was so frightened and panicked that he didn't notice it.

And Cheng Sheng, who had been running in front of him, heard it.

"Although Cheng Sheng reacts slowly when communicating with others, he has very developed motor nerves and has an almost natural instinct for danger. He suddenly stopped in front of me, and I was still running, so when the second shot arrived, he landed on me. From behind, he jumped over and blocked the shot for me."

"He pushed me away a few steps, and the third shot pierced my right lung lobe. If I was still standing in the previous position... that shot would have been aimed at my heart."

"The road was slippery on a rainy day, and that section of the road happened to make a sharp turn. The kidnapper's car couldn't be controlled at all, and it slammed into us. Everything happened very quickly that night, and I haven't even fully figured out many details. I I don’t know where Cheng Sheng was hit, and how he found out the danger. The last scene in all my memories is that he pushed me hard to the inside of the mountain road, and then he was hit by a car out of control and fell together right in front of my eyes. off the cliff."

Xie Guan was shocked and opened his mouth, but he couldn't say anything.He was stunned for a long time, then suddenly raised his head and drank the wine in the glass, and said in a low voice, "Sorry."

He suddenly realized that in the face of the fate of life and death, those grievances and contradictions, misunderstandings and quarrels that seemed to be higher than the sky and deeper than the sea, turned out to be so ordinary and so insignificant.

To be alive is a kind of luck in itself.

Huo Mingjun shook his head, indicating that he was okay: "When I woke up, I was already in the provincial hospital. My second uncle took care of the aftermath. The police found the damaged car that fell off the cliff under the highway, and there were three charred bodies nearby. The remains, two adults, and a boy about 15 years old."

"These are basically the whole process of that year."

Huo Mingjun picked up the small bowl on the table and took a sip of the cold soup: "For the past ten years, I have been thinking that there must be a reason for the emotional connection between people and the willingness to pay for each other. It may be Blood relationship, interests, maybe hormones, but how much affection does Cheng Sheng have with Neng, why would he sacrifice his life to save me?"

"Even the most unbreakable blood relationship may not be able to do this, but a child who doesn't even know who I am is doing it."

"Maybe it's not as complicated as you think," Xie Guan said, "Don't judge a child by an adult's standard. Maybe he just likes you and wants to play with you, so he works so hard to protect you."

"It's not based on interests, it depends on everyone's will, right?" Huo Mingjun said, "The question you asked just now, this is the answer I gave you."

"The extent to which our relationship is maintained, the distance between us and the depth of our friendship are not measured by beakers and test tubes. I did have other plans when I first contacted you, but some things that happened later have nothing to do with this. It's okay, I just hope you can live better."

Xie Guan said in a muffled voice: "You don't call it 'Each according to your heart', it should be called 'As you please'."

Huo Mingjun made him choke suddenly, almost choking his breath, but with Xie Guan's words, most of the gloom in his heart disappeared miraculously.

"I'm not telling you this to whitewash you. It was indeed my fault to lie to you and deceive your feelings before," Huo Mingjun said, "so now I will explain to you 'other plans' to seek leniency. .”

Xie Guan: "...Actually, I don't really want to know."

"I didn't get along with Cheng Sheng very much, only for a few days, and I didn't know anything about his life experience, family background, and I wasn't even completely familiar with him. When I received the news of his death, I was in the hospital , I was unable to see the remains with my own eyes.”

"That is to say, I only heard about Cheng Sheng's death, but I didn't confirm it."

"Wait a minute," Xie Guan could hear something wrong from his words, "What do you mean?"

Huo Mingjun did not answer his words, and continued on his own: "I only remember his appearance, but he was still young at that time, and his appearance was not fixed. As he grows older, it may change. This is why I I will feel familiar when I see you, but I don’t dare to confirm it completely. And my understanding of Cheng Sheng is limited to a few characteristics that I can observe. You should have noticed that not only your appearance, but also you are very coincidental in some aspects. resemblance."

"The most important thing is that you lost your memory when you fell to your head and Cheng Sheng's accident happened in the same year and the same month."

Xie Guan was completely shocked by the amount of information contained in his words.

Huo Mingjun said: "I approach you not as a substitute, but—"

He took a deep look at Xie Guan.

"We suspected at the time that you might be Cheng Sheng."