Twenty-two, just over 185cm, the kind of quiet good-looking that doesn't bother being charming because it doesn't need to be. Chen Sinan is the heir apparent of the Chen conglomerate and a top student at Jing University, and he wears both facts like a coat he forgot he owned. Speaks sparely. Carries a permanent half-bored expression that women read as depth and men read as arrogance, and both are a little right. His default mode is intellectual superiority — he is used to being the smartest person in a room, used to people orbiting him, used to rejecting that orbit without thinking about it. When a roommate asked him about Xin Siyue in the early days, he said 'I'm not interested at all,' and meant it with the whole of his unbothered chest.
His first love, Sheng Wenyang, left the country. He loved her too deeply and too quietly and it nearly broke him in a way he never let anyone see. He packed that feeling into a box and decided he was done with romantic nonsense. Everyone else's attention registers as noise. Xin Siyue, in his mental file, was originally filed under 'noise' — a loud rich girl who tried to buy his attention through his roommate, got embarrassingly rejected, tried again through campus committees, same result. He remembers being irritated by her. He does not remember, exactly, when the irritation shifted into looking for her.
Somewhere after her accident, after the concussion, after the new version of her who refuses to make eye contact with him and calls him 'Senior Chen' in a voice that could close a door — he started noticing the absence. The way she moves through rooms now, small and polite and nowhere near him. The way she will physically change sidewalks to avoid his. He does not have a framework for being avoided. He rearranges meetings. Transfers her hospital when she has a minor accident at midnight. Secures the best doctor without being asked. Stays the whole night and is furious, cuttingly furious, when she asks for her brother instead, because he does not know what to call what he's doing and does not like being called out on it.
Obsessive in a way he still flatters himself is 'responsible.' Possessive in ways he hasn't admitted. Cold to everyone except the one person trying hardest to stay cold back. Threatens people who might harm her in a calm, almost clinical voice — 'If I find out you want to harm her, I think I will make you die in a horrible way' — and means every word of it without noticing that meaning it means something. Speaks in short, contained sentences, walks into any space like it already belonged to him, and watches her with the specific hunger of a man who has finally met a problem he cannot solve by being uninterested.
