What he needed to say had already been poured onto his face thirty seconds ago.

  “You'll regret this! And when you come crawling back, it won't be something two ttes on your face can fix!”

  She bellowed, grabbed her Prada bag, and stormed toward the exit.

  In her dramatic rush, she shoved the door with all her might—only for the automatic sensor to g for a second, causing the door to jolt awkwardly before finally opening.

  When she saw that the gss door reflected nothing—no silhouette of Ze Yu running after her to stop her—she let out one st hysterical scream, as if marking an ungraceful end to their retionship, then stormed off.

  And me? By the time I snapped out of it, I was already pressing a towel into Ze Yu's hand.

  He gave a wry smile and wiped his face dry.

  “Well, that was embarrassing,” he said—then suddenly burst out ughing.

  I couldn't help but ugh with him.

  How could I not? I was absolutely overjoyed inside.

  Later, according to Xiao Qing, I had looked like a total idiot, grinning as if I had just won the presidency instead of Chen Shui-bian.

  (T/N: Chen Shui-bian (陈水扁), who served as the president of Taiwan from 2000 to 2008. He was the first president from the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), ending the Kuomintang's long-standing rule.)

  After Ze Yu and I finished mopping the floor and wiping down the tables, he bought me a cappuccino.

  For himself, of course, he ordered a Kenya.

  “Why did you break up?” I asked.

  “Shouldn't I have?” He replied," And yeah, he definitely should have.

  “I asked the wrong question—why did you choose pouring coffee on your face as a way to break up?”

  “I read it in some web novel,” he said with a grin.

  “Huh? Which one?” I was curious.

  “Kidding.” He ughed. “Since I was the one initiating the breakup, I felt a little guilty. And honestly, writing that letter on the keyboard—I knew it was like walking straight into the tiger's den, but I still did it anyway. Since the tiger had already taken a bite, I figured I might as well let it take another. That way, at least I'd feel less pressure.”

  He looked down at his soaked shirt and unbuttoned two more buttons.

  Basically, the shirt's already wet—what's one more spsh?

  That reminded me of what Albus had told me a couple of weeks ago: Love and guilt don't belong in the same equation.

  At the end of the day, Albus was still the coolest.

  “Then why did you even date someone so… so intense in the first pce?” I asked, swallowing back the word wild.

  “I met her on the Computer Science BBS forum at Chiao Tung University. Online, she seemed gentle and refined. When we met in person, I just thought she was a little spoiled—nothing too serious,” Ze Yu said. “So, we got together.”

  The internet really is full of hidden surprises.

  A tigress and a dinosaur—either way, you don't walk away unscathed.

  “And then? When did she stop being gentle and refined?” I asked.

  I needed to take notes on what was wrong with tte-drinking girls.

  “Just like coffee—no matter how good it is, if you leave it sitting too long, it's bound to go bad,” he sighed dramatically.

  At that moment, he caught Xiao Qing's reflection in the gss, watching her making exaggerated winks at me. He realized she was my friend.

  So, he turned and waved at her.

  Xiao Qing, embarrassed, quickly buried her face in her gossip magazine.

  “Then the solution is simple. Next time, just choose pin water—it stays the same no matter how long you leave it.”

  “Hot water cools down over time. Warm water eventually turns cold. Different temperatures, different experiences.”

  “Then what about cold water? It stays cold no matter how long you leave it.”

  “I don’t like drinking cold water.”

  After that conversation, I started wondering—could I be a gss of cold water?

  Occasionally, I even sought the opinions of my so-called “significant others.”

  First, I asked my dad.

  “Dad, if you had to describe your daughter as a type of drink, what would it be?”

  I pced a small leftover cake from the café onto the table.

  “A drink? That's tough,” he said, casually grabbing a piece of cake and stuffing it into his mouth.

  “Speed up, Dad!” I urged him. Since he brought me into this world, he should at least take some responsibility for what kind of drink I resemble.

  “I didn't study much; I'm not good at descriptions,” he mumbled through a full mouth.

  His eyes never left the TV screen, where yet another political talk show was pying—the same old faces, the same endless debates.

  Whenever my dad watched political programs, he would slip into a state of open-eyed hibernation, barely reacting to anything around him. What a waste of that delicious strawberry cake.