Chapter 156: Do You Know Why You Can't Sing Well?

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Night enveloped the entire glittering city.

The streets were crowded with traffic, while neon lights of every color blazed brilliantly through the darkness.

Lu Zhou sat in Ye Fangfei’s car, on his way to Qin Yi’s home.

Silence filled the entire cabin.

Perhaps because of the conversation before they got into the car, the atmosphere between them was no longer as relaxed as it had been when they first met.

Ye Fangfei sat on the left, her head lightly resting against the window as she gazed at the scenery slipping past outside. Perhaps she was contemplating some profound question about life.

That was Lu Zhou’s guess.

He did not disturb her. His eyes remained fixed on the traffic ahead, and he kept silent.

No one knew how long that state lasted before a brief ringtone broke the oppressive silence inside the car.

Ye Fangfei came back to herself and picked up her phone. Seeing a new message, she ignored it and turned off the screen.

Perhaps finding the atmosphere in the car strange, she asked the driver to put on some music.

For reasons known only to him, the very first song that played was “Summer.”

Ye Fangfei froze slightly, and Lu Zhou’s gaze slowly shifted toward the car’s speakers.

The familiar song they had once shared brought the two of them back to a more natural subject of conversation.

On a whim, Ye Fangfei sang the song for Lu Zhou again, right there in front of him, and asked whether he thought she had improved since the last time.

“No,” Lu Zhou answered honestly. “Your emotional delivery was better last time. This time... I could hardly hear any sense of emotional trembling in your voice.”

Ye Fangfei gave a soft little “Oh.” At that moment, she suddenly found herself wanting to give up on the challenge of conveying emotion once again.

If she could not sing something well, then no matter how hard she tried, she simply could not sing it well.

She hated that feeling.

It was nothing but a waste of time and energy.

She turned her head slightly and looked out the window again, sinking into a brief silence.

Lu Zhou quietly studied her profile for a long while before speaking in a low voice. “Do you know why you can’t sing with the same feeling you had before?”

At his words, Ye Fangfei slowly turned her head and met his gaze.

“Music is subjective and emotional,” Lu Zhou said with a faint smile.

“If you’re carrying a great deal of disappointment toward the emotion you’re supposed to convey—and the intensity of that disappointment isn’t small—then if you try to enter the song’s emotions through your imagination, that imagined feeling has to counterbalance what you’re feeling now. Otherwise, the song can never come out the way you want it to.”

“You can’t counterbalance it right now. So when you sang just now, I heard reluctance. I heard complicated, struggling emotions hidden beneath your technique.”

Lu Zhou’s voice filled the car, neither loud nor soft, his words flowing calmly and steadily.

Ye Fangfei remained silent for several seconds after hearing him.

That final sentence was harsh to a musician’s ears.

But he had not been wrong. That was exactly the tangled state of her heart.

The person in question was right in front of her, yet when she sang the song, she still had to force herself to imagine the happy times they had once shared—to search for the excitement, the joy, and the refreshing sensation of a breeze brushing across her face.

It gave her an overwhelming sense of disconnection. More importantly, those feelings, summoned through deliberate memories, could no longer counterbalance the emotions in her heart at this moment.

She had to admit that, sometimes, he truly understood the thoughts she kept hidden inside. Again and again, he managed to strike straight to the heart of the matter.

But did he understand only her, or did he understand many people?

When that thought rose to the surface, the feeling it brought was strangely subtle.

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Ye Fangfei inexplicably felt like sighing, but she did not. She merely nodded at Lu Zhou and said, “That’s true.”

She did not deny that she was in a poor emotional state.

“Have you ever seriously considered why you can’t sing love songs well?”

Lu Zhou’s voice came again, leaving Ye Fangfei momentarily dazed.

Had she considered it?

She had.

Why?

Ye Fangfei pressed her red lips together slightly. Her slender fingers tightened around her phone, unconsciously rubbing the power button back and forth twice.

The light inside the car was dim, but Lu Zhou’s dark, luminous eyes remained fixed on her without blinking, catching every emotion that flickered through her gaze.

Music echoed through the cabin, covering the silence that had settled between them.

After a moment, Ye Fangfei gave a soft laugh.

“I have, but I couldn’t find an answer. I suppose it’s simply a deficiency in my genes.”

“When God opens one door for you, He must also close another.”

She turned her head away and stopped looking at him, fixing her gaze ahead as she spoke over the music.

She was lying.

She had always been good at telling this particular lie.

She had once evaded every probe and question from her psychologist. Now, deceiving a man who had known her for only a short while should have been effortless.

At that moment, she wanted to end the subject.

She did not want to continue talking.

So she turned her head, letting the cold, rigid lines of her profile tell him that it was time to change the topic.

However, certain things existed only in her own assumptions.

“Emotion and feeling—the essence of music is to express these things.”

“To become a musician, a person must be sensitive to emotion and feeling. They must naturally possess strong empathy.”

Lu Zhou’s gaze never left her face, and he had no intention of changing the subject.

“A musician who is numb to emotion and feeling could never create music with much spirit or beauty.”

“You’ve reached your present height in music. You can resonate deeply with other emotions, and you can sing songs expressing those emotions so beautifully. That means you should be able to sing about love just as well.”

“God never truly closed your capacity to empathize with love. You were the one who forcibly closed that window.”

His voice seemed to carry thorns, stabbing at her eardrums again and again.

Ye Fangfei’s grip on her phone tightened unconsciously. Moist starlight glimmered in her eyes, shimmering beneath the reflected glow of the neon lights along the road.

She secretly drew a deep breath before turning to look at Lu Zhou.

In the faint light, surprise flickered in her eyes, carefully restrained. She stared at him, trying to see into his eyes, to pull out the thoughts hidden within and discover his true nature.

“Who exactly are you?”

Her voice was faintly hoarse when she spoke.

The sudden question nearly shattered Lu Zhou’s composure.

A slight sting rose in his nose. At that moment, he felt an overwhelming urge to pull her fiercely into his arms.

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Who was he?

I am the man who crossed the river of time to find you.

Lu Zhou said it silently in his heart.

He smiled lightly and extended his right hand toward her with exaggerated solemnity.

“Hello. I’m Lu Zhou, a man who has spent many years hidden in the shadows, doing his best to understand music.”

He was trying to dissolve the atmosphere in the car with a joke.

This time, however, Ye Fangfei did not play along.

Her expression was serious as she stared at him without blinking.

In the end, Lu Zhou withdrew his hand and let the playful expression fade from his face.

“What I said just now was only a personal guess based on my understanding of music. If I offended you, I apologize.”

“What I was trying to express was merely a self-important thought of my own. I’m saying that if you once chose, without hesitation, to close that window, then you must have had reasons of your own that left you no choice.”

“If opening it is painful for you, then perhaps you should leave it closed.”

He spoke in a grave, measured tone.

Tears suddenly welled in Ye Fangfei’s eyes.

Not wanting him to discover her emotions, she abruptly turned her head and looked out the window.

“Thank you for the advice,” she murmured.

You are the first person in this world who has made me feel that if I do not want to open that window, then I do not have to.

You are also the first man in this world who has suddenly made me want to open it.

Ye Fangfei said this silently to herself.

A crystal tear slowly slid down her left cheek.

She wanted to ask him whether the real reason he had not gotten out of the car to confess his feelings that day was because he had seen this hidden side of her heart.

But in the end, she did not ask.

Once again, silence descended upon the car.

She turned to look out the window.

He turned to look at her.

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End of chapter.