Chapter 33

In the middle of the night, Xia Xingcheng was woken by the sound of a phone call from Huang Jixin. Glancing at the time, it was just after two o'clock in the morning, and he immediately got angry. The first sentence he uttered was, "Are you insane?"

Huang Jixin replied, "I was just about to ask you the same thing. Have you gone mad?!"

Xia Xincheng raised his head, rubbing his messy hair. His entire head hurt like it had been tossed and turned all over. He said, "What is it?"

Huang Jixin pelted him with questions, "What did you post on Weibo? What 'you' and 'you guys' by your side? Who do you think you are?!"

Xia Xingchen's brain was a lump of mush. "What are you talking about?"

Huang Jixin said, "After you posted on Weibo, your name went on the hot search together with Yang Youming. People are thinking that the company bought the hot search for you and that you're using the peoples' movie emperor for hype!"

Xia Xingcheng's brain finally grasped a thread, "What hype?"

The anger in Huang Jixin's voice didn't recede, "'What hype?' Are you literate or not? It sounds like you're going public about a relationship. You tell me, who are you going public with, Yang Youming?"

Xia Xingcheng reached out and turned on the lamp, the warm yellow light washing over his face in an instant. He involuntarily narrowed his eyes. His whole face wrinkled up as he asked Huang Jixin, "What's happened to me?

Huang Jixin was so angry that he was almost out of breath. "Are you drunk?"

Xia Xingcheng buried his face in a pillow, and after a while, said, "Maybe a little."

When he hung up the phone, he opened Weibo and saw that the Weibo post he'd sent before going to bed had unexpectedly been forwarded nearly 100,000 times. He was a little overwhelmed, and when he clicked on the comments, it turned out that it was not just fan nonsense. Many people were asking about who that "you" is.

Someone asked him, "Is Xingcheng gege in love?" Others also asked, "That 'you' isn't Yang Youming, is it?" Furthermore, there were even more strange questions. One of them said, "Yang Youming is married. Is this hyping* a CP with a married man?" In turn, his fans defended him, "He's filming a movie with Ming ge!"

Everything else was unclear to Xia Xingcheng, but he felt that the word "married" was especially unsightly. For a long time, it's as if he himself had all but forgotten that Yang Youming was already married. He didn't expect that under such circumstances, he would be caught off guard by the people reminding him of this matter.

He kneaded his forehead, bending his legs and hunching his back on the bed. The thin quilt slipped down to reveal his naked upper body. He held his head up with one elbow on his knee and his other hand accidentally slipped across the screen.

It opened the topmost private message, which was from an unfamiliar netizen who cursed at him, "You're shameless! Can you even compensate Yang Youming for the damage you caused?"

Xia Xingcheng threw the phone away and covered his face with both hands to calm himself for a while. And yet he couldn't help picking his phone back up to reopen the message, "Hello, can you not hype a CP? Youming gege is married, so you being like this makes me think that you're really low… "

After staring at that private message for a while, Xia Xingcheng logged out of Weibo. Opening Wechat, he sent a voice message to Huang Jixin, "Calling Old Huang, calling Old Huang." His voice was weak and feeble, extremely beaten down.

Huang Jixin replied with an angry emoji.

Xia Xing Cheng lay down, pointed at his mobile phone and said, "I just worded it wrongly. I didn't mean it like that."

Huang Jixin replied to him, "You'd better not mean it like that."

Xia Xingcheng said, "I don't know what you're talking about."

Huang Jixin said, "If you and Yang Youming act in this kind of film, it's possible that it would influence public opinion that will be hard to avoid in the future. Other people will also make guesses about the two of you. These things, they're strong enough to bring you fame in the beginning, but I'm afraid that it'll be no good if it turns around and bites you back. In any case, I feel wary."

Xia Xingcheng listened while staring blankly, "What things?"

Huang Jixin sighed, "Forget it. I know you debuted as an actor at a young age, and you also haven't read any books. Don't post on Weibo. You can take a picture and send it to me later. I'll ask someone to post on Weibo for you tomorrow morning to explain."

Xia Xingcheng was not in the mood to quarrel with him right then, so merely asked, "What picture?"

It took a while for Huang Jixin to reply to his voice message, "Take a selfie, a selfie with your doll."

Xia Xingcheng turned over and got up from the bed, turned on the room's overhead lights, arranged the doll on the bed, changed his clothes, fixed up his hair, and tossed about for half an hour to take a satisfactory picture, which was then sent to Huang Jixin's Wechat.

Afterwards, he laid on the bed and lamented about his near death.

Before filming the next day, the makeup artist put makeup on Xia Xingcheng and said, "Xing ge, you're not in good shape today."

Xia Xingcheng closed his eyes and let her apply makeup. He said, "I had a great time during my birthday and drank too much."

The makeup artist smiled and said nothing.

After his makeup was done and the makeup artist left, Xia Xingcheng opened Weibo on his phone and saw that his account had sent out another Weibo post in the early morning, attached with the last minute selfie he'd taken late last night. It read, "Who is 'you'? You are the one who's been the closest to yourself for the last 24 years."

He didn't click to read the comments below, and even disabled his private messages.

As a matter of fact, Xia Xingcheng was not that scared of getting cursed out by others, but he was afraid that those people would constantly mention Yang Youming to scold him. This made him feel extremely uncomfortable.

Assistant Xiao Tang ran over to tell him that the assistant director was already looking for him.

Xia Xingcheng stood up, handed his phone to Xiao Tang, and took a deep breath. There weren't many scenes in the shed's built set. Among them though, were two very important scenes. One was Fang Jianyuan and Yu Haiyang's last intimate scene, and the other was the climax of the entire movie, the turning point of this love story.