After dealing with the pile of emails, Xu Miao lit up his phone and immediately saw the notification bar flooded with messages from the same person. He let out a long breath, the furrow between his brows slowly relaxing, and slid open the screen to enter the chat.
[ATM]: Why did you eat so little for lunch?
[ATM]: [Crying puppy.jpg]
[ATM]: Miss you.
[ATM]: I’m off to class first, kiss >3<
[ATM]: School’s over.
[ATM]: Ran into that kitten again.
[ATM]: [Image]
[ATM]: I want to keep it.
[ATM]: Hate that you’re always busy with work.
[ATM]: Hate you.
[ATM]: Just kidding. Even if you ignore me, I don’t really hate you.
[ATM]: But if you did reply, I’d hate you even less.
[ATM]: It’s already been five hours, forty-six minutes, and thirty-nine seconds.
[ATM]: Fifty-eight seconds.
Xu Miao glanced at the time. It was already close to six-thirty. He’d only gotten halfway through his lunch before being called away. As soon as he walked out of his supervisor’s office, meetings came one after another like they’d been scheduled on purpose. He’d been spinning non-stop for hours before finally getting a break and preparing to clock out.
As for those messages taking up multiple screens, Xu Miao was already used to it. It was like this every day. His phone might as well be the other person’s second body—once awake, it started running. Whenever there was a free moment, he’d send a message to Xu Miao, sharing everything he was going through.
Xu Miao opened the picture of the kitten again. It was a stray, but its fur looked shiny and healthy, the whole thing chubby and round. Curled up in a ball, sunbathing, it looked just like a big mooncake.
If only there wasn’t an annoying human scratching its chin while it slept…
After staring at the cat, Xu Miao’s gaze naturally shifted to the hand scratching the cat. His vocabulary failed him—he could only think that the hand was really beautiful. Fair, slender, with distinct knuckles. The ideal shape of a hand, Except…
[XM]: What’s up with the hand?
Almost the instant he sent the message, a reply came from the other side. The corners of Xu Miao’s lips curved slightly, and he laughed silently.
He was right after all—this guy’s phone might as well be his second body.
[ATM]: I knew you cared about me. Out of so many messages, you instantly saw my injury.
[ATM]: What would I do without you? You’re the only one who feels sorry for me.
[ATM]: [puppy holding its heart.jpg]
Xu Miao stared at the screen, the smile in his eyes growing deeper.
The guy had clearly zoomed in so much that it was practically a close-up of the injury instead of the cat. Even if he were half blind, he couldn’t have missed it. Though… it was true that, unfortunately, the first thing he saw was the cat. But thankfully, no one else knew that but him.
[XM]: Don’t pretend to be pitiful.
[ATM]: I’m not pretending.
[ATM]: You always doubt me. Don’t you know I’m fragile? I’m made of glass.
[ATM]: You should be taking care of me.
The guy always had a way of making nonsense sound totally righteous. Xu Miao had experienced it plenty of times. But he didn’t feel like arguing. Bullying someone acting pitiful wasn’t his style. But… subtly testing him a little—that was his guilty pleasure.
[XM]: So who’s the boyfriend here, you or me?
[XM]: Fine, I’ll be the boyfriend.
[ATM]: No!
[ATM]: I don’t want a boyfriend—I want a girlfriend.
Xu Miao saw the flood of screaming emoji stickers that followed and instantly pulled back the small, restless thought rising in his chest. In the end, things had only gotten to this point because of him. Maybe not entirely, but he couldn’t pretend he wasn’t a part of it.
It all started a long, long time ago—when he began pretending to be a girl online, falling into fake online relationships to get money.
Calling it a scam wasn’t completely accurate, though. Every single person willingly gave him money. They saw him as pitiful, wanted to help him through tough times. None of them knew their sweet, kind-hearted “girlfriend” was actually a man.
Xu Miao knew how despicable it was.
But he had no choice.
His mother had been chronically ill for years, and all the family’s expenses fell on his father’s shoulders. Things were manageable—until the year his younger brother was born. That year, there was an accident at a construction site his father had contracted. The unfinished building collapsed, killing a worker. Xu Miao’s father, who had been inspecting the site with the worker, had his right leg crushed and broken.
Escaping death should have been something to be grateful for, but what followed was a huge compensation fee and the burden of responsibility for the accident. With the old source of income gone, he had to find a new one fast.
Xu Miao tried many things, but the results were minimal. As a first-year university student, the money he could earn in his spare time wasn’t nearly enough to patch up the hole in his family’s finances.
Until one part-time job, he overheard a girl complaining to her friend — she said her online boyfriend always sent her tens of thousands at a time and bought her expensive gifts.
She didn’t want to accept them at all. It was too much. If they broke up, it’d be fine if he just took the money back — she hadn’t spent it anyway — but if he insisted on her paying back the gifts in cash, she really didn’t want to. After all, not all the gifts were even to her taste.
That’s when Xu Miao got a twisted idea. He thought: it’s just chatting online, it wouldn’t take too much time. He could go to school, do his part-time jobs, and also try scamming through online dating.
If the scam worked, he’d get a windfall. If it failed, it wouldn’t really impact his life too much.
From the moment the idea took root to when he began putting it into action, only three days passed. Xu Miao gritted his teeth and spent half a day’s part-time wage to buy a voice changer.
Failure was inevitable at first, because he didn’t know anything. But success was also inevitable — Xu Miao learned fast.
It took him less than two months to go from awkward and clumsy to smooth and confident. From then on, everyone who online-dated him was willing to spend money on him. Even after breaking up, they still felt attached, guilty even — most of them gave him a breakup fee, and it wasn’t a small amount.
Until Xu Miao scammed this one — and this one became the last.
Xu Miao never remembered the names of any of them. He wasn’t curious, and he didn’t care. He gave every one of them the same nickname: ATM. Simple and straightforward — because they were there for him to withdraw money from.
Xu Miao thought he’d keep going like this, scamming one after another, until he was capable enough to shoulder his family’s financial burdens.
However, when you walk the night road too often, you’re bound to run into ghosts eventually. The new ATM was different from the previous ones. After spending some time together, Xu Miao realized that this new ATM seemed even poorer than him, and the family background wasn’t any better.
A father who resorted to violence at the drop of a hat, a mother who drank heavily, a brother addicted to gambling, and a younger brother in the throes of rebellion.
Objectively speaking, this wasn’t a good choice for him at all. The smartest thing to do was to treat the past few months as a sunk cost, ditch this one, and go develop a new target.
But when it came to deleting him as a friend, Xu Miao still hesitated.
He was about to enter his third year of university. In the second half of the year, he could begin his internship. The company offered great benefits, and if he could hold out until graduation and go full-time, everything would turn around. He wouldn’t need to be a scammer anymore.
Just one year. Just hold on for one year.
Let’s just say he felt a bit guilty. After conning so many people, maybe he should pay back just a little.
Although he lost one source of income, luckily there was another to make up for it.
The internship was exhausting and tough, but Xu Miao didn’t really mind. When he got his first paycheck, he bought a beautiful scarf for ATM, because ATM always said it was so cold, shivering and hunching his shoulders every day.
The day the scarf arrived, he received the first photo ever sent by ATM. The picture looked like a product photo for a scarf—so zoomed in the scarf took up almost the whole frame. Only at the top, there was a small sliver of a chin in the shot.
Xu Miao’s ears were red from the cold, but as he looked at the screen, his eyes curved from smiling. He thought, in such a cold world, at least one of us should be warm.
Author note:
He Tang Tang Tang:
SC (Single Couple), although it should be pretty obvious, I’ll still say it — Xu Miao is the bottom (0).
