At thirty-four, Evan Forrest never in a million years saw this coming.

After all those years, he finally ran into his high school deskmate again—the girl everyone had called the school beauty.

And in the very first second of seeing her, he got sent flying by a freaking truck.

...

It was a night drowned in crazy, nonstop rain.

Then all at once, two huge pale beams tore through the dark, slicing open the curtain of rain as a heavy truck came roaring forward like a beast let off its chain.

Straight ahead, on the sidewalk, a slender woman holding an umbrella was about to be hit head-on.

Evan, standing not far behind her, didn’t even have time to think. His body moved before his brain caught up. He lunged forward, beat the truck by a split second, and shoved the woman away with everything he had.

In that instant, the whole world seemed to go dead quiet.

Time slowed without warning, like someone had hit pause and switched everything to slow motion.

In his sight, the torrential rain seemed to freeze in midair.

Only the woman he had pushed to the roadside turned around in shock, hurried and flustered, her gaze breaking through the rain and crashing straight into his.

And Evan saw her face clearly.

Beneath that smooth, jet-black hair was a face so stunning it almost didn’t feel real—delicate, breathtaking, mature and cool, yet still gorgeous enough to leave people speechless.

The scare made her soft red lips part on instinct. Then, as if she suddenly realized what was happening, her expression changed hard—shock, panic, disbelief all hitting at once—and she opened her mouth like she was about to shout something.

And at that exact same moment,

Evan recognized who she was.

Clara Whitfield.

The undisputed school beauty of Yunan High back then.

And now, the icy business goddess of South Province, worth billions and famous enough that basically everyone knew her name.

And also…

His old deskmate from high school.

"Fate really works in weird ways."

That was the very last thought that flashed through Evan Forrest’s mind.

Then came the brutal scream of brakes, rushing closer and closer, mixed with the harsh scrape of tires clawing at the road—and a woman’s panicked cry, strange yet somehow painfully familiar:

"No!!!!!—"

Pain hit him like a tidal wave, crashing over him in an instant. Then his whole world went black.

His consciousness seemed to drift loose from his body, floating in that endless darkness, dazed and weightless, for who knew how long.

Until, somewhere in that blur, he vaguely saw a figure charging toward him with everything she had, desperately reaching out, trying so hard to grab him.

Almost on instinct, he reached out too.

And the moment their hands met, the darkness shattered with a bang.

Evan jolted awake.

He opened his eyes and looked around.

Only then did he realize he was sitting in a bright, spotless classroom.

It was summer. Outside the window, cicadas droned nonstop while birds flickered past in the light.

Above his head, the ceiling fan creaked and rattled as it spun, pushing out waves of warm air. On the platform, the homeroom teacher droned on in a flat, lifeless voice, the kind of lecture so sleep-inducing it was honestly kind of lethal. Put together, it was enough to make anyone’s eyelids start fighting to close.

Everything felt ridiculously familiar.

So real that it almost didn’t feel real at all.

…

Then memories came flooding back, slamming into him like a burst dam. And only then did Evan finally understand what kind of unbelievable miracle time itself had worked on him.

It was early summer, 2007.

He was a senior at Yunan High School.

Time had slammed into reverse, rolling back a full sixteen years.

He had been reborn.

If he had to guess, it was probably karma cashing in on that one heroic moment of his. Maybe even heaven had been moved.

Evan Forrest felt all kinds of things at once. A little dazed, a little emotional, but way more fired up and stunned in the best possible way.

A second shot at life.

That meant he could patch up a whole pile of regrets from before, and maybe finally live the kind of life he actually wanted.

Come to think of it, he probably ought to thank that former school-belle deskmate of his too—the one he hadn’t seen in years, who had popped back into his life and basically gotten him killed the instant they reunited—

Wait.

Deskmate.

Only then did Evan snap back to himself and turn to look beside him.

He was sitting by the window in the last row of the fourth group in the classroom.

And right now, in the seat next to him, a girl was lying there asleep.

Her face was buried in her folded arms, so he couldn’t see her clearly. She wore a simple ponytail, neat and fresh-looking, and Yunan High’s standard uniform. The red-and-white school jacket looked light and thin on her, and below the collar, a stretch of slender, pale neck showed, clean and soft like fine porcelain.

The school uniform pants were supposed to look loose and baggy, but on her, they were pushed taut by those long, shapely legs, outlining curves so unfairly good it was enough to make boys their age instantly blush, heartbeat going wild, mouth dry on the spot.

Of course, Evan was mentally in his thirties. He’d seen enough of life that he wasn’t about to act like some clueless kid and lose it over this.

So he calmly wiped the drool from the corner of his mouth.

Then took another quick glance at those ridiculously long legs.

Then swallowed, cool as ever.

An eighteen-year-old campus goddess with a figure this unreal already… yeah, that was honestly kind of cracked.

In his previous life, he’d basically never had a chance like this, to look at her this closely and really take her in.

Yeah, they’d been deskmates, but back then Evan Forrest had been quiet, awkward, painfully shy. His grades were nothing special either. And when he was sitting next to Clara Whitfield, the girl everyone had called the school’s icy beauty since day one of high school, he’d been so self-conscious he didn’t even dare start a conversation.

Three whole years at the same desk, and the two of them had probably exchanged fewer than ten sentences. Forget staring at her for more than a second—he hadn’t even had the guts to sneak an extra glance.

Who could’ve guessed that after graduation, after more than ten years of not seeing each other, the next time they met, he’d end up saving her life?

Looking at the school-belle deskmate beside him, Evan felt a rush of emotion in his chest.

Sure, he’d paid for it with his life, but he’d also gotten a shot at being reborn. If you thought about it that way, they were probably even now.

It wasn’t like he’d come back to life and immediately started planning to act on the feelings he’d never dared touch in his last life.

Come on. She was the universally acknowledged ice-queen goddess of the whole school. How was someone like that supposed to be easy to chase?

Three years of high school.

Who knew how many guys had crashed and burned in front of that iceberg.

Why would she suddenly melt for him just because he’d been reborn, going from frosty to soft in one second flat?

Unless she remembered that he’d saved her—

But she hadn’t been reborn.

Evan curled his lip and was just about to dump all those random thoughts out of his head.

“Evan Forrest! Why are you spacing out in class?”

A furious roar exploded.

At the podium, homeroom teacher Mr. Norwood was glaring straight at him.

At the same time, the rest of the class all turned to look over in sync, their faces full of that classic watching-the-drama smugness.

Evan froze for a second, still not sure how he was supposed to apologize or admit fault.

But in the seat beside him, the school-belle deskmate seemed to be jolted awake by the shout. She pushed herself up with one arm braced on the desk, rubbed at her sleepy eyes, and slowly lifted her head.

And just like that, Evan Forrest finally got a clear look at the face of the school-belle desk mate from sixteen years ago.

Her features were delicate, almost unfairly perfect. Her nose was small and lifted just right. Compared with the breathtaking, cool beauty Clara Whitfield would have more than a decade later, this version of her had less of that polished, grown-up charm, but way more of that fresh, makeup-free purity that hit people straight in the chest.

While Evan was staring at his former school-belle desk mate—

she, almost on instinct, lifted her head and looked at him too.

Time had looped.

The years had been overturned.

But their eyes still met again.

From Evan’s angle, he suddenly noticed that this so-called ice-cold campus goddess had frozen on the spot.

Her cherry-red lips parted slightly without her meaning to.

It was like she’d just seen something so shocking, so impossible, that her whole brain had crashed.

And then—

visible to the naked eye—

the girl’s eyes reddened at an insane speed.

A clear sheen of tears gathered fast in her eyes, filling them until they trembled on the edge.

Before Evan could even process what was happening,

under the utterly stunned gaze of homeroom teacher Mr. Norwood, and in front of a whole class so shocked they were basically losing it on the spot—

a soft, sweet fragrance rushed toward him.

The publicly acknowledged number one beauty of Yunan High School, the untouchable iceberg goddess herself, suddenly threw open her arms and lunged forward, wrapping Evan in a tight, desperate hug!

For one brief moment, everything went dead silent.

Like the whole world had muted.

Then, in the very next second—

the entire classroom exploded like a pot boiling over, erupting into chaos and disbelief.

The uproar was so huge that it perfectly covered the line the school-belle girl choked out, trembling with excitement as she held Evan tightly:

"I found you!"