After Thinking I Was the Top, I Was Taken by a Cold Beauty - Chapter 14

Inside the Jingshan villa, Liu Min was sipping tea with several friends in the tea room when Mother Zhang, the family’s domestic helper, knocked on the door to announce that her son had returned.

The surprise was seasoned with a touch of alarm. Whenever Yun Deng made a sudden appearance, it either meant he was in trouble or he was looking to raid the family’s coffers. Liu Min left the tea room and headed straight upstairs. Finding the bedroom door wide open, she stepped inside.

“Son, what are you looking for?”

Yun Deng had run all the way from the car. The moment he entered the house, he had sprinted up three flights of stairs to his room and began rummaging through his drawers and cabinets.

“Mom, you are home today? I thought you would be out playing mahjong with your friends,” Yun Deng said, startled by the sudden voice behind him. He immediately ran to Liu Min’s side and took her hand.

“Your father has a business social tonight and asked me to accompany him, so I stayed in,” Liu Min explained. She then asked what he was searching for. Upon hearing the description, she reached into a corner of a wardrobe compartment and accurately pulled out a burgundy velvet box.

Yun Deng truly admired his mother; she remembered exactly where every single item was kept and could find it instantly. Having secured the box, he prepared to leave, mentioning as an afterthought that he wanted to move back home for a while starting next week.

After leaving the Jingshan area, he returned to Xia Shisheng’s apartment. Since adding his crush on WeChat a few days ago, he had been riding a wave of excitement, though it was dampened by the fact that their chat history had not moved since that first day.

When he reached his floor and entered the apartment using the passcode, he was immediately assaulted by a pungent smell of burnt mold. The stench was so overwhelming it nearly choked him. In a panic, he rushed to open the bay window in the living room. Once the air cleared slightly, he dashed into the kitchen to find the creator of the toxic gas.

Xia Shisheng was wearing at least five or six face masks, clutching a spatula and stirring something unrecognizable in a ceramic stew pot. Yun Deng felt as though he had walked in on a witch brewing poison in a television drama; his eyes and nose were under attack once again. After a few words of protest, Xia Shisheng, who also could not stand the smell anymore, turned off the heat, covered the pot, and fled the kitchen.

After peeling off the stack of masks and breathing in fresh air, Xia Shisheng looked immensely relieved.

“What on earth are you brewing? It smells horrific,” Yun Deng said, opening every window in the apartment. He grabbed a disposable paper cup, gulped down a large amount of water, and finally began to recover.

“Mutton soup. My girlfriend loves it, but the smell of this mutton is just too gamey.”

Yun Deng successfully caught the key word. “Girlfriend? Since when are you off the market again?”

“Since last week,” Xia Shisheng replied between coughs.

Yun Deng wanted to say more, but he could not stand the strange smell of burnt mutton lingering in the living room. He grabbed his phone from the sofa and hid in the guest room where he was temporarily staying. Xia Shisheng, enduring the nausea, prepared to call a cleaning service online to help tidy up; he was so repulsed by the smell that he would rather pay than deal with it himself.

Back in his room, Yun Deng opened his message list. Since that day, he had pinned Lin Yanxu’s chat at the very top, right alongside his family members. He cautiously clicked into the chat to review the first day’s conversation before exiting again. He pulled down the status bar to check the date.

Today was Thursday. The other man was surely busy and had no time for him, so he abandoned the thought of sending a message once more. Since getting the contact information last Friday, he had been waiting for the following Friday to arrive. Yun Deng had never realized that a single week could feel so agonizingly long.

He collapsed onto the bed and wrapped himself in the quilt. Lying on his stomach, he pulled the red velvet box from his pocket. Inside was a birthday gift his father had given him for his nineteenth birthday: a pearl slightly smaller than a coin. His family had made their fortune in jewelry, so they never lacked for diamonds or pearls, but back then, his father had handpicked the most beautiful one for him. For the past few years, this pearl had been gathering dust in a corner, serving no purpose other than decoration. Now, he had sought it out, intending to give it away.

After idling in the room for a while, Yun Deng still could not resist reaching out to Lin Yanxu. He had held back for six days, and he felt he was going to burst if he waited any longer. After repeatedly editing and deleting a message, he grew so frustrated that he threw his phone a meter away, where it wedged into the gap beside the nightstand.

He decided he would be better off helping Xia Shisheng clean up the mess. However, as he walked out, he ran into the cleaning lady from the service. She was tidying the kitchen while simultaneously lecturing Xia Shisheng on how to stew mutton soup.

“Young man, if you do not know how to cook, you should look it up online or take a class. You did not even turn off the gas stove.” The cleaning lady had never seen such a situation. Seeing two young men living there, she could not help but offer a few words of caution.

It took a full hour to get the kitchen clean. Before leaving, the cleaning lady helped start a new pot with the remaining mutton and gave instructions on when to turn off the heat. Since he was staying at Xia Shisheng’s place for free, Yun Deng paid the four hundred yuan cleaning fee.

Once she left, Xia Shisheng collapsed onto the sofa in exhaustion. He had barely closed his eyes to rest when his phone began vibrating frantically with messages. Yun Deng grabbed a bag of potato chips and sat down beside him, offering a large chip to his friend.

After Xia Shisheng ate it, Yun Deng asked curiously, “Is that your girlfriend messaging you? Why are there so many?”

Xia Shisheng did not answer but quickly typed a reply. He suddenly stood up, grabbed his jacket from the rack, and prepared to head out.

“She is angry. I am going to go coax her. Help me turn off the stove.” Before he could finish the sentence, the door slammed shut.

Yun Deng finally understood why Xia Shisheng had been out of the house every day lately; he was busy spending time with his new girlfriend. Seeing that it was still early, he walked into the kitchen, bored, to figure out his dinner. One look in the refrigerator killed any desire to cook. Aside from drinks and beer, there were almost no ingredients, not even a single egg.

Returning to the sofa to finish his chips, he opened his phone to check for unread messages.

min: “Good brother, I probably will not be back tonight. Please bring in the clothes from my balcony. Thanks.”

Yun Deng felt the weight of the responsibility, but at this moment, food was the priority. At two o’clock in the afternoon, his lunch finally arrived via courier. He placed the pizza and pasta on the coffee table and sat cross-legged on the carpet. He took a photo from an angle with good lighting, chose the best one, added a filter, and drafted a post for his Moments.

Caption: “So hungry. I almost ate the delivery rider along with the food.”

As soon as he hit send and refreshed, several likes appeared. While eating his pasta, Yun Deng scrolled through his feed, liking the posts of his circle of friends one by one. His heart skipped a beat when he saw a specific name, and he immediately dropped his fork.

It was a link to a school’s public account shared by Lin Yanxu. It had been posted five minutes ago. Realizing the other man might be online and free, Yun Deng wished he could teleport to the school to find him. He immediately liked and commented on the post.

At three forty-five in the afternoon, after finishing his last class of the afternoon, Lin Yanxu returned to his office to grade the homework assigned that day. This year, the second year high school curriculum had to be finished early to begin the third year material, placing immense pressure on the teachers in the department. There were twelve periods a day, and on his busiest days, Lin Yanxu taught ten of them. He had not finished grading the previous stack when the class representative brought in a fresh pile. For a time, the only sounds in the office were the turning of pages and the scratching of pens.

Fang Yu, who had been sitting for the entire afternoon, finally completed all her lesson plans. She was so tired she felt like she might fall asleep at her desk. She turned to see Lin Yanxu still grading and said, “Teacher Lin, do you teach three classes in the second year? I feel like my eyes are going blurry just looking at the handwriting in these workbooks.”

Lin Yanxu capped his fountain pen and set it aside. He rubbed his right wrist to ease the ache and replied, “Yes.”

“I am truly being drained dry. I do not even know how much is in the homeroom teacher fund this month. If this continues, I might just resign and run away,” Fang Yu said with a smile.

The two shared a brief conversation before returning to their work. It was not until the bell for the last self-study period rang that Lin Yanxu finished his tasks. Thinking that the students would be heading to the cafeteria or the dorms at this hour, he personally delivered the Chinese workbooks for two floors back to the classrooms.

When he returned to the office, he noticed dozens of unread notifications on WeChat. This was his work account, where colleagues usually did not like each other’s posts unless they were resharing school-related links. When Lin Yanxu clicked in, he found that every single post he had ever shared had been liked and commented on by one person.

Mianmian Yu liked your post. Mianmian Yu commented on your post: “Teacher, you are so serious. Your feed is entirely about school. I have no way of getting to know you by lurking on your profile [sad face.jpg].”

Lin Yanxu simply replied with a question mark. He had been so busy these past few days that he had forgotten he had added a clingy puppy last week. Seeing the nickname, he briefly wondered if he had forgotten to set a memo for a colleague. Shortly after he sent the question mark, two unread messages popped up.

Mianmian Yu: “Teacher, you are online! I thought you were so busy you did not look at your phone.” Mianmian Yu: “Can I ask you a question? But you have to promise not to delete me first.”

On the other side, Yun Deng was clutching his phone and jumping excitedly on the bed. Having received a reply to his comment, he could no longer hold back and had sent a private message. After waiting about a minute, a reply came through.

Handsome Beauty: “Ask.”

Having received permission, Yun Deng immediately typed out the question he cared about most and sent it. However, he regretted it the moment it was sent and quickly hit “Recall.”

Mianmian Yu: “Are you a 1 or a 0?”

Yun Deng felt he must have lost his mind to ask such a private question right away. Fortunately, his brain had not completely shut down, and he realized how inappropriate it was. But as he prayed the other man had not seen it, a message from Lin Yanxu sent him from heaven straight into hell.

Handsome Beauty: “Hmm?”

He frantically typed a message to salvage the situation.

Mianmian Yu: “Sorry, I was too excited and said the wrong thing.”

Mianmian Yu: “Just pretend you did not see it [twiddling thumbs.jpg].”

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