Don’t Even Think About It - Chapter 5

The friend request was approved, and a new chat box instantly appeared in the message interface.

Qiao Yan didn’t have any pinned friends or groups on WeChat. The moment she accepted the request, Zhou Xiyun “airdropped” directly to the very top, firmly occupying the number one spot.

“You have added Zhou Xiyun. Now you can start chatting.”

Qiao Yan froze for a moment; it was already too late to regret it.

Since they had already added each other, deleting her now wouldn’t make her feel any better, and missing out on the money would be an even bigger loss. She was someone who could bend and stretch according to the situation, never letting herself get bogged down by trivial matters. After a moment of deliberation, she typed out: “Didn’t you say you have no money?”

Zhou Xiyun replied in a split second: “Yeah.”

Qiao Yan: ?

Zhou Xiyun replied calmly: “Borrowed it.”

Qiao Yan’s fingers flew across the screen, typing out a row of words. After a second thought, she deleted them all. Skipping the nonsense, she said short and sweet: “Pay me back.”

Whether she was busy with something or deliberately teasing her, Zhou Xiyun didn’t reply right away. The words “The other party is typing…” appeared at the top of the phone screen, but vanished after a while, with no response following for the longest time.

Qiao Yan sent two exclamation marks over, too lazy to even look for an emoji.

This was the first time in their lives that they had appeared on each other’s social media apps. They never had this before. After all, WeChat hadn’t even been invented in their earlier years, and cell phones weren’t common back then either. Later on, the commonly used chatting app was QQ (Penguin). Yet, Zhou Xiyun’s QQ account hadn’t even reached the level of a “Single Sun” (Level 16) despite having it for over a decade. She was not active at all.

When they were kids, most top students were aloof and detached from mundane life, they didn’t play video games, didn’t use QQ, didn’t hang out with sketchy friends, and some even disdained owning a phone.

The Goddess Zhou was one of them. She didn’t even step foot into internet cafes. Computers and the internet were merely tools for her to broaden her horizons and study. Aside from looking up information, she didn’t know how to do anything else with them.

Back then, the Zhou family already owned a computer, having acquired one as early as the nineties.

Computers were still a novelty in that era, one would cost anywhere from several thousand to ten thousand yuan, so they weren’t installed in every household. The computer in the Zhou family was bought by Zhou Xiyun’s biological mother, Ms. Zhou Huiwen, after she made money from her business. It was upgraded several times later on.

Qiao Yan had been wasting her life away playing around since childhood. Her own family didn’t have a computer back then, so she had the thick skin to leech off the Zhou family every single day. Every time she walked through the door, she would sweet-talk Zhou Huiwen with a few lines, and then swagger into Zhou Xiyun’s room, shamelessly staying put and refusing to leave until sunset.

Come to think of it, Qiao Yan’s very first QQ account was registered on the computer at Zhou Xiyun’s house. She had wanted to add Zhou Xiyun as a friend back then, but the other girl didn’t appreciate the gesture, looked down on her, and rejected her with a face full of annoyance.

Having finally added each other as friends after so many years, Qiao Yan was still not quite used to it. She felt that Zhou Xiyun’s presence was an eyesore for some inexplicable reason, and she hesitated over whether she should delete this person after receiving the money.

Out of sight, out of mind. They had never gotten along anyway, so deleting each other was no big deal, and blocking her wouldn’t even be an issue.

Qiao Yan gave it some serious thought and felt increasingly that it was feasible, that was exactly how it should be handled, to save her from staying around just to make her presence known. She sent another exclamation mark over and even gave her a “nudge.”

It took Zhou Xiyun two or three minutes to explain: “I was a bit busy just now, didn’t have time.”

Qiao Yan didn’t care about any of that; she stuck to her initial point, only waiting to collect the money.

Zhou Xiyun picked up where the previous topic left off: “I didn’t borrow enough, so I can’t pay back that much right now.”

Naturally, Qiao Yan didn’t believe her and exposed her on the spot: “Keep on bluffing.”

Zhou Xiyun: “I only have eight hundred yuan.”

Qiao Yan: “Oh.”

Zhou Xiyun: “I really don’t have money.”

Qiao Yan sent an emoji over, refusing to entangle further with her.

Zhou Xiyun typed out a long paragraph of text: “I made an investment before returning to the country, and a while ago I lent a sum of money to a friend for cash flow. My expenses have been high recently, so money is tight.”

Qiao Yan asked: “Which friend?”

Zhou Xiyun answered: “Xing Yuan.”

Xing Yuan. Qiao Yan knew him, he was also someone who grew up in the same courtyard. However, he had a tighter relationship with Zhou Xiyun and wasn’t very close to Qiao Yan, amounting at most to the kind of acquaintance where they would greet each other when crossing paths on the street.

But Qiao Yan still knew a thing or two about Xing Yuan. She knew that he had indeed been doing business for the past two years, and it was also a fact that he was short on cash flow. The last time she returned to the courtyard, she had even heard Xing Yuan’s family members talking about this.

Qiao Yan hesitated slightly. Although she still didn’t entirely believe it, she let her off the hook for the time being, following up with: “Pay back as much as you have, and the rest will be put on tab for now.”

Zhou Xiyun: “Fine.”

Qiao Yan: “Don’t even think about reneging on your debt.”

Zhou Xiyun transferred the money right away, exactly eight hundred yuan, no more, no less. Qiao Yan wasn’t soft-hearted, she accepted the money as soon as it was given, ending the small talk.

The chat box instantly fell completely silent, with neither disturbing the other.

The relationship between the two sides hadn’t reached the point where they had things to talk about. Furthermore, with an accident like last night’s having occurred, keeping up the chatter was impossible, there was no way they could face each other calmly.

After a moment of thought, Qiao Yan pressed down on the screen for two seconds, clicked “Delete Chat,” and removed Zhou Xiyun from her message interface.

The night was deep, it was already ten minutes past midnight.

They hadn’t really chatted about much, yet half an hour had flown by in the blink of an eye.

Qiao Yan reached out to pull the blanket over herself and lay flat on her back. Taking advantage of the moment, she turned on silent mode, set her alarm clock, and truly put down her phone to sleep.

She still had to work tomorrow, and today had been exhausting enough.

On the other side, Xijing Courtyard.

The night breeze was slightly cool, blowing in gentle gusts. In the courtyard, the bamboo swayed softly with the wind, the leaves rustling as they brushed against one another.

The lights were still on inside the Zhou family’s old house. Behind the tightly closed window of the room on the east side of the second floor stood Zhou Xiyun, wrapped in a bath towel. She was drying her hair with a dry towel while looking down, scrolling through her phone.

The old house was large. Although its exterior walls had grown weathered and worn with age, the spacious interior was exceptionally clean and well-decorated.

On the desk, her office laptop was still receiving files. Even at this late hour, Zhou Xiyun was still working, handling the unfinished tasks from earlier that day.

Having just come out after taking a bath, she had used that brief pocket of time to take care of her own affairs to avoid staying up too late. Walking over to the desk, she set her phone down without locking the screen. She then proceeded to blow-dry her hair first. When it was nearly dry, she glanced down at the screen once more, confirming there were indeed no new messages. Only then did she push the phone aside and focus wholeheartedly on her work on the laptop.

The remaining work wasn’t difficult, just a matter of wrapping things up. Once the files were received, it would be resolved very quickly.

In less than twenty minutes, the laptop was shut once again.

Before heading to bed, she got up once more and walked back into the bathroom to hang the washed and dried clothes out on the balcony.

There weren’t many clothes, just the ones she had worn yesterday and today. Zhou Xiyun wasn’t particularly skilled at doing chores, so her movements were a bit slow. This was especially true when she picked up that cyan blouse, her brow furrowed slightly, unaccustomed to having her clothes washed together with someone else’s.

The cyan blouse was ultimately hung at the very edge of the drying rack, far away from the room owner’s own garments, keeping a distance of at least one meter.

She deliberately kept them apart, drawing a clear line between them so they wouldn’t mix.

Only after finishing everything did Zhou Xiyun finally go to sleep with peace of mind.

It was a quiet and peaceful night, followed by another sun-drenched day.

The start of the new day was just like any other, completely unchanged.

She got up, tidied herself, drove to the company, attended a morning meeting, and officially started her workday.

The overall working atmosphere at Yifeng Group was decent; all the employees were active, energetic, and took their tasks seriously.

The Venture Capital Department didn’t have many people, making it seem rather quiet and deserted compared to other departments. Early in the morning, it was completely silent with no one speaking. Everyone immersed themselves in their work right after arriving, keeping busy with their own tasks and only communicating when necessary.

When the employees in the department saw Zhou Xiyun, they all greeted her, either with a warm word or a nod of acknowledgment, no one ignored her.

There were many unspoken rules in the workplace. Everyone was well aware of Zhou Xiyun’s weight, knowing she was someone the top management had gone to great lengths to hire with a high salary. Consequently, they all tacitly treated her with extra politeness, intentionally showing her special courtesy.

Zhou Xiyun didn’t care how her colleagues viewed her. She wasn’t fond of engaging in the conventional rules of workplace socializing, she simply did her duty, keeping things polite on the surface and ignoring everything else.

There was a mountain of miscellaneous tasks to take care of in the morning, once she sat down, half the day flew by.

In the afternoon, a vice president came over and called Zhou Xiyun out.

The VP wanted to talk to her about some urgent matters and gave her a list of tedious requirements.

Zhou Xiyun returned holding a thick stack of documents. By the time she sat back down at her desk, a bouquet of flowers had appeared there out of nowhere.

Yesterday it was Blue Enchantress roses, today it was a bit more low-key, replaced by subtle baby’s breath.

A neighboring colleague told Zhou Xiyun that the flowers had been handed over by a male employee, but who exactly sent them remained unknown, as the male employee hadn’t specified.

Receiving flowers wasn’t considered unusual at the company. Yifeng was full of attractive men and women, so people frequently experienced this kind of treatment.

However, since she was a new colleague and an exceptionally capable beauty, the employees in the department still looked on quietly, stealing glances out of the corners of their eyes.

No one discussed it, and no one made wild guesses.

They were simply curious and wanted to see the fun.

Being pursued right after starting work at the company was considered quite a big piece of gossip in any department, and everyone wanted to see how it would unfold.

Of course, a small number of people harbored different thoughts, fearing that someone else might beat them to the punch.

Zhou Xiyun could intuitively sense how the people around her were reacting. She ignored all of it and felt completely unmoved by the gesture of sending flowers, lacking the interest to even give them a second look. Her eyes only caught the small card clipped to the wrapping paper of the bouquet, as well as the flamboyant love note written on it.

The handwriting of the person who wrote it was far too distinctive. Having possessed the exact same writing style since childhood, it was difficult not to recognize it.

Zhou Xiyun picked up the card, holding it between her long, fair, and slender fingers. She swept her gaze down calmly. Written in black pen on it was:

“Passionate love is a quenchless thirst.”

A certain Miss Qiao certainly knew how to run her business. Fearing that her client’s expression of love wouldn’t be clear enough, she had not only written this English sentence beautifully but had also taken it upon herself to draw a small heart at the end.

It was red, drawn specifically with a different pen.

This was to ensure that even if the recipient of the flowers didn’t understand English, they would still know exactly what it meant.

After reading it in silence, Zhou Xiyun casually set the card down and picked up the bouquet without a trace of emotion.

The nearby colleagues all looked over, watching her closely once again.

Zhou Xiyun walked with measured steps to the door, turned left into the corridor, walked to the corner at the end of the hallway, and tossed the baby’s breath into the trash can without changing her expression.

She threw it right in, without a single shred of hesitation.