It Seems Like My Senior Seems to Like Me - Chapter 95

At the entrance of Xiaoxiao’s pet shop, a tall woman in a white coat stepped out of the crowd and walked toward the front, where someone was clutching a sick poodle and demanding an explanation.

“I’m from the Institute of Animal Diseases. This is my business card.”

Her calm voice carried into the hall.

The moment she spoke, Wei Xiaoxiao jolted as if struck by a stick. On the plastic chair in the lobby, she froze like a block of ice.

Her eyes shifted slightly, following the voice, and there she saw a slender woman standing sideways at the door—black trousers, a white hip-length coat, neat short hair, and black-framed glasses—

Calm, composed, utterly unshaken, as if nothing that happened had anything to do with her.

It was Jiang Shiyu, a name Wei Xiaoxiao had tried countless times to forget, but the harder she tried, the clearer it became.

Her gaze flustered in an instant. She hurriedly hung up her phone, turned her head aside, and her mind felt like wet mud being splattered, chaotic and murky.

At the entrance, the angry woman had no time to notice her strange reaction. She demanded of the newcomer:

“Who are you?”

Jiang Shiyu handed her business card a little closer. “I work at the Institute of Animal Diseases. My specialty is infectious diseases.”

The woman took the card. “Really?”

Seizing the moment, Jiang Shiyu glanced at the test report in her hand and said:

“This virus has an incubation period of three to six months.”

“What?” The woman was bewildered, clearly clueless about the subject.

Jiang Shiyu explained evenly: “It means that after your dog was infected, it wouldn’t show symptoms during those three to six months. Now that it’s sick, the actual infection must have happened at least three months ago.”

Not during the week it had been boarded at Xiaoxiao’s pet shop, as the woman had assumed.

Still doubtful, the woman typed the virus name into a search engine. Sure enough, the explanation matched Jiang Shiyu’s word for word.

Thinking back, she remembered: four months ago when she went back to her hometown, her dog had fought with a stray mutt, leaving a cut on its front leg. She had brushed it off as a minor wound and bandaged it herself.

Now it all made sense—it must have been that time.

After realizing the truth, she apologized to Wei Xiaoxiao, then immediately hailed a cab to confront that rural household.

“Good heavens!”

The pet shop had narrowly escaped a crisis, and the staff all sighed with relief, rushing to surround Jiang Shiyu like she had descended from the skies.

“Pretty lady! Thank goodness for you, thank you, thank you!”

“What pretty lady? Show some respect! She’s from the research institute, at least call her Professor. Right, Professor? May we know your name? Come inside, please!”

“Exactly, it’s all thanks to you being an expert in this field. If this had spread, our business would have been ruined!”

Four or five employees clustered around her, some expressing gratitude, some trying to ingratiate themselves. Yet all of them, buzzing like bees around blossoms, never received a flicker of attention from the tall pine they encircled.

Standing upright, Jiang Shiyu tuned out the noise, her gaze cutting through the crowd and landing on the figure sitting at the front desk, turned slightly away from her. A ripple stirred in her calm eyes.

After a long moment, Wei Xiaoxiao finally moved. She got down from her chair, walked toward Jiang Shiyu, and spoke with an expression like a bowl of cold water:

“Professor Jiang, thank you.”

The staff lit up in surprise. They had thought Jiang Shiyu was just a passerby coming to the rescue—never expected she and their boss to be old acquaintances. Cheers erupted, marveling at the strangeness of fate.

But when they looked closer at Wei Xiaoxiao’s face, not a trace of a smile could be seen. The front desk clerk sensed something wrong and hurriedly ushered everyone out, leaving the two women facing each other.

Wei Xiaoxiao took the initiative to speak, and Jiang Shiyu felt like a prisoner suddenly set free. Her composed face broke into joy, and she quickly said:

“It was nothing, Xiaoxiao. Long time no see.”

Indeed, after years of separation, both still held onto the sweet memories of their youth. At first sight, happiness outweighed anything else.

But Wei Xiaoxiao’s next words were:

“You’re not welcome here.”

Crack!

A sharp knife plunged into her heart, piercing through and bleeding profusely.

Jiang Shiyu faltered. For the first time in her life, she felt that peculiar helplessness—someone right before her eyes, yet unbearably distant, out of reach of thought itself.

She stood there blankly, like a statue. By the time she came back to herself, Wei Xiaoxiao was already at the door with her bag.

Backlit, her figure glowed, but all Jiang Shiyu could see was darkness.

This was the rare, icy side of the girl she remembered as sunny, lively, and kind.

“You were the one who said—the cheapest thing in the world is liking someone.”

Leaving that line behind, the graceful figure quickly vanished through the doorway, leaving Jiang Shiyu in the shadows, her heart throbbing painfully.

Back then, when impoverished Jiang Shiyu had earned admission to a graduate program abroad, she faced tens of thousands in tuition fees.

Wei Xiaoxiao, from a well-off family, had finally persuaded her parents to lend thirty thousand yuan to help her. But when the check was handed over, Jiang Shiyu tore it to pieces.

“What gives you the right to do this?” she demanded.

“Because I like you,” Wei Xiaoxiao had said—both innocent and indignant. “I’m your girlfriend. You need money now, so I figured it out for you.”

Her intention had been simple: help solve the tuition problem. But Jiang Shiyu, raised in poverty, could never accept such overwhelming generosity from a lover—especially not a check her girlfriend had nearly severed ties with her family to obtain.

If she took that money, what would that make her?

She had never promised Wei Xiaoxiao anything. She wasn’t sure if she herself could succeed in the future. How could she justify accepting such a sum?

On faith in her academic future? On empty words? On mere affection?

So she had said it:

“The cheapest thing in the world is liking someone.”

It was meant for herself, but in Wei Xiaoxiao’s ears, it cut like a thousand blades.

Wei Xiaoxiao went alone to Ye Wanjia and Pei Suye’s new home, carrying nothing but her heavy thoughts.

Ye Wanjia stayed with her the whole time. Seeing her weighed down like someone drowning, she knew the voice on the phone—the one that had sounded like Jiang Shiyu—hadn’t been her imagination.

“Never thought I’d meet her again like this.”

Flat on her back with a face mask on, Wei Xiaoxiao spoke woodenly, eyes blank, like a machine running endlessly on its track.

“Quite unexpected, yeah.”

After listening to the whole story, Ye Wanjia fell silent, thinking.

“But Xiaoxiao, I don’t think she appeared there by accident.”

Wei Xiaoxiao’s gaze stiffened. “What do you mean?”

Ye Wanjia explained: “The coincidence feels too neat. Your shop is far from the institute, so she probably wasn’t just passing by after work.”

Wei Xiaoxiao’s mind leapt instantly, and she sat up with a snap, peeling off her face mask.

“You’re right. That woman could’ve been arranged by her. Then she shows up to save me, looking all heroic—perfect excuse to get close to me again!”

Ye Wanjia forced a smile. As expected, Xiaoxiao’s mind leapt in far stranger arcs than most. She tried pulling her back a bit:

“Her EQ doesn’t seem that high. I just checked online—the institute’s new hires started two months ago. Maybe, without you knowing, she’s been visiting your shop every day. Just from afar, not wanting to disturb you. Then today, by chance, she saw trouble and helped.”

Wei Xiaoxiao pressed her lips together. That seemed more plausible, yet still puzzling:

“But she’s the type to count every step she walks, every action weighed against return. What’s in it for her to walk back and forth every day, doing nothing?”

Ye Wanjia glanced at the figure in the kitchen squeezing orange juice, lowered her voice, and said:

“Well… maybe she still likes you. Maybe she wants to get back together.”

Wei Xiaoxiao shook her head, unconvinced. “Impossible. She was the one who broke up with me. I said all the harsh words I could. She left, heartbroken, to study abroad.”

Then she found another angle to argue:

“Besides, who does that? Take you and the President for example—when you two got back together, it was straightforward. Mutual confession, instant reunion. Who circles around making excuses, showing up for no reason like that?”

Crash!

In the kitchen, the orange juice maker slipped, shattering the first glass in their new home.

Wiping the tension from her face, Pei Suye turned with a smile.

“I’ll clean this up. You two carry on.”

Ye Wanjia raised a hand awkwardly in agreement. Wei Xiaoxiao, meanwhile, sat obediently cross-legged on the couch, eyes lowered, waiting until Pei Suye had walked off with the broom before daring to whisper:

“So… what did the President do back then?”

What exactly had she done—appearing before Ye Wanjia, seemingly meaningless yet with such clear intent?

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