Chapter 1

Chapter 1

“So you’re damn well just after my body?”

When I first met Ruan Pingshan, I stood in his doorway glaring at him and snapped that at him in a huff.

He didn’t seem bothered in the slightest. Reclining in an armchair with one leg crossed over the other, he kept running his fingers over a piece of fine lambskin in an almost sensual way-as if he were imagining that soft texture was the skin on my back.

Still in that posture, he curled his lips faintly. “I thought that was the unspoken understanding between us.”

“Of course not. I want a relationship!” Anger rushed straight to my head, and I couldn’t even put together a complete, logical sentence. “I want to be your girlfriend. What I want is, uh… a…”

Ruan Pingshan took his time and prompted me leisurely, “A proper status.”

“Right, a proper status.” With his help, I finally managed to finish the sentence.

He nodded, set down the wineglass in his hand, and rose to walk over to me. His tall frame swallowed me in shadow.

His gaze settled on me, while his long fingers brushed past my waist and hip before finally closing around the doorknob. When he turned it, a gust of wind poured into the room and cooled my burning face.

“I’ll have the driver take you home,” he said, as if it were only natural to end the conversation there.

“That’s it? You don’t have anything to say to me?”

“I’m sorry?” He gave a small laugh. “Is that what you want to hear? Yerao, I like you very much, but I can’t give you that proper status. I’m sorry.”

“I don’t understand why. I can’t figure you out,” I said.

He let out a quiet sigh, straightened up, and adjusted the distance between us until it was no longer so intimate. “I’ll say it again. I’m single. I want to be with you, but I will always be single. As compensation, aside from affection, I can also give you money, cars, houses, and enough freedom.”

“That’s exactly why I said I don’t understand!”

“You don’t need to understand my logic. You only need to consider whether you’re willing to accept the terms I’m offering.” He turned, pushed the things on the table a little closer, and said to me, “There are two million in this card. We can give each other a year to start with.”

His lukewarm attitude infuriated me. “What I’m asking is this: if you like me and I like you, why don’t you want to date me and only want to keep me as your mistress?”

He shook his head helplessly, clearly having no intention of tangling with me any longer. “I’m going to take a shower. Think it over slowly. If you accept, everything is here. If you don’t, the door is there.”

That was ten months ago, when I first got together with Ruan Pingshan-yes, I accepted. I liked him far too much.

At the time, I had just entered my senior year of college. I was twenty-two, a complete slacker just drifting through life. He was twenty-eight and already owned a publicly listed company.

He came to my school to give a lecture, and I went to scrape together credits. There was no love at first sight. We were both motivated by lust at first glance. He was fickle, I was frivolous; he was blinded by desire, and I was dazzled stupid by his looks. Thinking about it that way, at least neither of us was in it for fame or money. In its own way, it was pretty pure.

Anyway, after a series of unspeakable shady dealings, we finally succeeded in getting together.

To be precise, I became a canary he kept in his garden. All I needed to do every day was show up before him looking pretty.

He was busy with work and didn’t come by every day, while I was free to do almost anything I wanted. Even when I replaced the set of premium bedding in his bedroom-worth well over a hundred thousand-with Hello Kitty to suit my own taste, he didn’t say a word. That night, he just moved the battlefield to the guest room.

I’m not afraid of being laughed at for saying this: becoming a kept woman and getting something for nothing has been my lifelong dream. What I didn’t expect was that in the year I graduated at twenty-two, I wouldn’t just achieve my life’s ambition-I’d also end up sleeping with the man I wanted.

I know I’m beautiful, just like I know I’m not very smart. Sometimes I suspect my parents got expert advice when they named me. My name is Yerao, Jiang Yerao.

Beautiful, sure. But it always feels like there’s something a little indecent about it.

Ruan Pingshan once said I’m the kind of woman who makes every man show his true form. Such elegant, obscure phrasing. Anyone who didn’t know better would think I was some kind of demon-revealing mirror.

My own assessment is much more straightforward: I have pale, smooth skin, full and heavy breasts, and a round, plump ass. From the front, my waist looks slim, but my lower belly always sticks out a little, soft and squishy to the touch. My legs aren’t slim at all, but they’re long, straight, and well-proportioned. When I wear thigh-highs, the tops dig in and press out a ring of soft flesh.

I have a dazzling face and a dull mind. All in all, I’m a beautiful, stupid woman.

I know this doesn’t sound very nice, but being a canary is probably the profession that suits me best in this world.

As the dependent party, I’m honestly not all that professional. In front of Ruan Pingshan, I’ve always done whatever I wanted. If I wanted to lose my temper, I did. If I wanted to give him attitude, I did. If I was happy, I smiled at him. If I wasn’t, I picked fights. And if we couldn’t get a proper fight going, I just cursed him out unilaterally.

I never really had the awareness of being his kept woman. Or rather, I’d been lying to myself all along, pretending we were in a relationship.

And Ruan Pingshan, as the one footing the bill, could practically be called generous and benevolent, his grace extending to all. He doted on me. He would take me to refined concerts, but he’d also go with me to deafening music festivals. He would take me to high-end photography exhibitions, but he’d also accompany me to take silly photo booth pictures.

I could never understand the books he read, but if I asked, he would explain a little to me. Even if I still didn’t get it, he would patiently explain it again.

Sometimes when I got sick, or when I was on my period, he would come by too. He’d bring me some medicine and food, sit with me for a while, chat with me a bit, and then leave.

The rarest thing-the most unbelievable thing-was that other than me, this nameless canary with no status, he actually had no other women.

I once asked him if he would ever get married. He said maybe. Back then, I told him my bottom line was that I could never destroy someone else’s family, could never be the other woman. If that day ever came, then we’d be done.

He smiled after hearing that and asked, “What if the person I married was you?”

We were naked in each other’s arms when he said it, the air and light around us charged with intimacy, and the words sounded unbearably romantic.

But I only let out a cold laugh. “A man who won’t even date me properly is going to marry me?”

See? I really am stupid. I ruined a perfectly good mood.

He didn’t get angry, but I started thinking about it. Right-if we kept fooling around like this, there was no future for us. The best possible ending was that we’d eventually get tired of each other and part ways cleanly. The worst was that I would keep sinking deeper all by myself, without end, and one day he would walk away with perfect ease.

This kind of drama plays out in TV shows and novels every single day, and I still had to learn it firsthand. It took me ten whole months to finally wake up. That really was stupidity on another level.

So I negotiated with him. I told him I was breaking up with him. I was going to go find myself.

At the time, I was standing in the doorway with my suitcase, while he sat quietly in an armchair listening, exactly the same as ten months earlier.