Chapter 4

Chapter 4

How was I supposed to maintain my current standard of living after leaving Ruan Pingshan?

There was no way I could do it by working here.

When I was leaving the shop, he said to me, “Yerao, I honestly can’t believe you call this work. You’d be better off coming to my company and working as a receptionist.”

He really was unbelievably condescending.

“Why do I have to rely on you to find a job? You’re a big boss, of course you look down on these entry-level positions. But for me, this is still something I earned with my own abilities. Isn’t beauty a kind of ability too?” I argued confidently.

“Of course beauty is an ability,” he said, to my surprise, admitting it outright. Then he shot back, “Without beauty, would you have what you have today?”

“What is that supposed to mean?” It was the second time I’d asked him that today.

“I gave you a shovel, and I gave you a mine, but instead of digging for ore, you turned around and started digging up cement.” He shook his head and looked at me like he was furious at my failure to live up to my potential. “When are you ever going to learn how to use your resources? All your resources, including me?”

Without thinking, I blurted out, “Then can that even still be called dating?”

His palm slammed against the wall beside my face with a bang. As his face moved closer and closer, his breath hit my skin, carrying the scent of cologne.

“Jiang Yerao, do you think I’m dating you?”

That single sentence was practically his foolproof incantation. It could ignite my anger in an instant and burn away every shred of reason I had left.

“I think you’re a pervert, a lunatic! You don’t even know how to date, so all you can do is play this sugar daddy game with the woman you like!” I shoved at him with all my strength, but it was useless. In the end, I could only glare at him in outrage. “You just think it’s embarrassing for me to be working as a waitress, don’t you? Well, I don’t think it’s embarrassing. And no matter how embarrassing that is, could it possibly be worse than selling my body by being with you?”

He quietly waited for me to finish my rant, then took two steps back and pulled down the blinds of the private booth.

He didn’t turn on the light. The room was left with nothing but the dim golden haze of afternoon.

After doing all that, he sat down in the chair, crossed one leg over the other, and looked up at me.

“You call this selling your body?”

All at once, the scene felt strangely familiar.

Ten months earlier, he’d come out of the bathroom in a robe. When he saw that I was still standing by the door, his gaze rested on me for only a moment before he went to the fridge and took out two cans of sparkling water.

“What do you need me to do?” I’d spent a long time working up the nerve before finally forcing the question out, even though my voice was no louder than a mosquito’s buzz. “Is it that all I need to do is sell my body to you, and everything else about your life is none of my business?”

Back then, he had sat the same way on the sofa too, one leg crossed over the other, looking up at me.

“You call this selling your body?”

I held my breath, and my tone wasn’t very good. “What else would you call it? Aren’t you just hoping I’ll take your money and obediently sleep with you?”

At that, he laughed. His eyes stayed on the TV screen as he asked me casually, “Don’t you think it’s cheap of you to say that about yourself?”

I had never imagined he would be so blunt, using a word like that to describe me. I was so angry I burst into tears on the spot.

But he ignored me and went on.

“Yerao, my advice is this: don’t put yourself in such a cheap position. This is all your choice. If you think this money is an insult to you, then don’t take it. If you think acting a little more obedient is oppressive, then curse me out. If you think sleeping with me is a punishment, then you can leave.”

It was like he’d cut off my spell mid-cast. The two tears that had just fallen were still on my face, but I already couldn’t make sense of what he was saying. “Huh? What do you mean?”

He stood up and slowly walked toward me, finally stopping extremely close. He pinched one of the buttons on my collar between two fingers.

Lowering his head, he gazed into my eyes and laughed softly. “I have ten thousand ways to trick you into bed. I don’t need to stand here listening to you cry and ask me whether I want to ‘buy’ your body.”

I instinctively took a step back, and the button caught between his fingers slipped right out of its buttonhole because of my movement.

In a moment like this, I actually got amused by the little blunder I’d made myself.

My “ha” still carried a sob in it, but by some twist of fate, it eased the stalemate between us.

My dulled nerves sensed that shift, so clumsily, I tried to win back a little ground. I looked at him with my big, misty eyes in the most pitiful way and said, “I really do want to be with you-to have a proper, legitimate relationship, one that has a future.”

“Do you know what lie men tell women the most, the best, the one that never fails?” He smiled at me without a sound and leaned close to my ear. “I really do want to be with you-to have a proper, legitimate relationship, one that has a future.”

He made that lie sound so achingly tender that my legs nearly gave out, and I almost believed it.

Sensing my reaction, he let out a low laugh. His index finger landed on my lips and lightly stroked them, then slid along my chin, across the hollow of my throat, and finally came to rest on my collarbone. Curling his knuckle, he hooked the gap in my collar where that button had just come undone and pulled me slightly closer.

“But I won’t lie to you, Yerao. The only thing I can give you is a secret relationship, one that can’t be made public and might end at any moment.” His lips were so close that I even thought he was going to kiss me, and I tilted my face up ever so slightly to meet him, to chase after it-but he didn’t. Like a cunning hunter, he deliberately drew back and widened the distance between us, teasing and controlling, his smile intimate and provocative. “Of course, I’ll also ‘sell’ you my body.”

Sometimes people really can be so cheap. In that moment, my mind was full of nothing but that kiss that never came.

That tiny bit of sweetness was like a piece of candy hanging in front of me, and I was desperate to taste it.

?

Time returns to the present. He sat in the chair with one leg crossed over the other, looking at me as he asked, “You call this selling my body?”

“How else am I supposed to understand it? Ruan Pingshan, more and more, I feel like I’m the one selling myself. I just happened to run into an owner who knows how to cherish his merchandise.” I felt like I was about to cry again. I sobbed twice and asked him in a tearful voice, “After saying all that and doing all that, do you really think telling me you like me now sounds convincing?”

He listened quietly to the end, then nodded. “If that’s how you want to frame our relationship, I don’t mind dealing with you as a buyer would.”

He stood up, walked over to me, grabbed my arm, and pinned me against the wall. Then he spoke four words.

“Quit your job immediately.”

“No!” I bit my lip and glared at him.

“Does merchandise have the right to say no to its buyer?” He crushed my defiance almost instantly and said in an unhurried low voice, “Yerao, if you were my ‘property,’ I would never allow you to waste your life here, wear down your shelf life, turn yourself into some wretched yellow-faced woman, and lower my ‘user experience.'”

I came here to find myself and realize my own value!