Chapter 5
Chapter 5
After a quick wash and a bite to eat, I changed into slightly more formal clothes and headed out for my interview.
While I was changing, Pearl was on the bed behind me. I happened to glance back and couldn’t help laughing.
“Pearl, you were staring at me just now. Why are you acting shy all of a sudden?”
The black snake was coiled on the bed, but its head was turned the other way.
“I mean, we’re not the same species, but we are the same sex. Do snakes get embarrassed too?”
I was just talking nonsense.
Who knew whether snakes had that sort of awareness?
After fixing my hair in the mirror, I left.
As usual, I made sure the doors and windows were shut before going out.
The front door had a keypad lock. It was a little old. When I first moved in, the landlord told me to change the password, but I couldn’t think of anything, so I changed it to my phone passcode.
I’m a sentimental person. That string of numbers was the first six digits of my student number from some year back in middle school.
Those six digits had pretty much followed me through my entire daily life.
The interview didn’t take too long. I ate outside before heading home. When I got back, the apartment was quiet, and unsurprisingly, there was no snake in the reptile tank.
After searching around, I finally found Pearl on my computer chair, with a pair of my pants underneath it.
“Why did you dig out my clothes too?” I picked up the snake that had taken over my seat, suddenly questioning my life choices. “I’m raising a snake, not a dog, right?”
The snake, whose mental state was truly touching, opened its mouth and bit me.
It didn’t hurt.
I didn’t know whether bites from other snakes hurt, but with Pearl, only the first two bites at the very beginning had been painful.
I patted its head, a little worried. “Are you hungry? Want Dad to feed you something?”
But it still showed no intention of eating.
It was like raising a child for the first time. When they didn’t eat or poop, it was just easy to worry.
On Sunday afternoon, the headhunter called to tell me the good news that I’d made it to the next round of interviews, and also confirmed my expected salary.
When the call came in, the snake was coiled around my arm.
Such a tsundere snake.
Today, it wouldn’t come over and wrap itself around me on its own, but if I applied a little “forced love,” it stopped struggling.
Adorable.
I gave it a kiss.
In just a few days, Pearl had gone from resisting me at first to compromising now.
It was so beautiful that I’d already lost count of how many times I’d kissed it.
And because it felt so nice to touch, I no longer had any psychological barriers about accepting a snake sleeping in my bed, or even on me.
On Monday morning, I woke up groggily and peeled the snake sleeping on top of me off.
I hadn’t slept all that well last night. Snakes were cold, and they liked coiling everywhere. When that kind of contact was directly against bare skin, it easily gave a person goose bumps. And this restless snake tail had wrapped around my lower abdomen while I was asleep.
It felt a little weird.
Looking at the marks on my body that hadn’t healed from the day before, plus the new ones added last night, I sighed.
Once I put on my clothes, all the marks were covered.
Then I timed things out and arrived at the company right around the start of the workday.
Today, my superior, who had rarely taken sick leave last week, was back.
Dressed in a suit and leather shoes, he still had that same unapproachable look.
Only, he was late. A full half hour late.
And his complexion didn’t look great, like he hadn’t fully recovered.
The moment the Big Devil returned, everyone wilted like frostbitten eggplants.
Early in the morning, my colleagues went into his office one by one to be criticized.
Qin Jingchong wasn’t the kind of boss who would blow up and curse people out, but he would pick out your flaws one by one and express his dissatisfaction in a tone as calm as a robot’s.
Clearly, physical discomfort hadn’t affected the Big Devil’s combat ability.
Then it was my turn.