Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Secretary Guan was right.

Someone who worked at a leader’s side really was different.

Her judgment was sharp.

Over the next little while, Li Chengfeng went at me like a madman.

He targeted me at every turn.

Things that could clearly be synced by email, he insisted I report to his office in person. I had nothing to do with fieldwork, yet he made me accompany him to inspect the factory lines. I was in planning, but he singled me out to take meeting minutes.

My workload multiplied overnight.

At last, I couldn’t hold back. “Don’t you have a secretary?”

He lazily spun his pen, not even bothering to lift his eyelids. “She’s busy. Don’t you have a secretarial certificate? Did you get it just for decoration?”

I clenched my back teeth and cursed him out wildly in my head.

This was obvious retaliation!

Abuse of power for personal revenge!

How petty. So what if I’d beaten him up a few times when we were young?

What mischievous Little Fatty hadn’t been disciplined by the class monitor in childhood?

The most infuriating part was that his venomous tongue had only gotten worse. Every word was sharp and vicious, stabbing straight into my lungs. Several times, he left me speechless and almost made me explode.

I knew he was deliberately trying to provoke me.

Of course I couldn’t let him succeed.

How could I let the persona I’d worked so hard to build collapse at the last second?

So I swallowed it all down through gritted teeth. In front of him, I was forever meek, submissive, and silently enduring.

As for him, he would simply tilt his head and look at me from the corner of his eye, that faint, barely-there smile on his face, as if to say:

Go on. Keep acting!

Thankfully, when I got home, there was Wei Che.

That day, Li Chengfeng called me into his office to revise a proposal again, and I got home forty minutes late.

When I pushed open the door, steak, red wine, and fresh flowers were arranged on the table.

Wei Che was wearing a crisp white shirt, the cuffs rolled to his forearms, revealing firm lines. In the candlelight, he watched me with a smiling gaze.

“Yao Yao, happy second anniversary!”

“Gege!”

I flung myself at him like a little bird, wrapping my legs around his waist.

He caught me steadily.

That night.

Just as my eyes went unfocused, Wei Che suddenly gripped my wrist. His strength was astonishing.

“Jiang Yao.”

“Mm-”

“If I suddenly left one day, what would you do?”

He stopped there, his breathing abruptly light.

Caught in that unbearable limbo, I blurted out, “I’ll wait for you for the rest of my life, Gege!”

Wei Che stared at me, his eyes bright as two clusters of flame in the dark. Then he lowered his head, his lips brushing my ear as he let out a relieved sigh. “It doesn’t have to be that long…”

That night, he was utterly unrestrained.

As if he had become a different person.

The next day at work, my waist and legs were so sore I could barely stand up straight. Every so often, I couldn’t help hissing under my breath.

The colleague beside me asked carefully, “Did your husband, uh… drink again yesterday?”

The corner of my mouth twitched. “He did drink a little.”

That drew a wave of sympathetic looks.

My phone rang. Wei Che had sent me a message.

[I have to leave for a while. I don’t know when I’ll be back. Take care.]

I stared at the screen for several seconds.

The heart I had been holding up finally died.

I got up and went to the break room, made a cup of hot coffee, and held it in my hands as I leaned against the counter, dazed.

Wei Che had gone back to his original world.

Back to marry into an arranged alliance.

Of course he would never come back.

Those words had merely been a delaying tactic to placate a hopeless romantic like me.

Heh.

Good thing I wasn’t actually a hopeless romantic.

So I wouldn’t be that sad, either.

I lifted my head.

For a long while, I didn’t move…

“What are you doing posing like a swan during work hours?”

A cold voice rang out.

Startled, I met Li Chengfeng’s eyes.

He was leaning against the doorframe, a cup in his hand, his gaze sharp like a cat that had caught the scent of blood.

I casually brushed the corner of my eye with my pinky.

He narrowed his eyes at me.

“Were you crying?”

“No. Steam got in my eyes.”

He gave a light scoff and spoke with cutting sarcasm.

“Don’t tell me you’re deliberately acting pitiful here to make everyone sympathize with you. Jiang Yao, you might fool other people, but you can’t fool-”

He suddenly stopped.

His gaze landed on my wrist.

I looked down. A ring of bruised purple marked my wrist, especially glaring against my fair skin.

It was a mark left from last night’s madness.

My face heated slightly, and I tugged my sleeve over it.

“You… were you really hit by him yesterday?”

Li Chengfeng’s eyes widened, his face full of disbelief.

I looked at him.

That stunned expression made him look like an idiot.

“It’s fine. He hasn’t hit me in a long time…”

After saying that softly, I slowly turned my face away, leaving him with only the sight of the reddened corner of my eye.

Li Chengfeng’s departing figure was hurried, heavy, and wretched.

I took a small sip of coffee.

The temperature was just right.

Rule Three of pretending to be a hopeless romantic: go with the flow and seize every opportunity that can be used.

There will always be some great scholar to argue my case for me~