Chapter 11

Chapter 11

After two years together, Huang Yuanrui realized her feelings for Qin Song had shifted.

In the beginning, she had approached him with the mindset of a hunter capturing high-quality prey.

Just like with her previous catches, her logic was simple: use everything to its fullest potential and ensure every fish in her pond provided its maximum value.

On Weibo, people called this being a “player” or a “Sea King.” Later, a more fitting term emerged: “Sea Queen.”

Huang Yuanrui would scroll through these terms on her phone, her lips curling into a smirk.

She thought these words were invented by people as stupid as pigs.

Huang Yuanrui hadn’t read many books and her grades in school had been terrible. She couldn’t name a single work of literature, but she had a vast vocabulary of insults at her fingertips.

“Only people as stupid as pigs become losers in relationships. Winners don’t come up with words like that.”

Qin Song was no exception; he was a tool to be used.

She didn’t have a job, so whoever gave her money was her boss.

Her various boyfriends were all bosses. As long as she played the role of the lover well, kept her skin fair and supple, and maintained her figure, the bosses would be satisfied and she would get paid.

It was that simple.

During her second month with Qin Song, she officially broke up with Lao San.

Lao San made her feel a sense of humiliation, as if she were being played. Now that she had Qin Song and was happy with him, there was no need to keep a cancer like Lao San around to remind her every day that she had once been delusional enough to want to marry a fraud.

When Qin Song came to see her, she devoted all her attention to him, telling Lao Da and Lao Er that she was going to stay with her parents for a few days. Once Qin Song left, she would tell them she was back.

Qin Song left her with many memories.

As their conversations grew deeper, her understanding of him went beyond his Hermès belt, his villa in City A, or his luxury cars.

She gradually learned that Qin Song had once been an unremarkable boy in a crowd, the one of two brothers who wasn’t the favorite. She learned that as a child, he had once brandished a knife to save a friend; that his mother had once felt entitled enough to rifle through his diary; that he had once run several kilometers away from home in the middle of the night, crying; and that he had spent years earnestly liking and pursuing a girl in college.

Qin Song wasn’t as tough or chauvinistic as he appeared on the surface.

To the outside world, he was always cold and hard, but when he was with Huang Yuanrui, he liked to curl into her arms like a child when he slept.

At the same time, she found him to be a very honest man.

He never said anything bad about He Qian to her. When He Qian came up, he would say frankly, “He Qian is truly good to me and my parents. She’s a good wife; it’s just that I don’t have feelings for her. That’s not her fault.”

He didn’t choose to please Huang Yuanrui by belittling his wife like Lao San had, which made Huang Yuanrui feel a sense of security.

“Security? That makes you feel secure? The fact that he won’t even badmouth his wife in front of you means he can’t be bothered to please you. You call that security instead of him not being invested?” Xixi waved five fingers in front of Huang Yuanrui’s eyes. “Are you okay? Have you gone ‘love brain’ on us?”

Huang Yuanrui’s eyes widened as she said earnestly, “Then I’m a clear-headed love brain! Don’t you know that a person’s character is consistent? If a man belittles his wife to a woman on the side, he’ll do the same to that woman with the next one. The fact that Qin Song refuses to say anything bad about He Qian even to me shows he’s a real man who takes responsibility!”

Xixi shot back dryly, “If he’s so responsible, why is he cheating?”
Huang Yuanrui was momentarily at a loss for words.

She rolled her eyes and lit a cigarette. “You don’t understand. His thing with He Qian is just a marriage. What he has with me is true love.”

Xixi and Nian Gao both burst out laughing at the same time, spraying their coffee all over the table.

Nian Gao managed to stop herself after a couple of chuckles, but Xixi kept going, doubling over with laughter.

Huang Yuanrui looked at them strangely. “What are you laughing at? Have you lost your minds? Did I say something wrong?”

Nian Gao glanced at Xixi, who finally stopped laughing and took a moment to compose herself before speaking.

“Think carefully about what you just said. I’m saying that you… you’ve actually fallen for him.”

Huang Yuanrui froze.

From the walk home until she finished washing up and lay in bed, Huang Yuanrui kept replaying every little detail of her time with Qin Song.

She finally realized that this man was different to her. He wasn’t like Lao Da, Lao Er, or Lao San.

She wasn’t sure when it had started, but she was no longer just using him; she had become dependent on him.

Whenever Qin Song couldn’t make it to the small town, she would become anxious and irritable.

She never used to be like that. If one didn’t come, there was always another.

With three or four boyfriends, one of them was bound to be around. It didn’t matter who it was.

But Qin Song was different. She cared about him specifically.

There was an even more important point: she felt sorry for him.

As the saying goes, a man only needs to be thirty percent drunk to act his way into making you cry.

Usually, when men called her while drunk, she found it incredibly annoying. They would be slurring their words, unable to speak clearly, yet insisting on rambling on the other end of the line. You’d be lucky to understand more than three sentences-who would want to pick up a call like that?

Qin Song, however, loved calling her when he was drunk. Every single time he had too much to drink, he would call Huang Yuanrui.

He was already a self-centered person, and alcohol only made him more so.

He didn’t care if it was the middle of the night and Huang Yuanrui was already asleep. No matter what time he finished drinking, he had to give her a call.

For two years, Huang Yuanrui hadn’t missed a single call. Not only did she not resent his calls, she actually felt bad for him, worrying that he was suffering from the alcohol late at night.

In the beginning, to maintain her image as a “gentle and virtuous” woman, she would jokingly tell him, “Since you’re spending the money anyway, make sure you pick the prettiest girl to hold onto while you’re singing.”

As time went on, she grew to dislike that joke. She changed her advice to: “If you dare touch one of those hostesses, I’ll hop on a plane immediately and crack your head open.”

Nian Gao’s boyfriend also loved to drink, so Nian Gao had bought him a lot of anti-hangover candies.

Huang Yuanrui asked Nian Gao for the link, intending to buy some for Qin Song.

Opening the link, she calculated the price. They averaged out to over ten yuan per candy.

“Can this junk actually help someone sober up? The packaging looks like a toy…” she grumbled. While complaining, she searched for alternatives and ended up buying several hundred yuan worth of sobering tea for Qin Song.

After exiting the shopping app, she thought for a moment and then opened it again.

She picked out an ashtray for Qin Song and bought an identical one for herself.

It was shaped like an iceberg-very distinctive and quite beautiful.

On the twenty-fifth month and third day of being with Qin Song, Huang Yuanrui woke up and opened her phone. Her crystal nails tapped against the screen, making a clicking sound as she edited two paragraphs of text.

She opened WeChat, pasted the two paragraphs into two separate chat boxes, and broke up with Lao Da and Lao Er.