Chapter 8#
The Cowardly Office Drone 8#
“Ah… ah?” Shen Anyu let out a strained sound.
Xie Yuzhi said, “Yes or no?”
Though Shen Anyu didn’t understand why Xie Yuzhi had suddenly grown curious about his face, compared to the exorbitant demands he had imagined before entering this room, this was an utterly trivial request.
He pressed his lips together, then pulled a little farther away from Xie Yuzhi, lowering his head to type.
He’d been about to agree outright.
But recalling the strange possessiveness Shen Xifu had shown toward him over the years of their marriage, Shen Anyu hesitated, then typed: Can we change the condition?
“Why?” Xie Yuzhi leaned in and asked, “It’s just taking a look at your face. Even that, brother-in-law can’t do?”
Shen Anyu tilted his head back, unable to say it directly, and could only remain silent.
But Xie Yuzhi, with his full young-master temperament, refused to back down an inch, as if he absolutely had to see what Shen Anyu looked like today. In particular, Xie Yuzhi said, “Brother-in-law, you were the one who promised to make it up to me. And besides,” he said with dissatisfaction, “my clothes are all wet, and I only have two sets total. What’s more, what if it had been hot water?”
As if Shen Anyu had done something utterly unforgivable to him.
“…”
Shen Anyu couldn’t speak, so he could only type: You didn’t say what the compensation was. How about… I ask your sister to take you out to buy some clothes, okay?
Xie Yuzhi said nothing.
Time trickled by between them, second by second.
In the end, faced with Xie Yuzhi’s stubborn eyes, Shen Anyu conceded defeat.
It’s just letting him see what I look like; besides, he’s Shen Xifu’s younger brother. It’s nothing…
Having just come home and not yet removed his oversized suit jacket, Shen Anyu habitually kept his head lowered. The thin bangs on his forehead had grown long enough to cover his eyes. Lifting his gaze, Shen Anyu looked at Xie Yuzhi and silently mouthed, “Okay.”
With that, he clumsily pushed the hair back from his forehead.
His smooth, clean forehead was exposed, along with that face of Shen Anyu’s that had always seemed veiled in dust.
Even though Xie Yuzhi had already seen this face many days ago, he still froze at this moment.
The young man’s clothes were exactly the same as before, and his aura hadn’t changed in the slightest—shabby, weak, dull. No matter how you looked at him, he was a thoroughly honest man, an office drone exploited by everyone at work.
But it was somehow different.
Xie Yuzhi racked his brains but couldn’t figure out where exactly the difference lay…
Shen Anyu kept his eyes lowered, unaccustomed to exposing his face so openly in front of someone, and even more puzzled as to what was so special about his face that Xie Yuzhi would stare at it for this long. After a while, he silently let his bangs fall back into place, lowered his head, and typed: Are you done?
“…”
Xie Yuzhi’s ears felt a little hot. Looking at the words in the memo, he stammered, “What do you mean, ‘are you done’? It’s not like we have any kind of relationship.”
“You’re making it sound like… like that kind of thing,” he muttered.
“?”
Shen Anyu looked up, confused. It seemed that every time he encountered Xie Yuzhi, a string of question marks bubbled up inside him.
— What are you talking about?
Before Xie Yuzhi could answer, the sound of a door opening came from outside, followed immediately by Shen Xifu’s cool voice, “Honey?”
On ordinary days, whenever Shen Xifu went downstairs to buy groceries, if Shen Anyu didn’t want to go along, he would wait in the living room before Shen Xifu came home.
Today’s anomaly made Shen Xifu realize something was off.
Just as he finished checking the bedroom and found that Shen Anyu wasn’t there.
At that moment, Shen Anyu, still in Xie Yuzhi’s bedroom, was about to push the door open and head out. But the moment his hand touched the doorknob, he heard Shen Xifu’s phone ring from outside.
The ringtone echoed through the not-very-large living room.
In that instant of hesitation, from just a wall away, Shen Xifu had already answered the call.
“Hello?”
A muffled conversation drifted over.
Even though he couldn’t make it out clearly, Shen Anyu had a strange, inexplicable intuition that the person on the other end of that call—was Jian Lixu.
This intuition was confirmed when 9106 transformed into a ball of light and flew onto his shoulder.
[Dearest~ We’ve now reached the plot point in the original novel where the male lead, having gotten drunk, has his subordinate accidentally call the female lead to come pick him up and take him home.]
9106 said: [The plot you need to follow is to play the suspicious husband, tailing the female lead to the bar, and watching with your own eyes as she brings the drunken male lead back home (to your home, that is).]
Shen Anyu: “…” No need to include what’s in the parentheses. Too harsh on the ears.
He didn’t even want to ask 9106 what happened in the plot after the female lead brought the male lead home.
Especially since this was a house he’d bought with a thirty-year mortgage. How could just anyone move in?
And besides, the male lead was such a big-shot CEO—didn’t he even have one single assistant who knew where he lived? Why did everything have to be outsourced to the female lead?
But he could only grumble feebly in the depths of his heart.
By the time the phone call ended and Shen Anyu pushed the door open to step out, he happened to see Shen Xifu standing at the entryway, about to change shoes and head out. Shen Anyu’s lips moved silently, about to type something, when he heard Shen Xifu straighten up and say, “I’m going to pick up a friend. Honey…”
His gaze fell upon Xie Yuzhi behind Shen Anyu. His eyes darkened briefly, and his voice was icy cold. “Wait for me at home… alright?” He emphasized the word “me.”
With that said.
The “female lead,” who should have been rushing out the door, fixed her eyes on Shen Anyu. Only when she saw her husband across from her docilely nod did she pick up her coat and hurry away.
Shen Anyu stood in the middle of the living room, just as in the original novel, playing the part of a cowardly husband who had realized his wife had completely changed her heart.
Beneath his long, thin bangs, a pair of red-rimmed eyes welled up, and tears slowly dripped down onto the floor.
Even his crying was silent, as it had been for years on end.
Yet inside, Shen Anyu was frantically asking 9106 what Shen Xifu’s words just now had really meant.
Why did she deliberately tell him to wait at home for “her.”
And he kept racking his brain, wondering whether, besides that business of standing outside the waiting room today, he had done anything else that might have crossed Shen Xifu’s bottom line.
But after thinking for a long time, he still couldn’t come up with anything. Instead, it was Xie Yuzhi, who had been silently watching it all from the side, who spoke up: “Brother-in-law, you…” cried?
Xie Yuzhi had originally wanted to take advantage of the chaos to say something divisive, but when he saw the tear stains on the floor, he realized Shen Anyu was crying.
“…”
Although Xie Yuzhi had always felt that his elder sibling’s marriage wouldn’t last, he hadn’t expected it to fall apart this quickly.
After a pause, he decided to follow his conscience and asked, “Don’t you even wonder who it is that’s worth my… Shen Xifu going out specially to pick up?”
Snapping back to his senses, Shen Anyu looked at Xie Yuzhi, drawn in by the young man’s words just like the office drone in the original novel who was egged on by his brother-in-law.
Xie Yuzhi said: “I just heard that the location they mentioned in the conversation is a bar. I know the place. Besides…”
Xie Yuzhi glanced up and down at Shen Anyu, wanting to find fault. But recalling the face hidden beneath the young man’s bangs, he swallowed the words back down and only said: “Brother-in-law, even if my… sister really has changed her heart, you have no right to object. With your dull, wooden personality, anyone who stayed with you for that long would find you boring.”
“You should loosen up a bit.” After a moment’s thought, Xie Yuzhi lowered his voice and said, “Perfect timing—I’ll take you to see what kind of person Shen Xifu likes. How about it?”
“…”
Shen Anyu didn’t want to go.
But “Shen Anyu” wanted to go.
In the end, the two of them left the house one after the other, following close behind Shen Xifu.
On the way to take a taxi to a bar in the city center, Shen Anyu kept his eyes lowered. His lashes, still wet from crying, hung limply, casting a small patch of shadow beneath his eyes.
His emotions pulled inexplicably in two directions.
On one hand, Shen Anyu didn’t believe Shen Xifu would actually bring Jian Lixu back home.
After all, they had only met a few times. And especially given the previous encounters, as an outsider, he couldn’t see any sign that Shen Xifu liked Jian Lixu at all.
But on the other hand.
Shen Anyu’s thoughts drifted back to the corner in the afternoon. At that time, the new lunchbox Shen Xifu had been carrying was indisputably real.
Even his breathing seemed to grow heavy and dull.
Along the way, Xie Yuzhi, for some reason, remained quiet. Unlike in the original novel, he didn’t spout belittling words at Shen Anyu.
After getting out of the car, Shen Anyu silently paid for the taxi, then stood in front of this unfamiliar place, hesitating to enter.
Though it was called a bar, entering it required not just identification, but proof of assets as well.
Fortunately, although Xie Yuzhi had been cast out of the family home, his identity as Young Master Xie still proved extremely useful.
Presumably, Mr. and Mrs. Xie had also worried that Xie Yuzhi might starve on the streets after being thrown out, so they had only cut off his cards—not driven him to total desperation.
So, relying on face recognition, Shen Anyu followed behind Xie Yuzhi, stepping inside with an awkward, uneasy air.
Inside the bar, multicolored lights flashed brilliantly, and the ear-splitting music made Shen Anyu furrow his brow.
From the moment he walked in here, it felt as though he had stepped into an entirely different world.
The bar counter, the bartender, the customers enjoying themselves—as he weaved through the crowd, Shen Anyu accidentally brushed against quite a few people. Before he could instinctively say “sorry” to them, they had already brushed past him.
This made Shen Anyu unconsciously press closer to Xie Yuzhi, who was walking ahead of him.
As they moved along, Shen Anyu looked at the kaleidoscope of people around him. Even if he couldn’t identify the brands of the clothes they wore, he could still tell from the fabric and tailoring that they were all wealthy and distinguished.
A conservative, dull, honest young man, utterly out of place in a place like this.
Like an ugly duckling that had wandered by mistake into high society.
As they walked, Shen Anyu pulled at the hand Xie Yuzhi was holding. He was a little scared, wanting to tell him that he needed to go out, that he could wait for Shen Xifu to come home. But Xie Yuzhi only gripped his hand tighter.
Amidst the deafening music, in order to make sure Shen Anyu could hear him, Xie Yuzhi leaned close to his ear and said, “Don’t move. I’m taking you to find Shen Xifu right now.”
“…”
Usually, bars that catered exclusively to a select clientele would have a highly private second floor, accessible only by status.
Xie Yuzhi obviously qualified.
Holding his hand, Shen Anyu was led step by step away from that clamorous world. When there was almost no sound left to hear, Shen Anyu looked back and felt as though it had all been an illusion.
Stepping out of the elevator, he walked across a floor so clean it reflected one’s own image.
Shen Anyu’s oversized suit jacket had already been wrinkled from squeezing through the crowd below, and even the hair on his forehead had become disheveled amid all the dodging downstairs. He opened his mouth, wanting to say something, but Xie Yuzhi, who was holding his hand, kept walking straight ahead.
Shen Anyu couldn’t pull out his phone to type under these circumstances. He pressed his lips together.
In the end, led by a waiter, Shen Anyu followed Xie Yuzhi into a private room.
The door closed behind them.
Looking at a space even larger than his own home, Shen Anyu stood at the entrance and felt, in that instant, utterly minuscule.
He looked toward Xie Yuzhi.
The young man was sitting on the sofa, smiling at him. “Brother-in-law, aren’t you curious where Shen Xifu went? How about we wait here for the rabbit to come to us?”
In front of Xie Yuzhi was a massive floor-to-ceiling window, giving a clear view of the revelry downstairs below.