Chapter 6 Rounding up should be 5...
"He and I are not..." Tao Siyun was helpless. Just as she was about to say that the relationship between him and Xu Ji was not what she imagined, she suddenly remembered that she owed him money when she went to the supermarket a few days ago and it seemed that she had not transferred it to him yet.
On the other end of the phone, Li Huan acted as if he didn't hear her and continued to talk and comfort her.
Tao Siyun lay on the sofa with his eyes covered, not caring about Li Huan's increasingly shocking misinterpretations. He said a few words in a hurry and hung up the phone.
She felt that she was too careless to forget such an important thing.
Tao Siyun felt a pang of regret.
In fact, the first thing she did when she got home that night was to charge her mobile phone. After turning it on, she was ready to transfer the money to him immediately. Unexpectedly, as soon as she opened WeChat, dozens of unread messages popped up waiting for her to reply.
I glanced at the schedule and realized, oh, it’s time to hand in homework tomorrow.
Out of his instinct as a teaching assistant, Tao Siyun's first reaction was to prioritize students' matters.
She studied product design in France, and graduated with full marks in both her three-year undergraduate and two-year graduate studies. After graduation, she returned to China and took the postgraduate entrance examination for Shanghai University.
Tao Daiming and Qin Shu did not object to her decision to return to China to study for another degree and let her go.
Since she had experience as a teaching assistant when she was studying abroad, she applied for a teaching assistant position at Shanghai University at the beginning of her second year of graduate school, and taught two undergraduate classes on "Design Methodology" at the same time.
The male professor who taught this course was notoriously strict in the design school. Perhaps because he had worked as a design director for a listed company for several years, he had a bad temper and little patience.
Moreover, he is not the type of person who can joke and mingle with students.
Tao Siyun followed him for a few classes and found that he was extremely arrogant, sharp-eyed, and vicious-tongued.
Freshman year has just begun, and now is the introductory stage. Not only does he look down on the design plans submitted by the students, but every time the group work is presented, there is nothing he doesn't dislike.
Almost everyone in the class had been ruthlessly attacked by him with words like "I think your aesthetic sense is problematic and you are not suitable for studying design"...
So every day before his class, some students with fragile mental health would first seek out Tao Siyun, the kind and helpful teaching assistant, and ask her to help check their homework. After she had corrected it, they would hand it in and avoid being ridiculed.
Tao Siyun felt that it was fortunate that he was not abroad, otherwise he would be complained about eight hundred times a day by students for various reasons.
That night she sat in front of the computer and looked at a PDF file for more than two hours.
I looked so much that I became hungry.
She wanted to make some soup to comfort her stomach, which had been suffering with her, but it was too late, so she gave up and just had some yogurt and cereal for dinner.
After reviewing the group assignments and asking each student to make suggestions for revisions, Tao Siyun selected several works from his previous portfolio and made them into PPTs, which he sent to the students for reference.
It was almost dawn when we finished.
The next day, at eight in the morning, Tao Siyun was already extremely sleepy, so he fell asleep right after washing up.
Later, I worked non-stop for several days. Every day, I was either on the way to class or on the way to correct homework. I also had to squeeze out some time to give students private lessons...
After all this time, I completely forgot about paying back the money.
Xu Ji probably wouldn't think that she was taking advantage of him on purpose, right?
She swore she didn't mean it, she just simply forgot.
***
The time period from 10pm to 11pm is when Yinju KTV does its best business.
The constantly changing colored lights in the corridor wrapped around the rhythmic music coming from the hall, pushing strong waves of sound towards the men and women who had already let themselves go.
The waiter stood at the door with his head hung down. It was obvious that the young man was quite tormented by the tuneless singing inside.
Xu Ji went to the bathroom, hoping to take the opportunity to hide outside for a while to get some fresh air, but he didn't expect to be immersed in the real experience of ghosts howling and wolves howling all the way.
Pushing the door open, the lights in the private room were dim. Cao Wenzheng and Jiang Zhen were standing in front of the screen, arms around each other like good friends. The two men making the noise were awkwardly pressed together, singing a duet of affection.
"You are my—lover—"
"A rose-like woman..."
"With your fiery lips—"
"Let me lose my soul endlessly in the midnight——"
Xu Ji: “…”
Three minutes later, the song ended.
Cao Wenzheng, whose voice was breaking, finally put down the microphone, turned around, grabbed the cup on the table and gulped it down, gushing out the whole thing the next second: "Fuck, why is it wine?!"
Jiang Zhen switched on a song, then took the microphone and asked affectionately, "Boss, are you going to sing again? Another one?"
"Singing shit, I won't sing anymore," Cao Wenzheng said with a look of disgust, "Your fucking singing is worse than mine."
So Jiang Zhen asked someone else, "Engineer Xu, would you mind singing a song with me tonight? It's to celebrate your transfer back to Huxi, back to our warm embrace, and finally ending your days without us."
"No."
The music suddenly stopped.
Cao Wenzheng turned on the light with a click, opened the door of the private room, cleared his hoarse voice, and said to the waiter at the door: "Hey, Xiao Chen, make a pot of tea and bring in two fruit plates -"
The waiter rubbed his battered ears and forced out an ugly smile: "Okay, boss~"
Jiang Zhen picked up an oxidized apple from the fruit plate with a toothpick and ate it. He couldn't help but say, "Why would you, a tone-deaf person, go to KTV? Do you have any musical talent? Just looking at the word tremolo in your voice, I feel like you're going to fade sooner or later."
"Screw you! Shut up! You're such a jerk!" Cao Wenzheng felt insulted. "You're not much better than me. I'm still on track, but what about you? Are you even on track? You've gone off somewhere and you still have the nerve to criticize me."
Soon the waiter came back and walked in with tea and a fruit plate.
Cao Wenzheng poured himself a cup of hot tea to soothe his throat, then dragged his 190-pound body to the other side of the sofa. "Are you talking about Lao Xu?"
Xu Ji lazily leaned back on the sofa, took out a lighter from his trouser pocket, lit a cigarette, and commented from the bottom of his heart: "The fact that you two sing badly has nothing to do with being off-key."
Cao Wenzheng: “…Fuck?”
Jiang Zhen walked over with the almost finished fruit plate and comforted him perfunctorily: "It's okay, Fatty. Xu Ji has always been a man. It's normal that he doesn't understand lingering love songs. After all, other people would have gotten goosebumps from nausea when they heard you sing. There are basically no people as calm as him, so -"
Cao Wenzheng finished most of the tea and wiped his mouth: "So what?"
"So he must have a problem with that part of his body, a low libido," Jiang Zhen said, swallowing the orange in his mouth. "When you pass by the men's department sometime, please make an appointment with a specialist for him."
"..." Xu Ji sat on the sofa with his legs crossed. He glanced at him with a rather unserious look and said nonchalantly, "Do I have any problem? Why don't you try it?"
"Puff!" Cao Wenzheng seemed to have his worldview overturned. He instantly erupted, his entire body springing up like a spring. He said in disbelief, "Fuck you, Lao Xu! You, you, you actually! You're so naughty!"
Tao Siyun sat on the carpet with his hands on his knees and his chin resting on them for most of the day without moving. He finally made up his mind, picked up the mobile phone on the sofa, and opened Xu Ji's WeChat with a casual look.
Their conversation stopped at the embarrassing point last time -
Oseven↑: [Don't be so careless next time.]
The embarrassment that filled the entire screen once again hit me, striking directly at the fragile heart deep within my soul.
“…”
The phone in his trouser pocket vibrated. Xu Ji freed one hand and took it out to see—
Tao Siyun carefully sent two words: [Are you there?]
Xu Ji hesitated for a few seconds: [Hmm.]
[I was so busy the past few days that I almost forgot to return the money to you. Sorry, I will transfer it to you now~]
She rummaged around in the kitchen for a long time and finally found the shopping receipt for that day in a shopping paper bag that had been used as a garbage bag.
At first glance, Tao Siyun thought he was seeing things.
She squatted in front of the trash can, calming herself down for a long time, struggling for a long time, her vision going black and black again. When she finally stood up, she was suffering from hypoglycemia...
Her legs, which had been numb from squatting, were trembling slightly, and she almost fell.
This is really bad luck.
I don't know what kind of right time, right place, and right people could have brought about such a coincidence...
A sudden and blinding coincidence.
Isn’t it just a can of imported coffee beans, two boxes of limited edition mango yogurt, three pieces of chocolate, and a few bottles of fresh milk? How could it just be 521?
Even 521.5 is fine!
Tao Siyun felt like dying. She wondered if Xu Ji would guess that this was the reason why she hadn't paid him back for so long...
Or was it because the number happened to be 521 that he felt embarrassed to ask her to pay back the money?
The more I think about it, the more embarrassed I feel.
Tao Siyun thought for a second between transferring 500 first and then transferring 21 again, and directly transferring 522 to him, and decisively chose the latter.
Let him think whatever he wants. If he asks, just say you remembered it wrongly. It happened a week ago anyway, so it's normal to remember it wrongly.
“…”
After the transfer, Tao Siyun waited anxiously for a long time. Xu Ji didn't click to receive the payment, so she couldn't help but send an emoticon.
The little rabbit with a pink bow on her head pinched the edge of her skirt with two fingers and spun around happily, cutely reminding the other party to collect the payment.
Two minutes later...
Xu Ji: [Are you sure it's 522?]
“…”
Tao Siyun: [Rounded off.]
Xu Ji leaned on the sofa and typed slowly in the input box: [Rounded to 520]
"..." Tao Siyun: [Then you can give me a piece.]
"Hey, hey, hey," Cao Wenzheng knocked on the table with an empty beer bottle in his hand, and couldn't help but remind him, "Old Xu, be careful, or you'll burn a hole in your pants again."
The cigarette between his fingers was half burned, and he didn't notice that half of the ash fell on his pants. Xu Ji shook off the ash calmly, and pressed the remaining half of the cigarette into the glass ashtray on the coffee table.
Jiang Zhen swallowed the last bite of the apple and looked at him with an indescribable expression: "Xu Ji, can you stop smiling with your lips pursed like that? It's really disgusting, like a young girl in love."
Xu Ji slowly peeled an orange and stuffed it into his mouth. He glanced at the two people opposite him perfunctorily, "Did I smile?"
Jiang Zhen: “…”
Cao Wenzheng swallowed hard and asked cautiously, "Who are you flirting with? A man or a woman? Are you so aroused?"
Xu Ji's attention was all on his phone. Without even raising his eyelids, he sent a red envelope of one yuan to Tao Siyun, and said with a slight smile on his lips, "There's a girl flirting with me."
"...Does he look a bit frigid?" Cao Wenzheng looked at Jiang Zhen with a very suspicious look, and said inexplicably: "Do I need to stop by the men's department to make an appointment for him with a specialist?"
Jiang Zhen burped loudly, waved his hand and said, "I don't think it's necessary. If I continue to treat him, he will be too much. Forget it, Fatty, you should go by yourself."
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