Desk pad
Mao Lin was accompanied by several other managers. The Lin family wasn't as deeply involved in this business as Hua Lin, simply distributing cream on cake towers, so there was no need to "go all in" like Jin Nan and his family.
When Jin Nan saw Chen Chen coming, he greeted him briefly and sent his regards to the young boss Lin Jiaze.
More than ten minutes later, when he was about to board the plane, he received a reply: "Busy."
Jin Nan thought for a moment and replied, "Has his body been possessed?"
"Nannan, I'm dying." Lin Jiaze sent a voice message directly, "I've been so busy with so many orders lately that I'm almost dying. You have no idea how hard my life has been since □□ left."
Lai □□, Lin Jiayi's top assistant to Jiaze, earns an annual salary equal to Jiaze's net profit for the year. As for the salary, naturally, it's Mao Lin who pays it. Lin Jiaze is estranged from his family, and Jinnan didn't expect him to return half of his bread and butter to his parents. He was amused for a moment: "How about hiring a few more people? If not, give me some shares and I'll work for you."
Before Jinnan responded, the flight attendant came first.
"Hello sir, we are about to take off. Please turn off your phone or put it on silent mode."
"Hey, flying." Lin Jiaze heard it and teased, "Where are you going to have fun?"
"I'm going to plant cacti in the desert," Jinnan said. "I'll be dead first."
He hung up and turned off the phone. Jinnan showed the flight attendant the shutdown screen and smiled kindly. The flight attendant left and returned to her workroom, where she spent more than ten seconds calming down.
The Sudoku game cannot be played offline, and Jinnan was a little bored, so he took out the book he brought with him and started flipping through it.
He has only read three pages of this book since he took it away from him. It's not that it's difficult to read, but he was busy with various things and forgot about it for a while.
As he flipped through the pages, the unusual stories reminded him of the book-burning fire he had witnessed when he first entered high school.
Jinnan is not a person who accepts things passively, but it is too difficult to get into Liancheng No. 1 Middle School, and the tuition and miscellaneous fees of more than 1,000 yuan are not cheap for him, so he can only choose to swallow his anger.
He was very familiar with this. There was no one behind the orphan.
He could only watch the fire burn and die out, hoping for rain. A passing student on duty threw water on the fire, but the pages of the textbooks burned and fell apart, leaving no visible print. Only a chin remained of the faces in the textbooks.
Later, Jinnan went to see his teacher and said that he had lost his textbook and wanted to order a new set.
The teacher flashed the most surprised expression she had ever seen in her twenty-year teaching career: "All lost? Not a single one left? The notebooks are gone too?!"
The money was paid and the book was given to him. Jinnan was prepared to eat dry buns for half a month. Xu Zhiyuan, whom he had met once, made a move.
When Jin Nan was at his most extreme, he even thought that Xu Zhiyuan wanted to use these things to repay him. Xu Zhiyuan had helped him too much, and he could not repay him. It was then that Jin Nan realized that too much kindness can easily lead to enmity.
However, too much time has passed and Jinnan can no longer understand his past self.
Why does Xu Zhiyuan like this book? Jinnan reads slowly, trying to find a hint of Xu Zhiyuan between the lines. Everyone has a reason for liking something, whether it's a book, a certain food, a city, or a person.
To some extent, when Jin Nan read this book, he was also reading himself.
Dinner, night flight, a book accompanied him, reading from beginning to end.
It was almost midnight when they got off the plane. The shuttle parked outside the airport, and their luggage was loaded before them. It was Jinnan's first time experiencing the desert city's evening breeze. At 1 a.m. in March, the temperature was still a bit chilly, with temperatures in the teens.
The destination was more than ten kilometers away. Jin Nan got in the car first. Xu Zhiyuan sat next to him and was still on the phone.
When Xu Zhiyuan spoke English, there was a kind of temperament that Jin Nan could not describe, as if Jin Nan saw him at the negotiating table, smiling and decisive.
Jin Nan didn't listen closely. Chen Chen, sitting in the back row, was listening intently, texting his time-differing girlfriend: "Sister Yi! Big news! They're staying in the same suite!"
At 5am, the message came back: "?! Is it so blatant?"
Chen Chen: "Even though they don't talk much, when we got off the plane just now, J was holding a book and X was about to take it. Is it exhausting to hold a book?"
Bai Yi: "I'll get it for you next time too! Power MAX.jpg"
Chen Chen: "Sister Yi is awesome!"
Jinnan was completely oblivious to what was happening in the dark. Jet lag hadn't yet set in, and he was sleepy, so he fell asleep within minutes of sitting down. Xu Zhiyuan put his head on his shoulder.
Even Lu Yiqing, who was sitting in the passenger seat, couldn't tell that these two had just been in a cold war for a week.
Arriving at the hotel, Claire arrived first with a cart of luggage and was arranging what the CEOs needed. Jin Nan was half asleep, half-lit by the crystal chandeliers in the hall, unable to open his eyes.
Claire handed him the room card. "You don't have any plans tomorrow, so you can sleep in until noon and then go out and play. If you need a car, call the number on the back of the room card."
Xu Zhiyuan took it, thanked him briefly, and together with the waiter who was pushing the luggage, pushed Jinnan towards the elevator.
Claire: …
Is there anyone who can take care of these two people?
Lu Yiqing was also drowsy, still clutching a notebook, ticking off her to-do list for the day. Claire, sharing a twin room with her, felt a slight ripple of emotion. When the room card arrived at Chen Chen's, he was still grinning idiotically at the screen.
Claire didn't even need to glance: "Girlfriend?"
Chen Chen: "Ah, um. Hehe."
Claire quietly rolled her eyes. How come everyone else was so happy talking to each other, but she, forget about pursuing him? She had clearly told Lu Yiqing her real name, but Miss Lu still called her a honorific.
"Ms. Xu, I'll keep the room card with you." Lu Yiqing crossed out the last item and looked up, only to see Claire's beautiful big eyes looking at her meaningfully.
Lu Yiqing: "What's wrong? Is there something on my face?"
Claire closed her eyes deeply: "It's okay, go and rest."
In the penthouse suite, Jinnan was too sleepy to even take a shower. He dove into bed and fell asleep. Xu Zhiyuan dug him out of the quilt like a carrot and wiped his face with a wet towel.
"You don't even brush your teeth?" Xu Zhiyuan asked.
Jinnan groaned in distress for a long time, then half floated and half walked into the bathroom as if he was being lifted up by a steel rope.
When he came out again, he had tidied himself up. Xu Zhiyuan was still wearing his coat and trousers, sitting at the table with his computer turned on.
Jinnan walked over and without even looking at the content, he directly closed his computer: "It is forbidden to deduct overtime from colleagues."
Xu Zhiyuan, helpless, unzipped his jacket and half-took it off before Jinnan pushed him and his chair a little further out. Someone's weight fell onto his lap.
The warm air, laden with moisture, descended. Jinnan looked him in the eyes and said, "I don't have any plans for tomorrow."
Xu Zhiyuan hummed. Jinnan helped him pull down his coat, fished a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, took out a cigarette, and put it in his mouth.
"I've finished reading that book. The translation is a bit awkward, but otherwise it's good."
He carefully observed Xu Zhiyuan's reaction and finally saw some ripples in it.
Xu Zhiyuan's eyes flickered, as if he was looking at him repeatedly, but that was just a way of expressing suspicion.
"You haven't seen it before?"
Xu Zhiyuan's words made Jinnan feel a little strange. Should he have seen it? Why did Xu Zhiyuan think so?
"I haven't seen it before. This is my first time watching it."
A imagined love, hate, and resentment were erased just like that. Xu Zhiyuan never thought that Jin Nan would actually forget his own suffering. He didn't like to talk about other people's scars and was about to let it go, but Jin Nan put her arm around his shoulders and asked herself, "Why do you think I should see it?"
Breathe in, breathe out. Everything slowed down. Xu Zhiyuan hesitated whether to tell him the answer. It all started with a dishonorable act of his. Taking something without permission is stealing.
He never mentioned it once, and Jinnan himself didn't even notice it.
"I took the book from your home," Xu Zhiyuan said. "Home in Liancheng."
In a word, the willow blossoms in Liancheng in March seemed to float onto Jinnan's face again, making him squint.
He didn't need to recall it carefully; most of his memories of books were painful. The only thing he could relate to Xu Zhiyuan was probably that humble, two-dollar desk notebook.
A souvenir from the disaster day that Jinnan couldn't remember the name of, but Xu Zhiyuan thought it was his favorite book.
The coincidence was so funny it was almost ridiculous.
Jinnan suddenly lost interest in what he was doing. He let go of Xu Zhiyuan and returned to the bedside. He pulled out a lighter from the cabinet and lit it. It was an unfamiliar smell; Xu Zhiyuan didn't smoke often.
He sat by the window, cigarette between his lips. The night was unusually quiet near two o'clock. Beyond the lights, the blackness stretched as far as the eye could see, a sea or perhaps a desert. Sparks flickered before Jinnan's eyes, and he suddenly felt like turning off the lights, trying to recapture the feeling he had that night when Xu Zhiyuan had silently watched him.
He did so, and the lights went out, revealing both of them.
"My house, the one in Liancheng, doesn't have a desk for doing homework. I bought that desk for a little over ten yuan from a neighbor who was moving, and when I got it back, one leg was shorter. I tried a lot of different things, and I found the desk cushion the most comfortable."
That was a past that Xu Zhiyuan didn't know about. Jinnan himself never mentioned it, his high self-esteem not allowing others to have the opportunity to pity him.
Until now, Jin Nan found that his persistence had actually left room for others to imagine. Isn't it ridiculous?
Jinnan has to burst this bubble himself. Don't imagine him, don't speculate about him, and don't beautify him with unfounded imagination.
"I went to a used bookstore to buy a textbook, but couldn't find any. This tattered book was just lying on the ground, getting kicked around. It looked so pitiful. And it only cost two dollars, which I could have if I skipped breakfast for two days. So I brought it back and used it as a cushion on the corner of my desk."
Jin Nan confessed, almost with a sense of self-destruction, that while doing all this, he felt the pleasure of tearing off a blood scab. He no longer felt the pain, but he knew that the oversensitivity brought on by his embarrassing experience would accompany him for the rest of his life.
He will never be able to let go like Xu Zhiyuan.
"Do you think I've read it, Xu Zhiyuan?"
Jinnan finished a cigarette, the sparks nearly burning his fingers. His other hand pinched the cigarette holder, pressed it into the ashtray, and stubbed it out.
Before a puff of smoke is exhaled, it is first absorbed and dissipated, becoming the breath of another person.
"I have read it. I have read it now," Xu Zhiyuan said. "I apologize to you."
Jinnan paused, pressing his nose against his, breathing heavily, "What are you apologizing for?"
Xu Zhiyuan held his ears and rubbed his hair with his fingertips. Jinnan could hear some forced swallowing sounds besides his breathing.
"I was too arrogant. I thought I was saving you, but now it seems you don't necessarily need my pity."
"I still want it." Jinnan's voice became softer and softer. "Please have mercy on me, Brother Zhiyuan."
Xu Zhiyuan's breathing gradually became heavier, and he asked him: "What do you want?"
"Stop using your imagination and speculation to judge me. If you want to know something, just feel it yourself." Jinnan whispered in his ear, "I've taken a shower. There's a set on the bedside table. I saw it when I took out my lighter."
Xu Zhiyuan's last question was: "Shouldn't we calm down first?"
Jinnan chuckled and gave him his umpteenth kiss of the day.
"I'm too cold, please warm me up."
Jinnan wanted to let go of everything, just this one tender night, to sever the last vestiges of respectability between them, leaving only the truth. He wanted to see the real Xu Zhiyuan.
But Xu Zhiyuan kissed her for a while, then said indifferently, "Xiao Nan, you haven't slept for twenty hours."
The ambiguity faded, leaving Xu Zhiyuan's warm hug. He held Jinnan tightly.
Jin Nan had no choice but to surrender: "Then I want to see you when I wake up."
Xu Zhiyuan said, "Okay."
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