Chapter 29
Fang Lan is indeed difficult to make an appointment with.
Lin Yushu tried calling Fang Lan, but she didn’t answer. He then called Fang Lan’s assistant, who told him to contact a lawyer.
If there was a need for someone to relay messages, it would complicate matters, and Lin Yushu felt somewhat helpless.
During lunchtime, as usual, he went to the company cafeteria to eat.
Today, Lin Yushu arrived a bit late, and the cafeteria was crowded. At first glance, he could only see a few scattered empty seats.
He picked up his food and was about to look for a less crowded place when he turned around and saw someone waving at him.
“Manager Lin.” Song Qiming’s voice was clear and natural. “There’s no one here.”
Some colleagues had already looked over, and Lin Yushu couldn’t ignore them directly, so he reluctantly sat across from Song Qiming.
“Didn’t I tell you not to talk to me?” Lin Yushu lowered his head and poked the rice in his plate with his chopsticks.
“Last time, it didn’t matter when we talked in front of Shao Guangjie, did it?” Song Qiming spoke as if he was genuinely chatting with a colleague, highlighting Lin Yushu’s unnatural behavior. “Did you manage to schedule a meeting with Fang Lan?”
“No.” Lin Yushu quickly realized the reality and knew that avoiding suspicion unilaterally wouldn’t work. He decided to talk to Song Qiming instead. “She’s not answering my calls.”
“I found out that she has a private gathering with her girlfriends tonight,” Song Qiming, who also knew that walls had ears, intentionally lowered his voice as he spoke. “Do you want to confront her there?”
“Where is it?” Lin Yushu’s chopsticks froze.
“The Nanjie Resort Hotel.”
Lin Yushu often went to the Nanjie Hotel for meetings and social events. Hearing this location, he immediately deduced the floor where Fang Lan’s gathering would be held.
But it wouldn’t be appropriate to directly barge into the gathering, so he could only wait for her in the hotel lobby.
After thinking for a moment, Lin Yushu said to Song Qiming, “Remind me after work.”
The reason Lin Yushu asked Song Qiming to remind him after work was that he often missed the end of the workday.
Today was no exception. He had been looking at the documents in his hand until his phone vibrated, and he realized it was almost six o’clock.
The message from Song Qiming was simple, just an emoji.
[Song Qiming: 🚀]
Lin Yushu couldn’t help but wonder if this guy had nothing better to do than make emojis for Wowo?
He replied with a short message.
[Lin Yushu: On my way.]
At Lin Yushu’s job level, there was no need to clock in or out. He and Song Qiming left work ten minutes early together, and there weren’t many people in the parking lot at this time.
The Civic had gotten used to being parked on the negative third floor, but it wasn’t parked side by side with the GTR; there was some distance between them.
The two of them left the Eternal Star Building one after the other and merged into the rush hour traffic.
Due to the heavy traffic on the road, the GTR would occasionally disappear from Lin Yushu’s sight, but soon after, that cool GTR would reappear, giving Lin Yushu an inexplicable sense of reassurance.
After about forty minutes, the two of them arrived at the Nanjie Resort Hotel.
Although the hotel had plenty of parking spaces, they still parked their cars separately because two eye-catching performance cars, one red and one blue, parked together would be too conspicuous.
After coming up from the parking lot, Lin Yushu went to the hotel entrance first and instructed the doorman to notify him immediately if Fang Lan came to pick up her car. He also slipped two hundred yuan as a tip to the doorman.
The doormen working at five-star hotels had keen eyes and didn’t need to ask who Fang Lan was.
“You still carry cash with you?” Song Qiming chatted with Lin Yushu as they walked towards the self-service restaurant on the negative first floor. “Since returning to the country, I haven’t had a penny on me.”
“Having cash gives people a sense of reality,” Lin Yushu walked ahead, always attentive to whether there were any acquaintances around.
“Forget it, you love money,” Song Qiming made a gesture of pulling a zipper near his lips, “and you even hide gold bars in your bedroom.”
Lin Yushu suddenly stopped in his tracks and looked back at Song Qiming. “Can you stop mentioning that? It was an accident for you to see it.”
“Okay,” Song Qiming made a motion of locking his lips, “I’ll help keep your little secret.”
Lin Yushu acknowledged that it was his secret, but he didn’t want to hear that word from Song Qiming, as it made it feel like they were sharing the secret.
Yet, Song Qiming insisted on mentioning it, and even added the word “little” before “secret,” making Lin Yushu inexplicably feel that the conversation had a hint of ambiguity.
It seemed that last week’s misunderstanding incident had a lasting impact.
The dinner buffet in the evening cost twice as much as the lunch buffet, and dining with two people would cost nearly a thousand yuan.
Song Qiming took the initiative to pay with his phone, and the two found a corner to sit while having dinner and waiting for the doorman’s message.
Lin Yushu went to the food pickup area and came back with mostly seafood in his plate.
Pearl Harbor City was a coastal city, and people were accustomed to eating seafood. Looking at the dishes on Song Qiming’s plate, they were all varieties of Chinese cuisine, indicating that he really loved Chinese food.
“Do you know how to cook this?” Song Qiming picked up a piece of small pan-fried chicken and asked Lin Yushu.
“As long as there’s a recipe, I can do it,” Lin Yushu replied while eating garlic and vermicelli steamed scallops.
Song Qiming nodded, “Then this weekend, I’ll come to your place for a meal.”
Lin Yushu: “…”
After some consideration, Lin Yushu realized that it wouldn’t hurt to freeload a meal, so he said, “You prepare the ingredients.”
Song Qiming gnawed on a chicken bone. “Alright.”
The gathering organized by Fang Lan was held at an upscale club upstairs. When the sisterhood gathered, they would inevitably chat for a long time, and it wouldn’t disperse until around eight or nine in the evening.
Feeling worried, Lin Yushu called around seven o’clock to check, and indeed, the gathering was still ongoing.
Both of them had already filled their stomachs, so they could only have some snacks to pass the time. Lin Yushu ate caramel pudding while browsing emails on his phone. On the other side, Song Qiming seemed bored and engaged in a casual conversation with Lin Yushu.
“Where did you go to university?” Song Qiming asked.
“In Singapore,” Lin Yushu replied absentmindedly, still looking at his phone.
The initial draft of Shao Zhenbang’s autobiography had been organized, and recently Lin Yushu had been in contact with publishing houses. Several of them had already given publishing conditions through email.
“Did you major in finance?” Song Qiming asked again.
“Yes.”
One publishing house surprisingly required a fee for the book’s ISBN, and they also demanded that Lin Yushu purchase two thousand copies. Lin Yushu passed on that offer directly.
It wasn’t that he couldn’t afford the money, but it seemed odd for the CEO of the Shao Group to make their autobiography appear as if they were begging someone to publish it.
“After graduating, did you come directly to Yong Xing to work?”
“Yes.”
The other publishing houses were all very interested in receiving the manuscript, but they differed in the number of copies to print and the formatting conditions. Lin Yushu still had to consider them carefully.
“Did anyone guide you when you first started working?”
“I had a mentor.”
His eyes grew tired, so Lin Yushu decided to put down his phone. He scooped a spoonful of pudding, and then he heard Song Qiming ask, “Was your mentor your senior?”
“Of course, the mentor is always a senior,” Lin Yushu found it a bit strange and bit off the spoonful of pudding. “My mentor is Zhou Xian, currently the CEO of the family business. Don’t tell me you don’t know him.”
“Oh, him,” Song Qiming bit the straw, appearing disinterested. “Do you have any other seniors?”
“Other seniors?” Lin Yushu couldn’t think of anyone else for a moment, but as the conversation went on, he suddenly felt something was amiss and said, “You have so many questions, are you checking my personal information?”
“It’s nothing,” Song Qiming unlocked his phone screen, glanced at the time, and asked again, “Why didn’t you return home to work after graduation?”
“My mentor wanted to bring me to the family business, so I came here,” Lin Yushu honestly answered Song Qiming’s questions, “At that time, the family company was still small, and I felt that there were better development opportunities at Yong Xing.”
“Your family is also in the automotive industry. Aren’t you afraid that Yong Xing will suppress your family’s living space?”
“Really?” Lin Yushu shook his head. “Do you know how much our most expensive car sells for?”
“Over three hundred thousand yuan?” Song Qiming guessed.
“Yes, the main models of Yong Xing are priced at forty thousand yuan and above, so they don’t compete with Xunjie,” Lin Yushu explained. “Besides, Xunjie only makes electric cars, so they’re not on the same track as Yong Xing.”
“But electric cars are the future,” Song Qiming suddenly said.
“Do you think so?” Lin Yushu raised an eyebrow in surprise. “I thought people who are into modified cars would look down on electric cars.”
“Do you look down on electric cars?” Song Qiming asked.
“Not me,” Lin Yushu said. “My family is in the electric car business, so why would I look down on them?”
Both of them finished their desserts, but Fang Lan still hadn’t come down.
At this point, Song Qiming seemed to have run out of questions and said, “Don’t you have anything you want to ask me?”
Why would he need to ask questions?
Lin Yushu found it strange; they weren’t on a blind date or anything.
“No,” he said. “I already know quite a bit about you.”
He knew Song Qiming’s birthdate and where he went to university. If those were just surface-level knowledge, then after spending time together recently, he not only knew how many car models Song Qiming collected but also knew that Song Qiming liked sitting cross-legged.
“When did you start paying attention to me?” Song Qiming asked again.
His use of the phrase “paying attention” clearly referred to work-related attention, but Lin Yushu couldn’t help but think of the time he started following Song Qiming’s Instagram after he learned how to bypass the Great Firewall.
“I don’t remember,” he replied.
At that moment, a familiar voice called out “junior brother” from not far away. Lin Yushu turned his head and saw Du Yufei accompanied by several hotel managers, apparently inspecting the work.
Before coming to Nanjie Hotel, Lin Yushu had thought that he might run into Du Yufei, but he didn’t expect it to happen so coincidentally.
“Senior,” Lin Yushu greeted.
“Having a meal here?” Du Yufei walked over to them, glanced at Song Qiming, and said, “This person looks somewhat familiar.”
“Song Qiming,” Lin Yushu introduced concisely, “a new automotive engineer at Yong Xing.”
After that, he turned to Song Qiming and said, “This is Du Yufei, my senior from university. He now works in the investment department of Nanjie Group.”
They nodded to each other in greeting, and then Du Yufei said to Lin Yushu, “Why didn’t you tell me you were having a meal? I would have given you a free meal.”
Lin Yushu politely replied, “I didn’t want to trouble you, senior.”
“How could it be a trouble?” Du Yufei said to the manager behind him. “Give them a free meal.” Then he looked at Lin Yushu and asked, “When are you free? I can never manage to make a dinner appointment with you.”
“I’m a bit busy at the end of the year,” Lin Yushu said with the usual social niceties. “Once I’m done with my current tasks, I’ll treat you to a meal.”
“It’s a deal,” Du Yufei said, squeezing Lin Yushu’s shoulder and speaking with familiarity. “Don’t you dare brush me off.”
Du Yufei quickly left with his subordinates, presumably because he had work to attend to.
Lin Yushu looked bored and checked the time. At that moment, Song Qiming suddenly asked, “Can the investment department manage the food and beverage department?”
“Don’t you realize his last name is Du?” Lin Yushu glanced at the departing figure of Du Yufei. “The Nanjie Group is their family business. Treating us to a free meal is nothing.”
As Lin Yushu spoke, his tone carried a hint of absentmindedness because he thought of Du Yufei’s dinner invitation. Since Du Yufei had just treated him to a free meal, he owed him a favor, and it wouldn’t be easy to refuse next time.
Although Lin Yushu was generally open to socializing, he couldn’t help but feel somewhat uneasy in front of his past confessor.
And this uneasiness seemed to be interpreted differently by Song Qiming.
“I didn’t know the founder of the Nanjie Group had the last name Du,” Song Qiming said. “Is that common knowledge?”
Lin Yushu vaguely felt that something was off. Song Qiming’s tone wasn’t as casual as before; it seemed to carry a hint of sarcasm.
He thought for a moment and said, “You’ve been active in Europe for years, so it’s normal not to know.”
“So his family is well-off,” Song Qiming added, more as a statement than a question.
“Of course,” Lin Yushu said. “When we were in school, he was generous to his juniors and underclassmen.”
“I see,” Song Qiming nodded thoughtfully and said something that Lin Yushu didn’t understand, “So ‘senior’ doesn’t mean teacher or colleague, but ‘senior’ as in ‘senior student.'”
During the course of the meal, the term “senior” repeatedly appeared.
Finally, Lin Yushu remembered that he had mentioned to Song Qiming that he had a crush on a senior…
