Love Has Fireworks - Chapter 8
Chapter 8: Gifted Tea Leaves
Qian Fei asked casually, "Just getting back?"
Li Yifei nodded.
Then a duet of voices echoed in the living room.
Qian Fei: "Gui Lili didn't come back with you?"
Li Yifei: "Is Gui Lili back?"
Qian Fei was stunned, and she saw that Li Yifei was stunned too.
Li Yifei looked somewhat angry. With a toss of his hand, he threw the bag he was holding toward Qian Fei. "This is tea. I have no use for it, take it and drink it!"
Qian Fei happened to be deathly sleepy. She felt that Li Yifei was practically an unlovable-by-default, tsundere angel sent down by heaven to rescue her, who could actually show a flash of a halo overhead at a critical moment.
"Is this... appropriate?" Looking at the extremely exquisite packaging of the tea, she was a bit hesitant to reach out and accept it.
"If I give it to you, just take it," Li Yifei shoved the bag directly into her hands. "What are you afraid of? It's not worth much money anyway. Even if I regret it later and make you give it back, you won't have to sell your house and land!"
Hearing him say this, Qian Fei simply accepted the bag.
She returned to her room. Through the door, she vaguely heard Li Yifei seemingly making a phone call to Gui Lili. He asked very loudly, "Where are you? Why aren't you home yet when it's this late? What do you mean I always come home very late too! I'm a man, can you even compare? Nobody gossips about me when I'm networking in the middle of the night, but when you spend the middle of the night networking with your boss, I worry people are going to point at the top of my head and gossip! How are my words unpleasant to hear? If you didn't act so unsightly, would I say things that sound unpleasant? Gui Lili, how did you become like this now? Can you still live a proper life with me like a decent girl! Get yourself back here right now, and if you don't come back, don't bother coming back ever again!"
Qian Fei had originally been sleepy enough to want to rip open a bag of tea to brew, but as a result of eavesdropping on someone's wall, a phone call managed to jolted her wide awake. She felt that Li Yifei's mouth was truly not ordinary in its malice; he didn't know how to yield even a fraction when arguing with his own girlfriend. Of course, Gui Lili was no saint either, using her very life to choke the other to death every single time.
She truly felt exhausted on behalf of these two people. The man was completely full of a young master's arrogance, living a life where he wouldn't lift a finger to help, throwing a tantrum the moment things didn't go his way, and taking it as an unalterable principle that men shouldn't do housework. The woman didn't care for labor but loved to dress up, act cute, and play coquettish, and nobody could beat her when it came to being delicate. For two ancestors like this who both required someone to serve them, it would be a miracle if they could manage to figure out romance while being together.
She set the tea aside completely untouched and continued to work.
Roughly forty minutes later, Gui Lili returned.
She heard the two of them arguing. Separated by two doors, she intermittently caught Gui Lili's shouting and crying.
"Li Yifei, what right do you have to talk about me like that! Don't you also frequently go to bars with your colleagues and the like! Do you dare to claim you've never drunk with other women? My colleague said they saw it all, that you were making eyes back and forth with a female student from the film academy!"
She heard Li Yifei say, "Can you stop distorting things so much? That woman wasn't brought there by me. What's wrong with everyone sitting together and having a glass of wine? Your colleague? I bet it was your boss! On what grounds does he know she's from the film academy anyway? He probably wanted to hit on her but failed to get his hands on her! Besides, when I go to a bar, nobody wants to get into my pants. When you go to a bar, the person taking you there wants to sleep with you, so clear your head!"
Gui Lili kept crying, "Li Yifei, can you please stop always saying such nasty things to me! Can't we just be good to each other! Why is it that ever since we returned to the country, you're constantly arguing with me!"
Li Yifei seemed to kick the coffee table, and Qian Fei heard the sound of an object crashing against the wall.
She hadn't expected that the things bought on Taobao would actually be quite durable, managing to withstand Li Yifei's kicking until now without falling apart. She decided to go online tomorrow to leave an additional positive review for the shop owner.
"Good to each other? Have I not been good enough? Let me tell you, I regret being too good to you! You said we should rent an apartment together, so I rented an apartment with you. You said you wanted to be near the China World Trade Center, so I rented a place near the China World Trade Center with you. And what's the result? I'm already back in the middle of the night, yet you're still not back! I'm asking you, what kind of business is so vital that you absolutely have to accompany your boss to a bar in the middle of the night to discuss it? Gui Lili, you're truly something!"
Qian Fei felt her brains going completely numb from listening to them argue.
The argument next door continued for a while longer before the voices gradually quieted down. Based on various signs, Qian Fei guessed that Gui Lili had probably cried herself unconscious.
Qian Fei felt that her sense of sympathy must have lost its way in the middle of the night; she actually didn't feel sorry for Gui Lili at all.
She massaged her head and continued to work overtime.
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Arriving at the company early the next morning, Xiao Yuan told Qian Fei, "Sister Jin wants you to go find her in a bit. She said she has something to discuss with you."
After handing in the Investment Banking Quarterly Business Information Statistics, Qian Fei went to look for Sister Jin.
Sister Jin pulled her out into the hallway, telling her mysteriously, "Do you still remember when I introduced you and Hu Zining for a blind date, I mentioned that their hotel was planning to go public? I just heard that this project seems to have been taken on by our company along with another brokerage firm. The two brokerages will likely act as joint sponsors to handle the issuance and listing for Hu Zining's hotel together! Right now, most of the company's personnel are tied up on various projects, so they are quite short-handed. Therefore, Feifei, you might actually have a chance to participate in this project this time!"
During her first few years at the company, Qian Fei had always been in the back-office support department, doing service-oriented work similar to a secretarial role. For instance, conveying the core message of meetings, posting the latest industry regulations on the company website, or monitoring market fluctuations within a week and sending the compiled data and materials to every employee's email inbox. Later on, she discovered that the back-office service department was forever the most exhausting while forever earning only that tiny bit of money, completely cut off from project bonuses. Consequently, she took the professional qualification exam, wanting to transfer to the project department. However, Wang Ruohai had said that if a woman is constantly traveling on business, how can they still live a proper life. So, she suppressed the urge to go to the project department to work on projects. It wasn't until after their breakup when she bought the apartment and the monthly mortgage forced her to face life with a proactive attitude that she finally applied to her supervisor and transferred to the project department.
Yet within the project department, whether a project team consisted of five members or six members, the final bonuses distributed were completely different. Thus, during the year and more since her transfer to the project department, she had always been a marginalized figure, never having fully followed any project team from start to finish to complete a project. Usually, whenever a project team was short-handed, she would rush forward to help out, running errands and doing odd jobs, and organizing working papers. By the time the project bonuses were distributed, being allocated ten thousand or eight thousand yuan as a fee for her hard work was already considered not bad.
Speaking of which, over the course of this past year and more, the task she had become most adept at was organizing working papers. She had already cleaned up the working papers for several project teams. She actually quite enjoyed hearing her colleagues praise her: "In our company, when it comes to organizing working papers, nobody can beat Qian Fei! Her work is meticulous! Prompt! Beautiful!"
She had also consistently believed this to be a valuable skill of hers, even feeling secretly pleased with herself at one point. That was until one time, while pouring water in the pantry, she accidentally overheard the private chat of two colleagues: "You know, it's quite a pity for Qian Fei. Every project team wants to use her for free to organize their working papers, yet no project team wants to allocate her a larger share of the bonus!"
"Yeah, tell me about it. She's been in the project department for two years and has done nothing but organize working papers. Organizing working papers in investment banking for two years, don't you think that's a waste of time!"
It was only from that moment onward that she truly began to realize exactly what kind of situation she was in.
Therefore, if what Sister Jin said was true, Qian Fei very much wanted to seize this opportunity.
She asked Sister Jin, "Sister Jin, I especially want to formally join a project. I don't want to be an external, marginalized person anymore! Teach me what I should do!"
Sister Jin offered her a tip, "Why don't you find an opportunity to test the waters with Director Kong from the project department? See if he can squeeze you into this project team. If this project succeeds, even if you are the smallest shrimp, you will definitely be able to get a decent bonus!"
Qian Fei listened, her heart thumping wildly.
"Then how should I speak to Director Kong?"
Sister Jin thought about it, "Director Kong is the sharpest among the sharp; there's nothing he doesn't understand. You don't need to beat around the bush with him either. Dancing around the subject will only make things worse, so just get straight to the point and tell him your thoughts. Oh, right, he likes to drink tea, so buy him some good tea leaves!"
Returning home that evening, Qian Fei posted a question on a forum: If giving a gift to a boss, what kind of tea is presentable enough?
A whole string of people lined up below to reply: The expensive kind.
She rolled her eyes at the computer.
While rolling her eyes, somehow her line of sight twisted and landed right on the bag Li Yifei had given her yesterday.
A thought stirred in her heart. She pulled out the exquisite tea gift box from inside the bag. On the gift box, the four characters for "Wuyi Rock Tea" were mounted in a classic and antique style. She located the barcode, pulled out her phone, and used an app to scan it.
Following a "beep," the page displayed the price tag for this box of tea leaves: 18,888 yuan.
Qian Fei's knees went weak, and she almost fell to the floor.
That little spendthrift spend-everything next door had actually said that if he ever wanted her to return it, she wouldn't have to sell her house and land... With this price tag, she would at least have to sell half a toilet!
Qian Fei felt that if this tea was under a thousand yuan, she could have gone against her conscience and pretended not to know how much it cost, accepting it as it was. But since she now knew it was this expensive, she felt that if she didn't return it, she would definitely be so vexed that she wouldn't be able to sleep night after night.
She sent a text message to Li Yifei: "I heard that the tea you casually gave me yesterday costs 18,888 yuan. It's too expensive, I don't quite dare to accept it, take it back!"
In less than a minute, she received a reply: "A buddy gave it to me, didn't cost any money. If it's given to you, just keep it."
Qian Fei curled her lip.
"Just take it back anyway."
Half a minute later.
Li Yifei: Just throw it away directly then.
Qian Fei was conflicted.
"It didn't cost you any money, but it cost your buddy money!"
Li Yifei: It didn't cost him money either. It was a gift for topping up his phone credit.
Qian Fei's mouth hung wide open in shock without her even realizing it. Just how much phone credit did he have to top up for that!!
With utmost sincerity and reverence, she typed out a line of characters on her phone and sent it over to Li Yifei.
"Is your buddy married? Or if he is unfortunately already married, does he happen to have any unmarried brothers left?"
Then there was no reply.
It wasn't until two hours later, when she was already lying down ready to sleep, that she actually received Li Yifei's response: "Yes, me."
Qian Fei decided that maybe she should just throw the tea away after all.