The Early Spring - Chapter 40

Chapter 40 - Why Not Just Be Together?

Shang Zhitao had eaten just a fraction too much, feeling her blood sugar climb. A wave of blissful, satisfied dizziness washed over her. She hurriedly took a shower, crawled into bed, set her phone to silent, pulled the blanket over her head, and fell soundly asleep.

Luan Nian was at a bar with Tan Mian and the others, glancing at his phone as he set down his glass.

"Got a date tonight? Why do you keep checking your phone?" Tan Mian asked him.

"Nothing."

Luan Nian felt a sense of listless apathy. Watching the singer on stage, he tilted his head and asked Tan Mian, "What do you think if I open a bar?"

"A bar? Beijing has no shortage of bars."

"Set it up in the mountains, running as a private club. Open only to a select few."

"Then how do you plan to make a profit?"

"If I want to open it, it definitely won't lose money."

"Starting investment is three million."

"Money is not an issue."

"Right, I forgot young master Luan comes from wealth." Tan Mian teased him. "I'll help you pick a location later. Have you figured out where you want it?"

"Haven't thought about it. It's just a passing thought for now." Sometimes Luan Nian found life terribly dull; finding some extra project to tackle might make the days a bit more interesting. The song on stage had reached the south, and he glanced at his phone again just as the screen lit up. It was Zang Yao.

With his sharp eyes, Tan Mian caught Zang Yao's name, arched an eyebrow at Luan Nian, and stood up to move elsewhere.

"Where are you?" Zang Yao asked him, her voice carrying a hint of melancholy.

"I'm at a bar."

"Can I come to Beijing to find you?"

"What's wrong?"

"I want to move to Beijing," Zang Yao said. "I've had enough of Guangzhou. I'm sick of Guangzhou." She suddenly started crying. "I'm sick of Guangzhou, I want to come find you guys."

"Alright. Come on over."

Luan Nian couldn't remember how many times Zang Yao had moved. Ever since he had known her, she had been drifting endlessly, never willing to stay in one place for long.

"Thank you," Zang Yao whispered, gently ending the call.

Tan Mian sat back down and chuckled. "Turns out you were waiting for Zang Yao's call."

"I wasn't."

"Then why were you staring at your phone the whole time?" Tan Mian asked.

"I figured there might be a work call." Luan Nian said that, but the work call he was actually waiting for never arrived.

"So why did Zang Yao message you?"

"She wants to come stay in Beijing for a while."

"That's great, your place is big enough. If you ask me, you two should stop playing games. Since she's coming this time, get things sorted out and just be together." Tan Mian began spouting nonsense. Zang Yao had hung out with their circle for years, and the ambiguous tension between her and Luan Nian was an open secret. Their friends had placed bets more than once on when those two would finally tie the knot.

Luan Nian remained silent.

His relationship with Zang Yao wasn't what Tan Mian imagined. Zang Yao was a very good friend—so good that he felt zero romantic or physical desire toward her.

"She can stay in that apartment of mine, I'll help pay her rent." Luan Nian had no desire to live with Zang Yao; once they lived together, things would only become murkier and harder to explain.

"Does Miss Zang care about your pocket change for rent? What Miss Zang cares about is you finally devouring her whole." Tan Mian teased.

Luan Nian had no interest in discussing his affairs with Zang Yao. In truth, even among his closest friends, he loathed putting his private life on display. Besides, he didn't even have much of a private life to speak of these days.

The night felt excruciatingly tedious, devoid of anything that could spark his interest, yet the sight of two women walking past abruptly brought Shang Zhitao in her cheerleader outfit back to his mind.

He drank a bit before heading home, but the weekend's sound sleep failed to arrive as expected. Picking up a book from the bedside table on a whim, he wondered to himself: Had Shang Zhitao's problem been resolved? She hadn't asked him for help this time, so exactly where had the bottleneck been?

The supplier called him, and when he answered, he heard the vendor say, "The issue is resolved, we'll resume running the data immediately. Just wanted to give you a heads-up."

"How was it resolved?" The problem was fixed, yet Shang Zhitao hadn't even bothered to notify him?

"Alex called me and walked me through the situation. We've been collaborating for so long; minor slip-ups happen, no big deal, taking a small loss is a blessing in disguise." Clever as suppliers always were, naturally he wouldn't mention to Luan Nian that Alex had promised to compensate him in upcoming projects. Just because the vendor didn't say it didn't mean Luan Nian didn't know.

Shang Zhitao was quite something. She had gone straight to her direct boss to get things fixed—she certainly knew who could bail her out, learning to be clever.

"Did Flora send you the new brief?"

"Sent it. She sent it this afternoon."

"Alright."

Shang Zhitao had sent the new brief to the supplier, yet after making such a monumental blunder, she hadn't even offered a single word of explanation. He dialed her directly, but she didn't pick up. All the harsh rebukes Luan Nian had bottled up in his throat were blocked with nowhere to go; since she wouldn't answer, his temper had no outlet to vent.

Luan Nian stewed in silent frustration.

He never stewed in silence. Since childhood, he had been formidable, and everyone around him yielded to his pace. Even entering the corporate world, he remained far more overbearing than most. In his previous two or three relationships, he was never one to play the gentle saint—while he didn't need to shout at his ex-girlfriends, his cutting, back-and-forth remarks would invariably extinguish their anger within a few sentences. Crying and making a fuss had zero effect on Luan Nian, a fact all his exes knew well.

He was angry not because Shang Zhitao had messed up, but because she hadn't bothered to explain herself after committing such a massive error. She went about her merry way eating, drinking, and having fun without missing a beat, settling the matter with a simple phone call to her direct supervisor, never once pausing to consider what kind of disaster her mistake would have brought upon the company if he hadn't caught it, nor how she planned to survive in the corporate world afterward.

That suffocating anger wrapped tightly around his chest, refusing to come up and unable to disperse, lingering inside him like a trapped weight. It persisted all the way until the following evening when, after finishing his workout at home and heading to the kitchen to fix a bite to eat, his phone flashed with a notification: Shang Zhitao had sent him a message: "Hello Luke, Alex asked me to confirm with you whether you will be attending next week's Marketing Department weekly meeting?" She didn't utter a single syllable about her mistake.

Shang Zhitao flatly refused to bring up that incident. What was there to talk about? He had blasted her with a torrent of accusations, docked her bonus, blocked her promotion, and cut off her pay raise. When Kitty's creative work had gone sideways earlier, nearly causing the client to terminate the contract, Luan Nian had stepped in to smooth things over, yet people claimed he hadn't said a harsh word about it then. Office gossip held that Luan Nian favored his own people, but he treated Shang Zhitao with such relentless harshness simply because she wasn't one of "his people"—even if she had spent two deeply intimate nights with him.

"Why doesn't Alex ask me himself? Does your Marketing Department have no one left that you have to send an errand girl to ask?" Luan Nian still liked to reason things out when he was angry, though he never bothered reasoning with Shang Zhitao.

Seeing him revert to unreasonable bullying, Shang Zhitao shot back: "Then I'll have Alex ask you himself. He was tied up with other work just now and casually asked me to pass along the question. Sorry to disturb you."

The moment she finished saying that, Shang Zhitao called Alex. "Luke said he wants you to ask him yourself."

"Huh? Is he in a bad mood?"

"I'm not sure." How on earth would I know if he's in a good mood? We aren't even that close.

Hanging up the phone, Shang Zhitao went to do her laundry, completely dismissing Luan Nian like a passing fart. You want to snap at me? Well, I've decided I don't like you anymore either! At that moment, she was the epitome of a naive, worldly-inexperienced youngster. She thought she was locking horns with her boss, but in reality, she wasn't—she was locking horns with the man she loved. She simply refused to admit it to herself on a subconscious level.

When Shang Zhitao bumped into a stone-faced Luan Nian early the following Monday morning, she still offered him a cheerful greeting before retreating to the corner of the elevator car. Luan Nian didn't even spare her a glance; the moment the doors opened, he strode straight out. That stubborn ball of frustration remained lodged in Luan Nian's chest, and this brooding annoyance made him choose to completely ignore Shang Zhitao. He found it baffling himself: twenty-four hours a day, sixty minutes an hour, sixty seconds a minute, with six elevator cars on standby around the clock—why on earth did he keep running into Shang Zhitao everywhere?

Shang Zhitao sat down at her workstation and threw herself into her work with total concentration. Having suffered one catastrophic mistake that nearly torpedoed her very first project, she exercised supreme caution, swearing never to slip up again. When Lumi dropped by and saw her working with such intense dedication, she greeted her with a chuckle, "Model worker, sister of briefs, company star employee—hard at work, are we?"

Shang Zhitao was amused by her teasing, then pulled her aside to vent about her scrambled brief. "I can't afford to make any more mistakes. I have to do a stellar job."

"Luke's docking your bonus? Banning you from getting a promotion or a raise for a year?" Lumi looked slightly surprised. Strict as Luan Nian was, he had never intentionally cut off someone's escape route like that; the man merely had a sharp tongue. If he went on a bloody rampage, you could safely assume the target was genuinely at fault. But this time, the target was the harmless, innocent Shang Zhitao! Pondering deeply for a long time, Lumi finally couldn't help asking Shang Zhitao, "Peach, think very carefully—are you sure you haven't offended Luke?"

"I haven't." Would Shang Zhitao ever dare offend him? She countered with her own question: "Why would you say that?"

"Because Luke is clearly singling you out and making things difficult for you. How else do you explain this?"

"It's not like Luke has only started making things difficult for me today; I'm practically a veteran at being advised to resign by him." Shang Zhitao chuckled softly, turned back to her work, and dropped the subject.

No matter how hard Shang Zhitao tried to brush things off, she remained a deeply proud person at heart, her fragile self-esteem trampled into the mud by Luan Nian. That made her want to avoid facing him altogether.

When Lumi and Alex asked Shang Zhitao to go find Luan Nian on a couple of occasions to check on project progress, she politely declined both times. To keep herself away from Luan Nian, she carefully timed her departures to catch the very last bus home, and if her work remained unfinished, she packed her laptop into her bag and brought it home.

Project data began flowing back in batches.

Shang Zhitao had anticipated that the data wouldn't be entirely straightforward, but she soon discovered it was infinitely more complex than she imagined. The analysis didn't fall on her shoulders, but she needed to be able to read and understand it. She immersed herself in industry data sets, staring at them for the better part of the day. Her colleague in commercial analysis had told her that data demanded the beauty of logic—she needed to uncover patterns and breakthroughs amidst the overwhelming clutter, noting that comprehending data was one thing, while analyzing it was an entirely different beast.

Shang Zhitao tried her best to discover the beauty of logic her colleague had spoken of, to no avail. This left her feeling somewhat crestfallen. What exactly was logic? And why was she lacking it? When she brought this up in conversation with Sun Yuanzhu, he suggested she do some logical training exercises.

"Such as?"

"Such as..." After trailing off halfway through the phone call, Sun Yuanzhu chuckled, "Should I host a study session this weekend?"

"Now that sounds lovely."

"Don't stress too much over work. Stop acting like you have to be omnipotent—it's impossible for one person to handle everything. You need to recognize your own limits and learn how to show vulnerability. Lowering your boss's expectations of you appropriately is also a form of upward management."

I can't lower them.

My boss thinks I'm utterly useless.

Shang Zhitao thought to herself. Hanging up the phone, she walked back toward the office area, only to collide with Luan Nian right by the automatic glass doors. She hadn't crossed paths with him for days, so she offered a token greeting: "Good morning, Luke."

"How's the data recovery coming along?" Luan Nian suddenly asked, catching Shang Zhitao completely off guard.

Yet Luan Nian seemed to be in a pleasant mood, standing there with his hands shoved in his pockets as he waited for her reply.

"We've already recovered data for three industries, and the professional commercial analysis team will step in for the analysis next."

"Mm, keep it up."

"Thank you."

People kept passing by, and Shang Zhitao had no desire to converse with him out in the open—that would only make onlookers think he was the magnanimous boss while she was the hopeless dunce who couldn't be molded. She offered Luan Nian a tight smile. "Sorry Luke, I still have work to attend to. Would it be alright if I organize the project progress you're asking about and email it to you and Alex later?"

"Sure thing." Luan Nian smiled, looking as pleasant as a spring breeze.

Unable to read what was going on in his head, Shang Zhitao simply chose to stop trying, gave him a brief nod, and walked away. Her retreating back radiated stubborn defiance—a defiance so glaringly obvious that Luan Nian didn't miss it for a second.