Qian Fei casually asked, “Just got 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: “Has Gui Lili returned?”
Qian Fei was taken aback, and she noticed Li Yifei was also startled.
Li Yifei seemed a bit angry. He waved his hand and gave the bag he was carrying to Qian Fei, “This is tea. I don’t need it, so you can have it!”
Qian Fei was drowsy, and she felt that Li Yifei was like a tsundere divine excrement sent by the heavens to save her – usually not very lovable, but capable of showing his halo at crucial moments.
“Is this… appropriate?” She hesitated to accept, seeing the tea’s exquisite packaging.
“Just take it if I’m giving it to you,” Li Yifei shoved the bag into her hands. “What are you afraid of? It’s not worth that much. Even if I regret it later and ask for it back, you won’t have to sell your house or land!”
Hearing him say this, Qian Fei decided to accept the bag.
She returned to her room. Through the door, she vaguely heard Li Yifei seemingly calling Gui Lili. He asked loudly, “Where are you? Why aren’t you home so late? What do you mean I’m always home late too? I’m a man, how can you compare? If I’m out socializing late at night, no one gossips about me. But if you’re out late entertaining your boss, I worry people will point at me and gossip! How am I being rude? If you didn’t behave so inappropriately, would I speak so harshly? Gui Lili, how have you become like this? Can you still be with me properly like a decent girl? Come back right now, or don’t come back at all!”
Qian Fei had been so drowsy she was about to tear open a tea bag, but after eavesdropping on this phone call, she felt wide awake. She thought Li Yifei’s mouth was exceptionally harsh; he didn’t know how to yield at all when arguing with his girlfriend. Of course, Gui Lili wasn’t easy to deal with either – every time, it was like they were fighting to the death.
She felt exhausted for these two people. The man was full of young master’s airs, never lifting a finger to help, throwing tantrums when things didn’t go his way, believing it was natural for men not to do housework. The woman disliked labor, loved dressing up and acting cute, and was more delicate than anyone. With two ancestors like these who both needed to be waited on, it would be a miracle if they could make their relationship work.
She put the tea aside unopened and continued working.
About forty minutes later, Gui Lili returned.
She heard the two of them arguing. Through two doors, she intermittently heard Gui Lili’s shouts and cries.
“Li Yifei, how dare you say that about me! Don’t you also go to bars with your colleagues? Can you say you’ve never had drinks with other women? My colleagues say they’ve seen you flirting with a female student from the Film Academy!”
She heard Li Yifei say, “Can you stop being so twisted? I didn’t bring that woman there. What’s wrong with everyone sitting together for a drink? Your colleagues? I think you mean your boss! How would he know she’s from the Film Academy? He probably tried to hit on her and failed! Besides, when I go to bars, no one’s trying to get with me. When you go to bars, the person taking you there wants to sleep with you. Wake up!”
Gui Lili kept crying, “Li Yifei, can you stop saying such hurtful things to me? Can’t we just be good to each other? Why do you keep arguing with me since we’ve returned to China?”
Li Yifei seemed to kick the coffee table. Qian Fei heard the sound of an object hitting the wall.
She didn’t expect things bought on Taobao to be so sturdy, surviving Li Yifei’s kick until now. She decided to go online tomorrow and add another positive review for the store.
“Be good to each other? Am I not good enough? I tell you, I regret being too good! You said you wanted to rent a place together, so I rented with you. You said you wanted to be near Guomao, so I rented near Guomao. And what happened? It’s the middle of the night, I’m back, but you’re still not home! What business do you have that requires you to accompany your boss to a bar in the middle of the night? Gui Lili, you’ve done it this time!”
Qian Fei’s head was throbbing from listening to their argument.
They continued arguing next door for a while, then gradually quieted down. Qian Fei guessed from various signs that Gui Lili might have fainted from crying.
Qian Fei felt her sympathy must have gotten lost in the night; she didn’t feel sorry for Gui Lili at all.
She rubbed her head and continued working overtime.
Early the next morning at the company, Xiao Yuan told Qian Fei, “Sister Jin asked you to see her later. She said she has something to discuss with you.”
After submitting the “Investment Bank Quarterly Business Information Statistics,” Qian Fei went to see Sister Jin.
Sister Jin pulled her into the corridor and mysteriously told her, “Remember when I introduced you and Hu Zining to potential matches, and I mentioned their hotel was planning to go public? I just heard that this project might be taken on by our company along with another securities firm. The two firms might act as joint sponsors for Hu Zining’s hotel’s IPO! Most of our company’s personnel are currently engaged in various projects, so we’re a bit short-handed. Fei Fei, you might have a chance to participate in this project!”
During her first few years at the company, Qian Fei had been in the back-office support department, doing secretarial-like service work. For instance, conveying meeting spirits, posting the latest industry regulations on the company website, monitoring market changes over a week, and sending organized data and materials to every employee’s mailbox. Later, she realized that working in the back-office service department was always the most tiring yet always earning the least money, with no project bonuses. So she took the qualification exam, hoping to move to the project department. But Wang Ruohai said, “How can a woman who’s always on business trips manage a household?” So she suppressed her desire to work on projects in the project department. It wasn’t until after their breakup when she bought a house that the mortgage payments forced her to face life more positively, and she finally applied to transfer to the project department.
However, in the project department, whether a project team had five members or six made a huge difference in the final bonus distribution. So in the year and a half since transferring to the project department, she had always been a marginal figure, never fully participating in a project from start to finish with any team. Usually, when a project team was short-handed, she would rush in to help, run errands, do odd jobs, organize work documents, and if she was lucky, she might get a hardship allowance of eight or ten thousand when it came time to distribute project bonuses.
Come to think of it, over the past year and more, the work she had become most proficient at was organizing work documents. She had already helped several project teams clean up their work documents. She quite enjoyed hearing her colleagues praise her: “In our company, when it comes to organizing work documents, no one can beat Qian Fei! Her work is meticulous! Efficient! Beautiful!”
She had always thought this was one of her skills and had even been smugly proud of it for a while. Until one time, when she accidentally overheard two colleagues chatting privately while getting water in the pantry: “You know, it’s a shame about Qian Fei. Every project team wants to use her to organize documents for free, but no team wants to give her a bigger share of the bonus!”
“Yeah, she’s been in the project department for two years now, just organizing documents. Spending two years in investment banking just organizing work documents, isn’t that a waste of time?”
It was only then that she truly began to understand what position she was in.
So if what Sister Jin said was true, Qian Fei wanted to seize this opportunity.
She asked Sister Jin, “Sister Jin, I want to officially join a project. I don’t want to be an outsider on the fringes anymore! Can you teach me what I should do?”
Sister Jin gave her some advice, “Why don’t you find an opportunity to sound out Director Kong from the project department? See if he can squeeze you into this project team. If this project succeeds, even if you’re the smallest shrimp, you’ll get a nice bonus!”
Qian Fei’s heart was pounding as she listened.
“How should I approach Director Kong about this?”
Sister Jin thought for a moment, “Director Kong is a shrewd person, there’s nothing he doesn’t understand. You don’t need to beat around the bush with him; it’s better not to. Just be straightforward and tell him your thoughts. Oh, and he likes to drink tea. Buy him some good tea leaves!”
That evening, back at home, Qian Fei posted a question on an online forum: If I want to give a gift to my superior, what kind of tea would be appropriate?
A string of replies followed: Expensive ones.
She rolled her eyes at the computer screen.
As she rolled her eyes, somehow her gaze fell on the bag Li Yifei had given her yesterday.
An idea struck her. She took out the exquisite tea gift box from the bag. The box was decorated with an antique-style design featuring the words “Wuyi Rock Tea.” She found the barcode, took out her phone, and scanned it with a price-checking app.
After a “beep,” the page displayed the price of the tea: 18,888 yuan.
Qian Fei’s knees nearly gave way, and she almost fell to the ground.
That little spendthrift next door had said that if she ever wanted to return it, she wouldn’t need to sell her house or land… At this price, she’d have to sell at least half of her bathroom!
Qian Fei felt that if the tea had been worth less than a thousand yuan, she could have kept it with a clear conscience, pretending not to know its value. But now that she knew how expensive it was, she felt that if she didn’t return it, she would lie awake at night, troubled by her conscience.
She sent a text message to Li Yifei: “I heard that the tea you casually gave me yesterday is worth 18,888 yuan. It’s too expensive, I don’t dare keep it. You should take it back!”
In less than a minute, she received a reply: “It was given to me by a buddy, I didn’t spend money on it. If I give it to you, just keep it.”
Qian Fei pursed her lips.
“Anyway, you should take it back.”
Half a minute later.
Li Yifei: Just throw it away then.
Qian Fei was conflicted.
“You might not have spent money, but your buddy did!”
Li Yifei: He didn’t spend money either, it was a gift for topping up his phone bill.
Qian Fei’s mouth gaped open in shock without her realizing it. How much money did he have to spend on his phone bill to get this?!
She sincerely and piously typed out a line of text on her phone and sent it to Li Yifei.
“Is your buddy married? Or if he’s unfortunately already married, does he have any unmarried brothers?”
Then there was no reply.
Two hours later, when she was already lying down to sleep, she unexpectedly received a reply from Li Yifei: Yes, me.
Qian Fei decided that maybe she should just throw away the tea leaves after all.