【007: Darling, You Still Love Me】
Yao Mu assumed that Zhuang Yiyi had brought the ball to the hospital. He picked it up and asked, “Why did you suddenly bring this to the hospital?”
For a moment, Zhuang Yiyi didn’t know how to explain where the ball had come from.
Her unusual behaviour caught Yao Mu’s attention, and he also noticed something different about the crystal ball. It was too big; it fit perfectly in his hand, but for a girl, it was far too large. When he’d chosen it, he’d deliberately picked a smaller size, one more suited to a girl’s palm. There was another thing: the little figure was smiling, not expressionless.
“Did Chen Ding give you this ball?” His first thought was of that man.
Zhuang Yiyi gave a soft nod.
“Yiyi, don’t you really think, even now, that your relationship with Chen Ding is becoming too intimate? Won’t your husband get angry?”
Zhuang Yiyi kept her head bowed, offering no reply.
“Yiyi, is there a problem between you and your husband?” Beyond that, Yao Mu simply couldn’t fathom why she hadn’t rejected Chen Ding all this time.
“No.” Zhuang Yiyi still kept her head down; Yao Mu couldn’t tell if she was telling the truth.
He glanced at the ball in his hand, feeling increasingly repulsed by it. Setting it down, he said, “You can deal with this ball yourself.”
Only after the door had closed did Zhuang Yiyi lift her head. She liked that ball; there was no way she was going to get rid of it.
After leaving Zhuang Yiyi’s ward, Chen Ding went to Qian Yi’s room. They exchanged a few words, and before leaving, he took a deliberate look inside the room: Zhang Hongya was feeding Qian Yi an apple.
When would he ever receive such treatment? Chen Ding felt a pang of sadness.
As Yao Mu emerged from the staff lounge, he happened to meet Chen Ding walking towards him. There was only one room he could possibly be heading to.
Yao Mu walked towards him, and Chen Ding raised an eyebrow in surprise as he saw him approaching.
“Mr Chen.”
“Dr Yao.”
“Could I have a few minutes of your time? I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
“Certainly.”
Yao Mu and Chen Ding made their way to the stairwell.
“Mr Chen. Are you and Yiyi friends?”
“Yes.” Chen Ding realised he was getting at something else entirely.
“So, you were able to go to her home and see the crystal ball I gave her.”
“Yes.”
“So, you must be well aware of her marital status.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean that Yiyi is already married.” Having gone this far, Yao Mu didn’t mind making himself even clearer.
But Chen Ding asked him a question first: ‘How do you know? Did she tell you herself?’
She told you herself.
This was a question Yao Mu didn’t want to answer. To him, it sounded as though Zhuang Yiyi had deliberately told him this in order to reject him.
“Since we’re friends, let’s not take things any further. We all have our own lives; let’s not make things too awkward.”
Yao Mu left, unaware that Chen Ding, behind him, had lowered his head and was smiling.
Zhuang Yiyi was in the staff room discussing a treatment plan for a patient with bipolar disorder with Han Rong. The patient was a new case Han Rong had taken on that day; she was a bit of a special case—a girl, only 17 years old, in her second year of high school. She was far too young, and being in secondary school, medication wasn’t really an option. Han Rong was therefore discussing alternative treatment methods with Zhuang Yiyi.
They hadn’t finished their conversation when Sister Yue walked in.
Sister Yue shared a break room with Han Rong; she was about twenty years older than Han Rong and didn’t like noise. In their break room, the only sound was the clatter of keyboards.
As soon as she entered, Han Rong said to Zhuang Yiyi, “We’ll have to continue this later.”
Zhuang Yiyi was well aware of Sister Yue’s nature, so she replied, “Right.”
No sooner had she stepped out of the break room than she spotted Chen Ding standing not far away, leaning against the nurses’ station and chatting with Youyou.
He was quite tall, towering a good bit above the nurses’ station.
She didn’t know what they were talking about, but they both looked quite happy. Chen Ding spotted Zhuang Yiyi first and stood up straight. “Dr Zhuang.”
Zhuang Yiyi gave him a puzzled look. Once they were inside the ward, just as she was about to ask why he hadn’t left yet, she was taken aback by his smug grin.
“What are you laughing at?”
Chen Ding took a step forward and wrapped his arms around her shoulders. “Darling, you still love me.”
“What on earth are you playing at?”
Chen Ding kept smiling, rubbing her face. “Darling, you’re so cute.”
Zhuang Yiyi freed her face from his clutches and looked at him, utterly baffled. A knock on the door interrupted their conversation.
Han Rong had come to see Zhuang Yiyi with a medical file; she knocked on the door, and a handsome stranger opened it.
Where had this handsome young man come from? Han Rong’s lips curled upwards involuntarily. She’d completely forgotten she was in the hospital ward and, just as she would when striking up a conversation with a handsome man in the past, she held out her hand. “Hello. ‘My name is Han Rong. It’s lovely to meet you.”
“Chen Ding. A friend of Dr Zhuang’s.” Chen Ding shook her hand briefly before quickly withdrawing it. “Are you here to see Yiyi?”
“Yes. I wanted to discuss a patient with her.” Han Rong’s smile widened. “Am I interrupting?”
Chen Ding shifted to one side. “Not at all.”
Han Rong put down the medical records, sat up straight in her chair, and was just about to exchange a few words with the handsome man when she saw him say to Zhuang Yiyi, “Fancy lunch together? I’ll find a restaurant nearby and send you the address later.”
“I’ve arranged to meet Han Rong.”
Han Rong said, “Then shall the three of us go together? Since it’s our first meeting, I’ll treat.”
“I shall not stand on ceremony then.” Han Rong stood up. “Shall we exchange WeChat contacts?”
Chen Ding glanced at Zhuang Yiyi, who gave him a look that seemed to say, ‘Why are you looking at me?’ Chen Ding felt as though he were batting his eyelashes at a blind man.
Han Rong noticed the glance too. She smiled and put her phone away. “Never mind. If it’s inconvenient, never mind.”
“It’s not inconvenient.” The two of them added each other on WeChat anyway.
After Chen Ding had left, Han Rong asked, “Is that your boyfriend?”
“No.”
“A patient?” Han Rong’s expression changed. She’d thought he seemed like a decent man, but if he was a patient, no matter how handsome he was, she’d have to give him a miss.
“No. Qian Yi’s lawyer.”
“Oh.” Han Rong suddenly remembered something. “Hey! That’s the one who came to ask you out for dinner yesterday, isn’t it?”
“How did you know?”
“The whole hospital knows. You know as well as I do—it’s not often we get a bit of gossip, so let everyone have a bit of a chat. No wonder he was looking at you when I added him on WeChat. I thought he wasn’t keen, that he was looking to ask you for help.”
“Oh! Does he have a younger brother or something? He’s actually quite my type.”
“No biological younger brother. I don’t know about a cousin.” After sitting down, Zhuang Yiyi opened the medical records. “Haven’t we already discussed this young lady?”
When the conversation turned to the patient, Han Rong dropped her teasing manner and discussed the issues identified during the previous consultation with Zhuang Yiyi in a serious tone. This is a common occurrence in psychiatry; patients do not trust their doctors from the very first meeting. They have their own worries and scars they’d rather keep hidden; trust can only be built gradually through repeated individual or group sessions, unravelling layer by layer to uncover the root of the problem.
Mid-conversation, Zhuang Yiyi received a WeChat message from Chen Ding: “I’ve suddenly been called into work and won’t have time to join you for dinner. I’ve already found a restaurant and paid in advance, so you can just go straight there when the time comes. ”
That evening, Zhuang Yiyi went home after work. Chen Ding wasn’t there.
The living room was still decorated just as Chen Ding had left it the day before. It was a very girly setup—balloons, flowers, streamers… It should have been a lively and cosy scene.
She opened the fridge and found a cake inside, still in its unopened packaging.
Zhuang Yiyi looked at the cake and let out a long sigh.
She closed the fridge and sent Chen Ding a WeChat message: “When are you coming back?”
Chen Ding was in the middle of a meeting with a client; by the time he saw Zhuang Yiyi’s message, an hour had already passed.
He called her back immediately. “Darling, have you been missing me?”
Zhuang Yiyi paused for a moment before replying, “You’re imagining things.”
“Right. I know you’re a bit shy.” Then he added, “What did you want?”
Zhuang Yiyi had originally sent the message simply to ask Chen Ding to come home and eat the cake. But she regretted it almost as soon as she’d sent it; over an hour had passed, and she’d already returned to the lab.
“Nothing. Bye.”
“Hey! Are you coming home tonight?”
“No.”
“On duty again?”
“No. I’m in the lab.”
“Right. I’m off to Shanghai on business tomorrow; it might take two or three days to get back. If you miss me, give me a call.”
Zhuang Yiyi hung up.
Zhuang Yiyi returned to the lab, where Yao Mu was also present.
Yao Mu saw Zhuang Yiyi come in and glanced at her several times, as if he had something he wanted to say to her. Zhuang Yiyi was completely absorbed in her work and didn’t notice his gaze.
Yao Mu, too, was fully occupied with his own experiment.
When a postgraduate student came to seek Zhuang Yiyi’s guidance, and after she had finished advising him, Yao Mu watched her yawn and asked, “Shall i get you coffee?”