The man under the corridor wore a black suit and white shirt, no tie, clean and tailored, his posture tall and straight.
He looked down, brow slightly furrowed, surveying the person scrambling to get up in disarray.
A drunkard. Debauched. Worthless. Riddled with bad habits.
Labels flashed through his mind one by one, yet Li Ran’s face showed no particular emotion.
From beginning to end, he stood at the top of the high steps, watching the person below make a spectacle of himself like an outsider.
His pitch-black eyes first swept over Xin Ruan’s wrinkled, filthy clothes before finally landing on the blood-scratched arm.
“Clean yourself up.”
Li Ran spoke.
Though the words were well-meant concern, his tone was as if soaked in bone-chilling snow water, indifferent to the extreme.
Xin Ruan squeezed out an “mm,” steadied his slightly dizzy head, and forced himself to look up at the man before him.
There was a light in his eyes as he gazed at Li Ran, adding a touch of life to his sickly complexion.
He licked his somewhat chapped lips, gathering his thoughts to say a few more words to him.
He wanted to ask, did you see my messages last night? If you did, why didn’t you reply? I was out all night, didn’t you have anything you wanted to ask?
But then a breeze swept through the corridor, and Xin Ruan caught the heavy smell of cigarettes and alcohol clinging to his body, just like some drunkard marinating in a bar or nightclub.
The scent Li Ran hated most.
When he looked up again, sure enough, he saw the slight furrow in Li Ran’s brow.
Whether out of courtesy or simply because he didn’t care, Li Ran said nothing to him. Instead, he quickly smoothed his brow, turned half sideways, and with an indifferent expression gestured for him to go inside.
Xin Ruan looked at the cold Li Ran and opened his mouth, wanting to explain, only to find he had no way to begin.
Say that he hadn’t wanted to attend that kind of celebration party in the first place, and only went to test your attitude toward me?
Or say that he hadn’t actually gone wild outside all night that after realizing you didn’t care about me at all, he slunk back in the middle of the night, and because he had no key, squatted outside the door for half the night?
None of these were things Xin Ruan could bring himself to say.
“CEO Li, we should get going.”
A crisp, youthful voice came from behind Li Ran.
It was Jiang Zimo, Li Ran’s assistant.
Though Assistant Jiang wasn’t as delicate and handsome as Xin Ruan, he made up for it with a refined, gentle air. A pair of gunmetal-gray glasses sat on his nose, exuding the efficiency of a top-tier university graduate.
He came out of the house holding two ties, one wine red, one sapphire blue.
Facing his assistant, Li Ran’s icy tone softened somewhat.
He gave a light “mm,” his voice low and mellow, regaining the gentle warmth and mild grace Xin Ruan had seen when they first met.
Li Ran looked over, his gaze settling on the sapphire blue tie.
Jiang Zimo, understanding at once, handed the sapphire blue tie to Xin Ruan.
Xin Ruan stared at the sapphire blue tie, momentarily lost in thought.
This tie was Xin Ruan’s wedding gift to Li Ran. Based on Li Ran’s tastes, Xin Ruan had spent a long time carefully choosing it, a House M haute couture piece, beautiful and expensive. Though to Li Ran it was a drop in the bucket, hardly costing anything, it had consumed most of what remained of Xin Ruan’s savings.
But the heartening thing was that Li Ran seemed to really like the tie, since Xin Ruan often saw him wearing it.
Xin Ruan lowered his eyes. The tie lay quietly and neatly before him, offering him a sliver of an unrealistic fantasy.