“I’m not going!” Gu Siqiao’s furious voice echoed through the phone.
“Don’t be so cold-hearted, Fourth Brother. When you strike it rich, not returning home is like wearing fine silk in the—”
A thousand kilometers away in Jiangcheng’s Shiji Xinyuan, Gu Siqiao stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows wearing a suit shirt and vest, holding the phone in one hand with the other resting on his hip:
“Get lost! What kind of kickbacks did he give you?”
“Would I ever harm you?” Kang Shuai said over the phone, sounding aggrieved. “If we really sign a deal with No. 1 High School, and then discuss it with the government folks, they’d be more than happy to add a top provincial school to the list, wouldn’t they?”
Gu Siqiao: “Don’t take your Fourth Brother for a fool, Kang Shuai.”
“…Qi Chen said he has the follow-up archived files for all current graduates of No. 1 High School, and he said he could introduce me to someone to date.” Kang Shuai slid to his knees at light speed.
“You sold me out just to get set up on a date?” Gu Siqiao laughed out of pure exasperation. “How can you be so shortsighted? Go stay in Shanghai by yourself!”
He hung up with a sharp click.
Outside the floor-to-ceiling window, roads crisscrossed below, with endless traffic flowing along the main thoroughfare.
Thinking about Xue Lou—whom he had seen fumbling around at his computer before leaving headquarters, working frantically on who-knows-what—and then thinking about his brother who put romance before friendship, Gu Siqiao decided to pour a bottle of wine to ease his headache.
*
Kang Shuai couldn’t be relied upon anymore, but life had to go on.
The next day, Gu Siqiao was busy with meetings all day and wasn’t at the corporate headquarters.
When he returned to Shiji Xinyuan in the evening and unlocked his phone, he noticed a new QQ pop-up notification.
Lou: R&D said the draft is finalized, it just needs the President’s signature.
Lou: [Photo]
Looking at the decade-old default system avatar Xue Lou used, Gu Siqiao wanted to ask, ‘It’s been a whole week, why haven’t you added me on WeChat yet?’ But he held back, a wave of helplessness washing over him.
He simply replied via QQ as well: Bring the document over to my place. Set your taxi destination to Shiji Xinyuan and give my name; the butler will bring you upstairs.
Lou: Received.
Half an hour later, in the first-floor lobby of Shiji Xinyuan, Xue Lou entered carrying a briefcase: “Hello, I’m looking for Gu Siqiao.”
Butler: “Sir, right this way, please.”
The butler led Xue Lou, tapping a card to enter a staff-exclusive elevator.
The elevator ascended quickly and smoothly, soon coming to a halt. When Xue Lou stepped out, he found himself standing in what looked like an entryway, with a shoe cabinet right in the corner.
“This is a private single-unit floor served by two elevators, sir,” the butler reminded him. “You may head inside.”
Xue Lou put on the disposable shoe covers handed to him by the butler and stepped softly into the entryway.
The living room was exceptionally spacious. An irregularly shaped petal sofa and a lamb wool rug cast a soft glow against the seamless marble floor. The black screen of a hundred-inch TV reflected a bewildered silhouette. Looking around, he couldn’t spot the person he was looking for.
“Sit in the living room for a moment,” a voice called out.
Xue Lou whipped his head around. Gu Siqiao’s voice sounded far off, seemingly coming from the end of the hallway behind the living room—he knew that should be the direction of the master bedroom.
“There’s water and beer in the kitchen fridge, grab whatever you’d like to drink,” Gu Siqiao said.
Xue Lou took a few hesitant steps forward.
The place was huge, yet each zone had clear functional boundaries; walking further forward gave him a feeling of trespassing into someone’s private domain.
However, Xue Lou caught the sound of running water—the sound of shower spray landing on tiles.
Xue Lou uttered an “Okay,” returned to the living room, sat down at the edge of the sofa, and opened his briefcase.
Ten minutes later, Gu Siqiao stepped out of the master bedroom wearing a bathrobe, drying his hair with a towel.
“Yo,” he caught sight of Xue Lou’s back and the laptop on the coffee table. “What’s this?”
Hearing his voice, Xue Lou turned sideways: “This is a laptop I requested from headquarters. For working overtime outside the—”
The moment his gaze brushed past Gu Siqiao, he immediately jerked his eyes away. Realizing it was awkward to turn back right away, the tips of his ears flushed red.
“I know, I wasn’t asking about the laptop.” Gu Siqiao turned into the open-plan kitchen, pulling two bottles of fruit beer from the fridge and setting them on the island counter. “Working overtime right in front of your boss—quite the move. I like employees with drive.”
Half of Xue Lou’s body went stiff, making even his peripheral vision rigid: “I won’t drink, thank you.”
“Then have this.” Gu Siqiao swapped it for a bottle of water and tossed it to him.
Xue Lou caught it and looked at the label, trying to discern if this was the so-called Evian mineral water that rich people enjoyed drinking.
However, it was covered in German, and since he only recognized a few individual words, he gave up, unscrewed the cap, and took a polite sip.
Holding a can in one hand, Gu Siqiao walked over to Xue Lou’s side: “Is it this one?”
“Yeah.” Xue Lou handed over Gu Siqiao’s document and a signing pen.
Gu Siqiao took the items back to the island counter, reading while sipping his drink.
Xue Lou: “Gu Siqiao, what’s your Wi-Fi password? I need to get online to check my emails.”
Gu Siqiao: “Eight sixes.”
Xue Lou connected to the Wi-Fi, and after a moment’s thought, couldn’t help saying, “A simple password like that is easy to crack.”
The moment he said it, he suddenly realized: for a massive single-unit luxury flat served by two elevators, who would bother stealing Wi-Fi from upstairs or downstairs?
It was practically worrying over nothing.
Yet Gu Siqiao’s response was even more unexpected: “It’s a one-time setup; stealing the password won’t do any good.”
“What do you mean by one-time Wi-Fi?” Xue Lou asked, puzzled.
Gu Siqiao: “It’s something set up by the property management at Shiji Xinyuan; I don’t really know the exact technical mechanism either. The passcode can be changed once a week by the resident. If guests or outsiders visit temporarily and need to connect to Wi-Fi, they use this temporary password.”
Xue Lou let out an “Oh”: “That’s pretty impressive. First time hearing of such a thing.”
Gu Siqiao continued scanning the document when he suddenly heard Xue Lou pull out something else, standing up and coming over to his side: “Take this as well while you’re at it.”
Gu Siqiao spotted a blue office folder: “What’s this?”
“Meeting minutes,” Xue Lou said.
Gu Siqiao froze, flipping it open. Dozens of thick pages were bound into ten individual copies. Pulling out the first copy, he read a few paragraphs and turned his head:
“You organized everyone’s spoken statements from the meeting?”
“Right,” Xue Lou said. “Didn’t you say not to miss any items?”
Gu Siqiao flipped through copy after copy. Every attendee’s remarks had been meticulously broken down and logged, including the exact source of that data point he had argued with Manager Zheng about yesterday. Numerous sections even included annotations. To be frank, some of those annotations were common sense to Gu Siqiao, yet every single one had been referenced in painstaking detail, almost like an idiot’s guide.
Gu Siqiao couldn’t help nodding slightly: “Good, not bad.”
He then placed all the minutes back into the folder: “Though next time, there’s no need to make it this detailed. Doing it this way, you won’t survive regardless of how many brains or hands you have. I heard you stayed past eleven at work yesterday—you were compiling this, weren’t you?”
“Ah, yeah.” Having his cover blown, Xue Lou looked a bit embarrassed. “Understood.”
Gu Siqiao: “Take these annotations, for example. Thorough as they are, there are some I simply don’t need. I’ll tell you when I want something looked up, or have you instruct someone else to look into it. Doing it like this creates too much unnecessary workload for yourself. If it’s just to demonstrate your work ethic, it’s even less necessary—I’m not the kind of boss who ignores results and only cares about attitude.”
“I understand,” Xue Lou said. “I just wanted to make sure everything was clear for you.”
Gu Siqiao was looking down at the meeting minutes, his washed hair soft and fluffy, hanging down slightly.
Hearing those words, he glanced at Xue Lou and smiled.
The nuance in his smile was noticeably different from any time he had smiled at the corporate headquarters.
“Bring your laptop over here,” Gu Siqiao said. “Hunching over at the coffee table like that—aren’t you tired?”
Xue Lou moved all his gear over. With the two of them standing on opposite sides of the square kitchen island, the western-style kitchen counter instantly transformed into a workspace.
His fingers clattered across the keyboard while Gu Siqiao sipped his fruit beer, casually checking and marking up the document with his pen.
The vast living area was quiet, until Gu Siqiao, without pausing his pen, suddenly spoke up: “This is the first time I’ve praised you since you joined, isn’t it?”
The typing sound came to a halt.
Gu Siqiao struck out a sentence on the draft: “You stubborn academic god have indeed brought me quite a bit of trouble. But thinking about it carefully, I’ve been pretty impatient with you lately too. Nobody taught you a lot of these things, yet I always assumed you ought to know them.”
It took a good while before Xue Lou spoke: “Not really. You separate the work from the person.”
“It shouldn’t be like that toward anything,” Gu Siqiao said. “Your intentions were good, I know.”
Tilting his head, he noticed Xue Lou’s eyes fixed dead onto the computer screen, making him chuckle: “What’s with you? Am I Medusa?”
Xue Lou’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down.
“Do you always dress like this at home, Gu Siqiao?” he asked in a low voice.
Gu Siqiao spread his hands: “No way. When it’s hot in the summer after a shower, I don’t even wear a top. What’s up?”
The veins on the side of Xue Lou’s neck were taut, his nostrils flaring slightly with his breath—looking for all the world like a virtuous young maiden so terrified by a street rogue’s wolf-whistle that she didn’t dare budge an inch.
“What’s there to be shy about?” Gu Siqiao actually took pride in it rather than feeling embarrassed. “Your boss knows he’s ridiculously handsome—enough to make anyone feel inferior.”
The male peacock wasn’t satisfied yet. As he spoke, he took a leisurely stroll around the kitchen island, the front lapels of his bathrobe resting slightly open to reveal his chest—normally covered under layers of suits—exposing a broad expanse of fair skin alongside straight, slender collarbones.
Xue Lou tried to keep his eyes fixed forward, but it yielded little effect. His gaze drifted to Gu Siqiao’s waist; although Gu Siqiao looked tall, he was surprisingly lean, the bathrobe belt tied loosely around his narrow waist.
“Watch out or you’ll expose yourself, Gu Siqiao,” Xue Lou said.
“What’s there to fear? We’re old high school classmates who grew up in the same place. As your boss, I don’t even mind being completely open with you,” Gu Siqiao said.
Xue Lou suddenly raised his eyes, looking directly into Gu Siqiao’s gaze with seriousness.
“Do you still remember the things from high school?” he asked.
Gu Siqiao paused, capped his pen, and handed the revised document over to him.
“To be honest, I don’t really remember,” he answered.
Xue Lou looked at Gu Siqiao. Just a second ago, his eyes had been dodging him as if avoiding an exhibitionist, but now he stared unblinkingly into Gu Siqiao’s eyes for several full seconds.
Then, he lowered his eyelids, looking down at the document in his hands.
It was filled with endless revision notes written in Gu Siqiao’s hand.
The handwriting was beautifully practiced—completely different from the handwriting on his homework notebooks when he was seventeen, so bold and free that it looked like two entirely different people wrote it.
“Right,” Xue Lou muttered to himself softly. “In a blink, a full ten years have passed.”