Manager Wang, furious, was red in the face. The look in his eyes made it seem as if he wanted to eat Lin Xiaoyan alive for talking back to him.
When he suddenly heard Chu Xin’s voice, Lin Xiaoyan first thought he had misheard. He reacted quickly, took the document straight from Chu Xin’s hand, flipped to the signature line for the person in charge, and sure enough, just as Chu Xin had said, no matter how you looked at this document, it had absolutely nothing to do with Chu Xin.
This Manager Wang was just looking for an excuse to yell at Chu Xin.
Lin Xiaoyan instantly lost it and raised his voice. “If you’re sick in the head, go see a doctor. The office is not the place for you to throw your weight around! The name of the person in charge is written right here in black and white. Is Manager Wang blind, or can he not even read?”
Manager Wang was scolded into silence by Lin Xiaoyan, and he glared at Chu Xin with bloodshot eyes.
But Chu Xin did not, like before, stand there meekly, bending over to admit fault. Instead, he stood straight-backed and looked at him without the slightest sign of inferiority.
It was the gaze of someone looking at some petty clown.
The other coworkers around them were all watching the show too. Wang Desheng had never been this humiliated in the company before.
He barked at Chu Xin in a rough voice, “Beijing A·8xxx6.”
Lin Xiaoyan sneered. “Has Manager Wang gone so mad with anger that he’s started blurting out license plates to scare people? Who are you trying to intimidate with that?”
At that, Chu Xin frowned slightly, his expression turning a little odd.
If he remembered correctly, that license plate belonged to Zhou Huaijin. The reason he had remembered it was that Zhou Huaijin drove a Maybach.
Luxury cars always attracted attention, so he had happened to remember that plate, which was easy to remember even for a child.
Seeing Chu Xin’s expression change, Wang Desheng immediately felt like he had leverage again.
“Who I’m scaring, and whether it works, the person involved knows best.” With that, he yanked hard at the document in Lin Xiaoyan’s hand.
Who would have thought Lin Xiaoyan wasn’t even using much force? Wang Desheng overdid it, stumbled two steps, stepped on his own foot, and actually crashed into the office desk beside him. The desk scraped against the floor with a screeching sound.
Lin Xiaoyan hadn’t expected Wang Desheng to suddenly snatch the document and then slam himself into the desk. He had seen stupid people before, but never anyone this stupid.
He couldn’t help but snort in laughter.
That immediately made the others in the office laugh too. Wang Desheng’s face went from red to black. Lin Xiaoyan was famously sharp-tongued in the marketing department, and Wang Desheng didn’t dare keep arguing with him.
He slapped the document against the desk, kicked the chair a couple of times in anger, and stormed back toward his own office. But the look he gave Chu Xin before leaving made it obvious this wasn’t over.
Once Wang Desheng was gone, Lin Xiaoyan immediately dropped the aggressive attitude from before and looked at Chu Xin with some concern instead. “Xinxin, are you okay?”
Chu Xin shook his head. “I’m fine. Thanks for just now.”
Lin Xiaoyan reached out and patted his shoulder. “It’s nothing. But you were a little different today. With someone like Wang Desheng, you should’ve fought back hard. You were too soft before, which is why he kept bullying you. But what did Wang Desheng mean by that license plate? Xinxin, Wang Desheng doesn’t have something on you, does he?”
Chu Xin didn’t know either, but since the license plate belonged to Zhou Huaijin, it probably wasn’t anything troublesome, right?
The two of them said a few more things before Lin Xiaoyan returned to his desk. Before leaving, he carefully reminded Chu Xin that if Wang Desheng kept making trouble for him, Chu Xin had to call him over. He would definitely argue Wang Desheng into silence.
Chu Xin smiled at that and kept saying, “Okay, I’ll definitely call you.”
Still, if Wang Desheng really came looking for trouble again, Chu Xin felt he could probably handle it himself too.
After that, Wang Desheng did behave much better, and he didn’t trouble Chu Xin again. He just assigned him a lot of miscellaneous tasks. They took some time to deal with, but they were still manageable.
Near noon, Chu Xin pressed a hand to his stomach and finally realized how hungry he was. But it was already past lunchtime, so he took his cup to the pantry to make a coffee and tide himself over.
Just as he approached the pantry, he heard his own name and felt a little awkward.
“That Chu Xin is really good-looking. His face is so refined that even I, a girl, get jealous. He only said a few simple things, but somehow I feel like he’s even more charming than Manager Lin…”
The person talking to her seemed to be a middle-aged woman, who gave a soft laugh. “You young girls only look at faces. Still, who doesn’t like a handsome guy? Chu Xin really is handsome. It’s a pity he’s already married, otherwise I’d want to introduce my daughter to him. A face like that is a pleasure to look at every day.”
That prompted a burst of laughter from the people in the pantry. Chu Xin, standing outside, felt his face heat up, turning red and flushed in an instant.
“It’s just that his personality is too soft. If Wang Desheng dared to treat me like that, I’d tear his mouth apart.”
“Sister Li, why is that Manager Wang targeting Chu Xin so much? What happened today was obviously just him picking a fight for no reason.” The young girl asked in confusion.
“Who knows? I guess he just thinks Chu Xin is soft and easy to bully. Wang Desheng lives in the same neighborhood as me, and I heard that when he was younger he latched onto some rich woman. Then he got restless and secretly found someone else on the side. After the rich woman found out, she dragged out the divorce and refused to sign.
“That rich woman wasn’t that rich either, and she’s getting on in years now. Of course she wouldn’t let him run off and live happily ever after with the mistress, so she’s been tormenting that Wang guy like crazy. Chances are he got chewed out by his wife again today, and once he saw Chu Xin, he used him as a punching bag.”
The young girls all sighed. Trash like that deserved divine punishment.
Wang Desheng’s business wasn’t exactly a secret in the company. His wife had already come to the office and made a scene several times. It was only those few young girls who had just joined the company who didn’t know about it.
Chu Xin also lost his appetite for coffee. When he returned to his desk, he saw a WeChat message.
Xinxin, something suddenly came up on my side. I’ve told the driver to pick you up.
Seeing that message, Chu Xin breathed a sigh of relief. Unless absolutely necessary, he really didn’t want to be alone with Zhou Huaijin, especially in the cramped space of a car, which made him even more uneasy.
Yet for some reason, after feeling relieved, he actually also felt a little disappointed.
Chu Xin decided it had to be because he was too hungry and his mood was low. It definitely wasn’t because of Zhou Huaijin.
Once he calmed down, Chu Xin finally began to notice a lot of things that were off.
He remembered the book describing the original owner as someone who seemed gentle on the surface but was actually deeply scheming. Would someone like that be bullied at the company just because of a soft personality?
What he had accidentally overheard in the pantry just now, and what had happened this morning, all told him the same thing. The original owner was a pitiful little thing who got bullied at work.
That was only the first oddity. The second was Zhou Huaijin.
In the book, Zhou Huaijin was devoted to his career and had no interest in emotional entanglements at all. Yet whether it was his staying by the hospital bed or the messages reporting his whereabouts over the past two days, it all showed that Zhou Huaijin cared about the original owner.
What exactly was going on? This wasn’t the plot he had read at all!
Could it be that he had read a pirated copy?
Chu Xin racked his brains but still couldn’t make sense of it. By the time he was so hungry that his head was spinning, it was finally time to get off work.
At the intersection from this morning, a car was parked, but it wasn’t Zhou Huaijin’s Maybach. It was an Audi Q8.
Chu Xin hesitated, then saw the driver get out and open the rear door.
This should be the car Zhou Huaijin said would pick him up, right?
If he got into the wrong car, that would be social death for real.
But since it was parked here, Zhou Huaijin must have arranged it, so it shouldn’t be wrong.
Chu Xin walked over with complete confidence and, with fluid motion, got straight into the car. The driver who had opened the door even froze slightly.
Just as Chu Xin was about to urge the driver to leave, he suddenly heard a familiar voice. “I told you to park farther away. Why did you park so close?”
As he spoke, Lin Xiaoyan walked over to the open door. When he looked down and saw Chu Xin sitting in the car, he also froze for a moment.
“Xinxin?”
Chu Xin immediately stood up, only to knock his head against the roof of the car. The pain forced him to sit back down again. Holding his head, he asked with a glimmer of hope, “This is your car?”
Lin Xiaoyan looked a bit bewildered by the question. He looked at the car, then at Chu Xin, and nodded. “It should be.”
It was just that Chu Xin’s suspicious gaze made him feel a little less certain.
The driver beside him spoke up at the right time. “Second Young Master, this is your car.”
At that moment, Chu Xin wanted nothing more than to find a crack in the ground and crawl into it!
Just as he was dying of embarrassment, another car parked behind them, a Porsche.
At the same time, Chu Xin’s phone rang. The caller ID read: Driver Chen.
As Chu Xin got out of the car, he answered the call.
“Mr. Chu, the car has arrived at the intersection.”
Driver Chen had already gotten out of the car when he made the call, so all three of them heard him.
Face red, Chu Xin didn’t dare look at Lin Xiaoyan. He hurried into the other car.
Only after the Porsche drove away did Lin Xiaoyan come back to his senses and murmur, “Are Porsche and Audi that similar?”
The driver shook his head.
Then Lin Xiaoyan suddenly cried out, “No, wait! Isn’t Xinxin just an ordinary office worker?”
He immediately took out his phone and was about to call Chu Xin, but his finger still hovered over the dial button without pressing it.
Since Chu Xin didn’t want to say anything, if he called and pressed the issue, wouldn’t that be making things hard for Chu Xin?
Chu Xin would tell him when he wanted to.
Meanwhile, Chu Xin was both embarrassed and uneasy, wondering how he would explain it if Lin Xiaoyan really called and asked why he hadn’t even recognized his own car.
By the time the car stopped at the entrance to the kindergarten, he still hadn’t received a call from Lin Xiaoyan.
Seeing the children outside in their kindergarten uniforms, Chu Xin immediately put those embarrassing matters out of his mind.
When he saw the driver undoing his seat belt and getting out, Chu Xin quickly said, “I’m going to pick up Xiaoyu.” Then he got out of the car.
The driver was still in the middle of unfastening his seat belt, frozen for a moment.
Hadn’t Mr. Chu always waited in the car? Why was he suddenly going down himself to pick up the Young Master today?
The little dumpling was standing at the very end of the line, looking for the driver in the crowd, when he unexpectedly saw his Little Papa!
The little dumpling’s eyes lit up at once, and he couldn’t help smiling.
The little girl standing beside him actually blushed at the sight and said in a babyish voice, “Zhou Xingyu, you look so pretty when you smile!”
The little dumpling paused slightly, then restrained his smile and put on a small, serious face without saying anything.
Standing behind the little girl was a slightly taller chubby boy. Seeing this, he mocked, “Ohhh! Lin Chuchu, do you like Zhou Xingyu?”
A few boys following behind the chubby boy immediately started jeering too, shouting, “Lin Chuchu likes Zhou Xingyu!”
The little girl called Lin Chuchu was mocked and egged on like that by several of them, and tears fell from her eyes like beads, one after another, as she sniffled and cried.
The more upset the little girl cried, the more fiercely the chubby boy and the others jeered.
Teachers and a few parents also noticed what was happening and hurriedly asked, “What’s going on?”
Although Lin Chuchu was crying badly, she wasn’t soft. Pointing at the chubby boy, she said, “Teacher, Wang Xiaokai is bullying me!”
When Chu Xin walked over to the little dumpling and saw that chubby boy called Wang Xiaokai, his heart gave a jolt. The child’s eyes looked somewhat similar to Wang Desheng’s, and they both had the surname Wang. Could they be father and son?