This form of address left her utterly speechless.
Chai Qianning: [I'm staying at Gao Laozhuang tonight, not going back.]
Fang Jiaqin: [What! You're not coming back?! You went on a date, and you even went to a hotel with someone?!]
[Please don't choose this time to book a hotel room, I'm really scared being alone. Bajie, your house is so big and so empty. If I'd known you weren't coming home tonight, I wouldn't have watched that horror movie, sob sob.]
As Chai Qianning walked, she replied: "If you're scared, just call out and see if anyone's home. Maybe someone will come to keep you company."
Fang Jiaqin sent several "I'm going to kill you" emojis in a row.
Chai Qianning turned off the screen and ignored the phone's vibrations.
She looked up and realized that Sheng Muxi had already left her far behind.
Sheng Muxi doesn't usually walk this fast, but this time she seemed to be sulking. Chai Qianning jogged to catch up, saying, "Hey, Teacher Sheng, wait for me!"
Feeling that she was walking too fast and worried that the other person wouldn't be able to keep up, Sheng Muxi slowed down and moved forward at a snail's pace.
Chai Qianning walked to her side and took her arm: "When you do this, I really think you're jealous."
Sheng Muxi vehemently denied it: "No."
"Okay, if you don't have it, you don't have it..." Before Chai Qianning could finish speaking, Fang Jiaqin called, and Chai Qianning hung up without saying a word.
Sheng Muxi saw this and moved her lips: "Answer it, just in case something happens."
"It shouldn't be anything serious." Chai Qianning could guess that.
Fang Jiaqin persisted and attacked again.
"Are you sure nothing's wrong? But the other person seems to be in a real hurry?"
"Then I'll take this call. Teacher Sheng, please don't leave me behind again."
Sheng Muxi pursed her lips and walked slowly alongside her under the streetlights.
Under the streetlights, the two figures cast tall, straight shadows that sometimes separated and sometimes overlapped.
"What's up?" Chai Qianning asked the person on the other end of the phone, sounding annoyed.
Fang Jiaqin's voice trembled: "Bajie, I have something to tell you. I just called out... I really... I really heard it, someone answered me... It's all your fault for scaring me... Why did you scare me..."
Chai Qianning: "..."
There are no ghosts in this world.
Wanting to resolve Fang Jiaqin's phone call quickly, Chai Qianning could only comfort her with a few words: "In that case, just hide under the covers. Ghosts won't attack people under the covers."
There was a few seconds of silence on the other end. Just as Chai Qianning was about to hang up, Fang Jiaqin asked again, "What are you doing?"
Chai Qianning's phone wasn't on speakerphone, but the road was quiet at night, and Sheng Muxi inevitably heard Fang Jiaqin's voice on the other end of the line.
Upon hearing the voice on the other end of the phone, Sheng Muxi subconsciously glanced at Chai Qianning, who also glanced at her, and the two locked eyes.
"I'm..." Chai Qianning's eyes curved into a sly smile: "What do you think I'm doing?"
Chai Qianning spoke lazily, yawning, "I was only halfway through when you interrupted me. You should leave now."
Sheng Muxi glanced at her, puzzled. What do you mean, "halfway done"?
"Ah, you're at the hotel. I was wondering why it was so quiet over there. My apologies, please continue."
The phone beeped and hung up.
Chai Qianning turned around and saw Sheng Muxi looking at her with a complicated expression. Her eyelids twitched, and she slightly opened her mouth: "Hotel? You..."
Sheng Muxi glanced at the hotel not far ahead and then looked at Chai Qianning: "No wonder you led me down this road... You had ulterior motives towards me from the beginning, didn't you?"
Chai Qianning: "..."
Chapter 35 Calm
Sheng Muxi felt she needed to calm down.
I'm home.
She immediately went into the bathroom to take a shower, turning the water temperature down a few degrees than usual to wash away the heat from her body.
Compared to the fact that she had gone outside and the temperature was not exactly cool, leaving a thin layer of sweat on her back, what she felt even more restless at that moment was her heart.
The water flowed down her smooth skin, meandering all the way, and finally fell onto the bathroom tile, splashing up small droplets.
The sound of rushing water brought Sheng Muxi's thoughts back to an hour earlier, when Chai Qianning leaned against a lamppost, the dim light casting a soft glow on her eyelashes. Her thin lips moved slightly, and she uttered a soft, rounded word: "Mmm."
Her "hmm" was an answer to Sheng Muxi's question: Did he have ulterior motives from the beginning, wanting to take her to a hotel room?
At that time, when Sheng Muxi overheard her conversation with Fang Jiaqin on the phone, he only happened to see a hotel ahead, so he asked the question based on speculation.
After all, they lived in the same neighborhood, so there was really no need for them to go to a hotel. As a result, the other party just casually admitted it!
That scene lingered in Sheng Muxi's mind, especially Chai Qianning's last sentence, as she lifted her eyelids, looked at her with a smile, and extended an invitation: "Shall we do it?"
Do you want to?
She actually asked that question so bluntly!
Although the other party did not actually take her to a hotel, she had no idea how she got back.
When we arrived at the residential complex and got on the elevator...
Chai Qianning pressed the button for the 11th floor on the control panel, but not the 10th floor. Her heart was pounding. Could it be that the other party was going to go up to her house and...do something?
But a few seconds later, Chai Qianning looked up again, as if she had noticed something, and pressed the button for the 10th floor again. She suddenly breathed a sigh of relief.
After showering for a while, Sheng Muxi turned off the water, grabbed a bath towel, and draped it over herself.
She was much calmer after coming out of the bathroom; at least she had begun to analyze her inexplicable behavior and words from earlier that day.
After sitting on the sofa for a while, Sheng Muxi had regained her original calm and tranquil state.
He then opened WeChat and sent a message to Shi Manwen: "How long after you and your girlfriend officially started dating did you do 'that'?"
Shi Manwen sent a question mark.
Sheng Muxi looked at the question mark and read her message again to make sure that she had asked clearly, word by word, without any typos or awkward phrasing. What did the other party mean by sending a question mark?
So she replied with a question mark.
Shi Manwen: [We did it on our first day together.]
Sheng Muxi's finger hovered above the screen, somewhat unable to move, her thick eyelashes trembling slightly under the light.
After a long pause, she typed a reply: 【Did we do it on the first day we met?】
Shi Manwen: [Hmm, is there a problem? Why are you suddenly asking me this?]
Sheng Muxi: [No problem, no problem, I was just asking.]
She put down her phone, picked up the water glass on the coffee table, and took a few sips.
Thinking about it this way, it's actually quite good that Chai Qianning didn't ask her if she wanted to do it on the very first day they met.
So, it seems quite reasonable that she and Chai Qianning had known each other for several months before the other party said something like that?
"What's reasonable?" Sheng Muxi rubbed her temples, wondering how she had been dragged into this by Chai Qianning.
She put down her water glass, glanced casually at the city night view outside the glass window, then lowered her gaze to stare at a certain empty space, wondering if she was being too conservative.
——
Chai Qianning returned home.
When I opened the door, the living room was pitch black.
She activated the amulet. On the table in front of the sofa were several bags of snacks, and a few cushions were scattered haphazardly on the sofa. There was no light coming from under the crack of Fang Jiaqin's room door.
Is she asleep or has she gone out?
Chai Qianning glanced at the shoe cabinet and noticed that Fang Jiaqin's shoes were still there, so she must have gone to her room to sleep.
She slipped on her slippers and looked for clothes to take a shower.
The room door, which had been tightly closed, suddenly opened a crack, and a head peeked out, startling Chai Qianning who turned around.
"Fang Jiaqin, why are you acting so suspiciously?"
Fang Jiaqin raised her hand, gathered up her messy long hair that was hanging down in front of her, stood at the door, one hand on her hip, the other hand on the door frame, and one leg slightly bent: "Didn't you say you weren't coming back tonight!"
"Considering you might be terrified being home alone, I took pity on you and came back to keep you company."
Before Fang Jiaqin could finish speaking, she saw Chai Qianning enter the bathroom and close the door.
"You think I believe that? And you're still going to keep me company? You should thank me if you don't scare me."
Feeling bored, Fang Jiaqin closed the door again and lay back down on her bed.
After taking a shower, Chai Qianning played some games on the living room sofa. Just as she was about to go back to her room to sleep, she saw Fang Jiaqin come out again, pick up a bottle of drink, and take a sip.
"I can't sleep, should I go out and have some fun?"
"What time is it now?"
"It's only eleven o'clock."
"I'm not going."
Chai Qianning stood up and went back to her room. Fang Jiaqin put the lid on her drink and called out to her, "Xu Yuan invited us out for a get-together. She's getting married next month."
Fang Jiaqin looked down at her phone and replied to a message, muttering, "She's about to leave single life behind, so it might not be as convenient for her to hang out with us anymore. Besides, she hasn't gotten together with us since she came back."
"She doesn't seem to like her fiancé very much," Fang Jiaqin said to herself.
After a pause, Chai Qianning recalled that she had seen Xu Yuan's fiancé at a Japanese restaurant in the evening. The man left without eating, leaving Xu Yuan alone. The two of them seemed to have no affection for each other.
"Was this marriage arranged by her parents?" Chai Qianning asked.
"I don't know. She clearly had someone she really liked before, but they broke up, and then she got together with her current fiancé."
Fang Jiaqin waved her phone: "Xu Yuan seems to be in a bad mood. Should we go out and keep her company?"
In the past, Chai Qianning was not keen on going out at this time, especially since she had already gone out with Sheng Muxi once in the evening.
But she hadn't seen Xu Yuan in a long time. She hadn't paid much attention when they were at the Japanese restaurant, but now that she thought about it, he did seem a bit down.