Chapter 084: Li Ruobing Completely Loses It

Chapter 084: Li Ruobing Completely Loses It

Li Ruobing had well and truly lost it.

The whole drive over, she had wrung her brain dry running through every possibility, and she still couldn’t land on a single reasonable explanation. How had they ended up together? Why had Su Qingying called him honey? Su Qingying was not that kind of woman!

She understood where the problem lay. Not with Su Qingying. With Wu Chen. This man was truly, truly unfathomable, as if he belonged among gods and ghosts.

“You made it. Why are you looking at me like that? Have flowers bloomed on my face?” Wu Chen smiled, waved her in, and fetched her a pair of slippers.

Li Ruobing came in with her bag, kicked off her heels, stepped into the slippers, and looked around as she went. She knew the exact address of Wu Chen’s old family apartment, but she had never come upstairs. In an unfamiliar place you naturally looked twice. And she was looking for someone.

Wu Chen’s home was still thick with the texture of daily life.

He had moved out the day before yesterday, taking only clothes and toiletries. Everything else remained, and nothing had been especially tidied or cleaned.

Li Ruobing caught the smell of cooking. It wasn’t a mealtime, so she assumed it had drifted in from some neighbor’s window.

She also heard a low humming. Walking further into the living room, looking around, she noticed the bathroom door standing open. The washing machine inside was running.

Why Wu Chen was in the mood to do laundry at a moment like this, she had no idea.

“Where is she?” Li Ruobing reached the coffee table before she turned and asked.

Wu Chen raised a hand and gestured toward the kitchen.

Just then—

“Honey, is Miss Li here?” In the kitchen, Su Qingying stepped back a few paces and turned sideways to look out. The angle happened to give her a view of Li Ruobing, and Li Ruobing a view of her.

“Miss Li, it’s been a while.” Su Qingying smiled and greeted her, her voice soft and sweet, perfectly polite.

“Miss… Su. Yes… it’s been a while.” Li Ruobing stopped dead. Even her words came out stumbling.

Because Su Qingying had her hair tied up, sleeve protectors on, an apron at her waist, and a soup ladle in her hand. She looked exactly like a little wife at home, cooking.

She was cooking.

The dissonance was explosive.

Su Qingying had always been so bright, so glossy. A ten-billion-yuan heiress. A beauty out of this world. Someone to be admired from a distance, not profaned up close.

Cooking?

Cooking for Wu Chen?

She even knew how to cook?!

She did. Su Qingying genuinely knew how to cook.

At home she was never allowed to cook, or to learn—it would ruin her hands, they said. She had picked it up during her years studying abroad, from the nanny who looked after her.

Wu Chen hadn’t intended to have her cook for him.

She had raised it herself.

First she said she was hungry. Wu Chen said they’d wait for Li Ruobing and all go out to eat. Then she said she’d cook, that she knew how, that she wanted to host Li Ruobing. It was a kind of… state in which she had installed herself directly in the role of the lady of the house.

Wu Chen didn’t mind, so he’d agreed.

The water and power hadn’t been cut off, and there were still a few edible ingredients in the refrigerator, though not many. So before Li Ruobing arrived, Wu Chen had gone downstairs once for groceries. The market was close; he was back in a dozen minutes or so.

And Su Qingying wasn’t only cooking. She had taken the laundry on herself as well, washing the dirty clothes Wu Chen had left lying around, along with the bedsheet.

Wu Chen understood the impulse. She simply wanted to try out the ordinary life of ordinary people.

“Honey, you two talk. The soup’s nearly done. I’ll fry an egg and then we can eat…” Su Qingying withdrew again and went on bustling around the kitchen, thoroughly delighted with herself.

Li Ruobing’s face stayed blank. Slowly she turned her head toward Wu Chen, stiff as a woman with a ghost riding her shoulders, her eyes widening by degrees as they fixed on him. Then she grabbed his arm, hauled him a couple of steps aside, and demanded in a low, urgent voice, “What is going on?!”

She felt as if she might have gone mad.

Because it was uncanny.

Every part of it was uncanny.

For instance—on the phone, the last thing that happened was Su Qingying denying she had ever called Wu Chen honey. Li Ruobing pretended to accept it, then came to see for herself. And the moment she arrived, Su Qingying called him honey right in front of her, then greeted her with utterly natural warmth.

Had she lost her memory? Was she schizophrenic?

And cooking?!

And frying another egg?!

Li Ruobing didn’t know whether she had gone insane or the world had.

For a moment she even suspected that Wu Chen had found a woman who resembled Su Qingying, or one who’d had surgery to resemble her, and put her up to a performance to fool her.

The thought flashed through and she killed it herself immediately.

Because a face could be remade. Bearing and presence could not.

Presence above all. That was cultivated over years. Su Qingying’s presence, even in an apron faintly stained with oil from long use, even with a big ladle in her hand, still gave off, effortlessly, the impression of… an immortal fairy cooking dinner.

For convenience she had tied her waves up out of the way, which left the full line of her cheeks exposed. Her face was strikingly small, her skin strikingly good. She was plainly twenty-seven, and she gave the impression of eighteen. Her whole being seemed full of spirit.

The woman couldn’t be a fake.

But the fact that she was real… made it more terrifying still.

What in the world was going on?

“Nothing is going on. She’s my woman,” Wu Chen said, smiling.

“Your woman? How did she become your woman? Since when?”

“Today.”

“Today? Were you close with her before?”

“No.”

“Not close? You—”

Li Ruobing’s mind was coming apart. She held onto his arm and fired questions at him in a low, rapid stream.

“Honey, the rice is done. I’m stir-frying. Open the pot and fluff it a bit—Auntie taught me it tastes better that way…” Su Qingying called from the kitchen.

“Coming,” Wu Chen answered. He gestured to Li Ruobing. “One moment.”

He went into the kitchen.

Li Ruobing naturally didn’t follow. She tossed her bag onto the sofa and pressed a hand to her forehead. She suspected she was ill. Was she ill? Was something wrong with her brain, was she hallucinating?

“Honey, it’s so hot.” Su Qingying’s voice came out of the kitchen again. “This tracksuit is stifling, and with the apron over it I’m sweating. Do you have anything I could wear?”

“Yes… there are some old clothes, but they’re clean. Actually, my old pajamas are in the bedroom cabinet. Far left, folded at the bottom. Blue.”

“Watch the pot. I’ll go change.”

“Go ahead.”

Su Qingying came out of the kitchen. Seeing Li Ruobing still standing beside the coffee table, she smiled, nodded, and said, “Miss Li, do sit down. Don’t stand there. We’ll be eating soon. Very soon.”

With that she went into the bedroom and shut the door.

Li Ruobing did sit down, expressionless. She felt she needed a moment to be calm.

Two minutes later Su Qingying came out of the bedroom. She had changed into a set of men’s pajamas that were slightly too big, apron in hand, pulling it on and tying it off as she walked.

Beep, beep, beep!

An alert tone from the bathroom. The washing machine. The wash cycle was finished and the spin had run automatically. The clothes could be taken out and hung up to dry.

Su Qingying turned to look, then headed for the bathroom, calling toward the kitchen as she went, “Honey, the clothes are done—do I hang them on the balcony? The bedsheet won’t fit out there, will it?”

Li Ruobing was on her feet in an instant.

Su Qingying had done the laundry as well?!

Li Ruobing, who had only just gotten herself calm, completely lost it all over again.