Shang Zhitao had eaten a little too much and felt her blood sugar spike, a warm, satisfied haze settling over her. She showered in a hurry, climbed into bed, switched her phone to silent, and pulled the covers over her head to sleep.
Luan Nian was at a bar with Tan Mian and the others. He set down his glass and glanced at his phone.
"Got someone waiting on you tonight? Why do you keep checking your phone?" Tan Mian asked.
"It's nothing."
Luan Nian felt bored. He watched the singer on stage for a moment, then turned to Tan Mian. "What do you think about me opening a bar?"
"A bar? Beijing has no shortage of those."
"Up in the hills. A private club. Only open to a select few."
"And how would you make money off that?"
"If I want to open it, it won't lose money."
"Three million just to get started."
"Money's not the issue."
"Right, I forgot our young master Luan comes from money." Tan Mian teased him. "I'll help you scout locations when the time comes. Have you thought about where?"
"Not yet. It's just an idea for now." Luan Nian sometimes found life dull, and giving himself something extra to do made the days feel less flat. The song on stage had drifted into something southern. He checked his phone again, and it lit up right then. Zang Yao.
Tan Mian, sharp eyed as ever, spotted the name and raised his eyebrows before getting up and moving to another seat.
"Where are you?" Zang Yao asked. There was a trace of sadness in her voice.
"At a bar."
"Can I come to Beijing to see you?"
"What's going on?"
"I want to move to Beijing." Zang Yao said, "I've had enough of Guangzhou. I can't stand it anymore." She started crying suddenly. "I can't stand Guangzhou. I want to come be with you all."
"All right. Come, then."
Luan Nian couldn't even remember how many times Zang Yao had moved by now. As long as he'd known her, she had never stopped drifting, never willing to settle anywhere for long.
"Thank you." Zang Yao said her thanks and hung up gently.
Tan Mian came back and sat down, grinning. "So you were waiting on Zang Yao's call."
"No."
"Then why do you keep checking your phone?" Tan Mian asked.
"Might be a work call." Luan Nian said this, but the work call he was waiting for never came.
"So what did Zang Yao want?"
"She wants to stay in Beijing for a while."
"Good, your place is big enough. If you ask me, you two should stop dragging your feet. She's coming this time, so settle whatever needs settling and just be together already." Tan Mian started talking nonsense. Zang Yao had run with their group for years, and she and Luan Nian had always seemed to hover somewhere unresolved. Their friends had wagered more than once on when the two of them would finally make it official.
Luan Nian said nothing.
Things between him and Zang Yao weren't what Tan Mian made them out to be. Zang Yao was a very good friend to him, so good that he felt no desire for her at all.
"Let her stay at that place of mine, I'll cover her rent." Luan Nian had no interest in living with Zang Yao. Once they were under the same roof, too many things would become harder to untangle.
"Miss Zang needs your rent money? What Miss Zang needs is for you to finally take advantage of her properly." Tan Mian teased.
Luan Nian didn't feel like discussing him and Zang Yao any further. The truth was, even with his closest friends, he had no wish to lay his private life bare. Not that he had much of a private life to speak of these days.
The night had grown unbearably dull. Nothing held his interest, and yet when two women walked past, he suddenly thought of Shang Zhitao in that cheerleader uniform.
He drank a bit more and went home. The good sleep he'd counted on for the weekend never came. He picked up a book from the nightstand instead, but his mind kept circling back to Shang Zhitao's problem. Had it been solved? She hadn't come to him for help this time, so where had things gotten stuck?
The supplier called him. He picked up and heard the man say, "The issue's sorted out, we'll rerun the numbers right away. Wanted to let you know."
"How did you sort it out?" The issue was resolved and Shang Zhitao hadn't said a word to him about it?
"Alex called me and explained the situation. We've worked together long enough, a small slip now and then is nothing. Taking a loss now can pay off later." The supplier was clever enough not to mention to Luan Nian that Alex had promised to make it up to him on future projects. He hadn't said it, but that didn't mean Luan Nian didn't already know.
So Shang Zhitao could manage after all. She'd gone straight to her direct supervisor, figured out exactly who could save her. She was learning.
"Did Flora send you the new brief?"
"She did. This afternoon."
"Good."
Shang Zhitao had sent the supplier a new brief after making a mistake that serious, without so much as a word of explanation. He called her directly and she didn't pick up. Every harsh word he'd been ready to say lodged in his throat. She wouldn't answer, and he had nowhere to put his anger.
Luan Nian stewed in silence.
He never usually did that. He'd been formidable since he was a child, and the people around him had always given way to him. Even at work he carried himself with more arrogance than most. He'd dated a couple of times before, and he was no gentleman about it either, though he never had to fight with his exes over it. His way of talking, back and forth, was infuriating enough that after a few exchanges the other person's temper would simply burn out. Crying and carrying on never worked on Luan Nian, and his exes all knew it.
He was angry because Shang Zhitao had made such a serious mistake and hadn't bothered to explain herself to him at all. She went about her eating and her fun without missing a beat, made one phone call to her direct supervisor, and that was that. She never once considered how much the company would have lost if he hadn't caught the problem himself, or how she would even manage to hold her ground at the company afterward.
The anger sat coiled in his chest, impossible to spit out and impossible to let go of, just held there. It wasn't until the next evening, after he'd finished working out at home and gone into the kitchen to make something to eat, that his phone lit up. A message from Shang Zhitao: "Hello Luke, Alex asked me to confirm with you, will you be attending next week's marketing department meeting?" Not a single word about her mistake.
Shang Zhitao had no intention of bringing it up. What was there to say? He'd already torn into her for it, her bonus had been docked, no promotion, no raise. Back when Kitty's creative work had run into trouble and the client nearly walked, it was Luan Nian who'd stepped in and smoothed things over, and that time nobody said a word against him. People at the company said he played favorites, that the reason he was so hard on Shang Zhitao was simply that she wasn't one of his favorites, even though there had been those two intimate moments between them.
"Why isn't Alex asking me himself? Is your whole marketing department too shorthanded to send someone else?" Even when Luan Nian was angry he could still be reasonable, but he never bothered being reasonable with Shang Zhitao.
Seeing him being unreasonable again, Shang Zhitao simply replied, "I'll have Alex ask you himself, then. He was just tied up with something else and asked me to pass the message along. Sorry to bother you."
She hung up and called Alex right after. "Luke says you should ask him yourself."
"Hm? Is he in a bad mood?"
"I wouldn't know." How would I know whether he's in a good mood or not? We're not exactly close.
Shang Zhitao hung up and went to do her laundry, dismissing Luan Nian from her mind entirely. You want to snap at me, fine, see if I like you anymore. At that point she was still that naive, inexperienced girl. She thought she was butting heads with her boss. In truth she was butting heads with the person she liked. She simply refused, somewhere underneath it all, to admit that to herself.
The following Monday morning, Shang Zhitao saw Luan Nian looking stern faced and still greeted him with a smile out of habit, then went and stood in her usual corner of the elevator. Luan Nian didn't even glance at her. The doors opened and he walked straight out. The anger still sat lodged in his chest, and that quiet stewing was what kept him ignoring her. It baffled even him. Twenty four hours in a day, sixty minutes in an hour, sixty seconds in a minute, six elevators running around the clock, and somehow he kept running into Shang Zhitao.
Shang Zhitao sat down at her desk and got seriously to work. Having made one mistake that nearly wrecked the first real project of her career, she was being extra careful now, determined never to slip up again. When Lumi came by and saw her so focused, she greeted her. "Model worker, our company's star employee, hard at it?"
Shang Zhitao laughed and told her about the brief mix up. "I can't afford to make another mistake. I need to work properly."
"Luke's docking your bonus? No promotion or raise for a year?" Lumi seemed a little surprised. Luan Nian could be strict, but he'd never cut off anyone's future like that before. He just had a sharp tongue, and if he ever came down hard on someone, you could bet there was a real problem behind it. But this time the problem was harmless little Shang Zhitao. Lumi thought about it for a long moment before she couldn't hold back the question. "Little Peach, think carefully. Are you sure you haven't offended Luke somehow?"
"I haven't." Would Shang Zhitao dare? She followed up, "Why do you ask?"
"Because it really looks like Luke's making things hard for you on purpose. How else would you explain it?"
"It's not the first day Luke's made things hard for me. I'm the one he's tried to push out three or four times already." Shang Zhitao smiled faintly, turned back to her work, and let the matter drop.
Shang Zhitao no longer let it weigh on her, but she was still someone with a stubborn streak, a small sliver of pride buried in her, and Luan Nian had trampled it flat. That was why she didn't want to face him.
Twice Lumi and Alex asked Shang Zhitao to help track down Luan Nian for project updates, and both times she found a polite way to decline. She timed her days around avoiding him too, calculating the last bus home so carefully that if her work wasn't done, she'd just carry her laptop home instead.
The project data began coming in.
Shang Zhitao had assumed the data wouldn't be too complicated, only to find it was anything but simple. She wasn't the one doing the analysis, but she needed to understand it well enough to follow along. She buried herself in industry data, sometimes for the better part of a day. A colleague in business analysis told her that data had its own logical beauty, that within all that clutter you had to learn to spot patterns and breakthroughs. Understanding it was one thing. Analyzing it was another entirely.
Shang Zhitao tried to find that logical beauty her colleague described and came up empty. It left her a little discouraged. What even was logic? Why didn't she have any of it? She brought it up with Sun Yuanzhu, and he suggested she work on some logic training.
"Like what?"
"Like..." Sun Yuanzhu trailed off on the phone, then laughed. "How about I run a little class for you this weekend?"
"That would be great."
"Don't push yourself too hard about work. Don't think you have to be capable of everything. No one person can do it all, that's just not possible. You need to know your own limits, and you need to learn to show a bit of weakness sometimes. Lowering your boss's expectations of you a little, that's a kind of managing upward too."
I can't lower them.
My boss already thinks I'm worth nothing.
Shang Zhitao thought to herself. She hung up and headed toward the office area, running into Luan Nian at the automatic doors. She hadn't crossed paths with him in days. She offered a token greeting. "Morning, Luke."
"How's the data collection coming along?" Luan Nian asked suddenly, catching her off guard.
He seemed to be in a decent mood, hands in his pockets, waiting for her answer.
"We've collected data on three industries so far. The professional business analysis team will take over from here."
"Good. Keep at it."
"Thank you."
People were passing by, and Shang Zhitao didn't want to be seen talking to him in front of everyone. It would only make him look like the generous boss and her the hopeless underling. She gave him a smile. "Sorry, Luke, I have work to get back to. I'll put together the progress update you're interested in and send it to you and Alex later, is that all right?"
"Sure." Luan Nian was smiling, as easy as a spring breeze.
Shang Zhitao couldn't figure him out, so she simply stopped trying. She nodded at him and walked off. Her back radiated stubbornness, unmistakably so this time, and Luan Nian saw it.