Ch 44: The Photograph
The chatter of three girls in the car filled the air. Zhuang Lingyun glanced in the rearview mirror and happened to see Luo Li tilting her head, staring at him, as if deep in thought.
Luo Li whispered in Xiao Yao’s ear, “Your Husband… he looks familiar to me.”
“Like a celebrity?” Xiao Yao giggled, “Isn’t he handsome? Isn’t he cool? That little punk just now even tried to harass me! It’s only because he arrived that he’s acting so polite. If it were me, I would’ve definitely broken that creep’s hand.”
Zhao Fangyuan chuckled, “You? You’d probably end up crying. If someone really needed to break that creep’s hand, it should be me. Sister, I’ve had training.”
“I’ve had training too!” Xiao Yao brandished her fair Fist, “Want to have a go?”
“How?”
Luo Li egged them on from the side, “I’ll be the referee!”
Xiao Yao curled her fingers into claws, gestured near Zhao Fangyuan, then suddenly lunged, starting to tickle her armpits. Zhao Fangyuan, momentarily caught off guard, laughed helplessly. She tried to fight back, and soon the back seat erupted into a chaotic flurry of playful fighting.
The car shook violently. While waiting at a red light, Zhuang Lingyun clearly saw the drivers of other vehicles looking at him with ambiguous expressions.
Zhuang Lingyun coldly withdrew his gaze and rolled up the window.
Luo Li and Zhao Fangyuan lived nearby and got out of the car together. Before leaving, Luo Li knocked on the passenger-side window.
The window slowly descended, and Luo Li leaned against it to talk to Zhuang Lingyun.
“Hey, handsome, what’s your surname?”
“Zhuang.” Zhuang Lingyun was economical with his words.
“Oh, Zhuang… handsome… uh…” Something felt off. Luo Li chuckled, “My Yao and I only dance close dances together, there are no other men involved. Don’t get any ideas. Don’t bully my Yao. You can check the security footage if you don’t believe me.”
“Your Yao?”
“Yeah! My Yao!” Luo Li had witnessed Zhuang Lingyun’s dark expression when he heard about her dancing intimately with someone else. If she didn’t explain, these two might misunderstand and quarrel, and she would be to blame.
“Don’t bully her!” She stressed again, until Zhuang Lingyun nodded in agreement before she left.
Xiao Yao leaned against the car window, watching her two friends walk away, smiling serenely. She was happy.
“Come sit next to me.” Zhuang Lingyun glanced at her through the rearview mirror.
Although she hadn’t danced intimately with other men, that could be overlooked, but she had abandoned him and intended to stay out all night!
Xiao Yao was drunk, acting spoiled, humming and wriggling in her seat before lying down, “No, I want to sleep!”
“Come here!”
“No!” After a pause, Xiao Yao beckoned him with her finger, her eyebrows raised seductively, “Or will you come over here?”
“Are you sure?”
The Car sped off, running two red lights on a deserted road before stopping in a dark corner.
Zhuang Lingyun got out, opened the back door, and climbed into the back seat.
Xiao Yao: “!!!”
“As you wish, I’m here.” He pounced, pinning her to the seat.
Xiao Yao shrieked a few times. Soon, the car swayed, and occasionally a bare foot would press against the car window… the toes curling and wriggling.
It looked like a “crime scene”.
After returning home and showering, Luo Li’s drowsiness subsided somewhat. She recalled Zhuang Lingyun’s face, feeling that she’d seen him somewhere before, a feeling of uncanny familiarity.
This feeling was unsettling, like writer’s block, like a veil over her memory. She felt like she was on the verge of remembering, yet something was missing. The more she tried to remember, the more elusive it became, making her increasingly anxious.
She decided to look through her photo albums.
Luo Li had a habit of taking photos. Besides storing them electronically, she also printed out interesting ones and kept them in albums.
Her storage cabinet contained twenty-five photo albums, one for each year since childhood, each with five hundred pages, capable of holding fifteen hundred photos.
Luo Li started browsing from her high school years, searching and recalling memories associated with the pictures, becoming increasingly energized.
Time flew by. It was 2:40 AM.
When Luo Li opened the 18th photo album and turned to a picture from her first year of university, she finally understood why Zhuang Lingyun looked familiar!
The photo was from the opening ceremony of a shopping mall in Yinghui City. Luo Li and Xiao Yao worked part-time as greeters. After the event, Luo Li and Xiao Yao, dressed in tight-fitting Qipaos, stood close together, arms around each other’s waists, heads touching, their faces beaming with smiles. Zhao Fangyuan took the commemorative Photo.
And in the Photo was another person, Zhuang Lingyun.
He stood beside Xiao Yao but wasn’t looking at the camera. Instead, he slightly tilted his head, his gaze gentle, a faint smile playing on his lips as he looked at Xiao Yao. Compared to his current mature and steady demeanor, Zhuang Lingyun in the Photo appeared more sunny and handsome.
What was his status when he took the Photo with them?
He was apparently a Senior from their university who had graduated years before, and it was he who introduced them to the Part-time Job.
Zhao Fangyuan took that Photo, and because of Zhuang Lingyun’s deep gaze at Xiao Yao, Luo Li teased Xiao Yao about it. Both being strikingly handsome and beautiful, it was easy to imagine an “overbearing CEO falls in love with me” drama.
Now that she thinks about it, could they have known each other back then?
Luo Li took out her Mobile Phone, took a picture of the Photo, and sent it to their three-person WeChat group, adding a smug emoji.
“Hurry up and praise me! I told you Zhuang Handsome looked familiar! Look what I found!”
Everyone was asleep at this hour, so there was no reply. But Luo Li’s excitement couldn’t be contained; she kept talking to herself, sending voice messages one after another.
“This is a Photo from five or six years ago! Yao, do you remember? Come clean, did you and Zhuang Handsome have a thing back then?”
“I told you, there was something fishy about the way he looked at you, but you didn’t admit it! You said he was just an unfamiliar Senior. There are tons of beauties in school, why did Zhuang Handsome choose only the two of us for the Part-time Job? Inside story! There’s an inside story, and I only found out now!”
After a while, she suddenly sent a shocked emoji, “This wouldn’t be your mysterious Boyfriend, would it? !!!!”
Drunk people think erratically and speak impulsively. The Message was sent, and it was too late to retract it. Luo Li then remembered that Xiao Yao said she had forgotten about her mysterious Boyfriend, so it obviously couldn’t be Zhuang Lingyun.
“Even if he wasn’t your mysterious Boyfriend! But from what I see, Zhuang Handsome must have had a Secret Love for you for a long time, tsk tsk, what a coincidence! You two actually got married.”
“Should I find the Negative, remove myself from the Photo, and give you two a commemorative Photo of the past?”
Luo Li’s flurry of Messages didn’t wake Xiao Yao, whose Phone was left in the Car, but it did wake Zhao Fangyuan.
The two of them chatted enthusiastically, reminiscing about the past and dreaming about the future, only quieting down at 4 AM, after exchanging more than seven hundred Messages.
✦ ✦ ✦
