158. What a coincidence

In the spacious room, Gao Tang lay flat in the shape of a starfish on the comfortable large bed, his shirt buttons casually undone by two, staring straight up at the ceiling without blinking.

"Bai Jinyan..."

"Not as handsome as me, family background not as good as mine, personality... Heh, hypocritical and petty, hesitant in everything he does, not even daring to express his own feelings directly."

"In what way is he better than me?"

"Isn't it just that he met her twelve years earlier than I did?"

"Twelve years..."

Gao Tang repeated the number, irritably pulling the blanket over himself and forcibly closing his eyes in an attempt to make himself fall asleep.

The room returned to silence.

This quietness lasted for over an hour before the person under the blanket gently moved his lips, letting out a low sigh.

"Twelve years..."

...

Freshmen undergoing military training do not have weekends; they only get about one day off every two weeks. Therefore, when the rest day finally arrived, Chen Ruowen slept guiltily until twelve noon before lazily crawling out of bed, yawning as she brushed her teeth and showered.

After waking up fully and looking at her messy bed, Chen Ruowen stopped in her tracks.

"Should I tidy up the room?"

During the half-month since moving into her new home, Chen Ruowen had adhered strictly to the principle of "independent living," refusing to let Chen Liwan interfere with her affairs. Consequently, neither Sister Zhang, Sister Feng, nor Panpan had followed her over.

In the first two days after the move, Guo Jingyuan had come to check on her and helped tidy up a few times. Later, when Chen Ruowen got drunk, Bai Jinyan seemed to have cleaned up a bit on the night he brought her back. Ever since then, however, Chen Ruowen had truly entered a state of unmonitored chaos.

The sofa was completely surrounded by dirty clothes, and a few bulky items had been tossed onto the floor. The financial statements she had brought along were scattered haphazardly across the floor, book by book. The mess was simply too unsightly to behold.

Realizing that cleaning the room would be a monumental task, Chen Ruowen pulled back her foot and hesitated for a moment.

"I think I'll go get something to eat first."

The kitchen in this apartment was still as good as new. Since Chen Ruowen didn't know how to cook, she had never once set foot in it. All three meals a day were ordered directly from restaurants, making the kitchen ironically the cleanest part of the entire place.

Chen Ruowen slowly walked over to the living room, stared at the front door for a while, and then turned back.

If she wanted to go out to eat, she had to change her clothes.

Therefore, she walked into her walk-in closet.

She hadn't brought many things when she came to Ziyi Court, only a dozen or so sets of clothes, yet this room was even messier than her bedroom.

The shoe cabinet, which had originally been neatly organized, looked as though it had been ransacked by thieves. Shoes were scattered randomly, left and right feet mismatched. Handbags were tossed carelessly across the floor, along with various items of clothing Chen Ruowen had tried on and casually discarded...

Chen Ruowen herself had no idea which items were clean and which had already been worn...

How despairing...

Cooking for herself was out of the question—not to mention that Chen Ruowen didn't know how, even if she did, the refrigerator contained zero ingredients. Going out had suddenly become a major dilemma.

"Should I just do the laundry first?"

Chen Ruowen pondered for a moment, still concluding that this was the most urgent task at hand.

However, as she glanced at the clothes strewn across the walk-in closet, the bedroom, and even the living room...

"Oh my god..."

Chen Ruowen despairingly covered her eyes.

Barefoot on the carpet, she picked up the military training uniform she had changed out of yesterday from the living room sofa and tossed it straight to the floor. Having cleared a small patch of clean space, Chen Ruowen immediately sat down on the sofa, grabbed her phone, and dialed Bai Jinyan's number.

"Yanyan, come save my life!"

...

Half an hour later, the doorbell of Apartment 801 rang. Chen Ruowen hopped barefoot across the floor to open the door, and upon seeing Bai Jinyan, she let out a joyful cheer and wrapped her arms around his neck.

"You're finally here."

Bai Jinyan stepped inside, closed the door behind him, and looked at Chen Ruowen with a trace of helplessness in his gaze.

"Why are you running around without shoes on again?"

Chen Ruowen blinked. "I don't know where my shoes went."

Bai Jinyan scooped her up onto the sofa, set down the food container he was holding, shook his head, and retrieved one slipper from beneath the TV cabinet and another from behind the curtain. Kneeling on one knee in front of the sofa, he gently slipped the shoes onto Chen Ruowen's feet.

"Put your slippers away when you come and go. Don't go barefoot; you'll catch a cold."

Chen Ruowen uttered an "oh," then sat properly on the sofa. Humming an unknown tune, she opened the meal Bai Jinyan had brought for her, picked up the chopsticks, fed the first bite to Bai Jinyan, and then began to eat herself.

Bai Jinyan glanced around the apartment, shook his head, and automatically set about cleaning up the place for her.

By the time Chen Ruowen finished her first meal of the day, a load of laundry had already finished washing and the second load was spinning in the machine. The floor had been swept and mopped to a pristine shine, the shoe cabinet was once again neatly arranged, and the clothes Chen Ruowen couldn't even remember wearing or not wearing had been sorted by Bai Jinyan—some hung on hangers, others placed in a basin awaiting wash.

Seeing that Chen Ruowen had finished eating, Bai Jinyan washed his hands, took two apples from beside the food container, washed and peeled them in the kitchen, and pressed them into a glass of juice to hand to her.

Holding the juice in one hand and hugging Bai Jinyan's arm with the other, Chen Ruowen leaned against him with a satisfied expression.

It seemed she had been blindly optimistic about her self-care abilities. Chen Ruowen considered herself fully capable of handling corporate affairs, but when it came to daily life... she was practically an idiot...

Yet this apartment was truly too small. Bringing a live-in housekeeper over would take up too much space, and Chen Ruowen harbored some other little schemes in her heart. After much deliberation, she resolved to trick either Bai Jinyan or Guo Jingyuan into moving in—and help her clean her room by the way.

She looked up at Bai Jinyan's profile and said in a slightly assertive tone, "Move in and live with me."

Bai Jinyan's heartbeat skipped a beat.

Although Chen Ruowen's words didn't sound like she was asking for his opinion at all, but rather issuing an order, Bai Jinyan knew her temperament well and bypassed her commanding tone to grasp the essence of the invitation.

Chen Ruowen was asking him to... move in?

Did she have any idea how easily an invitation like this could make a person overthink things?

Bai Jinyan sighed, gently pulled his arm out of Chen Ruowen's embrace, and ruffled her hair.

"Two more loads of laundry and it'll all be done. There are also a few pieces that can't be machine-washed; I'll take them to the dry cleaners later."

Unhappily, Chen Ruowen slapped his hand away.

"Don't change the subject."

This time, Bai Jinyan lowered his gaze and thought about it seriously. "It's too early. Let's wait a couple of years."

Chen Ruowen always felt something was slightly off about this response, but she couldn't quite put her finger on what. After resting at home for a while, she dragged Bai Jinyan out with her to go shopping.

Just as the two of them closed the door to Apartment 801, the resident of Apartment 803 directly across the hall happened to open their door to head out as well. The three of them exchanged glances and froze in unison.

"Well, what a coincidence."