GV – Chapter 73

After leaving Song Zhiqing with a Princess Elsa photo album, Ye Yuhuan had exhausted all her guilt amidst countless embarrassing poses. She could finally, with a clear conscience, set off on the road to Germany.

However, she first had to wait for the loving couple to finish their tearful farewell.

Ever since Ye Yuhuan and Song Zhiqing had witnessed their grand display at the banquet, Shen Wei and Shangguan Xianxian had become noticeably more cautious. They sealed away the last of their pride, refusing to let the shameless duo run rampant. To that end, they managed to restrain their overflowing emotions, saving all their tender, romantic feelings for a sufficiently safe place.

Thanks to their unremitting efforts, Song Zhiqing and Ye Yuhuan hadn’t witnessed love for a month and a half.

But today, it seemed they couldn’t hold back. After all, this separation would be too long. Shangguan Xianxian knew the important reason behind this departure, which made it feel even longer. It was such a crucial matter, yet she could only let Shen Wei handle it alone while she stayed behind at the Shangguan residence to lower Shangguan Chong’s guard.

And as long as Shangguan Xianxian wasn’t being reserved, Shen Wei was incapable of restraint. This led them to not only ignore their regular audience but also disregard the passersby walking around them.

The two of them kissed passionately in public, completely lost in the moment.

Excellent. Very yuri novel.

The veteran audience members, Miss Ye and Miss Song, stood awkwardly to the side, using their peripheral vision to see when the inseparable pair would finally part.

“Mm, it’s already been five minutes,” Song Zhiqing noted, secretly astonished.

Ye Yuhuan quietly dropped a bombshell: “Shen Wei specifically took up swimming to catch up to Shangguan Xianxian’s lung capacity.”

This tidbit made Song Zhiqing go “wow.” She never expected Shen Wei to be that kind of person.

Another two minutes passed.

Having seen all there was to see, Song Zhiqing turned her head and complained in a low voice, “It seems like they’re always in the same position.”

Ye Yuhuan whispered in agreement, “Now that you mention it, that’s true. But are there really that many positions for kissing?”

Song Zhiqing shot her a look that said, You’re so inexperienced, and began to lecture enthusiastically, “Haven’t you noticed they’re always standing face-to-face? And Shen Wei always takes the lead, going straight for the lips. No foreplay, tsk.”

“Wow, you’re so observant.” Ye Yuhuan gave her a thumbs-up on the outside, but inwardly, she was scratching her head in frustration.

Is she so calm because she doesn’t like Shangguan Xianxian anymore? But if she didn’t like her, would she observe so closely?

Before Ye Yuhuan could puzzle out an answer, the couple’s farewell finally ended. Ye Yuhuan breathed a sigh of relief. If they had dragged it out any longer, they would have heard their names over the airport broadcast.

But before she could fully exhale, Shen Wei passed by and said coldly, “We can hear you.”

Oh, no wonder it ended so quickly.

Ye Yuhuan smiled apologetically.

Shen Wei returned a cold smirk.

That Song Zhiqing! Who cares about positions and fancy tricks in public? I hope that when you and Ye Yuhuan get together, you can kiss at a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree angle in public every single day!

The two of them went to line up for the security check, while the other two who had come to see them off watched from the side. There were supposed to be more people, but neither Shen Wei nor Ye Yuhuan liked a big fuss. After persuading the people from Sheng Jing and Qinglin to leave, and since neither of them happened to have close family ties, it resulted in a rather modest farewell scene.

This farewell didn’t go as smoothly as Ye Yuhuan had anticipated. Just as they were about to go through security, Song Zhiqing, who had been calm the whole time, suddenly wasn’t. For some reason, she felt a sense of panic, as if fate had stuffed a dark cloud into her heart. She hadn’t even felt this way when she was kidnapped by Guo Siwan.

Pulling Ye Yuhuan, who was next in line, out of the queue, Song Zhiqing asked with a serious expression, “Are you hiding something from me?”

Ye Yuhuan’s expression darkened. They had come to this question after all. The lights of the airport terminal reflected in her bright eyes, blurring them so that Song Zhiqing couldn’t discern her emotions.

Fortunately, Ye Yuhuan answered directly.

“Yes.”

“Is it related to Shen Wei?”

“Mhm.”

Song Zhiqing took a few deep breaths. If she weren’t certain that Ye Yuhuan had feelings for her, she would have suspected Ye Yuhuan of being Shen Wei’s devoted backup lover. Shen Wei, Shen Wei, Shen Wei—it was always Shen Wei.

Up ahead, Shen Wei, who was waiting for them while whispering her goodbyes to Shangguan Xianxian, suddenly felt a chill on the back of her neck. She rubbed it, puzzled. Seeing this, Shangguan Xianxian rubbed it too, and Shen Wei immediately felt that the spot wasn’t the least bit cold anymore.

In fact, it was quite warm.

So she continued whispering her farewells to Shangguan Xianxian, interspersing them with complaints about the other two’s on-and-off clinginess.

“Why haven’t they kissed?”

“Why aren’t they kissing yet?”

Her complaints were mostly along these lines.

Over here, however, the atmosphere wasn’t exactly clingy.

“I won’t press you on things you don’t want to talk about, but you must be safe. You said half a month. You can come back early, but you can’t be late.” Song Zhiqing felt she was making a huge concession.

Seeing Song Zhiqing’s expression, Ye Yuhuan silently swallowed the words it might be longer than half a month. Well, there’s no need to stay with Shen Wei the whole time. I can just come back early after I’m done with my part.

“I will.”

At this, Song Zhiqing was finally satisfied. The strange feeling in her heart also dissipated quite a bit.

However, compared to the fiery farewell of the couple next to them, her goodbye with Ye Yuhuan had, at most, consisted of a three-minute hug.

Originally, she would have thought that was fine. But after witnessing so much love these days, Song Zhiqing had to admit her appetite had grown—whetted by what she’d seen.

She shot Ye Yuhuan a disdainful look, which earned her a hurt expression in return, and Song Zhiqing’s heart immediately softened.

Forget it. What’s the point of arguing with a silly Princess Elsa?

Ye Yuhuan is just too oblivious.

As for Song Zhiqing, she really didn’t know how she could be any more obvious. Glances, gestures, words—she had dropped every hint she could think of. But that fool Ye Yuhuan only knew how to copy her, not how to react. It was useless, aside from making herself blush and her heart race.

They were friends, and still just friends.

Through frequently witnessing love, she had more or less figured out Ye Yuhuan’s feelings. After all, few people would be so focused on watching the reaction of the person next to them while others were kissing. Her intentions were, one might say, glaringly obvious.

Ah, so you want me to get over Shangguan Xianxian that badly?

You said you just wanted to be friends, but now your heart is moved, isn’t it? Song Zhiqing admitted she was feeling smug.

As for how Song Zhiqing could react so quickly, it was all thanks to the assistance of the entire Song family strategic advisory group behind her. Unlike Ye Yuhuan, who could only fumble around on her own—so pitifully that she even offered a high price online for love advice—Song Zhiqing had a history of being unable to keep her mouth shut once she started liking someone. At school, she was forced to be disciplined, but once she got home, she let herself go completely.

It could be said that everyone who entered the Song household, with the exception of Ye Yuhuan, pretty much knew that Song Zhiqing liked Ye Yuhuan.

Thus, everyone in the Song family, from her grandmother down to the cooking auntie, offered Song Zhiqing their advice and strategies.

Relying on this group’s rich life experience, Song Zhiqing easily deciphered the awkward feelings of the seventeen-year-old Ye Yuhuan as she faced love.

If it weren’t for her ambition to make Ye Yuhuan confess to her at least once, Song Zhiqing would have made a move long ago.

However, looking at the current situation, she couldn’t count on Ye Yuhuan figuring it out on her own.

Song Zhiqing irritably ruffled Ye Yuhuan’s bangs. The tips of her pale ears were red, as if splashed with ink. She said in a soft, delicate voice, “The ceramic cup I gave you—you haven’t used it to drink water, have you?”

To be honest, not only had she not drunk water from it, Ye Yuhuan had put the cups up on display like an offering. Together with the pearl, they had become her daily source of morning energy.

After all, Song Zhiqing had made them with her own hands.

But facing the person herself, Ye Yuhuan downplayed the extent of her exaggeration and simply went along with Song Zhiqing’s words. “Not yet.”

Song Zhiqing pressed her lips together. She knew it. Otherwise, how could she have not discovered it after so long?

Although she had given her five whole ceramic cups, the trick was the same in all of them. Five whole cups! Hadn’t inflation been enough to downgrade them from souvenirs to daily-use items?

But it was undeniable. Amidst her frustration, Song Zhiqing felt a sliver of joy. In an airport where everyone was rushing about, she felt a sense of security that came from being overly cherished.

This joy prompted her to give a further hint: “I gave you the cups so you would use them. If you don’t, I won’t give you any more in the future.”

With Ye Yuhuan’s extensive knowledge of the material world, discovering the secret of a cup should have been a piece of cake. Once Ye Yuhuan returned and found it, their relationship should, by all rights, break through that paper window that Ye Yuhuan herself had pasted over.

But in fact, a small rabbit ceramic cup was lying quietly in Ye Yuhuan’s backpack right now. It was the first one Song Zhiqing had given her, with snow-white fur and a little pink face, so cute it hardly looked like a cup at all. Therefore, the secret would likely be kept for a shorter time than Song Zhiqing imagined.

Ye Yuhuan agreed, half-sincerely, a placating smile clearly on her face.

“I will.”

At most, she’d drink from it once to satisfy Song Zhiqing’s request, and then she’d go right back to enshrining it. Using such a beautiful cup for drinking was practically a defilement.

Song Zhiqing smoothed out the hair she had just messed up. She wanted to say something more, but then she heard the airport broadcast announcing Ye Yuhuan and Shen Wei’s names.

It had still come to this. To the side, Shen Wei and Shangguan Xianxian were condemning them with their eyes for being too slow.

“Have a safe trip.”

In the end, this was the easiest thing to say. Then, Song Zhiqing watched Ye Yuhuan’s back recede into the distance until she disappeared around a corner. She turned around, and Shangguan Xianxian turned with her.

The two said a polite goodbye, and none of the ambiguous situations Ye Yuhuan had worried about occurred.

To be honest, it had never even occurred to Ye Yuhuan’s Song Zhiqing-obsessed brain that, for someone like Shangguan Xianxian, being ambiguous with a person who had witnessed her and her girlfriend kissing multiple times was not only immoral but also perverse.

If it weren’t for the strong heart she had developed after years in the Shangguan family, she wouldn’t even have been able to maintain a normal expression in front of Ye Yuhuan and Song Zhiqing.

“All panic stems from insufficient intellectual reserves.” This phrase, which Ye Yuhuan often used to encourage herself, could now be used for a bit of self-mockery.

The ritual of this farewell ended after much entanglement, but to everyone’s surprise, the separation itself lasted far too long.

So long that the production machinery Ye Yuhuan’s team had negotiated for had already been shipped from Germany, and Sheng Jing had already begun the product testing phase.

And still, the two of them had not returned.

Rumors abounded, but the most credible one was that Shangguan Chong, like a vicious tiger devouring its own cub, had tried to have them killed but failed, and they had been running in circles across Europe ever since.

They only returned after running two of those circles.

The whole ordeal lasted nearly five months. Shen Wei spent her birthday in Switzerland and obtained the evidence there.

From the moment they set foot back on home soil, autumn had arrived for the Shangguan family.

Realistically speaking, however, it was currently winter—deep winter. And “deep winter” referred not only to the weather, with its goose-feather snow, but also to the look on Song Zhiqing’s face.

She coldly took Ye Yuhuan’s backpack, looked her up and down, placed the bag on a nearby chair, and then reached out to touch the person in front of her, her hands moving from Ye Yuhuan’s arms to her waist.

She came to a conclusion: “Ye Yuhuan, have you even been eating properly?!”

Unfortunately, her voice was choked with sobs and her eyes were red, robbing her words of any interrogative force. Instead, she just looked pitiful, like a little girl who had dropped her favorite candy, her lips pursed as she tried her best to be good and not cry.

Ye Yuhuan ruffled Song Zhiqing’s hair, then pulled her into a tight hug, resting in this long-overdue embrace.

It wasn’t that they couldn’t imagine Shangguan Chong resorting to assassination, but this kind of rabid, no-holds-barred operation really made one wonder if the Shangguan Group was on the verge of bankruptcy, making him so desperate to usurp his daughter’s assets. During that time, after leaving Germany, they had basically lived a life with nothing but money.

They were often woken up by bodyguards in the middle of the night to start running for their lives.

There were plenty of times they’d taken just one bite of a meal before being dragged into a car. Later, they started eating in the car directly, but then they’d get carsick and vomit until their stomachs were empty. The nausea, however, would keep coming in waves. In the end, they just stopped eating proper meals, stocking up on chocolate and taking a few bites when they were hungry to maintain enough energy to get in and out of cars.

So, no, she had not been eating properly.

But it wasn’t good to say such things. Song Zhiqing was already on the verge of tears, and she couldn’t let her actually start crying. Once that girl started, she never stopped.

So Ye Yuhuan stroked Song Zhiqing’s back and sighed in a low voice, “I finally get to see you.”

“I missed you so much.”

And Song Zhiqing cried anyway.

It seemed that no matter what Ye Yuhuan said, she was going to cry.

Ah, so that’s how it is. In that case, I should have complained a little.

Those days were truly so hard.

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