I have to admit, I do have a few fantasies about Li Duidui’s face.
After all, the way I draw him in my realistic style has earned unanimous praise from readers, which means his looks are well above the average standard of public taste.
The reason why I'm explaining so much now is just to illustrate that on this quiet, cold, rainy night, at a moment when I should have been returning home alone, the skipped heartbeat caused by his appearance wasn't because I was falling for him. No. It was just the most innocent, hormonal reaction of a perfectly normal young woman who got a little lust-struck at the sight of beauty.
I pulled down my hat, trying to calm my heartbeat. "This has nothing to do with you, right?" I retorted, "What are you doing here?"
"What do you think?" Li Duidui looked directly into my eyes.
I looked at his big black umbrella. There were already many raindrops accumulated on the surface of the umbrella, dripping down, indicating that he had been standing here for a while. I was a little stunned.
Could it be that Li Duidui… saw that it was raining, knew that I didn't have money to take a taxi back, so he came to the bus stop specifically to wait for me and give me an umbrella…
Thump
My heart skipped another beat because of this guess.
Could it be that he really was like Meimei and Xiao Lang said…
While I was still guessing, Li Duidui had already reached out his hand. "Black Dog said you were coming to pay the rent this afternoon. Now, where's the rent?"
All the tender feelings in my heart were instantly frozen solid by a late-spring cold front, crackling apart like shattered ice.
A small black cat slowly crawled out from behind Li Duidui's neck. I don't know where it was hiding just now.
It squatted on Li Duidui's shoulder and licked its paw. This is Li Duidui's pet black cat. Although it's named Black Dog, it's a genuine local cat, running very fast. The year before last, because its meowing was too loud, Li Duidui dragged it to be neutered, and it suddenly learned to speak human language.
From then on, I don't know if it was out of revenge on society or some other twisted mentality, but it often ran upstairs to eavesdrop on us saying bad things about Li Duidui, and then went back to report to Li Duidui. A complete modern-day lackey, a dead eunuch dog!
Pah! Eunuch cat!
I glared at it.
Black Dog wasn't afraid of me. "What are you staring at me for?" As a local cat, it spoke in Chongqing dialect fluently. "Did you go out with Li Peipei and spend all the rent?"
You're just so damn talkative.
I gritted my teeth secretly, and explained under Li Duidui's cold gaze, "I didn't take the rent to play. I just sent Mangzi to have a minor surgery."
"Oh." Li Duidui put his hands back in his pockets and said expressionlessly, "So you spent the afternoon in the pet hospital drinking medical alcohol with animal corpses?"
I forgot that this vampire had a dog's nose.
"I just went to the bar with Peipei for a while... what corpses are you talking about? Can you not talk so scary?"
"It's more scary to be around you with the stench of corpses."
The way he said this seriously successfully scared me. "The stench of corpses?" I smelled around, but besides the smell of spring rain, I couldn't smell anything. I looked up at Li Duidui, asking for help:
"Is there really a stench of corpses on me? You're not scaring me, are you?"
Li Duidui glanced at me. Seeing that I seemed really scared, he didn't say anything more, averted his gaze, and walked back. "If you don't want to be eaten by random things, stay away from Li Peipei these days." He looked at the road and the rain ahead. "I'll let you do whatever you want after you pay the rent in full."
This stingy, venomous vampire is only focused on money.
I complained about him in my heart, but I still followed him step by step, taking shelter from the rain under his big black umbrella.
"Peipei said that the corpse drivers from Xiangxi recently lost a few zombies. Do you think I ran into a zombie on the way back just now?"
I guessed, and instantly imagined many scenes. The passengers on the bus, the passersby I brushed past, all seemed to become dangerous. I felt a chill down my spine and started to feel scared. "Will those old corpses really eat people? Like in Resident Evil, where biting someone spreads the virus? I wouldn't have unknowingly contracted the zombie virus, would I?"
"If they want to eat you, they'll just eat you clean." Li Duidui turned his head to look at me. "They won't give you a chance to become one of them."
I shivered and squeezed closer to him, until I brushed against his arm, and only then did I feel a little safe.
Li Duidui's footsteps paused slightly. I didn't think much about it, only feeling that the cold wind blew at this time, and the cold rain hit me, making me feel even colder. I moved even closer to Li Duidui. Although he didn't have much warmth on him, being by his side…
Was at least safe!
"Su Xiaoxin, don't you think my master's body is stiff?" Black Dog, on Li Duidui's shoulder, slapped me in the face with its tail. "Get lost, stop clinging to my master.”
I was angered by Black Dog's tail slap and didn't bother to care about what it was saying. I reached out directly to grab it on Li Duidui's shoulder. "You cat who bullies others because you have someone to rely on, I'm being nice to you, and you're getting more and more out of line, aren't you!"
I slapped Li Duidui's shoulder. Black Dog quickly jumped to the other side of his shoulder. I went around in front of Li Duidui, stretched out both hands to his shoulders, and hugged Li Duidui head-on. I wanted to grab the cat's tail, but Black Dog ran fast, and with an amazing angle, kicked off his back and jumped directly onto the black umbrella.
So under the umbrella, it was just me hugging Li Duidui's neck.
Li Duidui didn't move.
I muttered, “Damn eunuch cat.” Then looked up—and his eyes, behind his gold-rimmed glasses, were staring straight at me.
Our faces were so close, close enough to see his eyelashes clearly, so I could also see a hint of dark red surging in his eyes, illuminated by the streetlights through the black umbrella.
That red appeared so quickly, so quickly that it seemed like my illusion.
I immediately reacted, realizing that the posture was ambiguous. I coughed and took a step back. "You… you need to discipline your cat!" I tried to maintain my momentum. "It's not cute at all!"
"So you're very cute?" Li Duidui put his hands in his pockets and said in his usual annoying tone, "Did you think that by seducing me, you could avoid paying the rent in the future?"
"Huh?"
"Give up. You're still a bit short."
Give up? A bit short? Give up what? A bit short of what? This vampire's words were simply too insulting. If I could beat him, I would have already attacked him!
I pulled on my sleeves, hesitating whether to fight to the death for my dignity, but just then, Li Duidui's phone rang in his pocket. He didn't even look at me, answered the phone, said a few brief words, and hung up.
Li Duidui's expression became a little serious.
"You go back first. During this time, if you can avoid going out, don't go out."
I also became nervous. "What happened?"
"Nothing. I just don't want you to go out and be so ugly that you scare other people."
Me: "..."
"Take the umbrella. Use it to cover your face on the way back."
"..."
I swung my hand hard, grabbed the umbrella handle and yanked it away. “Well, thank you so much!”
I was very angry, but even more than that, I didn’t want to suffer a loss. Walking home in the rain, catching a cold, I'd be the one to suffer. And I was very clear on two things:
First, I'm someone who needs to update.
Second, I’m broke.
So I can’t afford to get sick.
I turned around and walked away angrily, shaking the umbrella hard twice to throw Black Dog off the top of the umbrella. Black Dog was agile, jumped onto the tree next to it, and jumped back on its own in a few steps, ignoring me. I didn't bother to care about it either and returned to the apartment without looking back.
At my door, I suddenly remembered I hadn’t brought in the clothes I left to dry on the rooftop. So I took the umbrella and headed up. As soon as I opened the rooftop door, I saw Meimei soaking in the fish pond. She was enjoying the drizzle, lounging in just a shell bikini like some Little Mermaid cosplay, totally unbothered by the spring chill.
"Don't splash around too much in the pond." I reminded her while collecting the clothes. "The roof waterproofing has just been repaired. Don't break it again."
Yu Meimei looked at me. "Oh, you still say our landlord doesn't like you. He even gave you an umbrella."
"It's raining. I'm not like you guys. I'll get sick if I get rained on. Getting sick will delay work, and he's counting on my royalties to pay his rent."
"Hehe." Yu Meimei smiled ambiguously. "I didn't see it clearly from a distance last time, but this time I saw it clearly. There's a magic spell on this umbrella. Ordinary non-humans can't get close to it. He gave you the umbrella to protect you. Li Duidui must like you if he's protecting you."
"Huh?"
The logic… actually kind of made sense?
Yu Meimei swayed her tail twice. "However, it's hard to say for sure. I heard Wanshi Nan gossip about it. Our landlord used to have a love history."
Wanshi Nan is an old man who lives on the third floor. No one knows how many years he has lived. They only know that he has superpowers and can travel through time and space. He also likes to look around everywhere, so he often doesn't live in the apartment, but because he has lived for a long time, he knows a lot of gossip.
I don't have much contact with him. However, Meimei lives next door to him, so she can occasionally meet him.
Right now, though, my attention was fully hijacked by the words Li Duidui’s romantic past. I squatted beside Meimei under the umbrella.
"Yes... you move away from me first. The magic spell on this umbrella makes me uncomfortable." I took two steps back before she continued, "Even Wanshi Nan isn't very clear about it. He only mentioned it to me vaguely last time. Li Duidui used to like a girl, a human, just like you. But she later died of illness.”
"Died of illness?"
“Yeah. She got caught in the rain one day, fell seriously ill, and her body was too weak to recover. She couldn’t hold on, King Yama came and took her away. I heard that Li Duidui was depressed for a long time after that.”
I was a little surprised. "Dying from getting rained on… at most, it's just a cold. How could she die? Was she just born so weak?"
"That was all many years ago." Yu Meimei stretched out her fingers to calculate, but in the end, she couldn't calculate it clearly and just glossed over it vaguely. "It seems that at that time, there was still war going on, a time of chaos, and women were still wearing cheongsams."
I thought about it, and that was probably during the Republic of China... In China at that time, there were probably quite a few people who died from catching a cold.
This Li Duidui looks young... but how many years has he actually lived?
"So giving you an umbrella on a rainy day, I think, might be because he likes you, or he’s just projecting.”
"It doesn't matter why." I pursed my lips and said to Meimei before returning to my room with the clothes, “Li Duidui is just material for my writing. He can't possibly like an ordinary person like me. Don't you guys overthink it. It's not like there can be any results."
Meimei swayed her fat tail and said slowly, "What if."
I ignored her and quietly closed the door.
I know that there's no "what if" in my ordinary life. My only "what if" was meeting Li Duidui and moving into this apartment. I think that's enough to exhaust all my luck in this life.
Don't expect any more "what ifs." Because expectation is bound to be accompanied by disappointment, and my life experience tells me that I'm not a lucky person. There's a high probability that I'll be disappointed.
So it's better not to expect anything, so there won't be any disappointment.
Especially… in matters of love. After all, that's what my several relationships have told me…