Her Tentacles 8

Chapter 8: The Weekend

She hugged me, ahhhh—

The thin gauze curtains swayed, letting the intense heat of the sun stream onto the bed. It was the weekend, a welcome holiday, and Shu Yao, who had lazed in her air-conditioned room until well past eleven, awoke to find her first thought was still of the embrace she had shared with Lin Ran in the deep woods of the campus on the afternoon of the sports meet.

Perhaps it was because Lin Ran had to fly to another city for two consecutive days of surgeries and seminars right after Friday, and they couldn’t see each other again, that Shu Yao’s brain would replay the details of that day whenever she thought of her girlfriend.

Lin Ran’s cool skin, her scent, the sound of her voice by her ear…

“Alright, stop.”

Twenty minutes later.

Shu Yao stood in the bathroom, an electric toothbrush in one hand, the other making a “stop” gesture at the love-struck fool in the mirror, whose silly grin needed to be reined in, and whose toothpaste had been brushed until it was tasteless.

Ding-dong! Ding-dong! Ding-ding-ding-dong!

The doorbell rang, adding to the urgency.

She quickly bent down to rinse her mouth, hastily wiped the white foam from her lips, and turned to hurry out. She was still wondering who could be ringing the bell at this hour, since she hadn’t ordered any food, when a glance through the peephole revealed the visitor.

“This blasted weather is killing me!” After the door opened, the visitor hooked off her sunglasses with one hand and placed several bags in the entryway with the other, pointedly lifting a black plastic bag that was slapping and splashing. “Here, a fish my dad caught this morning. Look at this thing, it’s got enough fight to jump up and slap me twice. If you keep it in a tank, it could probably live for another month before you have to kill it—”

The voice, as lively as a flock of larks, suddenly stopped. The guest, with her newly dyed trendy misty pink hair and sparkling round earrings, suddenly tiptoed closer from the entryway. “Why are you grinning like such a fool so early in the morning?”

Shu Yao: “?”

She was completely taken aback.

Before she could explain, Situ Jin had a sudden realization and pushed past her, craning her neck to look around the apartment. “I get it, your girlfriend’s here, isn’t she? Am I interrupting? Hello?”

“…”

Shu Yao took the bag with the fish and held out a finger to her forehead, gesturing for her to look at the slippers on her feet. “You’re overthinking it. There’s no one else here.”

Situ Jin let out a loud, disappointed sigh.

Slipping into her own exclusive pair of puppy slippers, she followed Shu Yao into the apartment. While her friend went into the kitchen to deal with the fruits and vegetables she had plucked from her family’s garden and the fish, Situ Jin began to shamelessly survey the room.

The overall color scheme was much brighter than the last time she had been here.

For example, the kitchen door curtain had been replaced with a bright yellow one featuring a cartoon puppy. Several more small animal-shaped throw pillows had been added to the sofa. The monthly roses on the balcony were in full bloom, and in the corner of the living room, an old desk had been brought out. On its shelves, succulents were displayed in small, half-open round jars, looking like colorful bubbles in the sunlight.

However, the desk was only half-filled, with a large portion still empty, adorned only with a seasonal flower arrangement in a red crystal vase. This was clearly her latest creative project, still a work in progress.

Even so, it was already lively enough.

Situ Jin walked over to the desk displaying the miniature worlds of succulents and said thoughtfully, “You like her that much?” The new girlfriend.

…

Since her friend had arrived right around lunchtime, Shu Yao hadn’t yet decided what to eat. After sorting and storing the vegetables and fruits, she poked her head out of the kitchen door and asked:

“How about we have that fish for lunch today? Do you want it in a soup, steamed, or braised in soy sauce?”

Though she hadn’t met the perfect girlfriend, Situ Jin, who was feeling the secondhand effects of their romance, stroked her chin and decisively ordered, “I want fish with pickled mustard greens.”

It suited her current mood perfectly: sour, green with envy, and utterly superfluous.

Shu Yao didn’t catch her underlying meaning. “That works. We had it at a place that was pretty good before. I want to try and replicate it, see how close I can get.”

After a pause, she blinked and added, “Even if it’s not good, you still have to help me with my chores later, okay?”

That’s right.

This was the reason Situ Jin was visiting today.

Shu Yao lived on the top floor, and the developer had included a rooftop terrace, which she had gradually transformed into a small garden over the years. However, the recent season of high temperatures and heavy rain in Nancheng had been very unkind to her flowers. There were rotted roots, empty buds, black spots, and red spider mites… Shu Yao had spent the entire previous day busy in her rooftop garden.

But she couldn’t finish it all, let alone the repotting that needed to be done.

So, the night before, she had cordially invited a laborer to visit today.

Now, Situ Jin, the summoned help, turned around slowly, her gaze meeting Shu Yao’s from across the room. Her tone was laced with sarcasm. “You only think of me at times like these. What about your dear girlfriend, huh? What’s wrong, can’t bear to let her do the work?”

“…”

Shu Yao’s cheeks flushed red at the teasing. “No, I—I haven’t invited her over yet…”

“Oh, so you mean if she were here, I wouldn’t even get the chance to be the laborer, right? Got it, I completely understand—” Situ Jin walked up to her, took her by the shoulders, turned her one hundred and eighty degrees, and pushed her into the kitchen. “I will cherish this opportunity to work for Her Highness. You may begin your performance, chef.”

“I want fish with pickled mustard greens, mashed century eggs with green peppers, stir-fried shredded potatoes, and scrambled eggs with tomatoes!”

…

At twelve-thirty.

The dishes were laid out on the dining table. Since there were summer chrysanthemums blooming in the garden, Shu Yao had also sent Situ Jin upstairs to pluck one. The long, slender petals, just as golden as the flowers, were sprinkled over the dark fish soup, creating a colorful composition with the dried red chilies and snow-white fish meat.

“Hmm… does it look about right?” she asked her friend at the table, uncertain.

Situ Jin picked up her chopsticks, lifted a piece of tender white fish, and took a small bite from the edge. Her expression then turned solemn.

Shu Yao was startled. “Is there something wrong with the seasoning?”

She urgently reviewed the cooking steps in her mind, but saw Situ Jin shake her head. “No, it’s precisely because it’s so delicious that I’m already starting to want to make things difficult for the person who will get to enjoy this kind of cooking every day in the future, like your new girlfriend—”

Her voice trailed off.

Shu Yao, who had just brought over a bowl of rice, hadn’t had a chance to speak when she saw her friend’s expression suddenly change, turning murderous. “Forget it, I’d better go scatter the ashes of the one who didn’t cherish this treatment first.”

Hearing her mention that person, Shu Yao was at a loss for words.

She, Situ Jin, and Lin Jingshu had been playmates since childhood. Their three families had lived in the same building, and their parents had been good friends. It was only after Shu Yao’s mother divorced her father and moved out with her when she was in the first year of junior high that the parents’ interactions dwindled.

But the children never forgot their friendship.

On weekends, holidays, and school breaks, they would meet up. Back then, Shu Yao’s mother was raising her alone and was busy with work. As a public school homeroom teacher, she had to deal with a class full of overly active teenagers, so she couldn’t often be at home. But she didn’t want to slack on Shu Yao’s discipline.

So she chose the simplest method.

As long as she didn’t give her any pocket money, assigned her a lot of homework, and locked her in the house, it would be fine. After all, Shu Yao had already learned to cook for herself by then.

For this reason—

Lin Jingshu learned to pick locks.

She would never forget that day. Situ Jin was in the hallway outside, shouting at her through the door as usual, while urging the other to hurry up, saying she was about to die of heat.

Then, with a click.

The door opened. The girl who brought the free wind from the hallway in with her triumphantly held up a thin black bobby pin, the kind used to hold back hair. She blew on it solemnly, then bowed and made a “please” gesture outward. “Mission to rescue the princess locked in the attic: successful!”

Because of this incident, the two of them always jokingly called her “Her Highness.”

But the afternoon they escaped from the house ended in a rather pathetic way.

One friend had lost her wallet, and the other had spent all her money on the expensive taxi ride over. The three of them ended up just wandering back and forth on the side of the road, unable to afford even a five-yuan slice of cake from the most ordinary bakery.

…

Until university.

The three of them went to different cities, and the time they could spend together dwindled. After graduating, when they reunited in Nancheng, everyone had changed dramatically.

Situ Jin wore a leather skirt from the latest runway collection and sparkling jewelry, shining as brightly as the light reflected off a crystal champagne bottle.

Pop—

The champagne cork flew out, propelled by the bubbles. She shook the overflowing, fragrant foam onto Lin Jingshu’s silver-dyed short hair, and it trickled down her jawline onto her androgynous, light-colored casual suit jacket.

“Hey!” she wiped off the foam with the back of her hand, glaring at Situ Jin.

Beside them, Shu Yao couldn’t help but laugh.

At that gathering, Shu Yao and her friends exchanged stories. Situ Jin complained that her family wanted to send her abroad for graduate school, while Lin Jingshu came out to them, talking about how she liked girls.

At the end of the party, Lin Jingshu said her new home was in the same direction as Shu Yao’s and that she could give her a ride. On the way, Lin Jingshu suddenly spoke to her again, telling her the part of the story she had omitted at the party. She said that the origin of her realization that she liked girls was related to Shu Yao. She had liked Shu Yao for a long, long time.

She rubbed her nose, as if she knew how abrupt she was being, but seeing Shu Yao again, she still couldn’t control her fluttering heart and wanted to say the words she had buried in her heart for so many years.

She confessed her feelings, then asked Shu Yao if she could give her a chance to try?

In that instant.

Shu Yao once again remembered that scorching hot afternoon many years ago, the image of the other girl using that ordinary bobby pin to rescue her from her cage-like home.

She, who had never been in a relationship or had feelings for anyone, nodded as if possessed.

She became Lin Jingshu’s girlfriend.

The girlfriend whose palms were sweaty in the summer and ice-cold in the winter—unfortunately, Nancheng only had these two seasons, so she was a girlfriend who was disliked in all four seasons. But she was also the beautiful vase that Lin Jingshu loved to show off by her side at KTV, at bars, and on all sorts of holidays.

When her mother passed away and she couldn’t find her girlfriend for comfort, and later, when she was shopping with Situ Jin, who had returned from abroad, and saw her girlfriend, who had claimed to be busy with work, laughing and chatting with several other girls in the rest area of a fruit tea shop at the International Trade Center, Shu Yao was pulled back to that afternoon once again.

She stood in the stopped time of her youth, and it dawned on her why the knights or princes who rescued the princess in fairy tales always got a happy marriage, endless wealth, and a respected status.

—Because the princess was their trophy after hacking through thorns.

Just like her, she was just a glorious medal adorning Lin Jingshu’s brilliant romantic history, a testament to her personal charm.

…

“It’s all in the past.”

At the dining table, Shu Yao came back to her senses. Remembering that Lin Jingshu’s new apartment complex was very close to Situ Jin’s family villa, she didn’t want her friend to get into trouble with a pointless person over a love that had long ended, or perhaps had never even begun. She immediately changed the subject:

“Wow, the tomatoes Uncle planted are so sweet. They’re completely different from the big, tasteless ones from the market that don’t even get mushy.”

Situ Jin snorted, but she played along and changed the subject. “Don’t let my dad hear you say that, or the next time you visit, he might proudly give you half a truckload of vegetables—if you don’t want your rooftop garden to turn into a vegetable patch.”

The image was too beautiful for Shu Yao to imagine.

Seeing her silent expression, Situ Jin burst out laughing and said to her, “Alright, let’s talk about something that makes us both happy. For example, you and that Director Lin, how far have you gotten?”

The same question was posed to Shu Yao by another person when she arrived at the office on Monday.

The man, who had arrived at the office before her and looked as if he hadn’t left all weekend, had a gloomy expression that tainted the entire room with the foul, stale smell of an old, decaying house.

His stiff neck seemed to be evolving into hemiplegia. At least from Shu Yao’s perspective, the man slumped in his office chair looked like a patient who had been half-paralyzed for a long time.

She subconsciously took a step back, retracting the foot she had just put inside.

His broken glasses were still unrepaired, cracked into a fine spiderweb. Normally, this should have made it difficult for anyone inside or out to see clearly, but she could feel it. Wu Li’s cold, chilling gaze was coming from behind those lenses—

It arrived at the same time as his voice, which was as unpleasant as sandpaper scraping against a wall:

“…How have you not been eaten by her yet?”