novelraw Chapter 1025 - 1023: Are You Free Tomorrow?
Chapter 1025 - 1023: Are You Free Tomorrow?
Then she spent a whole day secretly making up her mind, thinking that if Ji Huan called again tonight, she would just tell him straight out that she was really tired and didn’t want to chat at night.Only, the mental prep she’d painstakingly done over the course of one night plus one day turned out to be completely useless, because that night, Ji Huan didn’t call at the usual time.
Even though Zhu Qianyu kept telling herself not to care, and kept acting like she really didn’t care—eating when she should eat, obediently sitting on the sofa to watch TV with Wang Mengmeng when it was time to watch TV—on the surface, even she almost believed she’d really forgotten about the nine o’clock phone call.
But when she saw the time slip past eight fifty-something, she unconsciously lifted her head to check the clock. Seeing it was almost nine, her eyes naturally fell on the phone lying on the coffee table.
"Waiting for a call?" Wang Mengmeng said the exact same thing she’d said last night. Zhu Qianyu froze for a second, then smiled and shook her head.
After that, she pretended nothing was wrong and continued curling up on the sofa watching TV. Her gaze stayed fixed on the screen, and clearly what was playing was one of her favorite palace-intrigue dramas, yet she had no idea what the heroine and hero were arguing about, or why a third party got involved afterward.
The palace drama ran two episodes back-to-back, from eight to ten.
For those two hours, Zhu Qianyu barely moved, as if she were meditating, until both episodes finished and Wang Mengmeng got up, said goodnight, and turned back into the bedroom, leaving just her alone, sitting in the not-very-large but very empty living room, dazed.
On the TV, after a noisy block of commercials, an idol drama started. Normally, Zhu Qianyu would have scoffed at this kind of show, but right now she still stayed curled up on the sofa, and only when the phone rang did she snap out of her trance. She reached over for the phone. The caller ID showed: Sister.
"Sister..."
The person on the other end seemed to pause for a second. "Xiao Yu, are you asleep?"
"Not yet, just watching TV..." Zhu Qianyu straightened up and grabbed the remote, turning the TV off.
"Why do you sound so listless? Are you sick? Or is the internship too hard and you’re exhausted?" Among the three of them, mother and daughters, the one who always worried was the Sister.
"No, I haven’t had to work overtime these two days. I get off at a normal hour, a little after five." Zhu Qianyu hurriedly raised her voice a few degrees to make herself sound more energetic, so her Sister wouldn’t start overthinking and worrying for nothing.
"Okay. You have to take good care of yourself in R City. I’ve been a bit busy lately, and in a couple of days I’ll be going abroad. I probably won’t be back for at least ten days at the earliest. If anything comes up, go to Mom."
Zhu Qianyu’s Sister was named Zhu Qianying. She was only two years older than Zhu Qianyu, but a few years ago she had already taken all the family’s responsibilities for the three of them onto her shoulders. So that last reminder of hers was basically nonsense.
Because both Zhu Qianying and Zhu Qianyu knew very well that their timid, easily frightened mom, if any real trouble found its way to her, not only wouldn’t be able to solve it, she’d just make things worse.
"Don’t worry, Sister, I’ll take good care of myself. It’s you who needs to be careful when you’re away." A long time ago, the two sisters had already developed that instinct of relying on each other for survival.
Zhu Qianying asked a few more questions about her internship, and after they chatted for a while, she hung up.
That night, Zhu Qianyu went to bed at eleven thirty, but from the moment her Sister hung up to the moment she climbed into bed, the phone never rang again.
On the third night, from when she got back from the studio until she went to sleep, her phone actually rang three times: one call from Fang Ziqing, one from Director Fei, and the last one was from her high school best friend, just as Zhu Qianyu was climbing into bed to go to sleep.
After finishing her call with her best friend, Zhu Qianyu put the phone on the nightstand. Three days in a row without a single call from Ji Huan—she seemed to have gone back to how life was before. Thinking about it, this wasn’t so bad.
Wasn’t her original intention not to get entangled with him in the first place? The way things were now was exactly what she’d wanted, wasn’t it?
With that kind of self-soothing, Zhu Qianyu finally slept a little more peacefully that night.
As for the culprit who had left her so unsettled these past few days, Ji Huan, he actually hadn’t been idle at all. First he represented the Ji Family in signing a big contract with a multinational group; the next day he flew straight to L City and stayed there two days to deal with matters regarding the production base.
He’d been busy several days in a row during the daytime. At night, aside from one evening when he couldn’t get out of a client entertainment and went to a bar to drink with them, the other two nights he stayed in the hotel handling business.
To say he was so busy he didn’t even have time to make a phone call would obviously be a lie.
The reason he didn’t call Zhu Qianyu for several nights in a row was entirely deliberate.
If it had been someone else, after a few days of calls that were practically like a hotline, they’d definitely have taken advantage of the momentum to ask her out, meet up, have a meal or something.
But the young master went the opposite way. Once they’d gotten a certain amount of familiarity, he chose to intentionally cool things down for a while.
It wasn’t that he didn’t care about Zhu Qianyu, and it definitely wasn’t that his feelings for her had cooled.
It was that, from their late-night conversations, he could vaguely sense that not only was she very guarded, she seemed to have a lot of misunderstandings about him as well.
Of course, what exactly she misunderstood about him, he couldn’t guess. After all, a woman’s heart is like the bottom of the ocean; if she deliberately wants to hide something, it’s actually very hard for him to figure out why.
But he was sure of one thing: every relationship, whether friendship or love, can only move forward when both sides are willing. On one person’s will alone, you can never get to truly knowing and understanding each other.
Once he realized this, he deliberately pulled some distance back between them.
All these years of dealing with people had taught him that a proper distance doesn’t just create a certain beauty, it also lets you see the other person more clearly, both on the surface and inside.
Even though his feelings weren’t yet overwhelmingly strong, he was certain that he liked her.
Since he liked her, he didn’t mind giving her time and space to slowly see him clearly—both his surface and his heart.
Precisely because he had this thought and understanding, he hadn’t taken the initiative to contact her these past few days.
He was waiting. Waiting to see if one day her conscience might suddenly prick her, or if she might simply start to miss him and send him a message or outright give him a call.
However, his waiting was a little ridiculous right from the start; even he himself felt it was a bit of a fantasy.
Just when he was starting to feel a little hopeless and was about to change tactics and take the initiative again, she actually sent him a text.
"Are you free tomorrow?"
[That’s right, Zhu Qianyu’s Sister is Zhu Zi’s heroine Zhu Qianying from the new ongoing novel "Escape the Wedding 99 Times: Adorable Baby Delivered, Please Sign." Please bookmark, comment, and cast your votes for the new book!]