After washing the dirty clothes from the business trip, Mai Ding started mopping the floor. He nudged An Zi Yan’s feet with the mop. “Move.” An Zi Yan did nothing. Mai Ding clenched his teeth. “Please move.” Only then did An Zi Yan leave the chair for the sofa. Mai Ding heard sound coming from the laptop and assumed he was working. It turned out he was watching a video.
“Do you know how hard I worked over there? I had work all day, then I had to cook for all of you, and now we’re home and you don’t even help. You’re sitting there watching videos…” Mai Ding kept his head down and mopped furiously while muttering, mostly about how exhausted he was. Suddenly, he froze as though someone had struck an acupoint. He stopped moving completely. From the laptop came Su Xiao Mi’s voice and his own.
[“Keep gifts discreet. What if somebody sees?”
“Nobody would care.”
“Get inside.”]
W-w-w-what was going on?!!!!!!!
Mai Ding and Su Xiao Mi really should have checked properly for surveillance cameras. Su Xiao Mi had a habit of doing strange, and occasionally dangerous, things behind Yan Yan’s back, so Yan Yan had secretly installed cameras at home that could record both video and sound. Keeping them secret from Su Xiao Mi had been an extremely wise decision. If someone like Su Xiao Mi knew a camera was filming him, his obsession with becoming an actor would probably have him doing unspeakably embarrassing performances for it every single day.
And so everything was played back on the video: all the talk about crushing An Zi Yan under his feet and never letting him rise again, every mysterious candle ritual he and Su Xiao Mi had performed. In the quiet room, Mai Ding’s own voice rang out loudly: “Long live SpongeBob! Long live SpongeBob! Long live SpongeBob!” No wonder Mai Ding had frozen. A chill ran down his spine, cold sweat poured out, and every negative emotion seemed to hit him at once. He did not even have the strength to stop An Zi Yan from watching.
An Zi Yan watched the video from beginning to end, then closed the laptop. Mockery and contempt colored his voice. “Sorry. I was watching a video and didn’t hear what you were saying just now. You said things were very hard for you over there?”
“N-not that hard.” Mai Ding gave a dry laugh.
“You’re too modest.” Every word from An Zi Yan dripped with sarcasm. “Kneeling in front of the Great Immortal every day must’ve been exhausting.” Mai Ding laughed awkwardly again. “Hehehe… i-it wasn’t too bad. Good husband, what would you like for dinner tonight? How about I cook whatever you want?”
An Zi Yan had expected that Mai Ding and Su Xiao Mi would do something stupid together, but he had not expected anything this stupid. He set the laptop on the coffee table, stood, and rolled his neck from side to side. “Weren’t you demanding that we have a conversation just now? Fine. Let’s talk about exactly how you planned to crush me under your feet.”
After surviving a night he never wanted to remember, Mai Ding went to work the next morning with the strange feeling that he had not been at the company for ages. Cheerfully, he pressed 7 in the elevator. He wondered whether his coworkers had missed him. They liked joking around, but surely they had felt lonely with him gone. They were comrades on the same front line, after all. When he entered Public Relations, however, everyone looked exactly as they always did, as though Mai Ding had been there yesterday. Nobody found his return remarkable.
“How were things at the company?” In the end, Mai Ding had to greet them first. Fan Shao Jun rolled his eyes so far upward that almost no black remained visible. “If I’d known, I would’ve gone on the business trip with Yan. Old Cui spent the entire time Yan was away ordering us around however he pleased.” Guo Ping tiredly rubbed his face with both hands. “Yan’s finally back. That old fox didn’t treat us like human beings. And seeing you looking so energetic is seriously irritating.”
It was bad enough that nobody had missed him. Now they were taking all the suffering they had endured and directing it at him. Mai Ding felt wronged and angry. He dropped heavily into his chair. “You’re the ones who forced that miserable business trip on me in the first place. You think I had it easy over there? I was exhausted, and on top of that I had to deal with An Zi Yan. Being the subordinate of someone like him must be the result of eight lifetimes of bad luck. I almost wanted to quit.”
“Just put your resignation letter in my office.” An Zi Yan had appeared at some point without Mai Ding noticing. Gao Shuang added gloomily, “Nobody’s going to stop you.”
“Yan, you’re finally back,” Feng Fei Meng said.
“If you’d come back any later, I would’ve died from overwork,” Liu Wei said.
“Leave future business trips to me. You can’t leave the company,” Guo Ping added.
Compared with the welcome Mai Ding received, their enthusiasm for An Zi Yan was overwhelming. What a bunch of shameless flatterers. The observant Fan Shao Jun noticed An Zi Yan’s arm. “Yan, what happened to your arm?”
“A dog bit me.” The moment An Zi Yan said it, everyone turned toward Mai Ding and began accusing him. “Mai Ding, just because you and Yan don’t get along doesn’t mean you can bite him.”
“That’s too much. You actually bit someone.”
“Aren’t you afraid of getting fired? You even dared bite your boss.”
Why? Why did they react exactly like Su Xiao Mi and assume the “dog” An Zi Yan mentioned meant Mai Ding? Mai Ding pounded the desk with his fist. “He wasn’t speaking metaphorically! It was a real dog, not me!”
“Yan, was it a real dog or Mai Ding who bit you?” Feng Fei Meng asked for confirmation. The content of the question wounded Mai Ding deeply. An Zi Yan merely shrugged and walked into his office without answering. Explain it properly! Everyone’s going to misunderstand me! Mai Ding screamed inwardly but did not dare say it aloud. At the company, he and An Zi Yan were nothing more than a boss and subordinate who had a terrible relationship. Just like that, Mai Ding returned to his miserable, stifled working life.