Yang Fei stood there for a good while before working out that he’d just been insulted.

Taking in the sight of the two of them drenched in sweat, he scratched the back of his neck sheepishly. “I didn’t know you guys were back this afternoon. If I had, I would’ve come to help.”

Xu Ye couldn’t be bothered to respond.

Zhang Xinzhou was too tired to talk.

Yang Fei immediately switched to flattery mode. “Come on, let’s go — dinner tonight, my treat!”

Xu Ye sat up. “Zhang Xinzhou, help me off this floor. We’re going to Baolong Plaza tonight and we’re going to bleed this guy dry.”

“I said treat, not fine dining! Can’t we just grab a few dishes at a street stall?”

Xu Ye and Zhang Xinzhou, in perfect unison: “Get lost.”

After an afternoon like that, Xu Ye didn’t have much of an appetite anyway. They rested for a bit, gave the shop a thorough wipe-down, then Xu Ye pulled down the rolling shutter and called it a night.

On the way back, Zhang Xinzhou said, “The inside still feels a little bare. Maybe we put up some wallpaper, change out the shutter too?”

“Don’t bother.”

“Why not?”

“Here’s a comparison,” Xu Ye said. “Say you want barbecue tonight, and there are two places side by side. One’s got flashy decor, a lit-up sign, the works. The other is plain, no frills. Which do you pick?”

“The one with the nicer decor, obviously?”

Xu Ye gave him a look. “Right, forgot you’re loaded. Yang Fei — you?”

Yang Fei didn’t even hesitate. “The plain one, obviously. In my years of accumulated experience, every single street restaurant with fancy decor is, without exception, both overpriced and not even good.”

Zhang Xinzhou still looked a little unconvinced.

Xu Ye kept going. “Most of our customers are going to be students. Are students swimming in money? Not usually. Most of them are more like me and Yang Fei. If I walk past a fruit shop with expensive decor, the first thing my brain says is — the owner spent all that money on the interior, everything in there is probably marked way up.”

Zhang Xinzhou blinked. Then nodded.

Xu Ye grinned. “Running a business means thinking from the customer’s side. Stick with me, you’ll learn.”

Zhang Xinzhou laughed and didn’t argue.

Xu Ye swung by a street stall on the walk back, ordered a hand-grabbed pancake and a double-skin milk pudding, [TL: 双皮奶 — a Cantonese dessert made from steamed milk with a delicate skin on top, silky and lightly sweet, popular across southern China] then waved a hand at Yang Fei and told both vendors, “He’s paying.”

Yang Fei, dutifully, stepped up and paid.

The three of them headed back to the dorm together. Xu Ye, still sweaty from the afternoon’s work, took a cold shower first thing. When he came out, he sat down in front of Li Tongwen with deliberate gravity. “Li Tongwen, I want to talk to you about something.”

Li Tongwen set his book down, turning with a look of mild surprise. “Me?”

“Yeah.”

Xu Ye toweled off his damp hair as he talked. “Zhang Xinzhou and I are opening a fruit shop. It’s basically ready to go — once the stock arrives tomorrow, we’ll be doing a soft opening. I’ve got a lot going on, and even in my free time I can’t be parked at the shop all day. So I’m looking to take on two part-timers. Interested?”

Li Tongwen opened his mouth.

Xu Ye immediately added, “The pay isn’t much though — fifteen hundred a month. The work’s pretty light, mainly just weighing things, handling cash, keeping the books.”

Li Tongwen wasn’t slow. The pay might sound modest, but fifteen hundred yuan was more than enough to cover his monthly living expenses. He’d already made peace with working a part-time job before he’d even left for college — he just hadn’t found the right one. And he knew, with quiet certainty, that Xu Ye had set this aside for him specifically.

He nodded. “I’m in. As long as I don’t have class, I can be there.”

Xu Ye smiled. “Then it’s settled.”

Before the words were even out—

Yang Fei sidled over. “Xu Ye, I can do part-time too, you know.”

“Go away.”

“What the hell, why not me?”

“I’m only taking two part-timers, and I need the second person to be on a different schedule from Li Tongwen — that way the shop stays open longer.”

“Fair enough, I guess.”

Xu Ye clapped Yang Fei on the shoulder. “You can come help out at the shop for free whenever you want. I’ll even teach you how to actually talk to a girl.”

“Ha. Like I need your help.” Yang Fei bristled with barely concealed jealousy. “Give me that face of yours and I’ll have Senior Jiang Wei locked down by tomorrow.”

…

Qin Zhiwei was miserable.

Because college life was nothing like he’d imagined.

Five roommates. Two of them had been high school friends who’d formed their own little closed circle from day one. One was, as best as Qin Zhiwei could tell, painfully sheltered. One snored and ground his teeth in his sleep. And one spent all his time in an online relationship.

He’d even started to suspect the last one was a foreign operative — because the guy kept slipping off to the bathroom in the dead of night, and Qin Zhiwei kept hearing what sounded distinctly like Japanese women talking from behind the door.

It was a lot to deal with.

The silver lining was that the older dorms on campus were being renovated. Starting next semester, if you paid an upgrade fee, you could move into a four-person room with air conditioning.

Qin Zhiwei was clinging to that as his one hope — that at least three of his new roommates would be normal human beings.

He lay back on his bunk and sent Xu Ye a message. “Xu Ye, can I come to your school tomorrow?”

Xu Ye replied quickly. “I’m pretty busy tomorrow.”

“What could you possibly have to do on a weekend?”

“I’m starting a business. As of tomorrow, I’m a boss.”

Qin Zhiwei: ???

Come again?

You just started college and you’re already a boss?

Qin Zhiwei: Can you stop making things up.

Qin Zhiwei: I’m starting to think you made up the class president thing too.

Xu Ye: Come over then. Call me when you get here and I’ll come meet you.

Tomorrow was the soft opening — it was probably going to be hectic. And if Zhiwei came, that was free labor.

Xu Ye had already thought it through by the time he closed the chat.

Then came the best part of the day. He tapped into his conversation with Chen Qingqing, thought about just sending “you there?” — then decided that was too bland.

He typed: “Did you think about me today?”

The notification reached her phone almost instantly.

She picked it up, silently called him an idiot, and then couldn’t do a single thing about the smile spreading across her face.

She rolled over in her top bunk, phone in hand, and replied: “No.”

Xu Ye: I don’t believe you.

Chen Qingqing: Don’t, then.

Xu Ye: What’d you get up to today?

Chen Qingqing: Nothing much.

Xu Ye: I had a busy day.

He started going through the whole thing — everything he’d done from morning to evening — then sent her a few photos of the fruit shop at the end.

Qingqing immediately spotted what mattered most.

Face warm, she typed: “Why does the fruit shop have that name?”

Xu Ye replied without missing a beat: “Because that way, I get to be with ‘you’ every single day.”

(End of Chapter)