After Forcing Me to Work, the Boss Regretted It - Chapter 1

Chapter 1

Ever since I was little, I never had much ambition.

My goal in life was to drift along, eat my fill, and wait to die.

Shen Yueheng was the complete opposite.

All he ever thought about was escaping this tiny place and going somewhere broader, somewhere bigger.

He was an eagle. This cramped little patch of sky could only cage his ambition. And I was the chick tucked under his wings, perfectly content to stay in the nest every day and wait for him to feed me.

Shen Yueheng and I were the same age, and we were both orphans. We grew up in the same welfare home, and before we turned eighteen, every track our lives took was bound tightly together.

We were best friends, the closest of brothers, and we both believed we were the only family the other had in this world.

Until the year we turned eighteen, when Shen Yueheng received an acceptance letter from a prestigious university. His first reaction was to ask me whether I wanted to go with him to City A.

At the time, I was sprawled on the floor, stuffing my belongings into a woven fertilizer sack. City A was a big city, so I had even steeled myself and thrown out the few clothes I owned that had holes in them.

When I heard him, I looked up in a daze. “Huh? You’re only thinking of taking me with you now?”

And here I had been picking up so many plastic bottles to sell, all so I could scrape together enough money for the fare to go with him to the big city.

Shen Yueheng had excellent grades. So excellent that he could attend university anywhere in the country.

I didn’t know just how far away he would end up going, so starting in my second year of high school, I took on all kinds of part-time jobs. I even picked up discarded water bottles from the roadside and sold them for money.

At last, I managed to put together a decent sum, enough, I thought, for the two of us to travel to any city in the country.

I was never cut out for studying, but that was fine too. This way, no matter where Shen Yueheng wanted to go for university, I could go with him.

Back then, people didn’t really have a word for homosexuality yet.

So the kiss Shen Yueheng stole from me when he was seventeen seemed especially outrageous.

It was also then that, for the first time, the thought of going to a big city took root in me, because everyone said big cities had advanced medical care.

This illness Shen Yueheng and I had would probably be cured once we got there.

But Shen Yueheng said what we had wasn’t an illness.

That night at the welfare home, he climbed into my bed, his face and ears red, yet he looked at me with complete seriousness and told me that what we had wasn’t an illness.

Besides, even if the big city couldn’t cure us, I would still go with him.

Because we had grown up together in the orphanage. We had no real family. The maps of our lives were far, far too small.

So small it seemed the world held only the two of us, two lonely islands that had to press close together just to survive in that raging sea.