My CEO Keeps Wanting to Eat Me - Chapter 6

After the retreat, the end of the year drew near.

For a working stiff, the only thing more likely than the annual bonus to cause hair loss was fighting for a ticket during the Spring Festival travel rush.

I stared at the gray “waitlist” notices covering the 12306 app and felt my heart sink.

Just as I was considering spending a fortune on an unlicensed ride home, Shen Qinglan passed my desk.

“Couldn’t get a ticket?”

She held her eternally unchanging iced Americano, her tone casual.

I nodded dejectedly. “No. They’re impossible to get this year. I even bought several priority-queue packages, but none worked.”

Shen Qinglan was silent for two seconds.

“I’m going back to City A too,” she said. “It’s on my way. Ride with me.”

I froze, then belatedly raised my head to look at her.

Her familiar thoughts sounded the next second: *…How is she still as slow as she was back then?*

She… She remembered me?

It took me a long while to recover my voice.

Flattered and incredulous, I said, “Ms. Shen, that… that wouldn’t be appropriate, would it? I’d hate to trouble you.”

More importantly, I was afraid she might get hungry halfway there and stew me.

Shen Qinglan looked at me. The faintest smile flashed through her eyes and vanished.

“It’s no trouble. Send me your address. I’ll pick you up when it’s time.”

She walked away with her coffee.

Xiao Zhao immediately leaned in to gossip. “Hey, Lu Jia, how did Ms. Shen know you’re from City A?”

“Uh…” I said quietly. “Maybe she saw it in the employee records.”

Xiao Zhao nodded thoughtfully. “Our boss really does care about her staff.”

That wasn’t the reason.

Shen Qinglan and I had attended the same high school.

Back then, she had been the untouchable academic goddess who permanently occupied first place in our grade.

Exceptional people always seemed to carry their own spotlight. She had made a deep impression on me.

Her hair was always tied back perfectly, baring a clean, pale neck and pink ears. In sunlight, the loose wisps around her face seemed to glow.

Even the dull, faded school jacket she wore year after year, its cuffs frayed fuzzy, couldn’t hide the excellence she radiated from her bones.

I, meanwhile, was invisible: average grades, average looks.

People like Shen Qinglan lived in a completely different world from mine.

We had barely exchanged a few sentences.

Our only point of contact came on a deep-winter morning when I found her unconscious from low blood sugar beneath a tree by the athletic field.

I pushed the warm milk and bread my mother had packed for me into her hands.

Only then did I learn that Shen Qinglan’s family was poor. Desperately poor.

She received almost no living expenses and often couldn’t even afford to top up her meal card. She survived on the school’s scholarships and hardship grants.

But those were a drop in the bucket. When the money ran out, she went hungry.

So the next day, I brought two breakfasts.

I was a day student and arrived early, so I tucked one inside her desk.

When Shen Qinglan reached into the desk for a book during morning study and found it, she jerked her head up and looked straight at me.

I immediately raised my book and read aloud at the top of my voice, pretending not to see her.

That was why I missed her expression.

In this way, I secretly brought her breakfast for an entire semester.

When my mother asked, I said I was growing and needed more food.

I assumed Shen Qinglan had no idea who the kind soul bringing her breakfast was.

That was fine.

A young person’s feelings were as fragile as roses.

I didn’t want to wound her pride or make her feel indebted to me.

Later, Shen Qinglan received early admission to the best university. She left school before taking the national entrance examination.

I never saw her again after that.

But she was so outstanding that wherever I went, I still heard stories about her.

Former schoolmates said that after college she had moved south to start a business. It became wildly successful, and she was thriving.

I was sincerely happy for her.

After graduation, I also moved south.

By an astonishing coincidence, my thoroughly ordinary résumé got me hired by her company.

I often thought it was remarkably lucky to meet someone so exceptional again.

I had always believed she’d forgotten me.