AM Chapter 14

When Liang Jingren opened the silver car door and sat in the driver’s seat, the passenger who had been waiting in the back seat noticed his gloomy face.

“I’m really sorry to ask you to come and help when you’re in such a bad mood,” said the passenger in the back seat.

Liang Jingren glanced at the rearview mirror, and there was not a trace of embarrassment on the other person’s face, he was clearly smiling.

Tsk, the disadvantage of a “smiling lip” is that it’s irritating to look at. And it grows on this face, mother’s good genes are wasted.

Liang Jingren’s eyes swept slightly backward, and the cast on that person’s leg annoyed him once again.

–The one who had the car accident some time ago was someone else. This person used his name to trick Chen Mo back from abroad.

If Lucas hadn’t cared about him and sent him a text message to say hello, and said that Chen Mo had already bought a plane ticket back to China, he wouldn’t have rushed to the airport that afternoon, pushing off the board meeting and bringing people with him.

That afternoon when Chen Mo returned to China, Liang Jingren vaguely caught a glimpse of that familiar cast in the crowd in the airport hall, so later he didn’t continue to chase Chen Mo, but went to find the owner of the cast.

Although the other party gave a plausible reason that he was concerned about him and wanted to help him, Liang Jingren didn’t believe it. He felt that the other party was coming to the airport with crutches just to see him make a fool of himself.

It seems that since he was sensible, he and this person have disliked each other. Although they live together peacefully, and even in the eyes of some outsiders, their relationship is quite good, Liang Jingren can’t like him, and now he doesn’t know how to get along with him.

This time, out of the moral point of view that relatives should take care of each other when something happens, Liang Jingren came as soon as he received the call, even though the content of the call was very bizarre–the driver Little Zhuang had a bad stomach and went to a roadside public toilet, and accidentally slipped and fell into the toilet. The disabled person with a cast was trapped in the car, isolated and helpless, and asked him to lend a helping hand.

“Did you send Little Zhuang’s pants?” Hearing the question from the back seat, Liang Jingren grunted an “uh” in a muffled voice.

He just came out of the public toilet. He handed the new pants he bought casually in a nearby shopping mall to Little Zhuang, and also gave him the car keys to the car he drove over. Liang Jingren got into this car to temporarily swap cars.

If it were Chen Mo, he would definitely not do this kind of thing–he would never let someone who fell into the toilet drive his car.

This silver car seems to be newly bought, Liang Jingren has never seen it before. He studied the configuration before driving a little, and then stepped on the accelerator and asked, “Where do you want to go? I’ll take you now.”

“Where else can I go, to work.”

“【Night Shade】right.”

“Second location.”

“Got it.”

During the stroll, several cars drove past the road from time to time, none of which were familiar license plates to Chen Mo.

Chen Mo knew that hoping for Liang Jingren to turn back and pick him up was a luxury, an impossible fantasy, but whenever a car passed by quickly, he would subconsciously look towards the road.

When the flower shop man went to get the tissues, Chen Mo really stood there obediently and well-behaved.

He looked back at the dotted red line on the road he came from, and Chen Mo suddenly remembered a joke he told Liang Jingren, which was both a joke and a true story:

The incident happened when he was still in elementary school. A male classmate in his class had a nosebleed. The teacher was teaching at the time, so he asked the boy to go to the school clinic to deal with it himself. After class, the teacher asked the class monitor to go to the school clinic to check on the situation. The class monitor came back and said something that almost scared the teacher to death: “Teacher, it’s not good! XXX’s blood flowed from the fourth floor all the way to the first floor!”

The class monitor wasn’t lying. The person’s nosebleed did drip from the fourth floor all the way to the first floor.

Recalling the scene when most of their class poured out and lay on the stairwell wanting to see the “river of blood,” Chen Mo couldn’t help but laugh out loud.

“Are you…okay?”

The clear male voice appeared again, and Chen Mo immediately pretended to cover his mouth and cough twice, and thanked the other party with a smile: “I’m fine, thank you.”

“Take the tissues.” The man in the green floral apron handed him the folded tissues. Chen Mo bowed very politely twice and said “thank you” twice before taking it.

The flower shop man glanced sideways at his red and swollen cheek, seemingly very curious about what he had experienced. Chen Mo didn’t want to talk to strangers too much, and his eyes dodged vaguely.

The flower shop man said in an uncertain tone: “Um, I have some ice in my shop, you might…need it?”

Ice… Chen Mo thought about it, he should need it, so he nodded.

After all, he still had to go to a job interview, so it was better to reduce the swelling as soon as possible.

Walking into the flower shop, Chen Mo felt a wave of coolness and a refreshing fragrance. The flower shop was not large. Just the flower buckets placed on the ground and the blooming flowers protruding from the edge of the buckets took up half of the movable space.

“Blooming really well,” Chen Mo praised as he removed the tissue used to stop the nosebleed.

The flower shop man smiled, and said neither excessively modestly nor complacently arrogantly: “I take care of them very carefully.”

“I can see that, they are all very energetic, opening with all their might.” Chen Mo was very eloquent at this time.

Chen Mo had seen some extravagantly packaged but wilted flowers at graduation. He didn’t know how many times the bouquets had been bought, or they might have been picked up from the trash can and reused to make a scene, tsk tsk tsk.

He really wanted to show off the blue bouquet he received to everyone, but he was afraid that after taking the bouquet out, it would be touched by countless hands, borrowed, and damaged. In the end, he kept the bouquet privately.

Chen Mo also searched for videos of flower arranging and maintenance online, and specially selected a vase at the art department’s graduation exhibition, carefully placing the blue flowers in the vase.

After a while, the flower shop man brought over the ice wrapped in cloth. He asked Chen Mo to sit on the small round stool for pruning flower branches. Chen Mo carefully looked at the two buckets at the foot of the round stool. There were no floating branches or rotten leaves in them, and it didn’t look like there would be insect eggs, so he finally sat down comfortably.

However, there were too manyMiscellaneous on the table next to him, so Chen Mo didn’t put down the document bag. He held the document bag in one hand and held the ice towel pressed against his face in the other, his posture very stiff.

The water on the towel slid down his cheek to the tip of his chin and dripped down, making it look like he was crying.

Fortunately, he held the kraft paper document bag tightly in his arms, so the water droplets could only drip on his legs and not splash on the document bag.

During the twenty minutes that Chen Mo sat down to apply ice, it didn’t disturb the normal operation of the flower shop at all, because no other customers came into the flower shop except him.

During this time, the flower shop man patiently took care of every flower in every bucket, moving their positions, selecting those that were too open and putting them in another bucket, carefully holding up the calyxes to check whether the petals were broken or wet. In short, he was busy with his own things, and didn’t put any pressure on Chen Mo, who had visited as an “uninvited guest.”

Gradually, Chen Mo developed some curiosity about him, “Is this your flower shop?”

If he wasn’t the store manager, Chen Mo couldn’t imagine that a male flower shop clerk would have so much gentleness and patience even for thorny roses.

“Yes, it’s my flower shop now,” the flower shop man, the flower shop owner, said with a shallow smile. “The guest has been sitting for so long, won’t you patronize the store’s business?”

Perhaps because of the setting of the flowers all over the room, Chen Mo rarely felt warmth and brightness in a man’s smile. Even if the other party was marketing in an extremely clever way, he didn’t feel any disgust at all.

Chen Mo also smiled and said: “Then I’ve been sitting for so long, boss, let’s make friends~ Give me a discount on buying flowers?”

The boss cheerfully made a decision, “Okay, haha, I’ll sell it to you at cost price! Tell me what kind of flowers you want!”

Chen Mo realized that he seemed to have fallen into a trap, he didn’t intend to buy flowers in the first place.

Chen Mo thought about it again, buying wasn’t impossible.

Chen Mo put down the ice pack and walked to the rows of flower buckets. The boss enthusiastically began to introduce him to all kinds of flowers, and also told him the cost price and the price of wrapping them into bouquets very fairly.

“I can give you the cost price for home flower arrangements. If you want to give them as gifts, it’s more appropriate to wrap them into bouquets. I can give you a cheaper labor fee, how about it?”

Chen Mo smiled and said, “I didn’t say I was going to give them away.” He looked at a cluster of gorgeous red roses that the boss pointed to, and a trace of loneliness unconsciously appeared in his eyes.

“Little brother, did you just break up?”

Hearing this, Chen Mo was stunned. He thought to himself, this boss is really daring to ask.

“You can also send flowers to the other party after a breakup. Let’s get together and break up well, and wish each other to meet their own happiness as soon as possible.” The boss was not only eloquent, but his gentle words were also full of power to move people’s hearts.

Chen Mo lowered his eyes, sighed and smiled, and said: “I didn’t break up…” After all, they had never been in a relationship, and the other party didn’t even treat him as an equal adult…

The boss was a little surprised, “Then who hit your face?” He should be surprised that he guessed the story wrong.

Chen Mo pursed his lips and said, “A stubborn old thing.”

“Did you quarrel with your father?” The boss’s eyes widened slightly, staring at his half-swollen face and the expression on his face, as if he understood something again. “Then do you want to make up with him? Father and son don’t have overnight grudges, right~ You can buy flowers for your father, maybe you can move him!”

Chen Mo was stunned by this enthusiastic sales pitch, and thought to himself: You’re really a sales genius, it’s a pity to open a flower shop.

“No,” Chen Mo shook his head firmly, “Flowers are for people you like.” Not for his father. He added in his heart.

Hearing his words, the flower shop owner had another enlightened expression, and suddenly smiled. Chen Mo didn’t know why, but he was a little scared.

“Little brother, did you quarrel with your father because of your lover?” The flower shop owner asked with a smile.

Chen Mo’s eyelashes trembled slightly when they curled upwards, and he thought: …How can it not be?

He gave a soft “uh”.

“Haha, although I feel very guilty towards my father, I still chose my lover in the end!”

Ah…come to think of it…

Chen Mo’s eyes lit up slightly and he smiled, “I suddenly feel like you understand me, boss.”

Just like that, Chen Mo was moved and bought a bouquet of eleven carefully selected red roses.

He sat back on the original small round stool, watching the boss’s calloused hands, which were completely opposite to his delicate face, pick up one black wrapping paper after another and start wrapping the flowers.

The boss shook his head with a smile while tying the ribbon, and said frankly: “Actually, it’s okay if you don’t listen to my nagging and just turn around and leave without buying flowers. I didn’t expect you to choose the most expensive one, you’re really too honest.”

Me, honest? Chen Mo felt like he heard a good joke.

“If you say that, can I just not pay now and turn around and leave?” Chen Mo raised his eyebrows.

“That won’t work!” The boss stopped him with a bouquet of freshly wrapped flowers. “One hundred and eighty-eight yuan, thank you for your patronage~”

“It’s so expensive, what about the discount you promised?”

“Oh right, okay then, the discounted price is eighty-eight~”

“It seems…a bit cheap?” Chen Mo blinked. “Your labor fee is so profitable!”

The boss smiled and stuffed the flowers into his arms, and said: “Eighty-eight is the real wholesale price, all the other additional fees are waived for you~”

“Why?”

“Because even if you don’t buy it, I was going to give you a bouquet anyway.” The boss moved out a large flower bucket with his foot. This bucket should have been outside the flower shop, but the sun was too hot at noon today, so he moved it in. The bucket was written with [Please Take], and it was filled with flowers that were blooming to the most brilliant end of their lives. Their flowering period was approaching, they were no longer suitable for sale, but they could be given to customers, passers-by, flower lovers, innocent people, and sad people who needed comfort.

“Whether it’s a bouquet given by someone else or a bouquet to be given to someone, as long as you hold flowers in your hand, a person’s mood and mental outlook will be completely renewed! This is what my girlfriend taught me~”

Indeed, Chen Mo’s arms were full at this time, and his heart was not as empty as when he first entered the store.

“Thank you…” Perhaps it was because the red of the roses was too strong, Chen Mo, who lowered his head to admire the flowers, seemed to be stained with shyness.

When Chen Mo walked out of the flower shop with the red roses in his arms, the flower shop owner followed him and moved the large flower bucket filled with many flowers out, to the entrance of the flower shop’s glass door. He opened one side of the glass door to allow the cold air from the store to be transported out and cover the large flower bucket.

“It’s half an hour before closing time, there will be a lot of people passing by nearby.” Seeing that Chen Mo was still standing at the door watching him work, the flower shop owner straightened up, wiped his sweat, and said with a smile.

“What if someone takes it all away? Or even steals the bucket?” Chen Mo asked curiously.

The flower shop owner raised his chin and pointed him in a direction–it turned out that a camera was installed at the entrance of the flower shop.

“I’ve worried about these things you said, but Xiao Qing, oh, my girlfriend, insisted on putting the flower bucket outside, so I helped her install a camera.”

Chen Mo laughed: “I understand now, the real boss of the flower shop is actually your girlfriend!”

The flower shop owner opened his mouth in an o-shape, revealing an expression of “you guessed it all,” and then smiled shallowly, stroking the petals of the fully bloomed flowers in the flower bucket with gentle and very nostalgic eyes, “But…she’s gone. So now I’m the boss.”