AM Chapter 5

05 Softhearted

Chen Mo didn’t go to pick up Liang Jingren when he landed. That day, an old professor came to the college to give a lecture, and he was pulled over to help set up the venue. Of course, he was willing to be the workhorse.

But even so, Liang Jingren didn’t let him off the hook—after the lecture ended, he received a call from Liang Jingren.

The old number with the old contact name shone brightly on the screen, and the idle chatter crashing into Chen Mo’s ears instantly turned into a screeching sound like a blown microphone.

After a while, he snapped back to reality under the urging of his senior and hung up the phone. The lecture was a complete success, and he had to help move chairs. Afterwards, he could go to the old professor’s private celebration banquet with the seniors.

While he was moving the tables and chairs, the phone in his pocket continued to vibrate several times, but he ignored it. Finally, a caring senior noticed and reminded him to answer the phone, saying, “The other person might have an emergency!”

Chen Mo nodded slightly, feeling embarrassed. He took out his phone and saw that it was Lucas calling.

“Your roommate, then you definitely have to answer it!” A senior who was collecting water bottles happened to pass by him and saw Lucas’s name spelled out. He knew about his and Lucas’s shared apartment situation.

Faced with the kindness of the seniors, Chen Mo had no choice but to put down the work in his hands and find a corner to answer the phone.

The first sentence that came from the other end of the phone was sarcasm and ridicule: “I heard you’re being a workhorse for someone? Did you get any benefits?” It was Liang Jingren’s voice.

Chen Mo pursed his lips and said, “None of your business.”

Liang Jingren was silent for a few seconds before speaking again, asking, “Did you know I was coming today?”

“None of your business,” Chen Mo said.

“Okay.” With that, Liang Jingren laughed, probably out of anger.

Chen Mo licked his lips and said, “Don’t you not want to see me? You even said that seeing my face makes your hands itch, that you can’t help but want to beat me… Why should I be your punching bag?”

Liang Jingren fell silent once again.

After a long while, Liang Jingren said, “You were secretly reading my chat history with Lucas?”

Chen Mo said, “He showed it to me.”

Liang Jingren said, “Liar.”

Chen Mo didn’t want to say anything more, so he said, “I’m going to hang up, I have things to do.”

Liang Jingren said, “Let’s meet.”

Chen Mo asked, “Why?”

He also wanted to ask “Why should I,” but Liang Jingren didn’t give him the chance and hung up the phone directly.

Later, after finishing the logistics work with a frustrated heart, Chen Mo couldn’t help but call Lucas back.

This time, Lucas, the middleman and messenger, answered the phone, and thoughtfully arranged the meeting time and place for them for the next day.

At 4:05 p.m. that day, Chen Mo arrived as scheduled.

As a result, after waiting in the coffee shop for two hours, drinking two cups of bitter coffee, he didn’t even see Liang Jingren’s shadow.

He was so angry that he wanted to tear Lucas apart—this guy was actually cooperating with Liang Jingren to mess with me!

Damn it, unless Liang Jingren gets hit by a car, barely hanging on with one breath in a hospital bed, desperately looking for an heir, he can forget about seeing me in this lifetime! Chen Mo ordered a third cup of black coffee, pouring milk and sugar into it furiously while gnashing his teeth in his heart.

After finishing the third cup of coffee, Chen Mo felt his stomach churning, so uncomfortable that he wanted to throw up.

He opened his phone and saw that another ten minutes had passed.

“Damn it!” He clenched his fist and slammed it down, causing the empty coffee cup to jump. The surrounding customers seemed to look over at him.

The waiter also seemed to notice the abnormality here. Chen Mo took the initiative to leave the tip and slipped away from the coffee shop with his phone in hand.

He walked towards the apartment while dialing Lucas’s phone.

Lucas answered the phone after waiting for a long time, and then apologized in a flustered manner: “I’m sorry, Chen Mo! We ran into a little trouble here, I just remembered…”

If I didn’t call, you wouldn’t have remembered, would you? Chen Mo was both angry and amused, and interrupted him directly, questioning, “What happened? Just tell me!”

“We’re at the police station right now…”

Chen Mo was stunned, and his footsteps stopped unconsciously. “What?”

“My brother’s travel bag was stolen, money, phone, passport, everything was inside. I’m with my brother right now, giving a statement…”

“…”

“Chen Mo?”

Chen Mo laughed, laughing so unrestrainedly that tears squeezed out of the corners of his eyes, laughing so hard that he bent over and leaned against the wall.

“I swear, don’t go crazy! I’m scared! Chen Mo, don’t, don’t worry, we’ll definitely be able to get your brother’s things back!”

Chen Mo took a deep breath, his left hand gripping the wall bricks. The laughter stopped, but the smile on his face remained as he straightened up. He held the phone screen close to his right ear and said in a light tone, “He deserves it~”

Lucas said that Liang Jingren’s hotel room card was also missing. As a foreigner without a passport and other documents, it was inconvenient for him to enter and exit the hotel, so he was going to stay at their apartment for the next two nights.

Chen Mo’s mood changed again, becoming not so pleasant.

“Where is he sleeping?” Chen Mo asked.

“Your room? Or my room?” Lucas said, “We can’t let a guest sleep on the sofa, can we!”

Chen Mo gripped the edge of his phone and said, “I’m not going back tonight.”

“Ah?”

“Diana invited me to her house for dinner, I wasn’t planning on going back to sleep tonight anyway.”

“Oh yo~ Oh~” Lucas seemed to understand something and made a few strange noises and laughs, “Hehe, I knew it, a neat freak like you wouldn’t be so generous as to give up your room!”

A vein popped in Chen Mo’s forehead, and he emphasized each word: “If you know I’m a neat freak, then don’t let anyone into my room!”

“I’ll help you clean it up afterwards!” Lucas promised.

Chen Mo’s temples were throbbing so hard they were about to twist. He emphasized again, word by word, “Don’t! Let! Him! Into! My! Room!”

Diana was a blonde girlfriend he had been dating recently. She had invited Chen Mo to their family’s weekly gatherings, but Chen Mo had always made excuses to decline.

Chen Mo didn’t like the noisy atmosphere of foreign family gatherings, and Diana grew up in a very loving family. She was the only daughter in the family, with two biological brothers, two biological uncles, and a male cousin. They all doted on Diana very much. He could see them liking and commenting on almost every one of Diana’s social media posts. If he was there, he would only become “Diana’s boyfriend” and be included in the doting on the little princess group, losing his independent subjectivity. Chen Mo didn’t like that.

But the most suitable place of refuge he could think of right now was Diana’s family’s villa—lively, centered around Diana, losing himself, his brain stopping thinking.

But when he stood outside Diana’s yard, he hesitated.

In the end, Chen Mo didn’t press the doorbell, nor did he send a message or call his blonde girlfriend.

He opened his address book and found the contact information of another female classmate, called her, and told her: You were right, Diana and her cousin are really weird. I originally wanted to attend their family gathering tonight, but her cousin looked at me in a bad way. I felt like I wasn’t welcome, so I didn’t go in. I left…

“I’m very sad right now, can you have a drink with me?”

The short brown-haired female classmate quickly arrived at the bar he had located. Chen Mo had already drunk a lot by then.

The short brown-haired female classmate took the drink handed over by the bartender, sat down next to him, and asked him if he had broken up with Diana. He squinted with a flushed face and said, “We broke up.” Then he hiccuped, as if he had sobered up a bit, and said, “Oh, not yet.”

So he took out his phone, lay on the table, and typed slowly, muttering as he typed, “I’m very sorry, Diana, let’s break up…”

The short brown-haired girl clearly saw him send the message. She was watching with her head close to his.

She stared at the extinguished screen in front of her and said, “Chen Mo, you seem to be too drunk. My apartment is nearby, do you want to come up and rest?”

Chen Mo nodded. She felt it.

Chen Mo went to the inviter’s apartment and also went to the inviter’s bed.

He poured out all his anger, depression, and resentment on the other person, thinking “Liang Jingren probably isn’t lying in my bed right now, is he,” and then fell into a deep sleep with drunkenness and arrogant ego.

The next day at noon, he woke up and climbed out of bed, seeing the short brown-haired girl in a camisole next to him scrolling through her phone.

Chen Mo asked her, “Do you want to date me?”

The short brown-haired girl turned her head, smiled somewhat reluctantly, and said, “Never mind, you don’t seem as gentle as I imagined.”

This was the first time Chen Mo had taken the initiative to propose a relationship since arriving in a foreign country, and it was also the first time he had been rejected.

As expected, Diana made the breakup situation public. Lucas probably saw it too and bombarded his chat window with questions about the reason, and also asked him where he slept last night, worried that he was sleeping on the streets.

Chen Mo only cared: “Did anyone go into my room last night?”

Lucas replied: “Don’t worry! I was watching, absolutely no one went in!”

Lucas added: “If you don’t believe me, come back and check for yourself, not a single hair has been touched inside!”

Chen Mo stared at the words “Don’t worry,” and his mood couldn’t be considered good.

Before his passport could be reissued, Liang Jingren seemed to be planning to continue staying at his and Lucas’s apartment. One of the reasons was that Liang Jingren thought the food Lucas made was too delicious, so he could eat it every day if he lived in their apartment.

After hearing this reason from Lucas on the phone, what Chen Mo thought in his heart was: I hope you cut your hand while chopping vegetables soon.

He couldn’t go back to the apartment, and Diana’s house and the place from last night were out of the question. Others… tsk, he didn’t want to be questioned and suspected.

Because his germophobia directly ruled out most of the cheap hotels, Chen Mo ultimately used his limited scholarship money to book himself a star-rated hotel.

In less than a week, Liang Jingren’s passport was reissued, surprisingly smoothly.

Lucas said bluntly, “This is the power of money, Chen Mo!”

Chen Mo held the phone away from his ear, pursed his lips, and said, “When does he plan to leave?”

“Are you going to see him off?”

“…Yeah.”

“That’s right, there’s no need for the relationship between father and son to become so strained. I think you can totally sit down and talk it out. Don’t wait until the airport, let me arrange another meeting for you…”

“He’s not my dad,” Chen Mo said.

Before Lucas could speak again, Chen Mo took a deep breath and said, “Don’t make a mess of things, it’s annoying. Until he goes to the airport to board the plane, I don’t want to see him.”

“I just want to see him get on the flight back home and fly away, far from my sight.”

Although he said that, on the day Liang Jingren was preparing to return to China, five and a half hours before Liang Jingren’s boarding time, Chen Mo returned to the shared apartment early and opened the lock as quietly as possible.

He thought to himself: Liang Jingren only seemed to have lost his travel bag, but his other luggage wasn’t lost. I don’t know how much stuff he brought… I should go back earlier to help pack all his things and load them into the car.

–I’m really softhearted.