Chapter 105 – Holding Back Bad Intentions
Qin Feichen’s sense of danger had been sharpened in the military. Hearing Yan Shengping’s blunt words, he immediately shook his head. How would he dare!
To prevent Brother Yan from pursuing the matter further, Qin Feichen quickly changed the subject, once again chatting with Yan Shengping about work. However, Yan Shengping had no interest in returning to his role as a teacher. After a few cursory answers, he gave Qin Feichen a look that said, “figure it out yourself.” And so, Qin Feichen, who absolutely hated studying, was ordered to memorize the book in his hands until he knew it by heart, as Yan Shengping would be giving him a pop quiz at any time.
“Brother, what’s wrong with you? Are you about to cry?” Qin Taotao, who had been having a great time chatting with Lin Ganzhi downstairs, asked quizzically when she saw Qin Feichen come down.
Wanting to save some face in front of his sister, Qin Feichen coughed. “This is adult business, kids should stay out of it! Do I look like the type to cry?”
Lin Ganzhi looked up with a knowing glance, first at Qin Feichen’s on-the-verge-of-tears-but-trying-to-act-tough expression, then at Yan Shengping’s slightly narrowed eyes. He looked like some kind of high-level creature wagging its tail after a victory, lazy and noble, just missing a glass of red wine to wet his throat.
That expression clearly meant he had bullied Qin Feichen!
The moment Yan Shengping lowered his gaze, he looked at Lin Ganzhi. Unlike his gaze towards Qin Feichen, when Yan Shengping looked at him, the pretense and coldness in his eyes dissipated, leaving only a spring breeze. The curve of his lips was even wider than before.
Lin Ganzhi paused. His desire to scold Yan Shengping vanished completely. A great beauty leading people to sin was no lie!
As noon approached, Qin Taotao enthusiastically followed Lin Ganzhi to the kitchen to prepare lunch. Qin Feichen quickly sat down next to Yan Shengping again. His on-the-verge-of-tears expression was gone, replaced by the look of someone seeing their own dear brother. Yan Shengping closed his tablet, his back ramrod straight, and his eyes swept over Qin Feichen’s smiling face. “Spit it out.”
“Brother Yan, it’s the New Year. Aren’t you going to bring out a good bottle of wine to celebrate?” Qin Feichen asked, his face full of expectation.
Before his stomach problems became severe, Yan Shengping drank more wine than water. He had to drink at almost every social event and had a habit of collecting fine wines. When he was the head of Zhong’s Chips, many wineries had rushed to send him wine. The collection he had amassed was almost enough to buy a separate villa for, and in fact, Yan Shengping did eventually buy a thousand-square-meter underground wine cellar to store his wines. Not many people knew about this, but Qin Feichen was one of them.
“Weren’t you really wanting that bottle of my Romanée-Conti before?” Yan Shengping asked.
Qin Feichen’s eyes sharpened several degrees, and he even looked a little suspicious. “Brother Yan, are… are you serious?” Before, he wouldn’t even let him look at it.
Yan Shengping’s face showed no sign of pain. “You know where my wine cellar is, right? I’ll let the manager there know. You can go get it whenever you want. Apart from a few bottles in Section A, you can pick any other three from the back.”
Qin Feichen had never seen Yan Shengping be so generous with his wine. When he had just turned eighteen, he had asked to drink a bottle from Yan Shengping’s cellar and had only gotten a bottle from Section B, and that was after begging for a long time. What was with this domineering CEO move now? Could it be, Brother Yan, he…?
“If you keep letting your imagination run wild, there will be no Romanée-Conti,” Yan Shengping said, shattering Qin Feichen’s fantasy with a single glance.
Qin Feichen smiled and quickly replied, “Brother Yan, do I look like the type of person who likes to think?”
Yan Shengping withdrew his gaze. It was precisely because he didn’t like to think that he was willing to give it to him. As a thank you for the information about the pen. But the reason for this thank you was something Qin Feichen would never need to know in his lifetime.
The Qin family was a large clan. For the siblings to sneak out for lunch on New Year’s Eve was already pushing the limits of tolerance. After the meal, Qin Feichen and Qin Taotao’s phones buzzed nonstop. In the end, the two had no choice but to say goodbye to the couple at two o’clock and leave.
In the afternoon, the family of three began to prepare for the New Year’s Eve dinner. This time, Lin Ganzhi’s idea was to keep everything simple. Instead of following the old traditional New Year’s Eve dishes, they might as well make what they liked to eat. Uncle Yan liked rich, savory flavors; Yan Shengping preferred lighter tastes, mainly soups; and Lin Ganzhi couldn’t live without spice. They would each make two dishes they liked, and then they would make dumplings together.
The hands that Yan Shengping used to type on a keyboard and twirl a pen were not so nimble when it came to making dumplings. After continuously messing up the fifth dumpling, even Lin Ganzhi, who was teaching him, fell into deep thought, the same sentence echoing in his mind: This shouldn’t be happening!
Under such a gaze, Yan Shengping also fell silent for a moment. He had memorized it after watching once, but when he tried it himself, it just didn’t seem to work out…
“Forget it, you should go chop the filling,” Lin Ganzhi said after ten seconds of consideration, choosing to give up on Yan Shengping’s behalf. He then placed a thick stack of dumpling wrappers in front of himself and quickly and nimbly wrapped a plump dumpling.
From Yan Shengping’s perspective, he could see the fair nape of Lin Ganzhi’s neck as he lowered his head. The pink ends of his hair curled at the bottom, and the super-powered central air conditioning had even made the tips of his hair a little damp. His practiced movements made Yan Shengping’s heart ache a little. A voice in his mind asked at that moment: My body is almost healed, do I still need to tire my wife out by having him cook for me?
“I’ll try again. I haven’t done this before. Could Ganzhi please take the trouble to teach me again?” Yan Shengping took back half of the dumpling wrappers Lin Ganzhi had taken and placed them in front of himself, asking for instruction very humbly.
Lin Ganzhi’s heart trembled violently, completely affected by Yan Shengping’s words. He stopped what he was doing and asked, uncomprehending, “Why do you have to learn this?” Yan Shengping was amazing even if he couldn’t make dumplings.
“You’ve cooked for me for so long. I want to be able to cook for you in the future,” Yan Shengping said seriously. When facing Lin Ganzhi, he gradually forgot how to speak in roundabout ways and would subconsciously express what he wanted to say.
Lin Ganzhi’s first reaction was to look at Uncle Yan opposite him. Uncle Yan was diligently rolling out dumpling wrappers with his head down, pretending not to have heard the couple’s public display of affection.
But even so, Lin Ganzhi’s face couldn’t help but turn red. Flirting even while making dumplings was a total foul!
“What about the ruined dumplings?” Lin Ganzhi was inherently unwilling to waste food.
“I’ll eat them,” Yan Shengping replied in a second.
Successfully placated, Lin Ganzhi once again patiently taught Yan Shengping how to make dumplings. Perhaps with the added effort buff, Yan Shengping was even more serious than before. As a dual-degree master, if nothing else, his learning ability was still there. The thought of being able to make some simple food for Lin Ganzhi in the future gave him a different kind of motivation. In one afternoon, by the latter half, Yan Shengping was already able to make a dumpling shape on his own without Lin Ganzhi’s hand-over-hand instruction. Although it couldn’t compare to Lin Ganzhi’s, at least it wouldn’t fall apart when thrown into the pot.
Seeing this, Lin Ganzhi, as the teacher, showed a gratified smile.
After the New Year’s Eve dinner, the promised performance was brought to the family stage.
“By the way, sir knows how to play the violin. Why don’t you and Ganzhi perform together, sir? I’ll record it for you as a memento.” As the elder who had watched Yan Shengping grow up, Uncle Yan thought his violin skills were particularly impressive!
Yan Shengping also played the violin? Lin Ganzhi looked up at him in surprise.
Yan Shengping reached out and gently pinched Lin Ganzhi’s cheek, then turned to say, “Uncle Yan, it’s been so many years.”
“It hasn’t been that many years. It was when you were in your second year of high school. You performed with a classmate at the school festival. At that time, many parents came to ask me about you. I still have the photo of you and that dancing classmate. I think you performed The Butterfly Lovers. Your classmate at the time played both roles, which was also quite impressive.” Uncle Yan still had a deep impression of that child.
But Lin Ganzhi was a little dazed as he listened. Yan Shengping’s past—those were details that even the novel wouldn’t describe. After all, in the book, Yan Shengping was just a minor villain brought out as an accelerator when the protagonist needed to advance the plot. Thinking of this, Lin Ganzhi felt a little regretful, as if the Yan Shengping he saw wasn’t the whole of him. So Yan Shengping also played the violin. Before this, he had never seen any sign of a violin.
“Does Ganzhi want to hear it?” Uncle Yan coaxed.
Called upon, Lin Ganzhi first paused for a moment, then looked at Yan Shengping, his eyes filled with a little more expectation, as if to say, Can you?
Yan Shengping, who was about to refuse: …
“I haven’t touched it in so long, I might be rusty,” Yan Shengping said, laying the groundwork.
Lin Ganzhi shook his head, not minding at all.
“Sir, your violin. I saved it before we moved out. Otherwise, it probably would have been thrown away by them.” Uncle Yan produced a dark green violin case from somewhere.
The surface of the case was very clean, showing that Uncle Yan had taken great care of it, but the case itself looked a bit old, as if it had seen some years.
Yan Shengping reached out and touched the case, his middle and little fingers tracing the curve down to the zipper. With a creak, the violin, sealed away for nearly a decade, saw the light of day again. What Lin Ganzhi saw was a light brown violin.
Yan Shengping took the violin out of the case. His cool temperament paired with the violin, and even though he wasn’t deliberately doing anything, a naturally elegant aura immediately emerged. Before playing the piece, he first simply tuned a few notes, then, under the expectant gazes of one old and one young, he stood in the empty space of the living room.
He hadn’t been made to perform in front of relatives like this for over a decade. And this was directly in front of his partner.
“Yan Shengping, can I record this?” Lin Ganzhi asked with an expectant face.
Yan Shengping raised an eyebrow slightly. He was getting bolder and bolder with his requests from being spoiled. However…
“Yes.”
Making requests of him so freely—this was something Yan Shengping didn’t dislike. In fact, he wanted to indulge him.
Yan Shengping raised his bow, and a gentle, lingering sustained note flowed out like a stream. It was unexpectedly gentle and drawn-out, completely different from the kind of music Lin Ganzhi had imagined Yan Shengping would play. Moreover, this piece was Salut d’Amour, a song that could be heard in any restaurant or at any wedding.
A violin piece that expressed love.
Lin Ganzhi had been indifferent to this piece before, but the moment Yan Shengping played it in front of him today, his impression of the song seemed to change.
The Yan Shengping playing the piece had shed his usual sharpness. His tall, straight figure stood there, his movements changing with the music, like a taut string. His long, slender fingers moved nimbly on the fingerboard. But more than the piece itself, Lin Ganzhi seemed to be able to feel the love Yan Shengping was trying to express.
When the piece ended, Lin Ganzhi had even forgotten that he was still recording. The latter half of the video didn’t even show Yan Shengping’s face.
After finishing, Yan Shengping refused to play a second piece no matter what. He put the violin back in its case and walked towards Lin Ganzhi. He ignored everyone else and pulled Lin Ganzhi into his arms, whispering softly in his ear, “Darling, Happy New Year.”
At this moment, Lin Ganzhi couldn’t be bothered with shyness. He hugged Yan Shengping back tightly, his heart trembling violently at Yan Shengping’s word, “darling.”
Happy New Year, Yan Shengping.