Chapter 21: Being Loved by All Comes with a Price
Liang Bo went around to the back of the counter and whispered to Shou Jiaxun, “Did the police call you today?”
Shou Jiaxun shook his head while putting on a sanitary mask. “No, maybe tomorrow or the day after…”
At this time, Liang Bo’s classmates also gathered around. One of them took out his phone and suggested, “Let me leave you my number. When the police find you, we’ll go support you.”
“Thank you… thanks a lot, really appreciate it. You guys are so nice,” Shou Jiaxun thanked them repeatedly, but since he was opening a durian, it wasn’t convenient to take out his phone to record the number.
The strange young boy smiled brightly and suggested diligently, “Just say your number, I’ll dial it for you.”
“Oh, oh, okay.”
President Shou lacked energy today. He was either talking nonsense or reacting a beat too slow. When asked for his number, he obediently reported it, completely failing to notice that the high school students beside him were not memorizing it, but silently taking out their phones.
Only Liang Bo took out not a phone, but a stack of pink hundred-yuan bills from his pocket.
The young hero Liang rolled the bills up and secretly stuffed them into Shou Jiaxun’s apron pocket.
Shou Jiaxun struggled to keep a smile on his face while opening durians and filling fruit cups, exchanging pleasantries with the courageous high school students. His eyes occasionally darted toward Uncle Guo.
While Liang Bo made an excuse to help move the durians, he avoided his classmates and whispered to Shou Jiaxun, “Is your uncle okay?”
“Good, quite good.” Shou Jiaxun’s smile was rather strained.
The bad thing had already happened. After wailing and crying, what else could they say besides “quite good”?
Uncle Guo was not only robbed of his virtue by an intruder but was also secondarily marked, his whole body in pain all night.
He went to the hospital this morning for a few shots of emergency gland blockers and was already considering gland removal surgery.
The reason he hadn’t done it yet was that the surgery required half a month of bed rest, and they simply didn’t have time to rest right now.
There was no reason to tell outsiders these things. Since Uncle Guo chose silence, Shou Jiaxun could only accompany him in pretending nothing had happened.
So he whispered to Liang Bo, “Don’t tell anyone about my uncle.”
Liang Bo nodded but couldn’t help asking one more question, “Does his husband know? It’s not good to hide this kind of thing from family.”
“He doesn’t have a husband. ‘Duoyu’ is his son,” Shou Jiaxun mumbled.
Liang Bo’s face fell, and he pursed his lips in silence.
After moving a few more durians onto the counter, he turned back with a smile and begged Shou Jiaxun, “Lend me your gloves and let me open the durians. I love breaking these open, it’s super stress-relieving.”
“Excellent hobby,” Shou Jiaxun teased.
He had smashed the floor tiles with his fists last night. The tiles were fine, but the knuckles and skin on his fists were broken.
President Shou had put band-aids on the wounds earlier, but the rubber gloves made his hands sweat. Taking them off now, the band-aids all came loose.
He handed the gloves to Liang Bo and immediately bent down to find new band-aids to reapply.
Liang Bo glanced at Shou Jiaxun’s hand, seeing the broken skin and redness on the back of his hand, and couldn’t help muttering a reminder, “Hey, don’t get water on broken skin.”
Shou Jiaxun appeared busy on the surface but was actually distracted, completely missing Student Liang’s concerned words.
Liang Bo was tall and strong. Ordinary people needed a knife to pry open a durian without cracks, but he just broke them open with his hands.
Seeing this, his classmates clamored to try. In less than five minutes, all ten of Shou Jiaxun’s durians were cracked open.
If they didn’t open them, the leftovers could have been sold for two more days.
Now, he had to give them away.
Shou Jiaxun hurriedly turned back into the shop to find large fruit boxes, saying, “I’ll pack them up for you. Take them back to share with classmates or bring them home later.”
The young and innocent kids felt they had only “done a small favor” for Shou Jiaxun. They all smiled awkwardly and declined, saying, “No need, you keep them to sell! These things are quite expensive; we’ll just have one piece each.”
Shou Jiaxun didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, thinking, You guys know it’s expensive, too? Knowing we can’t eat it all, you still messed them up for me.
Ten premium large Golden Pillow durians… wholesale price was over two thousand yuan. Shou Jiaxun and his uncle’s stall tonight almost became a genuine gratitude banquet.
The “almost” was because of the roll of bills Liang Bo had secretly stuffed into his pocket.
He eventually coaxed the high school students into taking the durians away with gentle words.
Because high-value goods couldn’t be sold cheaply easily; if sold low once, no one would buy at the normal price later.
Secondly, they had opened too much flesh at once. They definitely couldn’t finish selling it tonight. Even if stored in the freezer, it would inevitably become “watery” tomorrow, and poor-looking fruit would lower the overall image of their fruit counter.
So the best outcome was to dispose of them quickly and pretend they never existed.
It wasn’t until Shou Jiaxun closed the stall and changed clothes in the middle of the night that he discovered the extra stack of money in his apron pocket. Counting it, it was exactly two thousand yuan.
He held it up for Uncle Guo to see.
Uncle Guo chuckled lightly. “Oh? Who gave it to you?”
Shou Jiaxun pouted. “Don’t know. I guess it was Liang Bo.”
While the two made do washing up in the shop’s small restroom, Uncle Guo pressed, “How do you know it was him?”
Shou Jiaxun shrugged. “I only know his name, can’t guess anyone else.”
“These kids, haha.” Uncle Guo shook his head with an embarrassed smile, but the smile vanished in an instant. “Thanks to them last night. Sigh…”
They set up two folding camp beds side by side between the shelves in the store, then turned off the lights and checked their phones, casually scrolling through the messages from that night.
President Shou’s phone had over a dozen messages from strangers. Some asked: “Are you done?” / “Resting yet?” / “Closing up?” / “Tired?”
Some asked: “How old are you?” / “Why did you drop out?” / “Do you have a boyfriend?”
And: “Can I come see you tomorrow?” / “Our school is very close, come play when you have time?”
President Shou replied uniformly: “Sorry, I have a boyfriend.”
Most of the students instantly went silent.
Only two persisted. One asked: “Really? You’re lying to me, right?”
The other said: “He doesn’t even care about you. Fail. Change him.”
Shou Jiaxun turned off his phone and stuffed it under the pillow, sighing emotionally to Uncle Guo beside him, “Turns out ‘luck’ isn’t about not meeting bad guys. Being ‘loved by all’ comes with a price.”
Uncle Guo asked, “What are you talking about?”
“Nothing.” President Shou sighed tearfully. “Uncle, is Duoyu’s biological father dead?”
“Dead,” Uncle Guo said. “Anyway, I consider him dead.”
Shou Jiaxun clicked his tongue and complained, “He got off easy. You should have sued him for non-marital marking back then, let him rot in jail for two years before letting him die.”
Uncle Guo sighed. “Back then… he hadn’t completely died in my heart.”
After saying this, there was a long silence. Shou Jiaxun didn’t press further. Just when he thought Uncle Guo had fallen asleep, Uncle Guo suddenly whispered, “I was about your age back then, just admitted to Southwest Jiaotong University as a freshman.
He was the youngest Alpha professor in our college, only in his early thirties. They said he was a Grade 4 Full Professor right upon entry.
Young, handsome, and brilliantly talented. Many Omegas actively pursued him, both men and women.
I was one of them.
He seemed hard to chase back then, rigorous in scholarship, unsmiling, never discussing anything outside of academics with students.
When someone teased him jokingly, he would mute them instantly.
So my classmates nicknamed him the ‘Petermann Elf.’ Petermann is a big glacier in the Arctic, you know?”
“Never been there, don’t know,” Shou Jiaxun said, turning over, the camp bed creaking. “You still liked him even though he was so ‘cold’?”
Uncle Guo continued, “Actually, I didn’t expect him to like me. My grades were average, looks… also average.
Looking back now, my mindset then was more like following a trend, chasing fashion. Seeing others do it seemed interesting, so I joined in the commotion.
So when he suddenly asked to see me alone, I was scared to death, thinking he was going to fail me.”
Shou Jiaxun asked, “You guys didn’t know he was already married back then, right?”
Uncle Guo sighed. “What’s the rush? I haven’t gotten to that part yet. When I was pregnant with Guo Duoyu, his dog father hadn’t married yet.”
President Shou strained to distinguish Uncle Guo’s outline in the dark, lamenting sincerely, “Uncle, I think you’re quite good-looking, really, much better looking than Guo Duoyu.
Guo Duoyu definitely takes after his dog father, grew a bit crooked.”
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