Living Only For Myself: Make Those Who Hate Me Regret It-Chapter 73 - 72: Alone in One Room

Seeing that she was silent and looked displeased,

Zhou Mochen moved closer and softened his tone. "That was my fault just now. I only meant to hug you at first. I’m sorry."

The moment he leaned in, Xu Su shot up from the sofa. "Don’t get so close to me."

Zhou Mochen froze, staring at her expressionlessly.

Feeling awkward under his gaze, Xu Su turned her head away. "I... I should get home. I’ve been taking out the trash for too long. My parents will get suspicious."

Only now did she have a moment to look around Zhou Mochen’s new home.

The decor and furnishings were identical to his home in her past life. Even though it was in a factory’s staff dormitory, the apartment was exquisitely decorated.

The original three-bedroom layout had been converted into a two-bedroom, making the living room enormous. The heating was on full blast, and Xu Su was only now starting to feel warm.

Zhou Mochen was only wearing a sweatshirt, while she had on a short down jacket. No wonder she felt hot.

"Your parents have work tomorrow. Why don’t you come over to my place?"

Xu Su’s head snapped up. She met his blazing gaze and her lips twitched. ’Do I look like the kind of fool who would walk right into a tiger’s den?’

Zhou Mochen stood up. As if starved for physical contact, he pulled Xu Su’s hand into his, interlacing their fingers. His voice was gentle. "You can do your homework, and I’ll work. We won’t disturb each other, how about it? Just stay and keep me company. I promise I won’t do anything. Just having you here to look at is enough."

Xu Su couldn’t pull her hand free. "Is this what you call ’not doing anything’?" she snapped. "So holding hands counts as nothing in your book? Then I suppose you’d find it perfectly normal if I held hands with other boys? After all, we’d be ’not doing anything’."

A sharp pain shot through her fingers before he let go. Zhou Mochen’s voice followed. "Don’t make comparisons that I find infuriating."

’What a hypocrite!’

Even after she got home, Xu Su was still seething with indignation, mentally cursing Zhou Mochen for his hypocrisy.

The Xu Family had already eaten dinner at the ancestral home. After returning, they all washed up and went to their respective rooms to sleep.

Xu Yang now slept in his own room as well, so all three bedrooms in the apartment were occupied.

In her room, Xu Su was focused on her review materials.

Her phone sat on the corner of her desk, its screen lighting up from time to time. She didn’t need to look to know who was texting. Her eyes never wavered from her focused studying.

Later that night, when her hands and feet had grown cold, Xu Su finally decided to go to bed. She picked up her phone and saw four text messages from Zhou Mochen and one from Xi Zirong.

She was a little taken aback when she saw the message from him.

She had hung up on Xi Zirong on New Year’s Eve, and since then, he had only sent a generic group text with New Year’s greetings on the first day of the lunar new year, which Xu Su hadn’t bothered to reply to.

She had assumed Xi Zirong would have given up completely, so she was surprised to see another late-night text from him.

The message was sent at 9:40 PM: "Xu Su, are you asleep yet?"

Xu Su pursed her lips slightly, deleted the message, and didn’t reply.

As for Zhou Mochen’s messages?

She didn’t reply to those, either.

The next day, Chen Shulan and her husband left early for work. Xu Su took the rare opportunity to sleep in, not getting ready to get up until almost eight.

When she came out of her room, she saw she was the only one home. Xu Yang had also gone out to play with his friends.

Everyone in the building worked at the same factory, so most of their children knew each other. Ever since Xu Yang started elementary school, he could never stay put at home during breaks and was almost always out running around.

Xu Su leisurely brushed her teeth, washed her face, applied a layer of moisturizer, and tied up her hair, getting ready to make herself breakfast.

Just then, she heard a knock at the door.

’At this hour...’ Xu Su’s heart skipped a beat. She looked through the peephole and saw the man standing outside.

She quickly opened the door and hissed, "Zhou Mochen, have you lost your mind?"

Zhou Mochen stood outside, looking at her expressionlessly for a moment before lowering his head as if in surrender, his tone coaxing. "You didn’t answer my messages all night. I made sure your family had left before I came looking for you."

Xu Su was so furious she shot him a death glare, but she couldn’t just stand there talking to him in the doorway. What if a neighbor came downstairs?

Xu Su gave Zhou Mochen a shove, pulled her own door closed, and stepped into his apartment.

"Zhou Mochen, don’t you have anything better to do? Aren’t you supposed to be starting a business, making investments, building an empire? Why are you always getting bogged down in puppy love?"

Xu Su felt helpless. She couldn’t understand why he had come back from his New Year’s trip to Beijing acting like such a clingy pest.

’Can’t you be a little more mature like me?!’

Zhou Mochen sat on the sofa, his clothes giving him a vibrant, youthful look. "The thought of you being so close without me being able to see you makes it impossible for me to focus. Xu Su, have you had breakfast? Why don’t you study here today, okay?"

"..." Xu Su was silent for a moment. She was beginning to understand that this was just his true nature.

In her past life, when she had been oblivious to his feelings, he had at least tried to hide them. But in this life, perhaps because their interactions were so different, he wasn’t bothering with pretenses anymore, revealing his true, lovesick nature.

Zhou Mochen went downstairs and bought breakfast: the soy milk and fried dough sticks she liked, plus two tea-leaf eggs.

The heating in the apartment was cranked up, so Xu Su took off her jacket, leaving her in a loose-fitting sweater. Though she looked good in anything, Zhou Mochen frowned at the pilling on her sweater. "Susu, should I have some clothes sent over for you? Or would you rather go shopping? I can take you."

’How can he say things like that in such a casual tone?’

Xu Su shot him a look, rolled her sweater sleeves up to her elbows, and began to eat her breakfast in a slow, deliberate manner. She managed to spare a moment to reply, "Zhou Mochen, I told you to wait two years. If you keep pushing it, I’m going to get seriously angry."

Zhou Mochen’s smile faded slightly. He remembered her cold sarcasm and wary defensiveness when they first met. In comparison, the fact that she was now at least willing to eat the breakfast he bought for her was a huge step forward.

At that thought, Zhou Mochen told himself to take it slow and not rush things.

’One day, I’ll have her willingly wearing the clothes I buy for her.’

After breakfast, Xu Su went back to her apartment to grab a few books. She then unceremoniously took over the desk in Zhou Mochen’s study and started to review her material.

Meanwhile, the apartment’s owner, Zhou Mochen, was curled up by the coffee table in the study with a laptop open. He would swipe at the screen from time to time, busy with something unknown. Occasionally, he would turn his head to look at Xu Su, who was sitting primly at the desk, his eyes filled with affection.

But Zhou Mochen wasn’t one to inconvenience himself. Less than half an hour later, a few workers arrived and brought in another desk.

They placed the two desks together, and Zhou Mochen sat opposite Xu Su. One studied while the other worked, and they could both look up from time to time to see the person across from them.

In the middle of it all, Zhou Mochen received two work calls. He stepped out of the room to take them so he wouldn’t disturb Xu Su’s studies.

After his calls, he walked over to Xu Su’s side and looked at her homework, intending to offer some guidance. He ended up discovering that the girl’s schoolwork was actually quite good—all her answers and her methods for solving the problems were correct.

The two of them stayed there, alone in the room, until eleven o’clock. Only then, with Chen Shulan about to come home from work, did Xu Su have an excuse to return to her own apartment.