The bar had been converted from a former village small house, nestled among intertwining green trees. If the layout remained unchanged, the women’s restroom should have been converted from the previous bathroom, with low and narrow windows that could barely allow a person to pass through. Outside connected to a lush, dense grove, and below was a fetid river emitting a rotting stench.
Ye Meng asked: “What’s your solution? Cheng Kairan’s underlings have blocked the front and back doors of the bar and the parking lot. A bar this small can’t even hide an ant. Can you get me out?”
“Guess.”
Li Jinyu was very tall, with half his waist exposed outside the window. Standing this close for the first time, Ye Meng could more clearly see the “kiss mark” on his Adam’s apple, which was almost certainly a scar. It was slightly thinner than the skin around it, slightly concave, with a light reddish color. It wasn’t very noticeable, but because his skin was so fair, it stood out.
Ye Meng looked at him coldly, her expression disdainful: “You think I don’t have my way out? Do I have to beg Big Brother for help?”
Li Jinyu had been quite indifferent when he heard the first half of her statement and was about to turn and leave.
But at the second half, he slowly stopped, lowered his head with a smile, then returned to the window and said to her: “Move aside.”
The arguing outside grew increasingly intense, like a pressure valve frantically releasing steam before a pressure cooker explodes. The tense atmosphere seemed to rise to the highest temperature along with the rapidly spinning valve.
“Mr. Cheng, you really can’t go in. This is the ladies’ room, and there’s a female customer inside. Can’t you just wait at the door for her to come out?” The waiter was truly dedicated, still persuading calmly.
Cheng Kairan was still furious: “What if she escapes through the back window?!”
The waiter seemed battle-hardened with such scenes, extremely patient and confident as he said: “There’s a smelly river behind the restroom; even ants hold their noses when crossing it. Besides, to prevent customers from leaving without paying, we’ve specifically added an electric fence to the windows, so you don’t need to worry about her escaping. She’s still inside.”
Cheng Kairan pondered silently for a moment, then delivered his ultimatum: “Fine, I’ll give you five more minutes.”
Ye Meng wasn’t one to easily submit. The reason she “knelt” so readily to Li Jinyu was entirely because she had just seen how professionally he put on his gloves. With such complete equipment, he was very familiar with this place.
Li Jinyu grabbed the window ledge with both hands, pushed hard, and effortlessly flipped himself onto the window. Then, with nimble hands and feet, he slipped sideways through the window into the bathroom. The entire sequence of movements was fluid, clearly demonstrating years of rich criminal experience. Indeed, he hadn’t been electrocuted.
Ye Meng suddenly felt reassured: “Are your gloves insulated?”
Li Jinyu jumped down from the window, his feet just steadily landing, not yet fully standing up, with a suspicious expression: “What insulation?”
Ye Meng leaned against the wall, pointing at his black gloves, “The waiter said there’s an electric fence here.”
“Private electric fences are illegal.” Li Jinyu had removed his gloves at some point, casually tossing them aside, and suddenly began inexplicably unbuttoning his shirt.
Ye Meng’s expression froze, and she involuntarily stepped back.
Li Jinyu looked down at her. He must have been born with passionate eyes, for even now when his gaze was as cold as dead water, it still seemed affectionate. As he unbuttoned, he said to her: “The waiters here are very good at improvising. To avoid offending any customer, they’ll tell whatever lies are needed to make you comply. If all their lies could generate electricity, the Earth probably wouldn’t have power outages for fifty years.”
“Then why are you wearing gloves?” Ye Meng’s gaze slowly followed the movement of his hands.
Li Jinyu calmly unbuttoned his shirt to the fourth button: “I just find the window dirty. Not everyone climbs through windows every day.”
Ye Meng: “…”
Outside the door, Cheng Kairan began frantically knocking again, bang-bang-bang.
“Don’t say I didn’t give you face. Three minutes left. When time’s up, I’m breaking down the door!” Cheng Kairan’s patience was exhausted.
Li Jinyu pushed Ye Meng into the stall. “Go in, take off your clothes throw them out, and lock the door.”
Three minutes later, “Bang!” A tremendous noise as the small wooden door of the bathroom collapsed to the ground with a heavy thud. Dust rose everywhere, gray mist swirling and diffusing, everyone unexpectedly entering the field of vision.
Ye Meng hugged a package of clothes that Li Jinyu had thrown in at the last minute, pressing tightly against the stall door, her expression still calm as she listened to every movement outside.
However, everyone outside was somewhat stunned.
Li Jinyu was leaning against the sink, with the mirror behind him reflecting his clean-cut back of the head. His black shirt was messily unbuttoned to his chest, revealing a tantalizing expanse of skin that was even slightly heaving. He was truly very fair, the skin underneath even whiter than his neck. His shirt was half-tucked, half-untucked, loosely hanging at his waist. Combined with that handsome face that seemed to care about nothing, the ladies outside truly feasted their eyes. Their faces reddened, but their eyes remained greedy.
In this state, the old Li Jinyu might have thought, ah, I’m dirty. But now, he was composed enough to lean against the sink, lighting a cigarette he hadn’t smoked in a long time, listlessly and casually blowing smoke rings.
Cheng Kairan impatiently pushed aside the waiter blocking him—who was so dedicated one might want to pay him a monthly salary of 100,000—with a very surprised expression: “Why are you here?! I saw a woman come in here just now.”
“She’s inside getting dressed,” Li Jinyu said, tilting his head to tap off some ash.
The bar guys’ small eyes bulged rounder than grapes, now resembling a pile of thousand-year-old fossils, competing for antiquity, motionless. Mainly because Brother Yu had just broken up with his girlfriend, and now he was having a quickie in the bathroom? And the key point was that Li Jinyu didn’t seem like the type to have quickies with people in his daily life.
Did he not seem like it? Some questioned themselves.
Li Jinyu always seemed quite carefree in his daily life. Although he appeared cold and indifferent, he never rejected most girls who approached him. You couldn’t call him a jerk, but he seemed to use his good looks as a weapon, being nice to everyone yet indifferent to all. Simply put, he was a person without rules, doing things entirely based on his mood, very casual. Putting it that way, if it were a moment of passion, difficult to part, it wouldn’t be impossible.
Cheng Kairan didn’t think that much; instead, he felt this version of Li Jinyu was a normal man. His eyes pointed toward the stall door: “Girlfriend?”
Li Jinyu’s expression was very relaxed as he took a drag on his cigarette and said: “Not really.”
The bathroom had only one stall; the rest was visible at a glance, except for some mops carelessly thrown on the floor—no place to hide anyone. Cheng Kairan still couldn’t believe it, searching around like a headless fly, even carefully examining outside the window, but not finding a single ghost.
“There’s no one else here besides you two?” Cheng Kairan found it hard to believe.
Li Jinyu smiled: “Do you think I have a habit of letting people watch?”
“I’ve been knocking at the door outside for so long, and you didn’t hear?”
Li Jinyu was speechless: “I was going to ask you what happened. Why did you burst in with a group of people? I…” With one hand holding his cigarette and the other on his waist, he exhaled a long, helpless sigh—truly Oscar-worthy.
Cheng Kairan showed understanding but persisted: “Then let this woman come out so I can take a look. I want to confirm if she’s someone I used to know.”
Li Jinyu extinguished his cigarette, put both hands in his pockets, got up from the sink, and walked to the stall door, standing face-to-face with Cheng Kairan. His black shirt hung loosely, and this lazy appearance just after finishing the deed truly made the ladies at the door envious. He said with a straight face: “Brother Kai, with so many people watching, the town is so small. I’m thick-skinned enough to let you see, but for a young lady, how bad would it sound if word got out?”
The way Li Jinyu called him “Brother Kai” left Cheng Kairan speechless, especially since he was a year younger than Li Jinyu. So Cheng Kairan casually waved his hand, signaling his underlings to silently close the door. Now only the two of them remained inside, nose to nose. Li Jinyu was slightly taller, and with his playboy demeanor, he looked more like a hooligan than Cheng Kairan.
“Just me, one look,” Cheng Kairan was quite polite to him. “If she’s embarrassed, let her cover her face. I just need to see her clothes.”
Li Jinyu looked somewhat impatient but still said blandly: “Then wait until she’s dressed.”
Seeing him relent, Cheng Kairan’s expression also softened: “What’s her name?”
“Cuihua? Guifen? Don’t know, never asked.”