After Becoming the Love-Brained Female Lead’s Best Friend - Chapter 14

The cinema was on the seventh floor of Sangyuan, sharing the floor with a KTV. The cinema had four screening halls, and none of them were very big, so almost every hall was packed.

Fang Shu told Ye Wanyin to buy popcorn and Coke, while she went to the self-service ticket machine nearby to pick up the tickets.

Fang Shu’s seat was in the very middle of the fifth row, the spot with the best view in the entire screening hall. Ye Wanyin had bought her ticket late, so she could only sit in the middle of the very last row.

Aside from her, there were only a few children in that row, as well as two couples sitting at the very edge.

The movie began. In the light reflected from the screen, one could faintly see the dark backs of people’s heads in the front rows. Ye Wanyin remembered Fang Shu’s seat and counted until she found the back of Fang Shu’s head. Then she began watching the movie seriously.

The newly released movie was a youth romance film. The stills looked very sweet: the male lead had his arm around the female lead’s waist as they looked sweetly at the camera.

If Ye Wanyin had not read the synopsis beforehand, she would have thought it was a sweet romance movie. In reality, however, it was a youth melodrama full of emotional pain.

At the start of the plot, the male and female leads were childhood sweethearts who went to and from school together. Amid the increasingly tense atmosphere of studying, an ambiguous relationship grew between them. They were just about to get together when the turning point came: the female lead’s father got into a car accident. In order to take care of her father, the female lead secretly dropped out of school, and the male lead did not know.

The male lead went to question the female lead, but she refused to explain anything. In the end, the two parted ways…

By the time the plot reached this point, faint sobbing could already be heard around her. Ye Wanyin vaguely saw someone in front stand up and leave. Looking at the person’s back, it seemed a little like Fang Shu. Ye Wanyin counted the seats in the fifth row from left to right and confirmed it. It was Fang Shu.

At first, Ye Wanyin did not move, thinking Fang Shu had gone to the bathroom.

But when Fang Shu did not come back for a long time, Ye Wanyin finally stood up in slight panic. As she walked, she apologized to the people beside her, and finally left the screening hall.

Standing at the entrance of the hall, Ye Wanyin sent Fang Shu a message asking where she was.

Fang Shu replied quite quickly, “Outside the arcade on the fifth floor.”

Ye Wanyin put away her phone, handed her ticket to the staff, and went out.

There were many entrances to the arcade on the fifth floor. Ye Wanyin did not know which arcade entrance Fang Shu was outside, so she could only search round after round. When she found her, she discovered that Fang Shu was sitting on a swivel chair beside a claw machine, trying to catch a plush toy. Beneath the claw inside the machine was a rabbit plush. Just as it looked like it was about to be caught, the claw loosened in the next second, and the toy fell beside the prize chute.

Fang Shu seemed to have expected this already. Calmly, she inserted another coin into the claw machine. This time, the claw wobbled as it grabbed the rabbit plush lying by the prize chute and finally managed to pull it out without mishap.

Only then did Ye Wanyin walk forward. When Fang Shu saw her, she stepped on the floor with the tip of her foot and spun around once, turning to face Ye Wanyin.

“Why did you come out so quickly?”

“I saw that you weren’t there,” Ye Wanyin asked. “You don’t like watching this movie?”

“I don’t like it. The plot is too melodramatic.” Fang Shu answered without hesitation.

“You mean the part where the male lead misunderstood the female lead?”

Fang Shu nodded. “It’s just one explanation, but the female lead insists on holding it in and saying nothing. She just has to wait until so many years later before miserably saying she had her reasons. Even more ridiculous is that the male lead is actually still waiting for her. For a plot like this, I’d rather they each form new families years later and cleanly go their separate ways.”

Fang Shu spoke endlessly. “That’s why I don’t like melodramatic stories. Everyone can clearly just date properly and be together properly, but they insist on creating misunderstandings. In the blink of an eye, years pass, and all that wonderful youth is wasted.”

Ye Wanyin uncertainly picked up the thread. “Maybe… that’s love?”

Fang Shu was utterly disdainful. “Then this love is truly uncomfortable.”

Just then, a child came over holding two cups of milk tea and called Fang Shu “sister” in a clear voice. Then he handed one cup of milk tea to Fang Shu.

“Your cheese grape.”

Fang Shu took it and said goodbye to the child. Then she said to Ye Wanyin, “There isn’t a share for you.”

“If you’d come out a little later, maybe I would’ve ordered one for you.” Fang Shu poked in the straw and took a sip. “What a pity. Now you can only watch me drink.”

Ye Wanyin had not expected Fang Shu to still be thinking of her and could not help saying, moved, “Thank you.”

Fang Shu indicated that she did not deserve it. “I didn’t even order one. Why are you thanking me?”

The child from earlier had originally been drinking milk tea nearby. Probably because he heard their conversation, he quickly finished the cup in his hand, threw it into the trash can, and ran over again, calling sweetly, “Sisters, do you still want milk tea? I can run errands for you again.”

Ye Wanyin was just about to say there was no need, but Fang Shu had already taken out a fifty-yuan bill from the small bag at her waist and handed it to him.

“Just order any cup. We’ll wait here.”

Seeing that the child had already run far away, Ye Wanyin swallowed the words at the tip of her tongue and instead asked Fang Shu, “You know him?”

Fang Shu spun the swivel chair. “I do. His name is Wang Hu. His parents often shop at Sangyuan, and when they do, they leave him in the arcade. Every time he uses up his game tokens, he runs out to play. Because I come here often, he also often watches me catch dolls from the side.”

Ye Wanyin asked, “Won’t he get lost?”

Fang Shu said, “Don’t worry. He might be even more familiar with this area than you are.”

Fang Shu finished sipping one cup of milk tea. The milk tea shop downstairs was probably crowded, because the child did not come back for quite a while. So Fang Shu went into the arcade and exchanged for a handful of game tokens. She gave half to Ye Wanyin.

“Want to try?”

Ye Wanyin had gone to arcades before, but she rarely played anything herself. Usually, after her parents exchanged tokens, they would give one handful to her and one to her younger brother. Then her brother would quickly spend all his tokens, while she would always end up not knowing what to play, so she would simply give all her tokens to him.

Later, she got used to bringing her phone whenever she went out, making it convenient to memorize vocabulary when she had nothing to do in the arcade.

Speaking of which, this was Ye Wanyin’s first time trying this thing. She inserted a token, then carefully controlled the joystick. She aimed at one on the outermost layer that looked easier to grab, then released—

Very good. She caught nothing.

Fang Shu shook her head from the side.

Refusing to believe it, Ye Wanyin tried again. Still nothing.

By the time Ye Wanyin had spent nearly half the tokens in her hand, aside from the doll at the very edge seeming to have moved just a tiny bit from where it had started, nothing else had changed.

“Huff, huff… Sisters, your milk tea!”

The errand-running Wang Hu had returned. He was carrying three cups of milk tea. He handed one to Ye Wanyin, hugged one of the remaining two, and poked open the other to drink.

Seeing that both of them were at the claw machines, he could not help watching from the side. After Ye Wanyin had spent all her tokens, Fang Shu glanced at the time and said to Ye Wanyin, “It’s seven. Want to go eat?”

Ye Wanyin glanced at the game tokens in Fang Shu’s hand, which had hardly been touched. She watched as Fang Shu gave all of them to Wang Hu.

“Have fun. We’re leaving first.”

The more famous restaurants inside Sangyuan were all full, so the two of them walked outside Sangyuan Plaza. From the west campus to the east campus, there was a food street in between, and when night came, there were especially many street vendors.

Fang Shu ordered quite a few skewers from one stall before pulling Ye Wanyin to a restaurant across from their residential compound.

While waiting for the dishes to be served, Fang Shu even shared some of her skewers with Ye Wanyin. Unfortunately, Ye Wanyin did not eat them, so in the end, Fang Shu finished them all by herself.

At nine in the evening, bright lights shone all around the plaza. Only when they reached the inside of the residential compound did the light gradually dim.

After dinner, Fang Shu did not speak much the whole way back. It was only when the two of them arrived downstairs at their residence that Fang Shu suddenly stopped Ye Wanyin.

“I’ve thought it through.”

“Ye Wanyin, want to date?”

Ye Wanyin froze for a moment, not even reacting to what “date?” meant. By the time she did react, Fang Shu was already about to turn around and leave with the expression of someone who had not just said anything.

Ye Wanyin hurriedly stopped her and quickly said, “Yes, yes, yes!”

Ye Wanyin calculated the days. Back then, they had agreed on twenty days, but Fang Shu had only spent two weeks thinking it through. For a moment, Ye Wanyin was actually a little moved.

After Fang Shu nodded, she walked past Ye Wanyin and went upstairs directly.

Ye Wanyin watched her back and felt that something was not quite right.

After a while, she remembered. It seemed that they had only gone from being best friends in name to being lovers in name. What was plastic was still plastic.

But it did not matter. As long as Fang Shu took this “relationship” seriously and responsibly, Ye Wanyin could pull her grades up.

As for Fang Shu, who had already gone upstairs, she had originally planned to drag it out for the full twenty days. It was all because of the movie they watched today. It had suddenly made her feel that she was being very pretentious.

She had clearly already made up her mind long ago, yet she had insisted on dragging it out and not saying anything. It felt exactly like the male and female leads in that movie who wasted time and wasted their youth.

Fang Shu did not want to be like them.

After going upstairs, Fang Shu originally planned to wash up directly, lie on her bed, read a novel, and sleep.

But as soon as she opened the novel, there was a knock on the door.

Ye Wanyin stood at her door carrying the bag of study guides that had been rejected last time and asked very politely, “Can you do one section of math questions tonight?”

Fang Shu: “…”

Amazing. She was already exercising her rights this quickly.

However, Fang Shu still accepted the bag and squeezed out one word through her teeth.

“…Fine.”

Fortunately, Fang Shu had already mentally prepared herself for this. After putting the bag away, she held the door and asked, “Anything else?”

Ye Wanyin felt that nothing else was urgent for the time being, so she shook her head.

Fang Shu immediately closed the door. Ye Wanyin touched her nose and secretly rejoiced at the doorway.

At least this time, the door had not been slammed.