Together Forever

Chapter 1.2

The Pretty Lady's Bane in Our Faculty

Every Sunday, Tong Yan would go to work at her part-time job in a French sporting goods store.

This particular company actually had four or five different stores within Shanghai. In the beginning, when she first went for her interview, she had favoured this particular company simply because of its branch store that was near the university. However, she had not expected that shortly after she started her job, she would be internally transferred to another branch store that was much further away. When she had received the call informing her of this, she had hesitated for three seconds and then still chose to accept the transfer.

As a result, every Sunday at five o'clock in the morning, she needed to force herself to crawl out of bed and travel by bus for two hours before she reached the store. The only benefit of this was that this particular store was near the Hongqiao area[1] and 90% of its customers were foreigners, so it was a nice opportunity to practice her spoken English while being a sales assistant at the same time. Except, the store's recent shipment of athletic pants had completely shattered that lovely dream.

These last several weeks, she had been sent directly into the storeroom where, like a machine, she would clip the pants onto the hangers. The biggest problem was, the metal clips were very stiff and the waist of the pants had to be pulled taut before they could be clipped. When she finished all of the more than five hundred pairs of pants, her fingers were swollen.

By the time the manager had completed inspecting her work, it was already past one o'clock in the afternoon.

She was starving, and her stomach rumbled as she walked out of the storeroom and ran with hands raised to the checkout counter. "Miao Miao, I'm going crazy. See how ridiculously swollen my fingers are?"

"Such a tragedy." Miao Miao shook her head. "It's a work-related injury, ah."

She growled in complaint, "Yeah! The first three fingers of both my hands have no feeling. Am I going to have to eat my lunch using my ring finger and pinky to hold my chopsticks?"

Miao Miao was about to banter a couple more sentences with her when she suddenly switched to put on a professional expression, shifted her eyes away, and addressed someone behind Tong Yan. "Sir, this checkout counter is closed already."

"That's alright," a voice answered from behind.

Teacher Gu? Tong Yan turned around in surprise. Gu Pingsheng was looking directly at her.

Could there be more of a coincidence?

Seeing the American professor beside Gu Pingsheng and that shopping cart that was crammed full of goods, she instantly understood. These two people were likely planning on driving themselves around on a self-guided tour. The cart was packed with things like tents and fishing rods...

"Your friends?" Miao Miao observed the two of them as he stared at her and she stared at him and quickly said, "Here, come here to pay. I'll give you the 11% employee discount."

After saying this, she immediately pulled the "closed" sign off her till and very keenly helped Gu Pingsheng pay for their items.

Seeing that she was standing off to the side with nothing to do, Tong Yan stepped in and helped her bag each of the items. This was work that she was accustomed to doing since early on, so very quickly, four large bags were filled. However, as she picked up the bags, she hesitated.

So heavy. Who should she hand them to? Forget it. Of course, she should take care of her own teacher. Without batting an eye, she handed the two lighter bags to Gu Pingsheng and gave the other two to the American professor. In any case, no one could tell the difference from just the size of the bags alone.