Mr. Rong's Lovelorn Diary

It is said that one depends on one’s parents when at home and one’s friends when away from home.

Far away from home, having no money at all, Rong Yi had to borrow from friends for the time being.

Rong Yi went through his contact book and had a slight headache. Among his good friends, one had just gone broke buying a house to get married a few days ago, one was a well-known ‘moonshine’ person (spent all his earnings every month) and the last one was obsessed with savings but was an avid buyer of regular wealth management products.

He called the last one with a glimmer of hope, but received a vehement recommendation of a fund before he had spoken. Although not a very high return rate, he had already invested all his spare money in it, and even recommended Rong Yi to stop spending so much money and start to make serious plans for the future.

After Rong Yi hung up the phone in despair, he simply sent out a post in his social media asking if anyone had any money to help him out.

He blocked out some people when he sent it. For example, parents, Chen Keyao, some colleagues and Zhou Li, who he had not known for very long.

The parents were blocked because he didn’t want them to worry. Rong Yi never returned to his hometown after graduation and had been trying to make a living for himself alone in this city. As parents tend to worry naturally, he had already got into the habit of only counting his blessings instead of unloading his problems. As long as he hadn’t really reached the point where he had no way out, he would not want to alarm the two old people.

As for Chen Keyao, it was just embarrassing. Asking the landlord for money to pay the rent would sound ridiculous.

As for Zhou Li, although Rong Yi was quite fond of this Omega, he was always worried that that guy might still be harbouring a little more than friendly intentions about himself. Zhou Li mentioned before that he was also poor, and Rong Yi feared the possibility that he would starve himself just to save Rong Yi. Surely that would be too much a debt for mere friends like them?

Quite unexpectedly, within five minutes of his post, his mother called him up and asked what was wrong: he’d been all fine so far, but how come he needed to borrow money now?

Rong Yi was dumbfounded.

At first he thought someone had leaked this information to his parents, so he checked his friends circle settings when trying to explain to his mother. He almost blacked out when he realised that in his haste to send the post he had set it to be visible to this group of people rather than blocking them from seeing it.

Rong Yi panicked. He quickly deleted it, then secretly prayed that the rest of that group of people had not seen it yet. Otherwise, it would be extremely embarrassing to be found out by a few colleagues that he was so miserable right now.

His mother sounded quite alarmed on the phone as well.

The retired woman had a rich imagination, asking if he had borrowed some dodgy loans or had become involved in pyramid sales schemes.

Rong Yi had originally wanted to hide the truth from his mother, but as his mother started to worry that he was going into a financial scam, was out of work and about to sell himself out on the street, he had no choice but to tell her the truth.

After that, there was of course a load of nagging.

To prove that he did not just live in a place but was actually living in a nice place, Rong Yi turned on the camera and walked around his room and the living room to show his mother. Just as he was going to return to his room, Chen Keyao’s door suddenly opened.

“What are you doing?” asked Chen Keyao.

Meanwhile, his mother’s voice came from his phone: “Oh my God!”

Rong Yi was totally embarrassed.

“Who is this? How come he lives with you? Hey, don’t cover up the camera. Can you let Mom take another look please? What are you doing?”

As Rong Yi pressed his phone against his chest and dashed back to his room, shutting the door behind him, Chen Keyao’s voice came from behind: “Hello, auntie!”

Though unnecessary, Rong Yi squatted down after closing the door and lowered his voice.

“Mom, please don’t think too much about it. That’s my landlord,” He looked at the phone, “Can you be a little bit more sensible at your mature age?”

“Mom didn’t think too much about it,” His mother couldn’t stop laughing. “But I know my son’s surely going to think too much about such a landlord.”

“...”

Mother always knows best.

His mother had known very clearly how boy crazy her son could be since his childhood.

“I really don’t have a crush on him,” his face blushed bright red. “Don’t be fooled by my landlord’s good looks. He’s actually got mental problems.”

His mother furrowed her brow at once.

“...not the aggressive type, though,” Rong Yi hastened to add, “Just don’t worry about it.”

“Oh...” His mother nodded. “Just in case, if you really can’t control yourself, don’t force him to do anything, and remember to use precautions, OK?”

“...”

“How much money are you short of? I’ll ask your father to make a transfer tomorrow.” His mother went on again, “Go and delete that post. Isn’t it humiliating?”

“...” Rong Yi looked away, “It’s been deleted already.”

...

Rong Yi had never thought that one day his parents would still be the people he could rely on after he had left home.

Rong Yi felt warm in heart and ashamed of himself, but he also couldn’t help feeling glad that he had eventually avoided a disaster.

He was just sighing to himself after he finished the phone call, when his phone suddenly vibrated again. Rong Yi thought it was his mother trying to nag him again, but was positively shocked when he saw the message.

Chen Keyao had sent him a WeChat money transfer, which was not a small sum.

He rushed to knock on Chen Keyao’s door.

“Why did you suddenly give me money?”

“For boarding,” Chen Keyao’s phone was still in his hand, “Didn’t we agree that you’d do the labour and I’d pay for the costs? You’ve been paying for everything so far, haven’t you?”

Rong Yi hesitated: “This is even more than the rent...You could take it off the rent directly. There’s no need to give it to me separately.”

“Let’s deal with them separately. It’s easy to mix up.”

“...But...” Rong Yi looked a bit troubled. “Buying food doesn’t really cost that much.”

“Really?” Chen Keyao looked surprised, “I never buy cooking materials, so I don’t know. But it cost about that much when I used to hire an auntie to come here every day to just cook. She didn’t help me tidy up the living room, and neither was her cooking skills as good as yours.”

“...”

“Are you complaining it’s too much?” Chen Keyao said, “Then give it back to me.”

Rong Yi looked at his face with a frown for a while and then went back to his room quietly.

He actually kind of wanted to ask Chen Keyao if he had seen the post he sent to the friends circle earlier, but he felt so embarrassed that finally he swallowed the words back down.

Lying in his bed, he hesitated for a long time and then sent a message to Chen Keyao who was under the same roof.

“What do you like to eat normally?”

...

The money Chen Keyao had given him more or less relieved his emergency. After all, to keep his parents from worrying too much, he had reported a lower deficit figure.

When he arrived the next day at the company, he even had a colleague whom he was not familiar with at all coming over to him quietly during lunch break and asking him if he needed any help. Rong Yi felt warm deep down in his heart after having declined her kindness.

His luck seemed to have started to rebound after reaching the bottom. It’s said that a great disaster is a blessing in disguise. Looking back, he still found the experience of the burglar the other day terrifying, but he was not hurt at all, and also survived the worst economic crisis he’d ever faced.

Moreover, maybe thanks to Zhou Li, these days the bald man of the client company had also become very amiable, and the work of the whole team had progressed smoothly. The project was very likely to be completed ahead of schedule, which would mean vacation and a big bonus.

Everything was going so well, so probably it was no surprise that later on a perfect Alpha might suddenly fall from the sky and land in front him and then give him a love for life at first sight.

...

The perfect alpha from the sky had not appeared yet, but there was a perfect Omega.

Zhou Li complained to him that he might have been sexually harassed at work. One of his Alpha leaders had been asking him constantly to have private talks in his office recently, acting strangely, pawing all over him when talking, and making him rather uncomfortable. However, his behaviour didn’t really amount to anything too serious to call for a formal warning either.

“Send me a picture!” Zhou Li said on the phone. “I’ll set it up as my desktop screensaver to let him see deliberately. That should make him feel a little conscious?”

Rong Yi thought for a moment: “How about I come and pick you up from work this Friday?”

Chen Keyao had classes on that day so he didn’t need to go back and cook for him. And he happened to feel a bit bored recently running just between home and work every day and was looking for a friend to hang out with.

Zhou Li was thrilled at the suggestion: “Fab, great. You come here, and I’ll buy you dinner!”

It even hurt Rong Yi himself to think that he had become so skilful at pretending to be an Omega’s date.

He had done a lot of things like that from childhood to adulthood. In addition to helping to discourage unwanted suitors, he also helped his friends who were unloved by the opposite sex because of their unattractive appearances. His pair of arms had been clung to by many Omegas, and it was hard to describe how he had felt.

But for some reasons that he himself cannot explain, though he felt sorry for himself every time, he would always take it up as his responsibility and volunteer to help as soon as his friends had this sort of need.

Rong Yi prepared carefully for the battlefield. No sooner than Rong Yi arrived at Zhou Li’s company building, he was already being chatted up by an Omega stranger.

He was just about to say no when Zhou Li came out of the building, accompanied by a slightly overweight Alpha. Seeing that Zhou Li ran towards Rong Yi like a flying bird and then hung on to Rong Yi’s arm, the Alpha’s facial expression changed immediately.

“My darling,” Zhou Li was so into his acting that even Rong Yi was a bit perplexed, “You’ve come here to pick me up without telling me. What a pleasant surprise!” Rong Yi wanted to laugh but held himself back, “That’s why it’s called a surprise.”

Then Zhou Li turned his head around to the Omega, who had come to chat Rong Yi up: “What do you want my boyfriend to do for you?”

That guy ran away immediately.

Looking up at Rong Yi, Zhou Li snickered, then he turned to wave at the Alpha, who was still standing at the gate: “My boyfriend is picking me up today. Honestly, I don’t need to trouble you for a ride, Manager Li!”

Rong Yi very skilfully collaborated with Zhou Li and smiled at the fat Manager Li.

The two men were just about to slip away, when Manager Li, who had been furrowing his brow, suddenly shouted behind their back: “Rong Yi? You’re Rong Yi, right?”

Rong Yi’s heart skipped a beat, and he turned his head around stiffly.

Zhou Li, standing right next to him, suddenly became nervous too.

“You know each other?” He asked quietly.

Rong Yi stared at that man’s slightly plump cheeks and thought hard. There did seem to be some kind of memory of his face, but he just couldn’t match it with a name at once.

He couldn’t be an old acquaintance then. Rong Yi was hesitating whether to simply tell this guy that he had got the wrong person.

In the brief moment of his struggle, the man furrowed his brow and walked a few steps toward them.

“You don’t remember me?” he said. “I’m Li Xiaoran.”

Rong blinked his eyes and then some bad memories came back into his head.

“Really?” Zhou Li asked again.

Not only knowing each other.

Rong Yi was feeling totally embarrassed.

This guy. He had even dated him in the past.

The writer’s notes:

I temporarily solved the question of “How do you call the male Omega who gives birth to yourself without appearing to be unrelated to the plot or awkward”.

It should work if both parents of the two main characters are set as a man and a woman!