Heartthrob, Your Image is Crumbling!

Chapter 530: Shen Yu's Decision

After Zhou Yuwen went in to take a shower, Zheng Yanyan saw that it was getting late and announced that she needed to wash up too. She smiled at Shen Yu and told her not to busy herself anymore. Once everyone was clean, they could play some poker together, just like they did last time in Suzhou."Would that be inconvenient?" Shen Yu asked.

"What's inconvenient about it? We have two bathrooms here, and the soundproofing is great," Zheng Yanyan said, almost as if to show off. After saying that, she seemed to remember something. "Oh, right. Are you worried that it's inconvenient because you're a girl and Zhou Yuwen is here? Don't worry about that. With me keeping an eye on him, I guarantee your innocence won't be tainted."

Zheng Yanyan's last sentence was clearly meant as a joke, but Shen Yu was an innocent maiden after all. She blushed as expected and quickly explained that she did not mean it like that.

"Oh, whatever you meant, I can assure you that Zhou Yuwen doesn't have those kinds of intentions toward you anyway. Let's go, time to shower," Zheng Yanyan said, pulling Shen Yu up.

For some reason, Zheng Yanyan's words bafflingly stung Shen Yu's heart.

'What does she mean Zhou Yuwen doesn't have any intentions toward me anyway?'

'Am I really that lacking in charm?'

This was not Shen Yu's first time staying over at Zhou Yuwen's house. No one else had stayed in the second bedroom she previously used, so the bedding and everything else were still there. After Zheng Yanyan helped her tidy up a bit, she got ready to take a shower.

As she was pushed into the bathroom, Zheng Yanyan announced from the outside that she would stand guard right there and absolutely would not let anyone harass her.

"The way you say that makes it sound like I don't trust Zhou Yuwen," Shen Yu muttered softly.

But there was no longer any movement outside. Clearly, Zheng Yanyan had already run off.

Left in the guest restroom, Shen Yu felt a bit helpless and could only obediently begin her shower. Shen Yu's skin was a bit fairer than Zheng Yanyan's, but she was shorter. She belonged to the petite and delicate type, yet she lacked nothing in the right places. Her waist was slender, and through the hazy steam, her exquisite curves were faintly visible.

While Shen Yu was showering, Zheng Yanyan headed straight for the restroom in the master bedroom. Quick and efficient, she stripped off all her clothes. She gave Zhou Yuwen a jump scare when she entered the bathroom, especially seeing her stroll in so casually, naked and honest.

Zhou Yuwen subconsciously covered himself for a moment, then looked up and down at Zheng Yanyan's entire body. He could not help but say, "I mean, you're a girl after all. Could you at least cover up a little?"

Zheng Yanyan giggled dismissively and asked what there was to be afraid of.

"Is there a single spot on my body you haven't seen, hubby? Come on, let's shower together!"

"Isn't there a bathroom outside?"

"Shen Yu is showering out there."

"Then couldn't you just wash with her?"

"I don't want to. I want to wash with you. Hehe, I'll scrub my hubby's back!"

Zheng Yanyan lathered up her hands, intending to thoroughly pamper Zhou Yuwen. Zhou Yuwen told her not to touch him randomly. Zheng Yanyan teased, "Ooh, hubby, are you thinking about naughty things? It's completely showing!"

Zhou Yuwen laughed out loud at those words. "You're rubbing and touching me completely bare, of course I'm going to have a normal reaction."

"I thought I had completely lost my appeal to you."

"How could that be possible?"

Although the two were like an old couple, they still found time for romance and playful charm in their daily lives.

While Zheng Yanyan and Zhou Yuwen were showering together, Lu Lin waited for Shen Yu to finish before taking a quick rinse herself and changing into a clean set of clothes.

Since Zheng Yanyan and Lu Lin treated this place like their own home, they were much more casual. They basically just threw on a jacket or top, leaving their beautiful long legs exposed. Lu Lin wore a black shirt with no pants underneath.

As for Zheng Yanyan, she wore a small camisole paired with black shorts.

Only Shen Yu was dressed conservatively, bundling herself tightly in pure cotton pajama tops and bottoms.

She had not brought any clothes with her, so this outfit was borrowed from Zheng Yanyan. It looked a bit loose on her petite frame, and the slightly wrinkled collar revealed a patch of snow-white skin.

It was not quite early morning yet, and since it was rare for Shen Yu to visit, they definitely needed to find some entertainment. After debating for a while, they finally decided to play poker, just like they used to.

Playing cards was secondary; the main point was chatting.

During the game, Zheng Yanyan asked Zhou Yuwen if he had safely escorted Li Shiqi back to her dormitory.

Zhou Yuwen replied, "What else would I do?"

"If I didn't take her back to her dorm, would I be back here right now?"

Hearing Zhou Yuwen say this, Zheng Yanyan covered her mouth and giggled. She was sitting on the sofa with one leg tucked under her and the other naturally dangling off the edge, clutching a large throw pillow to her chest.

Zhou Yuwen looked at her overjoyed expression and asked what was making her so happy.

"I've felt something was off from the start," Zhou Yuwen noted. "Since when did you become so generous? Why does it feel like you were practically forcing Li Shiqi into my arms?"

"What do you mean, become so generous? Haven't I always been great? Li Shiqi is so excellent, and a top student at Jinling University at that. Don't you like her? I'm just helping someone achieve their wishes. Hubby, you should be praising me, right?" Zheng Yanyan swung her long legs, blinking her eyes adorably as she fished for a compliment.

Zhou Yuwen sorted his cards with a cold chuckle. "Showing undue courtesy for no reason bodes ill," he remarked.

"You're definitely brewing up some wicked scheme in that head of yours."

"Let me warn you, a girl like Li Shiqi is quite simple. Don't you go bullying her."

"As if I'd dare bully her!"

Zheng Yanyan immediately sounded displeased at the accusation.

Hearing this exchange, Shen Yu silently disagreed. 'A girl like Li Shiqi is considered simple? Only a blinded boy like Zhou Yuwen would actually believe that.'

But at the end of the day, Shen Yu was an outsider. There were some things she just could not say.

At this moment, Lu Lin also spoke up, asking, "Is Li Shiqi really going to work at the company?"

Zhou Yuwen nodded. "We've already agreed on it. She can report for duty tomorrow."

Zheng Yanyan looked pleased with herself, boasting that she had just scouted a top-tier general for Zhou Yuwen.

Lu Lin, on the other hand, muttered a "thank goodness."

"Forget about whether Li Shiqi is simple or not," Lu Lin said. "Regardless, she's a student from Jinling University. Her working abilities are definitely much stronger than ours from this third-rate university."

"You might as well just strip us of our positions while you're at it."

Lu Lin was not actually speaking sarcastically. Lu Lin was great at everything except for the fact that she was excessively lazy. She was capable, and Zhou Yuwen wanted to nurture her talents. He had made her a manager back in their freshman year. Now, with the company's continuous growth, there were more and more part-time girls, and Qu Jing was finding it hard to manage everything alone.

Therefore, Zhou Yuwen intended for Lu Lin to pick up some of the slack.

If she worked hard, Zhou Yuwen planned to eventually hand the entire cultural media company over to Lu Lin's management.

But who could have guessed that Lu Lin would completely reject the tempting prospects Zhou Yuwen laid out for her.

She made it perfectly clear that she only wanted to slack off.

Zhou Yuwen asked her, "Don't you want to be the kind of strong woman who owns a massive office spanning thousands of square meters?"

Lu Lin replied, "Thanks, but no thanks."

So now, hearing that Li Shiqi was joining the company, Lu Lin was thrilled. She even suggested transferring Li Shiqi to the cultural media company to take over her position altogether.

It was perfect timing, really. There were hardly any girls from Jinling University working part-time at the company yet.

Once Li Shiqi arrived, she could vigorously develop a network of part-time female students from Jinling University.

"Listen to yourself, does that even sound like something a human would say?" Zhou Yuwen retorted.

"You're unbelievably lazy. Getting you to do a little work is harder than getting you to do anything else."

Zhou Yuwen originally wanted to say 'harder than getting you to sleep with me,' but since there was an outsider present, he reined it in slightly.

Lu Lin merely smiled at his words and joked, "If I wasn't so lazy, I wouldn't have ended up following you anyway."

Zhou Yuwen rolled his eyes at her.

Shen Yu kept her head down and played her cards, not participating in their conversation. Mostly because she could not find a way to insert herself into it. In truth, Shen Yu desperately wanted to join Zhou Yuwen's company now. Earlier, a whole group of Jinling University students had been fighting to get into his enterprise. One classmate had even said that if they could get in, it was best to join Zhou Yuwen's Fun Campus App company, or his overseas financial company, because they felt those were the two places where one could truly learn something.

Previously, Shen Yu never entertained the thought. But after hearing Li Shiqi's classmates discuss it, she suddenly realized it made perfect sense. Zhou Yuwen's company was no longer the small-scale, amateur operation it used to be.

Just his financial firm alone possessed over three billion in liquid capital.

So Shen Yu wanted to join, but she could not bring herself to ask.

She listened as Zhou Yuwen told Lu Lin, "You can't just do absolutely nothing. I have so many companies on hand. Just say the word and you can enter any of them. Go gain some experience for a couple of years, and then I'll make you the boss."

Zhou Yuwen's words were half-joking, half-serious, but his desire to nurture Lu Lin's talent was genuine.

Yet Lu Lin immediately rejected him.

"I might as well just have a child for you," Lu Lin suggested, trying to find a different way to slack off. Zheng Yanyan burst out laughing at the remark.

Zhou Yuwen was completely speechless.

Listening to this, Shen Yu felt an intense wave of envy. 'If only Zhou Yuwen would say something like that to me.'

When she calmed down and thought about it carefully, Shen Yu realized she was not actually all that outstanding. Even though she had become the vice president of the Student Union, she was still just a student at a third-rate university. Her future ceiling was simply too low. Her only other path was to grit her teeth and study hard to become a postgraduate student at Jinling University, and then pursue a doctorate. Three to five years would fly by, and she would be nearing thirty. Trying to enter the workforce at that age would make finding a satisfactory job extremely difficult.

Meanwhile, her roommates—excluding Su Qing, who had already gone abroad to study—were in completely different positions.

Take Zheng Yanyan and Lu Lin: one focused entirely on eating, drinking, and having fun, while the other was entirely dedicated to slacking off. Yet, leaning against a massive tree like Zhou Yuwen, these two were guaranteed to have far brighter future prospects than she ever would.

At that moment, Shen Yu suddenly seemed to understand why Li Shiqi had pretended to be Zhou Yuwen's girlfriend.

'As expected of a Jinling University student. She sees things much more clearly than I do.'

She had been incredibly foolish. She had clearly been secretly in love with Zhou Yuwen all this time, yet she allowed herself to be constrained by conventional worldly views, constantly trying to maintain her distance from him. Even Li Shiqi from Jinling University knew that encountering a man like Zhou Yuwen was not easy. Who cared how many women he had? When it was time to charge forward, you charged. Was she really sure she wanted to stay away?

Her starting line was already lower than everyone else's. If she continued keeping her distance, who knew how many laps she would fall behind.

Shen Yu was no longer the naive girl from freshman year who knew nothing of the world. From June up until now, she and Zhou Yuwen had practically zero contact.

Shen Yu had constantly warned herself that Zhou Yuwen's worldview and values were wrong, and that she absolutely had to stay away from them.

But what was the truth? In reality, no one was going to applaud Shen Yu for having upright values. By leaving Zhou Yuwen, she was merely reducing herself to nothing more than a somewhat excellent female university student.

Meanwhile, Zhou Yuwen's life simply continued to ascend. From venturing into New York to conquer Wall Street, to everywhere else he went afterward, he was always surrounded by people treating him like the moon among stars. It was true at their own school, and it remained true even at Jinling University.

It had been so difficult to finally get a chance to spend time with Zhou Yuwen, yet they barely had any topics to discuss.

Shen Yu suddenly realized that during their entire meetup today, she had not even managed to have a proper conversation with him.

In the future, the opportunities for them to speak would only grow fewer and fewer.

The distance between them would only continue to widen.

Zhou Yuwen was going to grow to a level where everyone could only look up to him.

And she, Shen Yu...

Was nothing more than an ordinary person among the masses.

"This is dull. I'm done playing."

Right as Shen Yu came to this realization, Zhou Yuwen, who had played a few rounds of poker with them, found it entirely uninteresting. He stood up to leave.

Zheng Yanyan immediately protested, "Don't go! We haven't played enough yet."

"With your skill levels, even all three of you combined can't beat me. You guys play. I'm going to sleep."

"Please don't go~"

Zheng Yanyan tried to keep him there, but Zhou Yuwen was insistent on returning to his room.

After Zhou Yuwen left, the three girls felt playing by themselves was boring as well.

Eventually, Zheng Yanyan stretched lazily and said, "Alright then, let's call it a night."

"I'm going to sleep too."

After exchanging brief goodnights, Zheng Yanyan and Lu Lin both headed into the master bedroom.

'Do they not even try to hide it anymore?' Shen Yu wondered.

'Are they seriously just sleeping in the same room together?'

Late at night, Shen Yu slept alone in the second bedroom of Zhou Yuwen's house. She tossed and turned, completely unable to fall asleep.

Reflecting on every little detail since she started university, she realized that almost every girl around her who was even slightly excellent seemed to be mindlessly throwing themselves into Zhou Yuwen's arms, one after the other.

From Su Qing, to Tao Tian, and now Li Shiqi.

Shen Yu had always thought that Jinling University was filled with incredibly outstanding students.

Yet in front of Zhou Yuwen, they were nothing at all.

Shen Yu suddenly had a strange illusion.

The illusion was that perhaps Su Qing and the others had been right all along.

It turned out that she was the one who had been wrong this whole time.

Since earlier, Shen Yu had been desperately wanting to initiate a conversation with him, just to prove that they were still friends like before. But right up until he returned to his room, they had not exchanged a single word.

Perhaps in Zhou Yuwen's heart, he had stopped caring about her a long time ago.

And in the future, they would slowly become strangers...

If that was the case...

Suddenly, Shen Yu felt incredibly reluctant to let him go.

Back then, she had been the one insisting on staying away from Zhou Yuwen.

But at the thought of completely becoming strangers with him, a deep wave of unwillingness washed over her.

Right as she lay in bed, endlessly conflicted over her feelings.

She heard the living room lights click on.

Judging by the sound of the footsteps, it seemed to be Zhou Yuwen.

It sounded like he had gotten up to get a drink of water.

Then she heard him let out a heavy sigh outside.

'Why is he sighing?'

Shen Yu pricked up her ears, unable to resist getting up from the bed.

She even wanted to press her ear against the room door to listen closely.

Perhaps at this moment, she should open the door, step out, and chat with Zhou Yuwen to hear his innermost thoughts.

Zhou Yuwen had many women.

But was he truly happy?

Could Zheng Yanyan and the others really understand the troubles weighing on his mind?

Perhaps not a single girl truly understood Zhou Yuwen.

Nor would any of those girls be there late at night to pour him a warm cup of water.

Standing there in her pajamas, Shen Yu suddenly felt a surge of impulsive bravery rush to her head.

She had no idea why she felt so certain that she could understand him.

But she felt that this was her final opportunity.

If she missed this chance, she might really never have another shot with Zhou Yuwen ever again.

From Zheng Yanyan, to Su Qing, then to Jiang Xinyi, and now Li Shiqi.

She had clearly been by Zhou Yuwen's side all along.

Yet someone was always one step ahead of her.

Did it really have to end up like this?

Shen Yu closed her eyes and let out a long, deep breath.

When she opened them again, her gaze had grown firm and resolute.

Without thinking any further, she boldly reached out and opened the door.