It felt like his heart was pierced by a sharp object as a stabbing pain surfaced and his throat turned sore.
He instinctively lowered his eyelids to hide the flash of anguish in his eyes.
The three women in front of him were still giggling away, but he was in no mood to continue listening. He stood up silently and left.
Without even noticing that the people in front of them were gone, the three women continued to chat while huddled around Tang Huahua's phone.
After about ten minutes, Bo He and Tang Huahua wanted to go to the restroom, so the two of them got up and left. Just then, Ji Yi inadvertently looked up and realized that He Jichen and Han Zhifan were no longer there.
"Huh? Where's He Xuezhang and his friend?" Tang Huahua's gaze happened to look over at the empty sofa and couldn't help but wonder.
"They probably just stepped away for something," continued Bo He. She was in such a rush to go to the toilet that she started to usher Tang Huahua to hurry up.
After the two of them were some distance away, Ji Yi turned her head and scanned the large room.
In another rather quiet corner of the room, Ji Yi saw Han Zhifan leaning freely on a long table with his head turned while talking to Cheng Weiwan.
Cheng Weiwan probably didn't want to bother with him and pretended he wasn't even there as her eyes were glued to the open laptop on the table in front of her. She was most likely editing the script. Every now and then, she furrowed her brows and typed away on the keyboard with her beautiful, slender fingers.
Ji Yi didn't pay much attention to the two of them as her gaze swiftly turned away. She scanned the entire room twice over but could find He Jichen.
He called me over yet before he could talk to me, he disappears?
Ji Yi was confused for two seconds, but she figured that He Jichen probably went to the restrooms. Sitting quietly by herself on the sofa, she withdrew her eyes and waited for everybody to return.
Seeing as she was bored, Ji Yi took out her phone and browsed through Weibo as her fingers simultaneously grabbed some pine nuts from the dish at the center of the table every now and then, just as she did when she was talking with the girls.
When she went for a second grab, she picked up a pine nut and put it into her mouth. Suddenly, she noticed something and stopped.
She hesitated for a moment and spat out the pine nut she just put into her mouth. Ji Yi looked down and saw that the pine nut in her fingers had no shell.
She furrowed her brows and opened her palms to look at the handful of pine nuts she grabbed. They were all just like the last one she put in her mouth - they had all been shelled.
She instinctively looked up and realized that all the pine nuts in the dish were shelled, and all the pine nuts with shells were moved to the far corner of the table.
Apart from her, He Jichen was the only one who peeled pine nuts...
So, he didn't actually eat the pine nuts he shelled. He just put them into the clean dish?
When did he replace all the shelled pine nuts? How did I not even notice?
Then he shelled those pine nuts for me?
Ji Yi's heart quivered for a moment then she turned her head and scanned the room again.
As before, she couldn't see He Jichen, but his assistant Chen Bai was still standing in his original spot by a sofa nearby.