James Lu leaned back his head and downed all of the whiskey in his glass. But not only did it fail to quell the anger in his heart, but it caused him to flare up even more.
Consumed with rage, he raised his hand and smashed the glass on the floor.
"TSHH-"
James didn't even wince from the huge noise of the glass shattering in this extremely quiet room.
"Hey! What's wrong with you?" Isaac Bai had just stepped through the door, and asked in bewilderment when he saw the utter mess that James had created on the floor.
"..." James ignored him. He took a bottle of alcohol and began directly drinking from it.
"Hey, hey, hey!" Surprised, Isaac rushed over to James and snatched the bottle from his hand. "Are you trying to kill yourself by drinking like that?"
"..." James saw that his bottle has been robbed by Isaac, so he turned around and opened the drinks cabinet to grab a new bottle.
"Hey!" Isaac saw this and hurriedly put down the bottle in his hand. He ran over and took the bottle from James's hand again. "Dude, what's wrong with you? Tell me!"
"Can you stop?"
Isaac shook his head. "What are you doing? Did you have a fight with your wifey?"
James immediately exploded when he heard this. "With her?!" He grunted, "I don't have the time or energy for that sh*t!" Said the man who was so pissed that he came alone to the Grand Dynasty to drink his sorrows away
"Oh —!" Isaac replied in a dragged- out voice instead of unraveling James's lie. He put all the bottles back into the wine cabinet and said, "Then why did you tell me to come? Why didn't you call up Ben instead since you're here anyway?"
"Isn't Ben on a business trip to France?"
"He's on a business trip? How come I had no idea? Well, even if that's the case, does that mean you wouldn't have called me if Ben was still here?" Isaac complained, "What am I, your side chick?!"
"Shut the f*ck up!" James rolled his eyes at Isaac and threw him a cigarette. "You find this sh*t funny?"
Isaac caught the cigarette, but instead of lighting it he just played with it in his hand.
James took two puffs, yet still felt extremely annoyed. His gloom and frustration were driving him god damn crazy.
"That f*cking woman Elizabeth Liang, can she be any more ungrateful?"
Isaac snorted. "I thought that you didn't wanna say anything? Now you're opening up?" After saying that, he looked at James's face, which was turning into a dark stormy sky, and stopped teasing him. He raised his eyebrows and asked, "What do you mean?" James closed his eyes and took a deep breath. "When she woke up today she lost her mind or something and blamed me for treating her like that!" As if that wasn't enough to vent his anger, he aggressively punched the table, "Do you f*cking think that I was in the wrong? That's the biggest bullsh*t I've ever heard!"
Isaac was about to light his cigarette, but paused when he heard this. "Really? Are you sure there wasn't some kind of misunderstanding?"
"Misunderstanding?" James burst out laughing. "What kind of misunderstanding could there be? I abandoned a huge f*cking business deal yesterday just to go and save her, and made a giant fuss over it and everything! Now I see that I was just being a f*cking living joke! A f*cking joke!"
James gritted his teeth and continued, "What did I do to her? Did I do anything wrong? Tell me, what was I supposed to do? Watch that fat pig President Lee go at it with her? I'm not f*cking dead!"
"Did she say anything else today?"
"She just kept repeating that I shouldn't have done that to her like a broken record, what else do you think?" James angrily snapped, "I've seen the light. She's just a heartless piece of sh*t!"
"Can you calm down for a second?" Isaac shook his head and sighed. "I think there must be some kind of misunderstanding, your little wife doesn't seem like an unreasonable person. After you've cooled down, go back and have a good talk with her, maybe it's not even that big of a deal?"
"Ha! I'm not a masochist! Why should I offer to talk to her when I haven't done anything wrong?"
"Then what are you going to do? Continue brooding here alone? Or continue holding a grudge like this forever?"
"Hmph! Nothing I do would be good enough for her anyway, so I might as well just keep her out of sight and out of mind! What's wrong with staying here alone? At least nobody's here to piss me off!"
Isaac suddenly chuckled as if he had heard something funny. "Are you sure?"
"Of course!"
"Fine." Isaac shrugged his shoulders in defeat. "Do whatever you want. Just don't go back in the middle of the night because you're desperate to see her face or something, 'cause I'm absolutely going to make fun of you for that."
******
Elizabeth sat alone on the sofa and cried until she was exhausted and her tears had run dry. Her head was completely blank.
She sat there for a long time, while the sky gradually darkened and the sound of crickets died down.
By the time the surrounding villas had all turned on the lights, James still wasn't home.
Elizabeth hadn't eaten anything all day, but she didn't feel hungry at all.
Some more time passed before she got up and was ready to go back to her room. She glanced at her phone that she had placed on the sofa, and saw that the screen was bright. Evelyn Wu had just sent her a message. On the screen, there were more than a dozen WeChat texts and three phone messages from her, plus two missed phone calls from Theodore Chao.
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