The most important person to her now was her mother. If anything happened to her mother, she really didn't know...
A pair of black calfskin flats appeared before Zuo Aiai, interrupting her thoughts.
Thinking it was the nurse at the nurses' station, she thanked him. She took the shoes gratefully and was just about to put them on when she saw that the man holding the shoes wasn't in a nurse's uniform after all, but rather in expensive-looking black shoes and slacks.
Stunned, she raised her head to see who they belonged to...
The man towered above her, hands in his pockets, chin slightly lowered. His lips were pressed into a thin, determined line.
She could've sworn she'd seen those eyes somewhere before!
They were dark gray and as clear as crystals, shining brightly as he stared down at her.
"Lift your feet."
He phrased it as an order, not a request.
For a moment, she was too stunned to move. Before she could ask him who he was and where she'd seen him before, the man had already squatted down to raise her feet himself.
Their soles were stained with mud and crusted with gravel. Some parts of her feet had already been pricked and were bleeding slightly. The man's beautiful eyebrows were tightly knitted together.
Suddenly, she felt shy and tried to pull her legs back from his strong grasp. She blushed.
"Who are you? What are you doing?" she gasped.
"Hilton Hotel..." said the man slowly.
She froze.
She had run away without checking out this morning. She guessed that the man would have noticed this when he came to clean the room in the afternoon.
She didn't know if she had used her ID card when she checked in, but the man clearly knew that she'd been there last night.
She blushed more deeply, remembering the sour feeling on her body this morning. Not to mention that brazen hickey...
She could not help but nervously swallow her saliva.
"You! Who exactly are you?"
"Oh, now you want to know?"
The man said these words with a fake, bitter smile plastered on his face. He gently put down her injured right foot, looking straight into her eyes.
She instantly felt as though she was being drowned in that starry gaze...
And she couldn't find her thoughts for a long time after that.
When she came back to her senses, she realized that her entire body was floating several feet off the ground.
"Oh! What are you doing?" she exclaimed as she came back to.
"Taking you to the nurse's station. Your foot needs to be sterilized and bandaged."
He was a man of few words. He would answer her basic questions, but he didn't want to say any more than he had to.
The nurse looked at the man suspiciously while she slowly bandaged Zuo Aiai's foot. After that, she seemed unsure whether or not she should leave the room.
In the end, the man finally said, "My secretary may come to look for me later. Please wait outside."
The young nurse seemed relieved, hurrying out and slamming the door behind her.
Zuo Aiai thought that she had been doing fairly well in Binhai City. At least, she had met some of the more famous people in upper-class society. She was familiar enough with some of them to call them friends, and even in the case of those she couldn't call friends, she at least knew their names and faces.
And even those she didn't know at all she should be able to recognize from the news.
But she really couldn't recognize this man in front of her!
Wasn't he a part of Binhai City's upper crust? He must be, by the look of him. But she was certain she'd never seen him in the news.
And he had mentioned Hilton Hotel. Did he know what happened last night?
Since she couldn't remember anything herself, she had to assume to worst.
"Um...I'm sorry, but did I order some special service at the Hilton Hotel last night? I can't remember, I was...''
She never remembered what she did when she was drunk, so she had no way of knowing just how badly she behaved. The only hint she'd had of it was Chen Ziyi's miserable face and mournful tone the on the mornings after, when he asked,
"Zuo Aiai, promise me that you'll never touch alcohol again, okay?"
Recalling Chen Ziyi's dejected expression at those times, she suddenly suspected that she might have taken advantage of the fact that she was drunk to order a gigolo or something. Considering Ziyi's extreme reactions, it seemed entirely plausible.