Chapter 272 - Xiao Zi, Envelope, and My Stepmother’s Worries
Chapter 272: Chapter 272 Xiao Zi, Envelope, and My Stepmother’s Worries
“Sigh…” My stepmother sighed, full of worries. “Which boy can always tolerate her and pamper like you? So, what I am most worried about is not whether there will be someone who really likes her, but whether she can find a boy she likes… Xiao Nan, don’t you think that our Yuan Yuan is not interested in boys? She is sixteen years old, but I have never heard her take the initiative to talk anything about the opposite sex except you and your dad. Apart from little Dongfang, what she talks about the most often is you…”
My stepmother’s words stunned me; she actually also felt this. Indeed, Chu Yuan always seemed to ignore the boys around her.
But what shocked me, even more, was the words my stepmother said next. She glanced at me and then said seriously, “I am worried that you are spoiling her too much. It will make her think that there will be no other boys that are as good as you, and then she will only want to marry you. Hehe.”
“Wh… What?” It turned out that my stepmother was not worried about her sexual orientation. But it was quite understandable. After all, unlike me, my stepmother didn’t know Chu Yuan’s interest in writing Yuri literature. However, her joke made me inexplicably flustered. So I could only smile foolishly with her and said, “Do you still think she is a child who likes to play house?”
But my stepmother said with a solemn expression, “It is exactly because she is not a child, and the future of a girl is not a game, so I am worried. Children spoiled by their families are always very naive. If she intends to use this naive attitude to face the future, I would rather let her rely on you, this elder brother, and never marry for the rest of her life, lest she makes the same mistakes I made…”
What mistakes did my stepmother make? I didn’t know what my stepmother was talking about, but seeing her bright eyes became dim at this moment, as if she had remembered something unpleasant in the past, I knew that she was angry at her past self…
“I was not a good daughter, but am I not able to bring up a good daughter? Is this God’s punishment for me…” My stepmother seemed to have caught in the mood of self-blame, muttering to herself in such a way that made me feel confused.
My stepmother wasn’t a good daughter? Daughter? I couldn’t help but be confused. Didn’t my stepmother have no family? I remembered asking my stepmother when I was a child why I had never seen my grandma, and my stepmother said nothing but cried. Later, my old man told me sternly that my stepmother grew up in an orphanage and had no parents or relatives, and I should not ask this kind of question in the future. Compared to my old man’s warning, my stepmother’s tears were more effective on me, so, until today, I have never mentioned it again. Even if I heard my stepmother say this sentence that made me doubtful, I still held my curiosity back.
Perhaps, my stepmother was just thinking too much after seeing Chu Yuan was holding a grudge against me.
However, I didn’t understand why the strange description in the household registration book would suddenly appear in my mind at this moment. The marriage relationship between my stepmother and my old man was “married” rather than “remarried”, and the relationship between Chu Yuan and the head of the household was “adopted daughter”, not ‘stepdaughter’…
Why would I suddenly think of this? This was really strange.
The silence at the moment was very unnatural. My stepmother suddenly came back to her senses and saw that I was looking at her in a daze. While covering her forehead with one hand hurriedly, she secretly wiped the tears from the corners of her eyes and said with a smile, “why am I telling you this. It is as if I want my daughter to marry my son…”
My stepmother paused for a second, and then suddenly carried on in high spirits as if she had discovered something incredible.
“Actually, this is not a bad idea. Anyway, you are not related by blood. So the law will not prohibit it. As long as your dad and I don’t object to…”
“Please stop!” Good god, the more my stepmother talked, the more ridiculous it sounded, “mom, what are you talking about?”
My stepmother stared blankly for a moment, then she knocked on her own head and said, “That’s right, this is something you two should decide yourself…”
My stepmother’s response made me completely speechless, “are you teasing me or Yuan Yuan?”
“I’m just kidding, kidding,” my stepmother rolled her eyes at me, and then pouted her lips, “I’m just reminding you that if you continue to spoil your little sister, it might really end this way in the future. She is my daughter, I know her the best. Xiao Nan, don’t you think Yuan Yuan really likes to cling on to you? In my opinion, she is not angry with you. She is actually angry at herself. She is obviously jealous of Xiao Cheng, just like that year when you graduated from high school, she deliberately tore the letter that Xiao Zi left for you…”
“Mom!” I subconsciously cut off the words of my stepmother. A chill suddenly spread across every corner of my body in an instant, causing my hairs to stand on end. Whether it was the name ‘Xiao Zi’ or the torn letter, it was something that I didn’t want to remember.
Because it would only remind me of Chu Yuan’s pale and apologetic little face when she was lying on the hospital bed, and the fact that she almost lost her life for it…
For other people, the immature teenage life would often leave a faint of regret, but for me, it left me with deep guilt and fear, which made me ashamed to face my stepmother. Because of a girl, I almost caused my stepmother to lose Chu Yuan!
However, my stepmother didn’t seem to mind it. She continued, “she was just a kid at that time, but she actually got jealous that easily. Haha, but she is a lot like me when I was young. Of course, I am still very young…”
She said in a tone that seemed to be sighing, and there was also a trace of self-mocking. I didn’t know if my stepmother was still joking, but my heart suddenly skipped a beat. Thinking of Chu Yuan’s rejection of Liushu, and my damp sofa that could even be called a “paranormal phenomena”… I found that those things were surprisingly similar to what had happened five years ago.
‘No, no, no. This is impossible. If that is really the case, would Chu Yuan still want to fix me up with Dongfang Lianren?’
I couldn’t help smiling. But then my stepmother frowned, and she finally said to me seriously, “Xiao Nan, I’m serious. You won’t be able to figure out what a girl is thinking. So anything is possible. Besides… Our family’s situation is different than other people’s. When I married your father, you two were not the little kids that didn’t understand anything…”
My stepmother stopped, hesitant to carry on. But I understood what she wanted to say. I was not Chu Yuan’s biological elder brother, and Chu Yuan was not my biological little sister. This was a fact that both of us knew clearly…
I suspected that my stepmother had watched too many Korean dramas, but her calm expression gave me an inexplicable feeling. Indeed, it was precisely because we all understood that our family was composed of two broken families, so we didn’t try to avoid this fact. And it was also because of this fact that there was always a sense of distance between me and Chu Yuan that could only be shortened but could never disappear…
This sense of distance made me scared, but I couldn’t tell why I was afraid of it.
While I was having a complicated feeling, my stepmother chuckled suddenly, completely ruining her rare serious image. “I was just saying it. Look how scared you are. I just wanted to tell you that you can spoil Yuan Yuan, but there is a limit. You don’t have to tolerate everything she did. Anyway, hurry up and finish your breakfast, then I will send you to the hospital.”
Was my stepmother really just saying it? But why did I feel that there seemed to be something hidden under her relaxed expression? I even had a ridiculous feeling that she deliberately used this joking attitude to suggest or warn me something…
It was actually quite understandable. As a mother, when the siblings that were not related by blood lived under the same roof alone, naturally, she would be worried about it.
“You don’t need to send me,” I quickly gulped down half a bowl of rice porridge, wiped my mouth, and said, “someone else will send me to the hospital later, you can go to the shop straight away.”
After hearing this, my stepmother immediately became interested, “Who is it? Is it Xiao Cheng? You think that I will disrupt you two’s little world. Xiao Nan, no wonder Yuan Yuan would be jealous, even I also started to feel a little bit jealous…”
Seeing that my stepmother pretended to be jealous, I couldn’t help but shake my head with a bitter smile. “It’s not her, it’s Sister Tiger,” I said helplessly.
“Sister Tiger?” My stepmother was confused.
Being teased by my stepmother, I was slightly distracted. Subconsciously, I said Dong Xiaoye’s ‘nickname’. Feeling embarrassed, I quickly answered, “It’s the policewoman dad met before. She is specially sent by the police to take care of… to protect me. She can send me to the hospital later, you can hurry up and go to the shop. ”
“Then I have to meet her even more,” the stepmother was even more interested, her eyes could even emit sparkling light, “Mom will check for you personally to see if she is better or Xiao Cheng is better.”