Mr. Rong's Lovelorn Diary

Chapter 9: I’m actually just like you…an Omega, too.

Translator: DragonRider

Before he arrived, Rong Yi had gone through a number of plans in his head.

The best thing was to let the other one reject him. However sloppy he might look, he still had his bottom line. It was theoretically possible to deliberately provoke an aversion through bad behavior. Given that Rong Yi was an Omega himself, he was only too clear what kind of Alpha behavior would cause dislike most.

But this was something more easily said than done. To make himself pretend to be arrogant, rude, talkative, and to boldly brag about himself, Rong Yi didn’t think his acting skills would be good enough. He wouldn’t be able to let go of his self-consciousness. In fact, he might not only be stuttering but also blushing. Even just thinking about these was making him feel embarrassed.

So he planned to go down a more modest route. He would sound the other one out first. If he turned out to be a nice guy, then he’d just tell him his real gender.

If he was as difficult as that bald guy, then he’d just cool it off afterwards.

*

Right now, Zhou Li’s fondness for him was very much evident in the classic lines of chatting up, which caught Rong Yi off guard completely.

In order to dampen Zhou’s enthusiasm toward himself, he deliberately chose the least emotional response.

“No, you must have misremembered.”

“Impossible,” Zhou Li looked at him with a smile. “Mr. Rong, you look so handsome. I won’t forget even if I’ve only seen you once. Let me think...”

“Let’s get the tickets first.” Rong Yi interrupted him, “The film is about to start.”

*

Dating at a movie theatre was not a good choice.

The two of them sat together, both facing the big screen. It was not easy to talk to each other, not good for communication at all. Rong Yi chose this place purely to avoid direct interaction.

The film was picked by Zhou Li, and it was a particularly boring artistic film. The scenes were very beautiful, but the actors only had very few lines, so the film was so very hypnotic that Rong Yi just couldn’t help yawning all the way through.

Unable to get engaged in the film plot, Rong Yi’s mind naturally started to drift into some wild thoughts.

The young couple sitting in front of them were sharing a popcorn tub, and having a little chat with their heads leaned together from time to time.

Rong Yi watched them from where he sat through the gap between their seats, then subconsciously held the tips of his right-hand fingers with his left hand.

Both hands were cold.

The air-conditioning was a little too strong in the theatre, temperature was too low, and he wasn’t wearing enough. His two hands, even held together, couldn’t warm each other up.

It was freezing.

This place was awful. He didn’t want to stay here anymore.

*

When he tried to stand up, he found Zhou Li, sitting next to him, was yawning in a rather exaggerated way, and his big eyes seemed moist under the light from the screen.

He looked so cute, like a little brother whom everyone would want to reach out and touch on the head.

It was obvious that he didn’t like this kind of film either, so why did he suggest to come here to see it?

*

Rong Yi’s doubts were answered within five minutes.

“...I was just doing this as a mere formality,” Zhou Li said as he walked out. “So I picked one of the least interesting films, sorry.”

Rong Yi was a little embarrassed.

When he hunched his back to leave the screening room, pretending to go to the bathroom, this yawning teenager immediately followed, asking if he wanted to go back to watch the rest of the movie or they could just find somewhere else for the date.

Rong Yi thought it would be a good time to tell him that he was only doing it as a mere formality too.

Unfortunately, before he could say anything, Zhou Li suddenly sighed.

“Mr. Rong, you really don’t remember anything,” He looked up at Rong Yi. “Honestly, we have met each other before. Last month, in that shopping mall that’s less than 10 minutes’ walk away from here, I asked you for your contact details. You refused.”

Rong Yi tried to recall. He seemed to have some vague memory of it, but he wasn’t totally sure.

*

“There must be a lot of people asking you for your number,” Zhou Li shrugged, “No problem if you don’t remember.”

“Sorry, I...”

“You’re still not interested in me right now, are you?” Zhou Li asked.

Such a direct question was too difficult to answer, but it also saved a lot of trouble and actually made one feel relieved.

“...I don’t think I’m that bad, right?” Seeing him keeping silent, Zhou Li was rather frustrated, “It’s the first time I was rejected like this. Oh, no, second time. The first time it was you too. It took me a long time to come up with an excuse to chat to you at that time.”

Of course he was not bad at all. As someone of the same gender, Rong Yi also found him cute and charming.

Even with the kind of envy “If only I could be like that too.”

Except for the bizarre species like Chen Keyao, any normal Alpha would be happy with such a date. Only that Rong Yi was not an Alpha at all.

*

“My uncle used to introduce me to strange people,” Zhou Li continued to say. “It was the first time that I wanted to thank him when I saw you today.”

“...Sorry.” Rong Yi felt even more awkward.

After all, he might be the strangest of them all.

Zhou Li looked at him: “You really are not going to give me any chance at all?”

Love relationships aside, Rong Yi was actually quite fond of this Omega in front of him. So he thought twice and decided to tell him the truth.

“Your uncle seems to have a little misunderstanding about me,” he said, with great difficulty. “I’m actually just like you...”

“You fell in love with me at first sight too?” Zhou Li’s expression did not look serious.

Rong Yi smiled bitterly and continued: “...Omega, too.”

Zhou Li was dumbstruck and looked at him with a frown, but did not utter a word.

“It’s true,” Rong Yi tried to emphasise. “I can show you my...”

ID card.

His hand was already into his pocket when he swallowed the words he was going to say. The usual pocket for IDs was empty. He was still waiting for his replacement ID card. He couldn’t show him anything right now.

In order to prevent Zhou Li from taking the wrong path, just like a few particular Omegas who tried to date him in the past, by trying to break the secular stereotype as well as ignoring his subjective will, he hastened to emphasize a point.

“Don’t be fooled by my appearance, but I am truly a bog-standard straight guy.”

Zhou Li’s expression was imperceptible, and he didn’t say anything for a long while: “...You made up all this just to turn me down?”

*

Rong Yi was absolutely shattered.

After that, Zhou Li pestered him for another half an hour.

This Omega, even though already a graduate from university, still had a baby doll’s face and looked like a 17 or 18-year-old boy. He could easily arouse the self-consciousness in those who were older than him and they would subconsciously go out of their way for him.

He said that was the first time in his life to try to chat someone up and had taken his failure to heart ever since. He even thought it was his destiny when he saw Rong Yi in the cinema. Unfortunately, he quickly sensed Rong Yi’s clearly perfunctory attitude towards their meeting.

But even so, with this opportunity, he still didn’t want to give up easily. After all, this was his first love at first sight in his whole life.

Rong Yi was quietly thinking, “By the time you’ve had love at first sight for 17 or 18 times, just like me, you’ll know it’s not a big deal. Most times you’ll just realise you’re totally blind.”

After having badgered Rong Yi for a bit longer, finally Zhou Li said, “Since we are both Omegas, can we at least be friends?”

He was obviously trying to beat around the bush, but Rong Yi could not find a legitimate reason to refuse. What’s more, if Zhou Li should be so upset as to tell his family something bad about him, then the baldy might take a personal revenge on him in the company.

After exchanging WeChat IDs, Rong Yi made a point to show Zhou Li the gender information on his profile page.

Seeing that Zhou Li still seemed unconvinced, he decided to wait until he got a new identity card. He would take a photo immediately, and set the section about gender as the profile picture for the Moments in WeChat.

By the time Rong Yi finally got home, it was a lot earlier than he thought.

After all, they had not finished watching the movie, nor had they had dinner together afterwards. Rong Yi was determined to get out of the battlefield and didn’t realise he was hungry until he was back home lying in bed.

The takeaway deliveries were too slow during this rush hour for dinner, so he found a packet of instant noodles in the food cabinet and boiled them on fire.

Rong Yi was very good at cooking, but his daily work was very busy, and most time he got home too late, so he usually either ate dinner at a convenience store or order a takeaway, and occasionally ate instant noodles for a change of taste.

There was plenty of time to cook on weekends, but he didn’t have much interest in cooking for himself alone.

He had thought he would soon have the chance to cook for someone he liked.

Chen Keyao was so annoying. He just barged in to his head all of a sudden again. If only the memories in the brain could be deleted as easily as the numbers in a mobile phone directory. This damned Alpha was just like a happiness overdraft facility where all the joy that he got from him was borrowed, and now he needed to repay both the capital and the interest.

But the interest was way too high. It was an endless debt that he could never repay completely. Rong Yi felt he had lost out big time.

Just as he was thinking at random in front of the cooker, his mobile phone went off.

Rong Yi rushed over and answered it only to find that it was a spam call. After blocking the number, he saw a new unread message.

The sender was Zhou Li, the content contained a picture only.

Rong Yi opened the message, and was left not knowing whether to laugh or cry. That was a picture of him taken by someone else at a university sports event. Zhou Li’s picture also showed a screenshot of some comments on the forum, all of which was discussing whether he faked his gender information.

Rong Yi remembered that this post was posted on their school BBS, and finally he personally posted an image of his student card at the end of that thread.

Zhou Li apparently did some searching after he returned home.

“Now you believe me?” He replied.

Zhou Li sent a voice call request. Once connected, Rong Yi immediately heard his voice on the verge of crying.

“I feel so depressed,” he said.

Rong Yi was embarrassed: “...I’m sorry.”

“But...It’s kind of comforting.” Zhou Li said. “To be rejected for a reason like this, although still feeling pain in the chest, I don’t feel that heart-broken any more.”

“You really are a nice person,” Rong Yi tried to comfort him, “You don’t know how much I envy you. In fact, isn’t it super easy for an Omega like you to find a date?”

“I wasn’t planning to date anyone...” Zhou Li said.

In one sense, he was like the opposite of Rong Yi.

Cute but self-contained, and dismissive of the many Alphas after him. Before graduation, he had made a career plan for himself, and the word ‘family’ was placed on the edge of his life blueprint that could be scrapped at any time.

But because of a baby face, which was not a problem when at school or university, he was looked down upon everywhere at workplace. Many were not being malicious, but some so-called “care” was not so agreeable to the self-respecting receiver.

He was trying to be strong and independent, but his whole family believed that, for an Omega like him, to get married and have children was the only right way. So they kept arranging blind dates for him.

“My uncle is really sick,” he complained to Rong Yi. “He’s never introduced me to a normal person! Oh, I’m not saying you’re abnormal...But you’re not really normal, are you!”

Hearing this, Rong Yi didn’t get upset at all. After all, this meant that he had resolved this dilemma smoothly. Zhou Li definitely wouldn’t badmouth him and make his bald uncle pick on him at work. And he seemed to have made a really interesting friend out of it.

They each had their own troubles. Rong Yi also shared a few complaints.

Contrary to Zhou Li, he was not a man of particularly strong career ambitions. But because of the extreme void of love life and the lack of any hobbies to waste time for, his life focus naturally fell on career only. He became the project manager at a young age. The responsibility became heavier and occupied more and more of his spare time, and it became even less likely to find a partner.

And his parents, though they kept joking that they couldn’t marry him off, didn’t really worry about it. He had politely hinted to them on several occasions that he wouldn’t mind going on some arranged blind dates, but the response he got was always “the match-maker is scared away as soon as they hear about your height”.

The two of them comforted each other for a little while. Although their personalities were far apart, they started to feel closer to each other, and friendship was gradually warmed up.

Zhou Li, who had been sighing, suddenly seemed to think of something.

“That...I suddenly got an idea. I don’t know if you’d like to...Just...”

“Do tell?”

“Can you pretend to be my boyfriend?” Zhou Li said.

“……”

“I’m sure my uncle doesn’t know you are an Omega,” he continued. “We don’t have to be together. Just say we feel happy about each other and would like to stay in touch. I’m really fed up with the endless dating.”

“Uh...”

“Anyway, we don’t have any overlap in our circles of friends, do we?” Zhou Li said, “I’ll try not to cause you any trouble!”

Rong Yi hesitated.

This wasn’t the first time that someone asked him for this type of favour. He had agreed to do this for someone before, only to find that that person ended up falling in love with him and caused a lot of unnecessary trouble later on.

He couldn’t help but to think twice about Zhou Li’s proposal.

“...You can charge fees, but I’m still very poor, so I can’t afford it if you are too expensive.”

What nonsense.

Rong Yi didn’t know whether to laugh or become irritated. He was just about to agree to do it when he suddenly smelled a very pungent burning smell.