Feast of Flowers

Chapter 14 Keep Smiling

"Maybe... my makeup came off and I haven't retouched yet." Hua Jin said as she put down a bottle of water. "It's already five o'clock in the afternoon, and by the time we get back to the hotel, the sky would have already turned dark, right?"

Pei Yan glanced at her and started the car, "It should take about two hours for us to get back to the hotel in Jiangsu from here, so you can go to sleep first."

Hua Jin nodded before falling silent right after closing her eyes.

Along the way, Pei Yan has had to adjust the car's temperature. When they finally arrived at the hotel's parking lot, it was indeed already dark. When he looked down, he saw a notebook had dropped down onto his side so he picked it up. Unexpectedly, there were a lot of small pieces of paper in it that were randomly attached everywhere and two of them dropped on his lap.

He saw that the papers contained very refined designs and had some notes about the embroidery techniques of various places and their various strong points. He then tilted his head to look at Hua Jin before carefully putting the papers back into the notebook.

"We've arrived?" Hua Jin opened her eyes in a daze before slightly twisting her sore neck. When she looked down on her body, she noticed that she was covered by a coat. "Thank you."

"You're welcome. I'm afraid that if you got sick in my car, I'll have to take care of you." Pei Yan then turned off the car's air conditioner entirely but kept the engine running. "Get out of the car once you're fully awake so I can save some fuel."

"Are rich people really so stingy?" Hua Jin proceeded to fold his coat, opened the car door and got off.

"Being frugal and saving are fine traditions of our Chinese nation. No matter how rich you get, you must never lose this virtue." Pei Yan then got out of the car himself and locked the doors. "And what's wrong with saving?"

Hua Jin: "..."

What he said made sense, so she couldn't refute it.

Hua Jin woke up several times that night, probably because the hotel's bed was just too soft. Half-asleep, she seemed to have been transported back into that crowded train and rainy night, where she was surrounded by many strange smells and her body was so cold, she might have frozen to death.

The next morning, she opened her eyes and looked at the sunlight outside the window. She then rubbed her face before getting out of bed.

It was a new day, and the sun was shining brightly.

On her return flight, Hua Jin didn't fly together with Pei Yan. As she sat on her window seat, she thanked him via WeChat, but even until she had to switch her phone to airplane mode, he still hadn't replied.

Back to where she lived, Hua Jin suddenly got her flash of inspiration so she started working on the panda embroidered handkerchiefs [Winter's Not Too Cold] ordered.

What the old grandma wanted probably wasn't the panda handkerchief itself, but the memory of her mother's love for her. It was said that 'old-children', or seniors that acted like children, shared similar taste to their younger counterparts. So, what she should be considering now wasn't how she could show how exquisite her embroidery was, but to simply embroider something her customer might like.

The grandma' mother was definitely not a professional embroiderer herself, so the embroidered pandas weren't necessarily exquisite, but every stitch of thread was full of emotion. She knew that she was about to go to the frontlines so when she was embroidering the handkerchief, she poured all her reluctance to part and all the blessings she wished for her daughter.

All she wanted was for her daughter to remember all the good times they had and how much she loved her, not the separation or the despair.

Slowly calming down, Hua Jin embroidered several different panda handkerchiefs at her home. Some were as delicate as living pandas, some were full of childishness, and some were made full of joy. Each embroidery was different, and even the poses of the pandas were also different. But Hua Jin smoothly embroidered them all.