The Pretend-Goody-Two-Shoes Chef Next Door Is a Lunatic

The worst decision Wen Yining ever made was taking a bite of her neighbor’s cooking. The braised pork that day was unforgettable, and what followed was downright unbelievable. First she mooched one meal, then two. Somewhere along the way, the little chef next door, with his dimples, started showing up at her door right on time, bowl in hand. His puppy eyes glistened as he said, “Sis, I made your favorite sweet-and-sour ribs today.” She thought she’d picked up a magical snail boy. A 25-year-old manga artist who had never been in a relationship and was painfully slow to catch on, she was being expertly fed by her sunny, healing 23-year-old puppy-dog neighbor. If she put that plot in her manga, her readers would call it clichéd. But it was actually happening. The whole neighborhood was helping him out. Her best friend Su Xiao was the number one shipper, sous-chef Cheng Lang provided cover, and even the editor Gu Huaizhi, whom he used to make her “jealous,” once slapped the table after a few drinks and said, “Old Lu, have I paid you back for what I owe you yet?” Everyone knew about this tender, carefully planned hunt, except the prey herself. But when Lu Yanchen laid everything bare before her, his dark, anxious, almost pathological possessiveness, Wen Yining stayed silent for a long time. At last, she picked up her pen and drew a smiley face on the last page of her notebook. Beneath it, she wrote: “Silly, you don’t have to pretend. I like you anyway.” She heard a spatula clatter to the floor in the kitchen. The next second, Lu Yanchen rushed out with flour-covered hands, his dimples showing all the way to his ears and his eyes red-rimmed. A long-planned, whole-neighborhood matchmaking scheme became a sweet romance in which both hearts reached for each other.