This is a continuation of  Love O2O: Episode 17 Highlights

8. Her embarrassment = him shooting himself on the foot

We’re so focused on the kiss that we miss this cute scene.

After kissing her, Nai tells Weiwei to wait for him and kisses her hand. She remains tight-lipped. To me, she’s keeping herself from grinning (not puking). She stares at the hand that he just kissed, like it’s morphed into an alien’s limb. lol. No, she isn’t thinking of chopping off that hand because Nai kissed it. She’s probably thinking that she’s not going to wash that hand ever.

She stirs from her state of incredulity. “How can I wait for him? That’s too obedient of me.”

This statement of hers is THE reason I didn’t see her passive kissing earlier as act of submission and compliance. 😎

Reasoning bears that if she refuses to wait for him because this would make her “obedient” then she should have refused his kiss earlier too because HEY! kissing is way worse than waiting. Ya think?

If she allowed him to kiss her because he’s her boyfriend and she had no choice but to “submit” to his kisses, then she could wait for him, too, because he’s her boyfriend and she has no choice but to “submit” to his order. Why is she complaining about waiting now?

If she considers waiting for him as “too obedient”, then how would she describe letting him kiss her? Shouldn’t that be “too too too too obedient”? If complying to his order to wait for him is a sign of obedience, shouldn’t submitting to his “unwanted” kisses be a sign of dominance, subjugation, enslavement, and torture? 

If she regards:
waiting for him because he said so = too obedient. Therefore, she must resist.

Then, she should have considered:
allowing him to kiss her because “he” wanted to = waaaayyy toooooooo obedient. Therefore, she should have kicked him in the nuts.

🤦‍♀️😈

To me, the kiss was stunning, that is, it stunned her.

She wasn’t restrained until that second when Friend #1 interrupted them. When she startled, and tried to move away, he deepened that kiss. She then forgot to resist and closed her eyes. If you replay that scene, she allowed him to go on because she lost herself in the moment, too.

THAT is the ultimate source of her embarrassment: that she LIKED the kiss when it’s FORBIDDEN.

As a psychological defensive move, she thinks to herself: I can’t wait here; that would make me too obedient. She makes up an arbitrary RULE in her mind, forbidding herself from acting “compliant,” waiting for him, and liking the kiss and being “seduced.” She’s putting a mental obstruction because she’s embarrassed.

Call it denial. 🤦‍♀️😈

She tells herself that she isn’t biddable; she isn’t an “easy” girl and a putty in his hand. She’s denying that she liked the kiss.

It’s a dead giveaway of her CONFLICTED and tortured mind that she suddenly spins herself in that Elephant Twirl and then composes herself with a Tai Chi-like move. Do you see it? 🤪 Those two actions counteract each other. The Elephant Spin makes her dizzy and lose her center of gravity, but the Tai Chi Move makes her focus herself and find her center of gravity.

Then, she gets this brilliant idea that flight is the answer. She tells herself, “No, I think I should just take off” and she hurriedly grabs her luggage and tiptoes out of the room. But she hasn’t moved 10 feet when she gets an attack of sanity, “I can’t just leave like this. Isn’t this… isn’t this normal? Dashen would probably laugh at me, if I run off like this.”

While she deliberates on her next move, her food delivery arrives. Nai ordered her food, before he went to his meeting, because she had complained of the terrible food on the plane. She uses having no change to pay the deliveryman as her excuse to leave Nai. She writes a note to explain her departure.

The only reason I didn’t roll my eyes at her virginal act is that she’s been consistent throughout. Prior to this, as I’ve explained in previous episodes, she’s too innocent to think about sexual intimacy in her relationship. She did NOT even get the whole implication of Tigers-cannot-cohabit-because-they’re-minors 🤪😂 that she complained to Nai about the restriction. Like why can’t the game allow this?! You’re not going to be this strict are you in your game?! 🤦‍♀️🤷‍♀️😂

The double-entendre missed her.

When Nai returns from the meeting and finds her note, he knows she’s lying, “Thanks for the Rice with Beef, but I didn’t have any change and they wouldn’t let me create a tab. So I went to a pay at the restaurant.”

lol. The deliveryman himself thought she was creating a fuss because SHE could have made a tab.

Nai mutters, “It’s bad enough that you ran off, you also made a lousy excuse for that.” So he calls her up.

WW: Hello?
Nai: Where are you?
WW: I’m cleaning Xiaoling’s apartment. I can’t stay on campus. So I’m staying at her place for a while.
Nai: Address?
WW: You’re coming over? Maybe later. I’m cleaning. It’s very dirty.
Nai: I’ll go to you. (meaning, he’ll come over.)
WW: No. You’re too important of a person. I can’t afford to hire you.
Nai: Weiwei, are you being shy? (I think I prefer the other translation, “Are you embarrassed?”)
WW: (rattling it off) 1601BuildingABaoguiGarden. Bringtwobottlesofjuicewhenyoucome.

He arrives at her door, ready to reason with her. But she plops a paper hat on his head, before he can say a word, and pushes him to the kitchen. He kinda laughs at her antics because he knows what she’s up to.

It’s obvious that she’s preempting him and avoiding any conversation about post-mortem talk about the kiss. She orders him, “Clean the kitchen. Don’t come out until it’s clean.”

She leaves him in the kitchen which is the perfect place for HIM to think about his situation.

The funny thing is Xiaoling predicted all this in Episode 13.

Remember? She couldn’t believe that Nai was moving slowly. She said, “That’s impossible! Is Dashen Xiao changing tactics and slowing down? Maybe he’s pulling ‘the boiling frog’ trick? He must want a long-term relationship with Weiwei. So romantic!” And Weiwei just poked her back to silence and retorted, “You’re the frog!”

I wiki’ed this “boiling frog” strategy. Apparently, to cook a frog, it’s best to slowly boil it instead of plunging it in a hot water. If a frog is suddenly dropped in boiling water, it will just as quickly jump out. But if the frog is placed in lukewarm water, and the water is slowly heated up, the frog will remain oblivious of its pending death. The frog won’t notice that it’s being slowly cooked as its body temperature is only being gradually raised.

And that’s why I thought the kitchen is an appropriate place for Nai to be. He’s reflecting on what he’s done. To use an English culinary idiom, he’s STEWING in his own juice, that is, he’s suffering the consequences of his own actions.

Nai now realizes that kissing her is like dropping the frog in boiling water. She hastily left his office, like a frog leaping out of the pot, because she realized that she was in danger of being heated to boiling point if she stuck around for more of his kisses. As a result of that kiss, he’s now sitting on the kitchen counter, like he’s been placed on timeout. To make it worse, he’s been ordered (like he ordered her to wait for him) to clean the kitchen all by himself.

And that’s what he means in the next Episode 18 when he tells Weiwei that he knows already what it means to shoot himself in the foot.

 

The expression on his face and her smile when they exchanged looks say it all.

This is why in Episode 29, she’s confused when XiaoLing teases her about losing out to Nai in everything including “wrestling.” She thinks “wrestling” referred to the actual sport when Xiaoling actuall means getting physical in bed. In this aspect of their relationship, she’s got Nai under her thumb. She calls the shots

…all because of their kiss in Episode 17.