A Night I Couldn’t Be Honest - Chapter 2.7

There it is again. That pleading look.

A man who had no reason to want for anything became, in front of Rozalia, the most helpless person in the world, entirely by choice.

“You can keep being angry at me. Act however you want, throw as many fits as you like. It’s all fine.”

“Ah…”

“Just stay with me a little longer, until the very end?”

He already knew she didn’t love him, he’d known from the start. She didn’t need to push him away for his own sake.

The outcome was inevitable, and he would never get what he wanted from it, and he knew that, and still he appealed to her, without shame, just for these passing moments.

Azelin shut her eyes briefly against the sudden dizziness. She had the terrible feeling she had walked into a trap.

The warning she’d been hearing all along went quiet. As if warning her was pointless now.

She pressed her fingers against her throbbing temple with a low breath.

“Rozalia?”

She was drowning in an affection that isn’t even hers, and still, she wanted to pretend not to know and keep leaning on him.

She was envious of this love of his, this love that the Princess would glance at and discard. She knew she had to push him away, and she kept testing the depth of his feeling under the cover of that excuse, unable to stop.

For the first time in her life, Azelin gripped the desire to be indulgent, and she clenched her teeth against it. The kind of indulgence she would likely never encounter again, the luxury of being loved.

* * *

Shaken to the core by the sight of a love that had no end, Azelin had gone quiet for the rest of the day. And yet she hadn’t followed through on her plan to turn him away and return to the villa.

In the end she spent the whole day with him again, and they finished the evening with dinner at an upscale restaurant the Marquis had reserved.

“Don’t you feel like the world has truly changed, at times like this?”

“It does.”

The Marquis swirled the last of his wine and murmured as he looked around the restaurant. Azelin nodded.

A meal that rivaled the finest noble table in the empire, food that once would have been strictly for nobility, now available to anyone with enough money.

The balance still tilted heavily toward the old families, but Azelin thought that the more houses like her father’s fell, unable to keep pace, the narrower that gap would become.

She should have felt the threat of it, but somehow she didn’t. Having lived through the collapse of everything that nobility was supposed to mean, she found she had no nostalgia for whatever people thought she’d lost.

‘Would Rozalia feel differently?’ Azelin faltered, not sure what reaction to give, and bit her lip.

“Oh, it’s raining.”

The Marquis came out to the entrance ahead of her, looked at the sky, and his face fell slightly. She followed his gaze up and saw dark, heavy clouds had swallowed the previously clear sky.

Most of the other guests at a restaurant like this would wait until their carriages arrived, unbothered by a sudden downpour.

“Should we call it a day on this charade right now?”

He held his hand out from under the awning and let the falling rain fill his palm.

At this rate, it was certain that within a few steps, they would have to face the fierce downpour. Since they had dismissed their attendants and carriages in the spirit of living as ordinary people for the day, which made getting back complicated.

If she were to call for a carriage right now and return comfortably to the villa, and have the guards who’d been tailing them quietly appear and resolve everything, but strangely, she found she didn’t want to.

Azelin held her hand out for a while, letting the rain water pool in her palm. Droplets balanced on the edge of her hand, then ran off between her fingers, and Azelin was suddenly elsewhere, looking at a memory of the Marquis’s smile, still perfectly clear.

Just as she hesitated, working up the nerve to say something, the area around them grew loud.

“Your clothes are completely soaked!”

Her head turned automatically. The noise was coming from the carriageway near the entrance, where a row of vehicles waited for their owners.

A restaurant employee was bowing repeatedly, mouthing apologies, while the man who had shouted exposed his rain-spotted shoulder and kept at it.

“I’m so sorry, sir…”

“Do you have any idea how much this coat costs? Good lord, really…”

The man flicked the water off with a careless hand, and the droplets flew back onto the face of the employee still bent in apology.

The hierarchy between them was blatant, and the oddly courteous grammar coming from the man who was furious. He spoke in polite forms but his tone and the way he looked at the employee, that said everything about who held the upper hand.

The scene made Azelin’s brow knit.

‘That one’s from the nobility.’

She’d spent enough months working ordinary day jobs in the street to recognize it without having to think. The recognition led her eyes straight to the Marquis’s expression.

She was afraid to see it, and desperate to know what his expression was like, what his thoughts were.

Whether the Marquis who had reached out a hand to her with such ease in the rain, on that day, was still the same person standing beside her now.