A Practical Guide to Ending a One-Sided Love - Chapter 41

However…

The more he thought he couldn’t and mustn’t do it, the stronger the urge rebelled against him.

Right now, all he wanted to do was run out of the temple and rush to where Leila was. He wanted to open the very door he had fled from earlier, pull the startled her into his arms, and share another heated kiss. If she allowed it, into the home she had prepared upstairs, and further into her bedroom…

Of course, the end of the fantasy was empty.

Before long, realizing the reality that he was alone in a palm-sized bachelor pad, Bjorn drove his fist into the innocent wall. The desire he must not harbor was so desperate his head throbbed.

But it was impossible after all. With a scrap of self-control thin and tattered as paper, he steadied himself.

There would never, ever, again be another kiss with Leila Bailey.

* * *

“Sir, could you… give me a moment?”

Bjorn, who had wandered the highest level of heaven with all sense of reality cut off, suddenly regained his hearing. A faint voice stopping him reached his ears, and a fingernail-sized portion of rationality returned.

“I think a customer came. The bell…”

Only after Leila’s very troubled whisper did he realize he was currently inside her bookstore. The two were frantically kissing in the small space behind the counter, hidden by curtains and a wall.

No, perhaps only Bjorn had been frantic. Leila had heard the sound he failed to notice and immediately stopped the kiss.

Trapped between the solid wall and Bjorn’s even more stubborn chest, Leila couldn’t move, but the moment he pulled away she escaped like a butterfly.

Leaning his back crookedly against the wall, Bjorn calmed himself while listening to her gentle voice attending the customer. Of course, it had little effect.

Already, half a month had passed since the day they first kissed. Bjorn’s resolve never to kiss Leila again had collapsed into nothing in a few short days.

While arranging another meeting with Leila under Allen’s newly enforced plan, Bjorn had been intoxicated by a strange anticipation.

And from the moment he met her again, all his attention was stolen by the lips before his eyes and he made mistake after mistake like a marionette with cut strings.

But as always, Leila covered for him, and when they briefly stopped by the bookstore to deal with his clothes ruined by spilled wine, it finally ignited.

Unlike his firm resolve, the moment the chance came, Bjorn clung to her lips and would not part, throwing away all worries and concerns.

It was the same today. He had visited the shop to escort her to the theater, today’s date location.

The determination that he would never yield to temptation today failed against the quiet, dim atmosphere of the book storage he entered to help her. In the end, today once again he reached toward her first. Well, more precisely, his lips did.

Once their lips touched, nothing else came to mind. Only the instinct remained that he must devote all his heat and effort to devouring Leila’s lips.

Her attitude, which had subtly grown more active, didn’t help either. At first Leila had only been flustered by the kiss, but at some point she began carefully trying to accept his lips in earnest, sometimes using her tongue first or wrapping her arms around his neck.

The thought that Leila was granting him not only her heart but her body excited him to the top of his head. Thankfully the evidence of that excitement was hidden from her beyond the thick folds of her dress.

Still leaning against the wall, Bjorn raised one arm and covered his eyes, letting out a sweet sigh. As the overheated passion from the kiss cooled, languid weakness settled over him. With his divine power purring quietly now, even that felt like pleasant satisfaction.

But Bjorn’s good mood soon turned into guilt. The faces of Allen and Todd, who had seen him off this morning without the slightest idea of his betrayal, came to mind.

Since he had still not succeeded in getting Leila to surrender, Bjorn and his two comrades were still fighting their private war.

Among them, Bjorn had suffered severe damage after kissing Leila and had almost lost the will and ability to fight, yet he had not told his comrades about his injury.

Perhaps because of that, interpreting Bjorn’s recent dejection in their own way, Allen and Todd united and planned strategies more actively than before. But no matter how excellent the strategy, success was difficult when the attacker, Bjorn, was already on the verge of surrender.

Allen and Todd were good men. The fact that they were among the few Bjorn, who allowed no one close, spoke with them at all proved their character. Yet even they had recently begun to harbor dissatisfaction and suspicion toward him. Nothing would be solved like this.

Whether he left Leila Bailey behind as she was, or abandoned becoming a monk and stayed by her side…

Bjorn clearly knew the time to decide was approaching.