Chapter 64
To be honest, Caesar hadn’t had high expectations for his marriage to Beatrice. He’d married her impulsively, driven by a desperate desire to keep her by his side.
His feelings were close to that of someone who, reaching out with greedy hands to seize a treasure, found himself dazed once it was truly in his grasp.
So Caesar felt that it was more than enough—almost too much—that, on paper, he had become her husband, that her surname was now followed by ‘Valentin’, and that he could should to the world that she was his wife.
If they could simply live with one another without intense dislike, sharing a moderately warm and stable relationship, would that not already be a blessed life?
But unbelievably, Beatrice seemed to want to give him even more than that.
Even just being enchanted by her as she lowered her eyes and brushing his lips against hers had filled him with overwhelming guilt.
When he apologized for stealing a kiss he couldn’t resist, what came in return was a kiss even deeper.
Could anything in this world be so soft, so gentle? As he carefully explored her tender lips, Caesar felt like his head might burst from the nervousness and bittersweet emotion.
Before the afterglow of that monumental—no, commemorative-worthy—first kiss could even fade, Beatrice threw him into another pit of shock.
“No. It has to be tonight. Unless you’re planning to make me the tragic Margravine who was shunned by her husband from the very first night.”
Had it not been for her firm insistence, the consummation of their marriage would have been postponed without question.
Born in the gutter and raised rolling through filth, later wading through pools of blood—he had intended to wait until this unclean body of his had at least begun to be purified by time.
And if that was impossible, he had been willing to wait until his young, delicate wife matured a little more with the passage of years.
But the human heart is far too weak, and he couldn’t bring himself to push away the hand that Beatrice used to gently pull him forward.
“Have you… had experience before?”
To hear such a question on his wedding night, after having lived like a monk—it was too cruel. A surge of injustice made him want to leap up, but the fact that the night ahead was daunting remained unchanged.
It wasn’t that he didn’t know how intercourse worked. But all of Caesar’s knowledge had been picked up on the streets.
And with this heavy body of his, one wrong move on his fragile wife might surely hurt her…
It would be a lie to say he hadn’t imagined their wedding night before the ceremony. But even in all those fantasies, Beatrice was always clear-eyed and innocent—he couldn’t easily envision her disheveled in passion.
“If you’re really nervous about our first night… how about we go slowly together, step by step?”
Perhaps frustrated by his hesitation, Beatrice offered those words, and at the same time, Caesar felt utterly wretched. To disappoint his wife over something like this—how pathetic.
Resolving himself to approach the night with more determination, he found himself handed a small, antique-looking book by Beatrice.
Opening it without thinking, he discovered it was filled with content that described marital relations in the most indirect and cultured way—a courteous perversion, in a sense.
Just imagining his wife reading this book alone and studying up on marital intimacy nearly drove him to madness, but Caesar managed to restrain his spiraling instincts.
“Then, I’ll lie down first, and you come over me. Ah, should we turn off the lights first, as per etiquette?”
“Th—”
“Yes?”
“…No, I’ll go turn them off.”
Lie down? Come on top? Did Beatrice have any idea how each of her words chipped away at a man’s self-control?
Still, Caesar endured even that. He considered, for a moment, telling her that he could see just fine in the dark, but ultimately said nothing and quietly extinguished every light, if only to ease her embarrassment.
As darkness enveloped the room, his heart paradoxically grew calmer. And when Beatrice insisted they pull the blankets over themselves, it created the secretive intimacy of a cave shared only by two.
What popped into Caesar’s mind at that moment was a tale of sinful indulgence of shielding oneself beneath a white cloth from the gaze of the gods to commit a forbidden act.
That this feast before him stirred guilt even before indulgence. That alone made him feel he truly resembled that sinner.
A mere blanket couldn’t cover that feeling, but if it could even slightly shield them from divine wrath, so be it.
If, by doing this, the capricious goddess of fortune would refrain from taking her back, he thought he might not mind spending his life secretly loving his wife like this.
“I’m so nervous, Caesar…”
He was just as nervous. But like any man before his wife, Caesar longed to appear competent, and barely managed to steady himself.
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