Hiya– It’s Me, The Runaway Female Lead - Chapter 11

With my lips stuck out a mile, I finished helping him into his armor.

And a little while later, by the time the young master was ready to leave the estate, I had already forgotten all about our earlier squabble.

Whatever the case, he was my master, someone I’d lived alongside for so long. I was honestly worried about Claude. To be precise, it was more anxiety about my own uncertain future if something happened to him… but still.

“Please take care on your trip.”

He glanced at my anxious face for a moment, then answered in his usual unaffected voice.

“Yeah. You stay safe, too.”

I got a reply back, huh. How touching.

That day, unlike usual, I found myself lingering at the driveway until the departing knights were completely out of sight, my eyes unusually wet.

For some reason, the bitter smile the young master showed me at the last moment wouldn’t leave my mind all day.

* * *

It was strange.

Normally, I would have forgotten all about the young master once he left and gotten on just fine.

But for some reason, this time, I found myself recalling his last expression every spare moment, and I didn’t understand why.

When he even started showing up in my dreams, I finally realized something was off.

What… is this?

I began to carefully examine my unusual state. And I was horrified.

Could it be… I have feelings for the young master?

It was hard to believe, but, on the other hand, it wasn’t entirely out of the question. The fact that I could so naturally accept the idea horrified me all over again, but regardless.

Well, considering I’d only lived about twenty years, and nine of them had been spent with him… that really was half my life.

Maybe, after so long, whether I liked it or not, I’d gotten attached to him in some way.

When I thought about our first meeting and everything that happened afterward, I couldn’t imagine how it was possible. But the human heart sometimes moved in the strangest directions.

Still, was it really possible for me to suddenly like that cold-hearted, unfeeling young master?

It was almost a schizophrenic thought, but that’s how confused I was.

If I had to point to a reason… maybe it was his oddly gentle attitude since his coming-of-age ceremony? Of course, ‘gentle’ by his standards was a bit different from what most people meant.

Most of what came out of Claude’s mouth was still far from kind, and there were plenty of times he was still insufferable, but his harassment had definitely lessened compared to before.

Or rather, maybe it was just that I hardly saw him anymore. These days, he’d be gone for three or four days at a time, sometimes even a couple of months, so it was much harder to see his face than before.

He’d always been like that, but after he officially started succeeding to the family business, the young master became the very embodiment of fear among the staff.

Even when he was still, Claude was hard to approach, and after a mission, he was as untouchable as a wild beast.

Even the maids who sometimes cleaned his room with me would scramble to flee if they happened to run into him.

Let alone anyone else, if the young master came back covered in blood, or battered, or looking like he’d crawled through a dung heap for two weeks, I was the only one who could handle him.

Maybe it was because I’d spent so many years with him, whether by choice or not, but my fear of him had dulled, like an old kitchen knife.

And at some point, Claude also stopped rejecting my touch. Not that he’d ever act tame as a lamb, but on days when he’d shed blood and when he was especially on edge, he’d let me be no matter what I did.

Maybe I was intoxicated by the specialness of that unusual relationship.

Still… did it make sense to fall for someone just because they’d become a little more composed, when their personality was still that bad?

My doubts remained, but whatever the case, it was the first time in my life that I’d thought so fervently about someone who wasn’t even in front of me.

Up to that point, I had no idea.

That after that night—the night when the moon was strangely beautiful, and both the young master and I were acting just a little bit off—those strange symptoms would only get worse.