Lately, something was up with Phil. He’d been acting bizarre, like he was particularly uneasy about something. I was currently sitting underneath the gazebo in the garden at House Lawrenson’s mansion, and Phil was preparing tea for us. However, his movements were more awkward than usual, and it looked like he couldn’t settle down. Right when I was about to ask him what the matter was, he placed a teacup in front of me.
“Take your time to calmly and carefully enjoy this tea.”
“Carefully? All right, then. Thank you very much.”
This was the first time he’d ever given me directions like this. Unsure of how to react, I nodded anyway. Perhaps this was a special tea? It would make sense if he wanted me to properly taste it and simply chose the wrong words to express that.
With that in mind, I immediately placed my lips on the rim of the teacup, ready to savor the flavor, when I noticed Phil staring at me closely with a serious expression on his face. His gaze was so intense I felt like he’d bore holes into me. Did he put that much effort into this cup of tea?
“W-Well, I’m going to drink it now,” I said.
Nervously, I slowly poured the tea down my throat. It was delicious, of course, but it was the same amount of delicious that it always was. What was so different about this tea? I wondered that as I carefully drained the cup. In the end though, I was so concerned about how Phil never took his eyes off me that I ended up chugging the entire thing. I placed the empty cup onto the table and for some reason, Phil gasped as if surprised.
“You drank...everything?”
“Huh? Uh, yes?”
“You’ve got to be kidding...”
He looked so shocked that I started to become perplexed. He told me to drink it, which was exactly what I did. So why was he staring at me like “I can’t believe you drank it”? Perhaps everything he said up to this point was a prelude for “Don’t drink it.”
“Um, was this tea something I shouldn’t have drank?” I asked.
“Well, no, it’s fine to drink. But um, there’s something wrong.”
“Huh?”
The answer was so ambiguous that it only deepened the mystery.
“Oh no, don’t tell me...”
After a moment of thought, Phil hurriedly picked up the cooling cup of tea in front of him.
“What?”
He chugged the whole thing and then took out a handkerchief from his pocket. With a curious expression on his face, he held the cloth in front of his mouth and when he took it away, there was a cute ring sitting in the palm of his hand. What was going on? We stared at each other in silence.
“Er, is this a new magic trick?” I asked.
“Something like that...” he said after a long pause.
“Uh, it sure is amazing. This is the first time I’ve ever seen a trick go this way.”
“Yes, I figured...”
I had no idea what he wanted to accomplish by taking a ring out of his mouth and then slumping his shoulders. What happened to him?
Phil was still behaving strangely the next time we met. His face flushed as if he wanted to say something, and he always did things that I would’ve never dreamed of. It was so bizarre that I couldn’t help but ask if everything was all right. Even though Phil would assure me things were, his words came out slowly, as if he had a hard time pushing them out.
Without a doubt, he was hiding something. But I didn’t know what it was or why he was keeping me in the dark.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Oh, if it isn’t Phillip, the best magician of our generation!”
“I’m begging you to never call me that again.”
It’d been a while since Rex last invited me to eat dinner with him. Once we arrived at our usual restaurant, he looked at my face, immediately burst out laughing, and of all things, called me a magician. It seemed that Viola told him what happened the other day. I heaved out a deep sigh and sat down across from Rex.
“Hey, so, what in the world happened for you to pull a ring out of your mouth?”
“I tried to propose to her...”
“Sorry, it looks like my mind is too feeble to understand the situation from that explanation. I can’t seem to tie those dots together.”
Rex looked genuinely befuddled, so I decided to explain everything to him.
“To tell the truth, I purchased a book the other day...”
After Rex gave me advice at the café on how I could get closer to Viola, I decided to propose to Viola in the most romantic way I could think of. So I purchased a book titled The Ideal Proposal ♡ What Girls Want. As I studied the book, it recommended a method where you would place a replica of a ring inside of a teacup, only for it to pop up after the other person finished drinking the tea. It was a way to spring a surprise proposal onto someone.
According to the book, girls loved surprises more than anything else. So I immediately put the plan into action. In the end, though, I was too nervous and made a fatal mistake. Not only did I fail in my proposal, but the people around me started to think of me as a magician as well.
“In other words... I made a mistake when putting the ring into the teacups.”
“Sorry, I don’t think that was where you made your mistake,” Rex managed to say before he devolved into fits of laughter, tears beginning to form in the corners of his eyes. “Oh, goodness, my stomach! It hurts! Phillip, you’re awesome!”
The waiter who walked over with our food saw the way he was acting and looked uncomfortable.
“You don’t need to pull tricks like that,” Rex continued after he calmed down. “You can just take her to a fancy restaurant, watch the stars, and propose to her with your own words and feelings. Even when you’re doing nothing but standing around, you’re cooler than anyone else in the kingdom. So long as you act like a normal person, of course.”
Rex was right. I shouldn’t do things I wasn’t used to. “Just be yourself,” as they said. I reflected on these words and where I went wrong.
“In any case, Phillip, you only need to do what you think is best for Viola’s sake. That’s obviously the best way to go about it.”
Rex’s advice was always straight to the point and from an angle I would have never come up with on my own. I once again took out my notebook and wrote down what he just said.
“Hey, did you try some of the other suggestions you wrote down in that book?”
“Yes, but how did you know?”
“Viola was seriously worried about you. She said that you’ve been acting weird lately. C’mon, tell me what else you tried. I’m gonna be so curious that I won’t be able to sleep at night if you don’t.”
“Sure, I don’t mind telling you.”
I’d failed in all my attempts to propose to her, and yet Viola was so worried about me she went to consult Rex. I simply wanted her to be happy, so I felt bad I was causing her so much anxiety. After that, I regaled Rex with tales of my past attempts and he laughed so hard he never finished his meal.