“Th— The real story? I don’t know what you’re talking about. A guy like him?” Cattleya glared at me, almost spitting the words. “Of course I’m in love with him!”
Well, there you had it!
Mm, mm.
“Of course you’re in love,” I agreed. Ah, to be young!
I was very happy to have gotten my answer—and just the one I expected, at that.
Cattleya, on the other hand, was appalled. “Hey! What’s going on? Why did I just—?” She couldn’t believe what had come out of her own mouth.
I was sure she’d been planning on trying to hide her real feelings. “But there’s no lying here,” I said, pointing to the teacup I had offered her. Inside was plain, clear water. “That’s the Water of Drawing Out True Personality,” I informed her, setting down a teapot full of the stuff.
It was one of the sancta we’d used in our recent attempts to break up Bruno and Annie. Just as the name implied, it could draw out the true self that people were hiding within. When you poured it over someone’s head, like we had with Bruno, it caused whatever they were thinking to immediately pop out of their mouth—but if you could get someone to drink it…
“You’ll only be able to answer truthfully to anything I ask you now.”
…then it acted as a truth serum.
“Oooh! Y-you’ve done it now!” Cattleya growled.
“You never would have told us the truth otherwise, right?”
“W-well, what do you care?! How I feel about someone else is none of your business!”
“Fair enough. I guess it’s not,” I said. But the way I saw it, if Cattleya’s real desires lay elsewhere, then there was also no need to go to all this trouble to break up Annie and Bruno. “Let’s confirm: You’re in love with young Bruno, right?”
“Huh? Yeah, sure I am. Madly in love!”
“So why do you describe him as human trash and everything?”
“I’m the only person who can understand his true beauty!”
“Oh, uh…I see.”
“I can make all his dreams come true, so what’s he doing with her?!”
“Oh, I see…”
Then Cattleya gasped. “Shoot! I’ve said too much!” She clapped her hands over her mouth.
“It’s like some whole new kind of passive aggression,” Elaina muttered from beside us. When she was right, she was right.
“If you love him that much, why don’t you just tell him?” I asked. There were only a few months left to do it. Did she really have time to be screwing around trying to tear Bruno and Annie apart?
Even after I explained my reasoning, Cattleya kept her hands over her mouth, afraid that she would say something else she’d wish she hadn’t.
She must have been frightened that the secrets she was holding in her heart would overflow. Instead, she had chosen to lie, dissemble, and avoid admitting her feelings for her childhood friend all this time.
I looked at Cattleya and said, “Do you really want Bruno to leave without you ever having told him how you feel?” I actually thought maybe I could bring her around. “Do you want to have to live the rest of your life keeping those feelings under wraps?”
Cattleya caught her breath. She gave me another dirty look, but she was biting her lip, pained. The hands drifted away from her mouth. A slow whisper worked its way from between her lips. “You think I don’t know that?” Now, I was sure, we were hearing her heart of hearts. “But it’s impossible! I could never tell him the truth!”
Why not?
I gave her a puzzled look.
Cattleya got more and more agitated as she talked. “I mean, I’m scared! If he turned me down, I…I don’t think I could survive it! Better to say nothing and be in a little pain than to tell him and have it all end!”
Again, this was her truth. I nodded. Yeah, I could understand that.
“But you do love him, don’t you?”
“I adore him!”
“What if you could go out with him?”
“I want to! I so want to!”
“All right…”
But if she never told him how she felt about him, then dating him was less than a dream.
Which meant one thing.
I picked up the teacup, the one full of the Water of Drawing Out True Personality, and said, “You can come out now.” Almost as if I were talking to the cup.
“What are you doing?” Cattleya asked, studying me.
That was when the bell above the shop door jingled.
In came a young man, tall and slim, with pale skin and hair. And he was holding a teacup just like mine. It was Cattleya’s childhood friend. The man she loved.
Bruno.
“Cattleya…,” he said.
Cattleya had been hiding her true feelings from us, yes, but we had also been hiding something from her.
“Say, Bruno. Could I ask you for a favor?” I’d asked after taking their picture and hearing some of the story.
“What is it?” he’d said, curious.
I handed him a teacup. “Hold this and wait by the store, would you?”
“Uh…” Naturally, he was somewhat confused by this sudden, strange request. He studied the teacup. “What’s this?”
“Just wait. You’ll see.” I chuckled and looked very clever.
“Why do I have to wait outside your shop?”
“You’ll understand that later, too.” I chuckled again.
“You don’t have any interest in explaining any of this, do you?” Bruno looked a bit nonplussed, but he humored me. He was really a decent guy, deep down.
“Cattleya… What you just said…” Now Bruno stood in the shop, his face as red as if he’d spent way too long in the sun after hearing what Cattleya truly thought. In his trembling hand, he clutched my teacup.
“See this? It’s a sancta that lets people far away hear what you’re saying!” I told them. Very useful.
Cattleya, meanwhile, was absolutely silent.
“Cattleya…I didn’t have the slightest idea you felt that way about me…”
She stayed silent; she couldn’t even answer Bruno. He didn’t seem to mind; maybe he didn’t even really notice. His eyes flitted this way and that as he said, “I, uh… I mean, about what you said, I—”
“Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek!”
He was interrupted by a scream—a scream from Cattleya, cutting him off before he could say what was really in his heart. Maybe, after hiding her secret so deep for so long, she couldn’t bear the reality she was now confronted with.
She clapped her hands to her cheeks, which were bright red. “Oh my gosh… My Bruno is too hot to handle!”
“I’ve heard of doing a one-eighty, but this is ridiculous,” remarked Elaina, watching them with no special interest.
“Kids these days,” agreed Riviere, equally detached.