“Huh…?”
“I’m asking if you would have refused to wear it if you knew beforehand,” Aresh repeated himself.
Seiichirou’s thought process screeched to a halt.
Wait… Wait, wait, wait. His mind quickly kicked back into gear. Inwardly, he shook his head. That’s not what this is about.
The problem was that Aresh had sent him off to a public venue wearing a symbol declaring their engagement without him being any the wiser. Whether he would have worn it knowingly was a whole different question.
“Let’s not change the topic.”
“People from another country were there. You’ll forgive me for wanting to deter any strange bugs from approaching you.”
Seiichirou had no idea what Aresh was so worried about. He didn’t say a single word to an Egorovan at the party—they barely made eye contact.
“That’s not the issue here. I’m talking about your deceptive actions.” Today, at least, he got strange looks from people he knew, which was very embarrassing.
“But you wouldn’t have worn it if you knew.”
Darn it all. They were going in circles. Seiichirou consciously breathed in, and then out. I have to be the mature one, he told himself.
As far as Seiichirou was concerned, Aresh’s willful statement was very much the kind of thing a younger man would say to his romantic partner. It was cute, in a way, but it was still moving the goalposts. It was unwise to mix public and personal matters.
“Listen, Aresh. This is not about whether I would wear the lapel pin. It’s about me unknowingly spreading a message in public.”
The people in the Sorcery Department had mistaken it to mean “you’re finally engaged.”
“In other words, you don’t want to be with me,” Aresh said in a low voice.
“What?” Seiichirou looked up again. This time, he did not see the pouting face of a younger man, but a look of composed seriousness. Seiichirou’s words died in his throat.
As he’d said a thousand times already, that wasn’t what this was about. But he was powerless to change the conversation.
Was Aresh really saying that Seiichirou didn’t want them to be together?
“It’s only been a month since we began this relationship,” was what he mustered.
Indeed. A mere month had passed since Seiichirou and Aresh officially became romantic partners. They first met ten months ago. One could easily argue that this was moving much too fast.
Aresh had different ideas, however. His hands pressed into Seiichirou’s shoulders, making Seiichirou sink further into the sofa.
“You’ll go back to your homeland if I take my time.”
Seiichirou blinked.
Not wanting to hurt Seiichirou, Aresh pulled his hands away from his shoulders, gripping only air.
Seiichirou was not from this world. He had proposed research into movement spells so that he could return home.
But Seiichirou couldn’t turn a blind eye to Aresh’s dogged emotions. It wasn’t as if he’d deliberately avoided thinking about their eventual parting. The spell to send him home was not a simple one to complete, and he figured that there was still plenty of time.
But Aresh thought differently.
“I have no intention of letting you go, Seiichirou.” Aresh rested his head against Seiichirou’s shoulder so that the other man would not see his deeply furrowed brows. Seiichirou could feel the ripples of Aresh’s voice against his body, perhaps because they were so close. “I want to bind us together before you can leave.”
There was nothing Seiichirou could say to that.
When, after some time passed, Aresh told him to leave his room, all Seiichirou could do was nod. He couldn’t even express his thanks to Pavel.
The door to Aresh’s room stayed locked from that day forth.