It's Not a Diary (2)
“Is this… a diary?”
It was simple curiosity. With a light heart, Elly peered at the paper Yona had been carrying.
Slap!
“Stand up. It’s the only thing a crippled bastard like you can do anyway.”
The woman, drunk as she spoke, had a sneer curling at the corners of her mouth. Yet the contempt wasn’t aimed at her crippled lover. No, it was self-mockery, directed entirely at herself.
The truth she could never confess to anyone had festered into a rotten wound, destroying her from within.
Anger with nowhere left to go took the shape of violence. What she struck was clearly his cheek, but the act was no different from self-harm.
Because even now, he remained the most precious thing in her world.
He clutched his cheek for a moment, staring blankly up at her, then slowly nodded.
“Yeah.”
He didn’t know what she had endured in the hobgoblin settlement. But he knew exactly what he had gone through.
The body odor that reminded him of rotten onions. Faces twisted with vulgar lust. Blatant, groping hands. Even though he had been drugged, his body had reacted, and sometimes, terrified of worse violence, he had even flirted back on his own.
He hated himself.
He hated the self that had been defiled by mere hobgoblins. He hated this body that had been forcibly developed and now grew aroused without warning. He hated that, even after bearing all that shame, he had become a cripple who couldn’t walk on his own two feet.
That was why her violence had always felt natural to him. If you did something wrong, you received punishment. Wasn’t that just common sense?
He was in the middle of atoning for his sins.
“…….”
Elly read like a woman possessed, flipping through the pages with frantic speed.
Having skimmed all the way to the final sheet in moments, she felt as if she had sobered up in an instant. Her face pale, she carefully set the paper back down.
It was a horrific story.
It certainly took the form of an erotic novel, and while the sex scenes were intense, they were arousing enough to stir a faint heat.
But beyond that, it left her feeling dirty.
A comfortable swamp. The foolishness of choosing one’s own ruin. A warped possessiveness. A relationship crumbling apart. A body and mind wearing down to nothing. Belated regret.
And at the very bottom of it all, an obsession as sticky as tar.
In a world influenced by the Goddess of Love, where every kind of sexual act was permitted, one could easily find stories far more extreme if judging purely by intensity.
Yet there was one unwritten rule. According to the Goddess of Love’s teachings, only relationships built on mutual consent were ever to be depicted.
From that perspective, how did Yona’s writing measure up?
It’s walking a dangerous line.
There was no outright force from one side. That didn’t make it a healthy relationship, though.
The woman unleashed her anger and irritation on the man through violence, and the man accepted it all while in pain.
Right up until the moment the woman, unable to overcome her self-loathing, hanged herself before his eyes. The man never once resented her.
It was the story of two twisted people who happened to fit together perfectly… a tale of them slowly strangling each other.
And at the same time, it was unmistakably a love story.
I didn’t know Yona had this kind of talent.
It was too dark, too uncomfortable, but in the end the female and male leads—who had both failed at suicide—cleared up their misunderstanding and reached a happy ending.
The writing itself was excellent. At least, it wasn’t the work of a complete beginner.
This was certain, seen through the eyes of Elly, the insane erotic-novel addict who had read over seventy percent of every title sold on the market.
However, what weighed on Elly’s heart wasn’t the story’s atmosphere, the fact that a minor had written erotica, or even the intensity of the scenes.
‘Those Who Swallow the Twilight’ had been replaced with hobgoblins, and the two characters’ relationship was exaggeratedly distorted, but…
The structure itself resembled her story with Yona so closely that it lodged in her heart like a thorn.
Did Yona see me that way? …No. The protagonist isn’t only the female lead.
With a complicated expression, Elly looked down at Yona’s face. He was sleeping soundly, no doubt exhausted from writing nonstop after his brief outing.
Not the female lead, but the male lead. Not me, but a projection of himself…?
The male protagonist in the story never escaped his trauma until the very end. To him, he remained a dirty, useless cripple defiled by hobgoblins.
And back when Yona had been an experimental subject of Those Who Swallow the Twilight, Elly knew what had been done to him.
She had also recently heard from Rydia that Yona might have come from a rather high-ranking noble family.
If he had simply been a bottom-of-the-barrel orphan in Pan Grave, someone who would risk his life or sell his body just to survive, it might have been easier.
But if Yona had been born with noble blood—if he had received the education and sense of chastity that came with it—then those memories from his time as a test subject would have been an unimaginable trauma.
Even his usual frivolous behavior…
People who had given up on themselves and threw their bodies around recklessly were a common sight in Pan Grave.
Even the staff at her own bar had carried that same air when she first hired them.
Thump!
The sensation of a heavy stone dropping onto her heart.
She hadn’t heard the full story directly, but because Elly had believed she understood Yona fairly well until now, the shock hit even harder.
“Haa…”
Her wounds weren’t aching, yet Elly suddenly craved a magic herb cigarette more than anything.
She let out a long sigh as she gazed down at Yona.
Hair as delicate and soft as silk, a lovely pink. An atmosphere like a flower bud halfway through the process of a boy becoming a man.
His defenselessly exposed cheeks looked strangely moist today, of all days…
Normally, Elly would have felt at least a flicker of lust. But now—at this moment—she simply couldn’t.
Perhaps Yona didn’t truly see himself the way the male lead did in that story. Even if he did, it might not be to that extreme a degree.
But it was clear such darkness existed inside his heart. Nevertheless, the way he still loved the world and believed without doubt that it could move toward something better was almost blinding.
“Ah.”
Only then did Elly understand. Why the Goddess of Love, silent for a thousand years, had taken an interest in Yona. She was finally beginning to grasp what Karen meant by calling him a possible saint.
A candle in broad daylight held little value, but a candle on a pitch-black night without even moonlight was more precious than anything.
Yona was the same.
A person who could speak of love in the face of despair… was more beautiful than anyone else.
It was a simple truth that Elly—who had once shouted for courage against a dark reality—understood better than most.
Elly carefully reached out toward the sleeping Yona.
A hand trembling with a mixture of affection, guilt, admiration, and pity.
Stroke. Stroke.
As she caressed his round head, the soft texture of his ear beneath her fingertips made Elly’s body tremble on its own. And then—
“Mmm…”
Yona rubbed his head against her like a cat in his sleep.
At that sight, Elly let out a wry smile.
“Sigh. If you’re going to sleep, do it properly in bed instead of slumping over the desk like that.”
With those words, she lifted the sleeping Yona and pulled him into her arms.
The weight of him against her chest. The pleasant scent that rose strongly from his body. Even though he was young, he was still a man—his subtly firm frame and muscles.
Every detail stimulated her, yet in the end Elly did not pounce on him.
Other emotions were taking priority over lust right now… and above all, the cowardly Elly simply didn’t have the nerve.
She laid Yona gently on the bed and pulled the blanket over him.
For some reason a large quantity of dried magic herb was hidden beneath the covers… but it didn’t seem important, so she quietly pushed it aside.
Then she leaned down, bringing her lips toward Yona’s forehead… only to lose her nerve at the last moment. Instead, she simply pressed their foreheads together.
Elly stayed like that for a long time, forehead to forehead with the sleeping boy, before slowly lowering her head.
“It’s okay now. It’ll be okay.”
Because she would make it so.
With a faint smile, Elly turned off the room lights and slipped out the door. Just before closing it completely, she whispered through the narrow gap.
“Sleep well.”
And so the skinship event Yona had been eagerly—and repeatedly—anticipating never happened.
Only the Unicorn Dagger left on the desk sparkled quietly in the darkness.
“Gwaaaaaack!”
The strange stiffness running through his entire body woke him. When he opened his eyes, he found himself lying in bed with the blanket pulled over his head.
“What did I do before falling asleep yesterday…?”
His memories were a little hazy, so he focused and retraced his steps. He had definitely been writing… writing and then…
“Oh, I just passed out right there?”
Had his body instinctively sought out the bed? It was a common thing when pulling all-nighters writing, so he knew the feeling well.
His body felt tired, but perhaps because he had finally written something after so long, his mind felt surprisingly refreshed.
“Hmm-hmm~”
A tune flowed out naturally as he hummed and headed down to the first floor.
Yet contrary to expectation, the view outside the windows was dark. Only now did he realize he had slept through an entire day and only woken up the following evening.
So the stiffness had simply come from sleeping too long.
…Well. With everything that had been happening lately, it was about time the accumulated fatigue exploded. Today must have been the day.
Since the first floor had already been cleared and he had decided to lie low for a few days while observing the Pope’s response, it didn’t matter.
The first floor was noisy once again, packed with customers. Enjoying the lively clamor, he descended the stairs.
There stood Elly, completely back to her usual self unlike yesterday.
Wild gray hair that looked as if it had been through a battlefield. Perky wolf ears. Elly, smiling fiercely while her empty right sleeve fluttered, was waving one hand in a suspiciously playful manner.
“You’re up? It was so late I thought you might be having some secret, intimate time alone in your room.”
It seemed the previous NTR play… no, incident? Anyway, that matter had been settled. She was back to her usual teasing tone.
In response, I grinned and raised the corners of my mouth.
“Aw, Elly, since you’re a virgin you probably don’t know, but unlike women, men have a limit on the number of times, you know? I can’t go for that long.”
“…Eh. Really? But in the books—”
“That’s because they’re fiction. Anyway, the work is mostly handled by the waiter hyungs so it’s not busy, right? Come here. I’ll give you some proper sex education, Elly.”
Chuckling, I hopped over the counter. Elly retreated, babbling incoherently.
Whatever else, I really liked this kind of daily life. Thinking that days like today would continue for a while made me feel a little happy.
Thump!
That is, until I spotted the purple-haired brat who had jumped up onto the counter and was now looking down at me.
“Hey. Are you that baggage carrier kid Rydia mentioned?”
“…You’re a kid too, so why are you speaking informally?”
Confucian Switch ON!