What the Body Remembered
As soon as Sylvia spotted him, color rushed into her face.
Owen, meanwhile, flicked a glance at the staircase where the men had gone, then looked back down at Sylvia and said with a crooked tilt to his mouth, “Do you make a habit of doing self-destructive things? You’re taking all of this so calmly, after all.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Does that matter?”
Owen only folded his arms, looking bored. The moment she realized he’d seen through the magic, she bristled with an instinctive urge to reject him, but that arrogant tone snapped her back to her senses.
Right. That wasn’t the important thing.
The important thing was that this man had placed that obscene curse on her.
She swallowed back the urge to grab Owen by the collar on the spot and jabbed a finger at him instead.
“You!”
“What.”
Even with her finger pointed like a threat, the man only looked annoyed, as if she were a child making a scene. That careless response, as though he were merely humoring a younger sibling, made even Sylvia’s ears burn.
She looked away a little and said in a tiny voice, “My body’s been strange ever since I broke things off with you. This is all because of you, isn’t it?”
She’d started out jabbing a finger at him with full force, only to end up sounding like someone who’d been thoroughly intimidated. Owen said nothing, only watched the reddened tips of her ears for a moment before catching the presence of someone else and taking her hand.
“Come with me. If you’re seen here, you’re the only one who’ll lose.”
She couldn’t tell whether he was worried about her or threatening to drag her deeper into some greater den of crime. Still, Sylvia decided to let him lead her for the moment.
Back home, she would have been trembling as she denounced Owen as a once-in-a-century pervert, but the truth was they’d already known each other for five years.
Even if the things they’d said to each other in that time amounted to nothing more than, “Where’s Heston?” or “Are you all right? That wound looks bad. Should I call a doctor?”—after five years of seeing a person, some measure of trust was hard to avoid.
Owen found his way to his room with practiced ease. Whenever people appeared, he hid Sylvia between the columns, and then stood in front of her to block her from view completely.
The knights kept sneaking odd looks at Owen, who had suddenly gone from bad-tempered to standing there blankly and fiddling with the edge of a curtain, but soon they were muttering to one another and disappearing all the quicker.
“Didn’t you hear? That guy’s been off his rocker lately, anyway.”
Even as they bad-mouthed him so openly, Owen didn’t so much as blink. From behind his back, Sylvia stole glances at his profile and found herself feeling something almost like admiration.
But once they reached Owen’s room and the door shut with a sharp click behind them, Sylvia realized she’d been far too careless to follow him in here.
It had only been three days since she’d spent the night with him. And what, exactly, had she been doing just before coming here, while thinking about Owen in her room?
Sylvia reached behind her to cool the heat in her palms as they began to tingle. Pressing them against the cold wall made the pulse in her fingertips even more vivid.
But Owen, apparently thinking she was making a dramatic bid for the exit, frowned irritably and took a step back.
“I’m not going to eat you.”
Having said that much, he strode over to a chair far from her and dropped down onto it. He crossed his arms, then his legs, and looked at her with the particular irritation of a man facing a problem he had no idea how to solve.
As if he were asking himself how this was supposed to be fixed.
Sylvia watched him cautiously, glancing at his crossed legs and the restless tap of his foot before finally hesitating her way over to the opposite side and sitting down. It was awkward enough that the only place to put her rear was the bed, but then again, the room contained almost nothing except the bed, the bathroom, a wardrobe, and a desk.
She had only barely settled onto the edge of the mattress when she opened her mouth.
“Explain.”
Owen’s heavy voice dropped low to the floor.
He pressed her, as though he’d already shown more patience than necessary just by waiting for her to sit down. Sylvia was caught off guard in an instant, her own intended attitude stripped away before she could even put it on.
“Explain what?”
“Explain what you did to me.”
He leaned slightly forward as he spoke.
“What did I do?”
She asked in disbelief, but Owen only lifted a brow as if to say she really didn’t know.
Sylvia had meant to have a calm conversation, but his insolent attitude made heat rise in her chest.
“Honestly, shouldn’t I be the one asking what you did? Not you?”
“You’re a mage and I’m just some knight, so who do you think could pull off something this strange more easily?”
He didn’t give an inch. Sylvia flushed, her voice shrinking as she made a feeble excuse.
“I thought it was the power of the treasure you received, obviously.”
That made his brows shoot up.
“The treasure?”
“The emperor’s treasure you got two years ago!”
It was almost absurd that he could forget something like that. Even compared to Heston, whom everyone called a hero, Owen had received the emperor’s medal and treasure two years earlier. It had been a reward for driving back and purifying the monsters that had plagued the troublesome province of Windsor, but he’d seemed uninterested in it then and now alike.
So that’s why he’s friends with Heston?
Sylvia let out a sigh, thinking she was beginning to understand how two such mismatched men could be friends.
“Anyway, it wasn’t me. There’s no way I’d do something like that. You have no idea how much I’ve been suffering because of you today, no, since that moment, and—”
The words that came out of her, weak and wounded, gradually filled with injustice and moisture. But then she felt Owen’s silent gaze on her and shut her mouth.
No matter how thoughtless she might be, she knew perfectly well how indecent and dangerous it was to sit in a man’s room and say she’d been aroused because of him and couldn’t cope.
So she decided, in the end, to pass the bomb back to Owen.
“So what symptoms did you have?”
Owen leaned his head back with a troubled frown, as though his own head hurt.
“Didn’t you hear the rumor?”
“What rumor...?”
“The rumor that I was crying my eyes out.”
At Sylvia’s blank blinking, Owen had no choice but to exhale and explain.
“You were grinning like an idiot yesterday, then getting angry, then getting sad, and finally throwing up, weren’t you?”
Of course a person could laugh and get angry. But when he even mentioned the vomiting, Sylvia had no choice but to gape.
Just as he said, yesterday she had grinned to herself—because the dessert Rosalyn had brought was delicious—then gotten angry—because Lady Blunk had come to the princess’s tea party carrying gossip that Sylvia had left early on account of being ill, and had then used it to cut her to pieces with venomous sarcasm—then fallen into self-pity over her own situation, and finally thrown up because dinner had not sat well with her.
How on earth did Owen know that?
Then she remembered something a passing knight had said earlier.
“Yeah. She was grinning and then getting angry—total lunatic behavior, that one.”
When she’d heard it, all she’d thought was, What? Seriously? But now, looking back, she wondered whether all of it might somehow have been connected to her.
But how? By what principle had he learned that?
No, wait. If he knows I cried and threw up, then does that mean today I...?
Before she could finish the thought, Owen drove the final nail into her panic and brought her to heel.
“And today, you were probably leaking all day, too.”
He glanced up to meet her eyes, then let his gaze drift meaningfully downward. Whatever that expression meant, it certainly did not sound like tears.
Sylvia could only stare at him, her face burning all the way to the roots of her hair.
“……”
Meanwhile, Owen was having entirely different thoughts as he looked at that pink-flushed face.
Does she have any idea what she looks like?
Sylvia Appleton’s hair was pink, and her skin carried a faint blush of rose beneath its pale surface. When she flushed like that, she looked exactly like a ripe peach.
With a face like that, eyes glistening wetly, any stone-hearted man would be provoked. And besides, he still remembered exactly how Sylvia had fallen apart beneath him.
Just thinking about that night made the carefully stored thing between his legs begin to stir again.
Then maybe I should check for myself.
He gave himself a rough, hard stroke. But the one who was conquered by the jolt that shot up her spine was not him—it was her.
Sylvia’s waist bucked sharply. She froze, suddenly shocked by her own body heating up before Owen’s eyes, and lowered her head as though time itself had stopped. From where he sat opposite her, Owen could see the redness spreading to her ears, then her neck, along with the white tension in her fingers as she tried to hide her excitement.
She’d probably only made a vague connection to Owen, not realizing it could be this direct.
“Sylvia. Look at me.”
His voice was uncharacteristically gentle, but she was already caught in pleasure strong enough to narrow her vision to a slit. Even with his face in sight, she still didn’t notice the shape thrusting insistently beneath his dark trousers. He clicked his tongue in annoyance.
“Even if we’ve rolled around together once, I’d rather not strip my clothes off right away.”
When his long fingers moved over the front of his trousers, only then did her eyes finally catch the unmistakable outline of him standing hard and upright. She stared, mouth open, bit her lip, then lifted a hand and pointed at him, then at herself again.
“Then what’s going on with my body right now...?”
Rather than explain, he wrapped his hand firmly around the swelling beneath his palm. Sylvia shuddered, feeling as though the burning heat low in her body had been directly jolted in his place, and hunched forward with a sharp gasp.
“Hah—y-you... stop it, right now.”
But how could he stop right now when she sounded like that, soft and breathless with pleasure? Owen, his face as expressionless as ever, gave himself a few more deliberate strokes, harder this time, before finally letting go. What had already been formidable now stood even more fiercely between his legs, thrusting upward as though he’d planted a monument there.
Unfinished arousal simmered and crackled through Owen’s lower abdomen. He looked at Sylvia with eyes gone languid and said, “Do you understand now? What’s happening to us.”
With that, he dragged a hand through his disheveled hair to settle himself down a little. But to Sylvia, that smooth, effortless gesture looked unbearably arrogant. As though he’d only been stimulating himself to show her this fact, with not a shred of responsibility in it.
“……”