Chapter 178: ¹⁷⁸: what do you mean?

Chapter 178: 1??: what do you mean?

He could have woken me up. He could have simply left me to deal with it when I woke up. Yet, for some reason, he had taken the trouble to clean me and change my clothes while I was asleep.

I didn’t know what to make of it. And that was precisely the problem with him. Every time I convinced myself that I had finally figured out where I stood with Kael, he did something that left me questioning everything all over again.

I lifted my gaze towards him, only to find myself at a loss for words. There were so many things I wanted to ask him that I didn’t even know where to begin. Why had he cleaned me himself instead of waking me up? Why had he stayed? And, more importantly, what the hell had happened to him last night?

The questions crowded my mind, each one demanding an answer, yet none seemed easy enough to voice.

I cleared my throat, gathering the courage I needed to look directly into his eyes. It was becoming increasingly difficult to do so these days, especially when the eyes that had once held a certain playfulness, accompanied by the occasional hint of care, now seemed to contain nothing but darkness whenever I looked into them.

It was as though the man I had once known had gradually withdrawn behind an impenetrable wall, leaving me to wonder whether I had ever truly understood him in the first place.

"Why didn’t you wake me up earlier? I could have cleaned myself," I finally asked, forcing myself to meet his gaze instead of stealing awkward glances at him.

"It would have been a hassle." He replied without giving it much thought, his tone so casual that I couldn’t tell whether he even realised how much his actions had surprised me.

I stared at him for another moment before nodding. Of course. A hassle.

Somehow, that simple explanation left me with even more questions than before. Still, I decided against pursuing the matter. If Kael didn’t want to make a big deal out of it, I had no reason to keep digging for an explanation that he probably wouldn’t give me anyway.

Lowering my gaze, I began fidgeting with my fingers, trying to arrange my thoughts into something coherent. I needed to ask him about last night. I needed to know what had happened to him, why he had been in that state, and whether he was truly all right now.

But before I could gather enough courage to bring any of it up, Kael reached towards my study table and pulled out a file. My assignment file.

"Didn’t you say last night that your assignment was unfinished and that you were stressed about it?"

His question caught me off guard. I gulped, suddenly remembering the excuse I had come up with last night when I couldn’t think of anything else to explain my behaviour. I had been so desperate to avoid answering his questions that I had used my unfinished assignment as an excuse.

Now, seeing him holding the very file I had used to support that lie, I began to wonder whether I had made a terrible mistake.

"Why is this quite literally finished, then?"

"I was talking about not finishing my second round of checking it for any mistakes I might find," I replied, surprising even myself with how quickly the excuse came to me.

Honestly, I was getting better and better at lying. Whether that was something I should be proud of or deeply concerned about was another matter entirely.

Kael raised an eyebrow at my explanation, his expression giving away nothing as he opened the file again.

"You don’t have to double-check it. I read through it, and it seems as if it had been checked several times already. I couldn’t find even a single typo, let alone an actual mistake."

I let out a small chuckle, desperately trying to disguise my nervousness as I listened to him. How had we even ended up here?

A few moments ago, I had been wondering about everything that had happened between us last night, along with all the things he had said seven days ago. Now, somehow, the atmosphere had shifted into something that felt almost like an interrogation, with Kael playing the role of a tutor determined to catch his student in a lie.

And the worst part was that I was actually struggling to keep up. "I might be a genius, then, if you couldn’t find even a single mistake in it," I replied, schooling my expression into something resembling a poker face.

It wasn’t as though I hadn’t earned the right to boast a little. I had gone through those same pages, those same lines, and those same conclusions over and over again until I could practically recite the entire assignment from memory. By the time I had finally stopped, I was so exhausted that I never wanted to look at it again.

If that wasn’t enough to qualify me as a genius, I didn’t know what was.

"Yes, you might be a genius," Kael said, not once breaking his gaze from my face. "But not because I couldn’t find a single mistake. It’s because of the way you’ve solved the problems in this thing."

His expression remained composed, but something about his eyes had changed. The soulless, indifferent gaze he had given me earlier was gone, replaced by something I hadn’t seen in quite a while..Interest.

Genuine interest, as though he had stumbled upon something unexpected and was now trying to figure out what to make of it.

I was caught off guard by the subtle change in his demeanour. It was strange, really. I had spent so much time trying to decipher his expressions that even the slightest shift in his gaze was enough to make me notice.

"What do you mean?" I asked, my eyes dropping to the file in his hands and then back to him.