Chapter 77: A Reasonable Reward

When Rose returned to the living room with a fresh bottle of beer, I was still sitting in the same position. Her eyes moved from my face to the bottle between my fingers.

"Why aren’t you drinking?"

"I don’t handle alcohol very well."

I set the bottle on the coffee table as I said it.

My tolerance for alcohol wasn’t the real issue. I didn’t like the thought of wandering around a demon’s home while drunk. I was already sitting here with no idea what to do while sober. I had no intention of losing control of my tongue too.

Rose shrugged.

"Okay."

She sat beside me without insisting, but this time, she didn’t go to the other end of the couch. She settled into the space between us, leaned back, and stretched an arm across the cushion behind me.

When her shoulder touched mine, I shifted to the side. Once I reached the armrest, I realized I had nowhere else to go.

"Oii, have you ever heard of personal space?"

Rose looked at me before bringing her beer to her lips.

"That’s a pretty shameless thing to ask when you’ve been checking me out like that ever since you came into my apartment."

"I wasn’t looking at you like that!"

One of her eyebrows slowly rose.

As I thought about what I had just said, my voice grew quieter.

"I was just curious."

"About what?"

She asked so casually that I felt obliged to answer. Looking away from her face, I lowered my eyes to my knees.

"Whether you were wearing anything under your T-shirt..."

Only after finishing the sentence did I realize that this was one of the worst explanations I could have chosen to defend myself.

Rose remained silent for a few seconds. Then she shook her head slightly and smiled.

"You look so sweet and innocent, but you’re quite a pervert, Noctis."

I opened my mouth to protest, then closed it again because I couldn’t deny what I had just said.

My angel had also said I looked at her that way.

At least, that was what she claimed. At the time, I had thought she had misunderstood the way I was looking at her. But hearing the same accusation a second time made me feel the need to reconsider my behavior.

Do I really look at people like a pervert?

I looked at Eris sometimes too. In fact, since I spent more time with her, I probably looked at her more often than I looked at Rose.

Sometimes Eris noticed, and sometimes she didn’t care. She acted perfectly relaxed around me at home and didn’t pay much attention to what she wore. After a while, I had started treating it as normal too.

Maybe because we were childhood friends, neither of us thought much of things like that.

Still, that explanation didn’t change what I had just said to Rose.

I stared at the coffee table for a while. Beside me, Rose drank her beer and occasionally glanced at my face. She seemed to be waiting for me to find something to say, but I didn’t want to voice the thoughts running through my head.

Eventually, she must have grown bored with the silence because she lowered the bottle onto her knee.

"Want to play a game or something?"

"I want to sleep."

The answer had come out a little too quickly.

If I could use sleep as an excuse to retreat to a corner, maybe she would leave me alone. I would pull a blanket over myself, close my eyes, and wait until morning without having to talk.

Right now, that sounded like a fairly safe plan.

Rose turned toward the digital clock on the wall.

20:27.

"Already?"

"Well... For some reason, I’m really tired."

Rose placed her beer on the coffee table.

"You picked a bad time to sleep. I ordered pizza."

"When did you order it?"

"Just now, when I went to get another beer."

So she had managed to do that too during her brief trip to the kitchen.

"I’m full."

"Come on. We’ll just eat pizza and talk."

There was nothing strange about her invitation, and her voice wasn’t threatening either. Even so, since all I wanted was to escape this conversation, I used the first excuse that came to mind.

"I don’t like pizza."

The smile slowly disappeared from Rose’s face.

After looking at me for a while, she sighed. She lowered the arm behind me and sat up a little, leaving a small gap between us again.

Her brows drew together slightly.

"Are you racist?"

"Huh? Where did that come from?!"

My voice rose more than it needed to.

What really bothered me was that the question hadn’t come out of nowhere. The moment I understood what Rose had noticed, my stomach tightened uncomfortably.

I tried not to look away from her.

Rose wrapped her fingers around the neck of her bottle and briefly glanced at the bookcase.

"I grew up surrounded by people’s prejudice and stares."

Her earlier cheerfulness was gone. A small smile appeared on her lips, but it didn’t reach her eyes.

"I can usually tell when someone feels uncomfortable around me."

I didn’t know what to say.

If she had been angry with me, perhaps defending myself would have been easier. But the faint sadness in her voice made every excuse I had been about to give seem pointless.

Noctis’s memories came to mind without warning.

I remembered how my family had looked at me because I didn’t have a Nexus. I also remembered the people who talked behind my back because of my appearance and those who judged me before I even opened my mouth.

Those memories hadn’t originally belonged to me, but I didn’t need to live through those days again to feel the humiliation in them. My throat still tightened whenever I remembered.

Knowing all of that, what was I doing?

Rose had bandaged my injured hand when we first met. Today, she had agreed to let me stay at her place, brought me a drink, and ordered food for me too.

She hadn’t treated me badly.

But ever since I saw her father’s horns in that photo, I had been interpreting everything she said differently. The girl who had been teasing me just a few minutes earlier had become someone to fear simply because I had learned about her background.

I had ignored how she treated me and assumed that what I had heard about demons applied to her too.

On top of that, I was doing it in the home of someone who had just told me she had grown up being looked at the same way.

"That’s not it," I finally said.

My answer hadn’t sounded very convincing because it wasn’t entirely true.

Rose looked at my face.

Feeling that I owed her an explanation, I clasped my hands on my knees. The more I thought about what to say, the stranger the sentences coming to mind became.

"I mean... I barely know you. I knocked on your door in the evening and asked to stay at your place. Now I’m sitting on your couch, wondering how I’m supposed to act."

Rose continued listening without a word.

"And you keep saying things like that."

"What kind of things?"

Heat spread across my face again.

"You know what I mean."

If I had left it there, perhaps I could have saved what remained of my dignity. But Rose was still looking at me, and I continued because I felt I hadn’t said enough.

"Okay, maybe I’m a bit of a weird pervert."

After saying that, I closed my eyes for a moment.

You were supposed to be defending yourself, Noctis.

I took a deep breath and looked at her again.

"Basically, I don’t want to make you uncomfortable. I don’t want to come to a girl’s apartment and then spend the whole evening acting strange."

I wasn’t lying, but I wasn’t being completely honest either.

I felt shy around Rose. I worried about getting caught looking at her, and I didn’t know how to respond to the things she said. All of that was true.

But I hadn’t found the courage to admit that learning she was a demon had frightened me.

At the very least, I wanted her to understand that I wasn’t ignoring everything she had done for me.

"And thank you for giving me the chance to be in the same room as a beautiful, sexy, kind, and generous girl like you."

The room fell silent.

Once I stopped speaking, the entire sentence echoed in my head again.

Rose’s lips trembled.

First, she turned her face slightly to the side, then brought a hand to her mouth. After trying to hold it in for a few seconds, she could no longer suppress her laughter.

I stared blankly as she threw her head back and laughed.

"You... Hahaha... You really..."

My brows slowly drew together.

"What?"

Rose tried to answer, but when her eyes returned to my face, she laughed again. Her shoulders shook as she pressed a hand against the couch cushion.

"I was just joking. I didn’t think you’d take it this seriously."

For a moment, I couldn’t say anything.

My embarrassment began to turn into anger, my face still hot. I had been sitting here thinking about my behavior and trying to explain how I felt.

And she was laughing.

"A joke?"

Rose nodded.

"Yes. But I think you really are a pervert."

I gritted my teeth.

"I’m trying to have a serious conversation here!"

"I know," she managed between laughs. "That’s the problem."

I looked away and leaned against the armrest. I wanted to take back the compliments I had just given her, but I knew trying would only make this even more embarrassing.

Rose finally caught her breath. She wiped a tear from the corner of her eye with a fingertip, still wearing a broad smile.

"I suppose I should show you my true form as an apology."

I turned back toward her without thinking.

Seeing my expression, Rose’s smile widened.

"Considering how much of a pervert you are, that should be a reasonable reward for you."