Slowly and Painfully ー ✓

Chapter 33: The Rediscovery of Feeling

When the road splits into two pathways, you are forced to make a choice. When you have to list your priorities, you try to weigh the difference of how heavy they are on a scale. When time stops and the prince of your euphoria is standing right in front of you with a catechizing look, you are stuck between a wild heart and a chaotic mind.

I hate this turn of events.

My first instinct was to lie, but my stuttering won't make the cut. Twist my words? Run away? Sure. But even if I managed to leave him unscathed, I was aware that he would start doubting me sooner or later. On the other hand, if I tell him the truth, I might...break him.

I don't want to break him, yet I don't want him to be distrustful of me as well.

I don't know which one is worse.

"Rosette," he uttered, snatching my attention, "are you listening?"

I may be facing him, staring deep into his eyes, but my thoughts were drifting somewhere else. His voice rang in my ears like he was from far, far away. Despite all my efforts, I still couldn't come up with an answer.

"Rosie?" he tried again, his tone sounding more like a plea.

Do not call me that. Curse me. Pester me. Ruin me with verbal abuse. Say anything, anything but that. It hurts. It hurts me a lot. It hurts the both of us.

Prince Jacque had been such a great friend, a talented painting partner, and a source of my joy. I remembered the smell of soap and the coziness of his warm hugs. I remembered his long, worried gazes whenever he sensed I wasn't fine. I remembered his tears akin to gentle, pattering raindrops as he told me his secret back at the atelier.

I wasn't being fair to him.

So what if I just tell him the truth? What if I can reason out with him? What if he gives me a chance to explain myself?

But Rosette, what if he doesn't? My inner voice warned.

I ignored it, drowning it beneath my garnered strength to hold on. I opened my mouth, ready to say that I was from the 21st century, that I was a spy of his brother, that I was about to be murdered the night his palace falls down in shambles. It sounded so wrong, so horrible.

Am I in the process of eliminating the villain or am I in the process of becoming one?

I have to redeem myself. I have to confess.

"Jacque-"

"The teacher is waiting for you at the library, Jacque." A figure of a young man approached us so abruptly that I flinched once he spoke. "You have not finished your History lessons."

The youngest groaned, disliking the fact that we were interrupted. "History is irrelevant at the moment, brother. It is not much of an importance whether I go or stay."

"Oh, but it is." Prince Nathaniel James said with certainty, hands in his pockets. "History is quite relevant at the moment."

"How do you know that?"

There was a brief second of his pupils darting towards my direction before he returned to look at his sibling and flashed a grin. "I just do."

Prince Jacque wasn't satisfied with that reply. Instead of asking though, he went quiet.

"Whose paper is that?" the fourth-born pointed at the page clutched tightly within the seventh's grasp, earning a flustered reaction while he attempted to sneak it away from view.

"That's mine." I immediately blabbed.

Prince Nathaniel realized what it was and acted almost in an instant. He was calm as he raised his chin at the youth and then at me. "Hand it over, Jacque."