Chapter 16.1

This man’s brain worked quickly in the most useless directions, it seemed. Anna heaved a sigh in secret. She didn’t want to waste her energy again.

‘Thirty minutes, huh.’

Since Lara had been almost kidnapped by the trafficking ring just this afternoon, she wouldn’t do anything dangerous for sure. If anything, she’d probably kill time at the restaurant on the first floor.

The misunderstanding could be well resolved enough later, when they shared the room for the night.

With Bertram, however, these thirty minutes would be her last.

Having come to a decision, Anna turned to look at Bertram.

There were quite a lot of strange people among the stragglers that Anna had brought in.

The same went for strong people and handsome people. Of them, Bertram was truly unrivaled in both strangeness, strength, and looks, but he wasn’t able to draw Anna’s interest in a similarly unrivaled way.

However, as soon as Anna had heard that ‘fake confession’ earlier, a different kind of interest surged up within Anna.

Her face bright red, Anna asked Bertram a question.

It was a question she could only ask because Bertram had no emotions, and because he was someone she was soon to separate from.

“You know…. P-people who vow eternal love to each other? How do they love…?”

Perhaps embarrassed by her own question, Anna waved her hands in the air.

“I, I know it’s really random for me to be asking this kind of thing! I know, but….”

“Please, speak freely. I do not judge, whatever Miss Anna’s intentions may be.”

“Alright. I mean…. Everyone around me tells me it’s the wisest thing to marry someone from the same village. Though they do look kindly on puppy love when you’re young, if you so much as talk about ‘marrying the person you love,’ they laugh at you. They said that it’s an emotion that’ll disappear anyways, so if you marry someone believing in that, you’ll only wind up hurt.”

The young boy who reads the chivalric code of honor and dreams of having a lady of his own will only garner snickers.

The same went for the young girl who wants to receive flower bouquets from her lover, rebuked instead that ‘instead of something so useless, it’s more sensible to receive a yard of fabric you can make into clothes and wear.’

This sort of tendency in the village only strengthened after the war.

“What the adults say aren’t wrong. Most of the young men who went off to war wanting to be heroes died or came back disabled. Some young girls who go out to the city dreaming of romantic connections get kidnapped. My mom, too, always tells me never to trust a noble waxing poetic about love, that a noble once trifled with a girl her age before too.”

“That must be why she showed such hostility towards nobles when she first saw me.”

Bertram envisioned the day that he’d introduced himself as a d*mn bum to the chaotic whirl that had been Carla.

Anna barked out something in between a sigh and a laugh.

“Yes. I’m sure that’s just how much people have gone off in pursuit of their romantic dreams no matter what anyone in the village said. Though in the end, I suppose I’ll end up marrying some bland guy from the village like Dieter anyways.”

The name of Dieter brought a shapeless image to his mind, like that of a thrice-boiled piece of seaweed. He was a man with no noticeable features. Right, and he’d seemed to like Anna.

For some reason, Bertram’s brows stiffened.

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“…..Do you like Mr. Dieter?”

“As a friend, I’ve built up something like an exasperated affection for him. As a man, not at all.”

“And yet you’ll still marry him.”

“That’s probably what’ll happen. Besides, it’s hard for an unmarried woman to garner support from the village. ‘Cause they never know if you might leave, they say.”

Anna’s face appeared to be darkening for a second, but then she straightened up in her seat and clapped her hands together. She forced herself to smile.

“Okay! That’s enough of this gloomy story! Tell me your story, Mr. Bertram. How your parents spent their every day in love with each other! I’m literally bursting with curiosity. Do they really give each other flowers? Even though you can’t eat those?”

“Early every Sunday morning, my father would buy flowers and decorate my mothers’ pillow as she slept through breakfast. But my mother would always regret how quickly the flowers would wither, so the day she announced she would not accept any more, my father personally made a small garden for her. He planted twelve kinds of seeds, and flowers bloomed in every season.”

“Did it bear fruit every season, too?”

“There were only about two fruit trees in the mix.”

“Why would he do something so usel-…. I, I mean. So that’s how much your father loved your mother!”

In front of Anna, desperately trying to cover herself up, Bertram placed a hand on his chin and spoke.

“It appears that Miss Anna is the one who does not understand emotions.”

“That’s because there’s nobody like that here….”

“There is no reason for you to be embarrassed. I too have learned only by seeing their actions; I am unable to understand the emotions themselves. Is there anything else you wanted to ask?”

“Yes! Um—”

Her thoughts stopped themselves a second before they burst through her.

‘Do they kiss, too? Do they want to? Does it feel good when they do?’

The thing she’d never seen in real life, only in novels.

The most Anna’s parents did, too, were give pecks on each other’s cheeks.

What was it that was so good about jamming two lips against each other. If their mouths opened by mistake, then their saliva would be mixed in. Were those red bits of flesh that everyone had more heart-pounding than the rest. Why did male protagonists within novels always desire for the female protagonists’ lips.

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…..But even Anna knew these were not things she should ask.

‘Now that is really out of line. Fight it back. Or else some story even more mortifying might end up seeing the light!’

“The end! I’ve asked basically everything I wanted to know!”

“You have only asked me one thing.”

It rather seemed like he was the one who was sorry to be done. Though he was still expressionless, that was what Anna felt.