NN 04

Chapter 4 First Impression

The rejection came just two minutes after the conversation started. This was how it happened.

I arrived at King’s College ten minutes before choir practice. As soon as I arrived, I spotted Elias entering the chapel and headed straight toward him.

“Excuse me.”

I called out to Elias from directly behind him. But as if he were lost in his own world, he did not answer.

I grabbed his clothes without hesitation. Elias flinched in surprise and frantically brushed off his clothes. His reaction was as if a bug had landed on him.

“What do you want?”

He frowned and looked down at me.

They say fortune favors the bold. So I spoke bluntly toward Elias’s furrowed brow.

“Excuse me. Please go on a date with me.”

Elias stared down at me coldly, his piercing blue eyes wide open.

“What? Who are you?”

“Me? I’m Jeong Sarang, an undergraduate philosophy student at Emmanuel College. Please go on a date with me.”

“Why should I? I’m not interested.”

“Why not? I’m a pretty boy.”

I muttered the words in Korean, unable to believe the reality before me. It was an instinctive reaction.

There was no way he could understand me. But then, surprisingly, his expression twisted.

“You’re Korean. So that’s why you didn’t react to Chinese or Japanese.”

Korean came from Elias’s mouth.

In England. At Cambridge. From the mouth of the youngest son of a British aristocratic family!

“I have no interest in wasteful social activities such as dating. I do not know what your purpose is, but I would appreciate it if you did not make any further physical contact with me.”

Elias’s Korean pronunciation was extremely accurate. There was not even the slightest strange intonation typical of a foreigner.

It was almost at an announcer’s level.

I got goosebumps. Only then did I let go of his arm and hugged my own arms.

“I have a busy schedule. Then, if you’ll excuse me.”

Elias bowed his head in greeting and turned toward the chapel. He looked refreshed, as if he had just relieved himself of a long-standing burden.

At the chapel entrance, he took off his robe and shook it as if dusting it off.

Had my hand really been that dirty?

92.5 days until the thesis deadline.

Once again, I tasted the bitterness of defeat.

I returned to the dormitory without gaining anything.

Now that things had turned out this way, I had no choice but to either focus on theoretical research and finish my thesis, or change my thesis topic even at this point.

It had been a topic I could not write about in the first place.

But for some reason, I had absolutely no desire to do that.

A moment ago, we had been close enough for our breaths to touch.

It was the first time I had ever faced a man up close.

Except for Elias.

No, not just him. Except for my younger brother, I had never been this close to a man before.

Long, narrow eyes beneath neat eyebrows. His thick lips looked cold because the corners naturally drooped downward.

I had noticed it last time too, but his eyes.

Elias’s eyes were truly breathtaking. They were such a vivid blue that they looked like colored contact lenses, and his long eyelashes cast shadows that made him look like an angel.

I really could not help being shocked.

How could someone be that handsome?

For the first time, I realized that the metaphor about one’s heart pounding, which I had seen in literary works, was not fiction.

And his voice.

How clear it was.

That voice, which seemed to gently scratch the inside of my ears, had coldly pressed me with its words, and the lower part of my abdomen, deep inside my body, began to itch.

For the first time in my twenty years of life, I felt it.

The sensation called sexual desire.

Until then, sex had definitely been a subject I could not write about.

I had never felt sexual desire, let alone romantic attraction toward anyone.

Anger, frustration, inferiority, even sadness.

I had traded every one of those extravagant emotions for studying.

That was how I made it all the way to Cambridge.

But things were different now.

Lying half-reclined on my dormitory bed, I remembered Elias’s voice and rubbed my legs together.

The wave of sensations I should have experienced along with puberty was so overwhelming that I could barely breathe.

“Just a little more. If I can feel just a little more…”

Then, perhaps I could get closer to the true nature of sexual desire.

Perhaps I could figure out how to relieve this burning heat.

Perhaps I could finally complete my thesis and obtain that something missing inside my heart.

Rejection was not a pleasant experience for anyone.

Elias had humiliated me twice.

“I’m not someone who gets discouraged over something like that.”

I got up from the bed and stood in front of the dirty full-length mirror.

Long, straight black hair. A slender body.

I looked a little worn out, but my smooth skin was pale because I rarely exposed myself to the sunlight.

Objectively speaking, my appearance had all the qualities of the Western beauty that people in the West tended to favor.

My appearance did not seem to be the problem.

Then the cause was probably somewhere else.

Elias had been genuinely terrified the moment I grabbed his arm.

What if he had social anxiety or a fear of women?

I needed to rethink my strategy.

I needed to make him look back at me.

If grades were the problem, I could simply improve them.

That was how I had lived until now.

After taking a deep breath, I sat down in front of my laptop.

I immediately searched Google for “How to seduce British men.”

The internet was a sea of information.

The search results were filled with blogs offering British dating tips, such as “How to flirt with a British man” and “Dating in Britain.”

I took out some paper and summarized the tips from the blogs, writing them down one by one by hand.

Studying was the one thing I was confident in.

I would definitely find a strategy.

And so, I spent the entire evening doing research.

At first, my research had been limited to British men and British dating.

But before long, it had expanded into the psychology of men in general.

The dating blogs and YouTube videos all said mostly the same things.

Wash yourself properly.

Behave prettily and modestly.

Dress well and have fun, but do not become too dependent.

Stimulate their desire to conquer.

I turned my head and looked over the pile of clothes thrown on top of my dresser.

They were all either black or gray.

Cotton pants and hooded zip-up jackets.

As far as fashion that men might like was concerned, they were nothing but comfortable clothes that were somewhat lacking.

“Should I ask Mom to buy some clothes and send them to me…?”

Grrrrr.

Just then, my stomach growled loudly.

I looked at the time on my laptop.

It was already 1 a.m.

Come to think of it, had I been fasting all this time?

“Is there anything to eat…?”

I dragged my exhausted body out of the room after all that difficult studying.

As I approached the kitchen, I heard the familiar voices of some girls.

There were several Korean girls from the same dormitory sitting at the dining table in the center of the kitchen.

I had greeted them a few times because we lived in the same dorm, but they had made it very obvious that they did not like me.

They would say things like, “Oh, yeah,” and then take a step back from me.

Those girls always dressed as if they had stepped out of a magazine.

When you got close to them, they sometimes smelled nice, like flowers.

I often saw them walking around the shopping district arm in arm with foreign male students.

Whenever there was a party somewhere, they seemed to rush off to it.

They lived in a completely different world from me.

Well, I did not particularly like them either, so it did not matter.

I gave the girls a small bow.

Perhaps they were drunk, because they did not seem to notice that I had arrived.

I shrugged and headed straight for the pantry.

I was busy enough as it was. Paying attention to them would only be my loss.

I looked around the place where snacks were always kept for the students, but perhaps because it was the early hours of the weekend, there was hardly anything to eat.

After searching through everything, the only thing I found was a can of baked beans.

“Ugh, beans. Who even eats this stuff…?”

What else could I do?

I had to eat this at least.

As I picked up the can and came out, I heard the girls’ voices again.

“With Theodore? No, nothing really happened.”

“Nothing happened, but you went out together and didn’t come back for a long time?”

“It really wasn’t anything. He just asked me to watch a movie with him this weekend.”

Ah, youth.

Why did girls always get so excited about talking about men whenever they gathered together?

If it was Theodore, he was probably the ace of the rowing team or something.

It was an extremely common name, but I was sure because it was a name I heard whenever these girls—or any group of girls—gathered together.