Chapter 6
“Hey, you just had a rude thought, didn’t you?”
“Of course not.”
“Then what were you thinking about?”
When I coldly pressed him for an answer, Railey lowered his gaze without saying anything. Then he grabbed each of my wrists and lifted them away before asking another question.
“Did you eat dinner before going to sleep?”
“Why are you suddenly asking about that?”
“Did you eat?”
“I stayed up for several days and then passed out from exhaustion. Do you really think I ate in the middle of that?”
I struggled to pull my hands free from his grip and asked irritably. Unlike me, he stood there with a perfectly calm expression while holding my wrists.
“Then did you eat anything after you woke up?”
“No. I called you as soon as I woke up. Do you think I had time to eat in between?”
“But you drank beer.”
“Beer doesn’t require me to do anything except open the can… And beer fills your stomach…”
Railey frowned again after hearing my answer.
“When was your last meal?”
“Yesterday morning, or maybe lunch. Ramen.”
“How much ramen?”
“Uh… Half a pack? I left a little.”
“……”
Railey lowered his purple eyes coldly and stared at me.
After looking at me for a while, he let out a deep sigh.
“What is your weight? You were thirty-nine kilograms last month.”
Why had we suddenly switched to this subject?
I narrowed my eyes, but answered obediently.
“I haven’t weighed myself, so I don’t know. Last week it was… thirty-eight?”
“How did you lose even more?”
“Shut up. It’s not like I can help not gaining weight.”
With the hand I had finally managed to free, I clenched my fist and thumped it into his stomach several times. Once again, it didn’t seem to have any effect.
“No matter how many times you hit me, it is like a cat’s soft paw. I am making an effort not to break you without meaning to, as naturally as breathing.”
“Why does everything you say sound so irritating?”
“Don’t drink too much. Make sure you eat properly as well. It would be better if you didn’t stay up all night, either. At the very least, don’t live with your days and nights completely reversed. You don’t gain weight because you don’t eat in the first place.”
“Oh, I told you, I do eat when I eat.”
I snapped at him, but once again, Railey didn’t seem to take my words seriously.
He grabbed each of my wrists with one hand and pushed them aside. Then he deliberately sighed several times before speaking again.
“Your health must be ruined again.”
“My doctor already nagged me last week when I ran into him on the street. Are you going to do the same?”
I snorted and struggled to pull my hands away again.
Railey narrowed his eyes and asked, sounding surprised.
“You have a personal doctor? I understand that only a small number of people in this society have one.”
“I call him my personal doctor, but he’s just an internal medicine doctor I visit often.”
“How often do you have to visit a hospital for the neighborhood doctor to recognize you on the street?”
“Well… I’ve accumulated four years’ worth of regular patient data…”
“The past ‘four years’?”
Railey picked out that particular point and questioned me about it.
I flinched and quietly lowered my gaze.
Railey still didn’t know how I had lived during the four years between returning from the world inside the novel and meeting him again.
He seemed to have assumed that I had simply fallen into a slump because writing was my profession, but he didn’t know anything beyond that.
To be honest, I didn’t want to tell him.
I didn’t want him to know that I was the kind of person who could be affected so deeply by someone like Railey Kraha.
And especially not in our current relationship, where neither of us had clearly expressed anything and we were both awkwardly testing the waters.
I lowered my gaze sullenly and muttered unhappily.
“That doctor has been running his own clinic for about five years.”
It wasn’t a lie.
When I answered grumpily, Railey stared at me with his cold purple eyes for a long time before finally looking away.
“Tomorrow, I will feed you. It has been a month, but I think I will open the dessert shop.”
“Huh? My work is finished, so I was planning to meet someone for lunch. I called you because I was saying that my schedule was free from the evening…”
“With whom?”
“With some freshmen.”
The moment he heard my answer, Railey’s expression hardened.
“Men?”
Here we go again.
After hearing the same thing so many times, an insult escaped my mouth before I could stop it.
“Ah, fuck, you’re really annoying me. Whenever someone around me happens to be a man, you always act like this…”
“To be honest, I dislike women as well.”
“I knew you’d give an even crazier answer! But seriously, what’s the problem? Whether they’re men or women, I’m just meeting my friends. What does it have to do with you?”
When I demanded an answer coldly, Railey lifted his chin arrogantly, as though he were about to say something completely reasonable and obvious.
“You have always been popular with women. Especially younger women.”
I knew exactly who he was talking about, but that was a distortion of the truth!
He was talking about the girl who should have been the original heroine of that world and with whom I had once been close.
To put it properly, if there was exactly one person among all those human trash who was such a clean and wholesome person that I thought, Now that’s what a romance heroine should be like, wouldn’t anyone naturally want to be friends with her?
It was true that she was very fond of me, and I also liked her quite a lot.
But that’s just how girls are with each other, isn’t it?
Sometimes we ate together, played together, hung out together, whispered among ourselves, and even had a sleepover once or twice.
But it was also true that she was one of the people toward whom Railey had shown some of his most obvious jealousy and possessiveness in that world.
Whenever Railey acted like a complete bastard, I had even once clung to the back of that girl, who was a head shorter than me at the time, for protection.
Several scenes flashed through my mind like a dying person’s life flashing before their eyes.
I unconsciously opened my eyes wide and pressed my lips together.
But soon I thought, Why should I be intimidated?
I glared at him even harder and raised my chin.
“So what if I’m popular?”
“From the beginning, I dislike you being around women even more. When the other person is a woman, you casually throw yourself into her arms, don’t you?”
“What exactly is wrong with you?”
“Then why do you leave your butler behind and go anywhere you please, shedding your fur and purring?”
“Isn’t the problem obviously your personality?”
I answered with a regretful expression, but Railey didn’t seem to regret anything at all.
In any case, this man seriously needed to reflect on his personality.
“If I stop you from meeting your female friends, you won’t come to me either. That’s why I am putting up with it.”
“Do you even realize what you’re saying? The moment you said that ridiculous thing, you already stopped putting up with it.”
“I said I dislike it. What does my personal dissatisfaction have to do with you?”
This crazy bastard.
I reflexively raised my middle finger, then hurriedly lowered it after noticing people around us and answered politely instead.
“Railey.”
“Yes.”
“I’m going home.”
“Eat something first. You look like you might break while walking.”
“Fuck, I told you I won’t break. By your standards, everyone in the world is a matchstick that snaps with the slightest bit of force! Besides, you’re not my butler anymore.”
I irritably tried to push Railey’s shoulder aside with my fingertips again.
But for some reason, his shoulder didn’t move this time.
Usually, whenever I lightly pushed him with my fingertips, he would willingly move aside.
Ever since he came to my world, the difference in our physiques had become even greater, so even when I barely put any strength into pushing him, he would usually move back on his own.
But this time, unexpectedly, he didn’t.
I raised my eyes without thinking after encountering the unexpected obstacle.
And suddenly, I met his icy purple eyes staring down at me.
His delicate face, like that of a perfectly crafted doll, looked cold and emotionless as he stared down at me.
Railey Kraha planted both hands firmly on the railing on either side of me.
I was trapped inside his arms with nowhere to escape.
My back bent slightly backward.
I hurriedly pressed against his chest once more, but he still showed no intention of moving away.
“Why… Why?”
“Say that again.”
“Again? Umm… I won’t break? Don’t think according to your standards?”
“Why am I not your butler?”
So that was what had angered him?
No, but no matter how I thought about it, his anger made no sense.
Was that really something worth getting angry about?
In any case, how could our current relationship possibly be called that of a butler and master?
I frowned and knitted my brows, then carefully chose my words so I could give him a reasonable answer.
“No… Think about it. Isn’t that obvious? What kind of relationship do we even have right now? How can you call this a butler-and-master relationship? We each live our own lives, then occasionally meet to take walks, go for drives, watch movies, visit each other’s homes, sit side by side while doing our own work, or have meals together. You cook for me or make desserts for me…”
The more I spoke, the more I realized there was no word other than lovers that could properly describe our relationship.
In fact, I had already told Dr. Jung Si-hoon that Railey Kraha was my boyfriend.
That was simply the truth.
Our current relationship was much closer to an ordinary romantic relationship than a butler-and-master relationship.
However, ever since Railey had crossed into this world, he had never once said or done anything like that.
If he had naturally kissed me or slept with me, I would have naturally accepted it.
But he was acting strangely.
He wasn’t touching me at all.
He hadn’t even hugged me unless there was some practical reason for it.
This was the same man who had suddenly kissed me when we had only just begun flirting.
If someone like that suddenly started acting this way, it was only natural for me to suspect something.
Maybe, after actually meeting me again, he had found that something about me was different from what he had expected.
I was not someone who believed that passionate, novel-like love truly existed, or that it could last forever.
But precisely because of that, I didn’t want a lukewarm relationship maintained by inertia and a sense of responsibility.
I didn’t want to cling to Railey Kraha and insist that I loved him when he didn’t love me.
“For now, I can’t call you my butler.”
“Then?”
Railey’s voice became frighteningly sweet—the voice he always used when he was extremely angry.
“What am I to you right now?”
I hesitated after hearing his question and tried to take a step backward.
Then I remembered the railing pressed firmly against my back and let out a deep sigh.
Instead of giving him a proper answer, I threw the same question back at him.
“Then what am I to you right now?”
For some reason, Railey Kraha’s expression became even more frightening.
“……”
“……”
Silence continued for a while.
The longer the silence lasted, the more uncomfortable my stomach became.
Perhaps I had wanted him to simply say that we were dating.
If I pushed him a little more, I might have been able to lead him into calling me his lover.
But if he had already indirectly rejected that idea once, I didn’t want to press him like that.
That was the most indirect hint I could bring myself to give.
But he looked down at me with an utterly cold and emotionless expression.
Then he answered coldly.
“If that’s what you say, then I suppose you’re nothing to me.”
