Chapter 11

“So that’s why you’re acting like this because you don’t understand it? Because it doesn’t seem like I’m completely hung up on you?”

Diana asked, swallowing a dry laugh.

“Yes.”

She had expected him to deny it or sneer, but Raymond answered calmly, his face showing no change in emotion.

“You really are innocent too. The way you keep doing this to me, I can pretty much tell what your love life must have been like……”

“But I still don’t know what exactly it is you keep saying I’ve done to you.”

At that moment, Raymond cut off her words.

“No matter how I think about it, I don’t think I’m doing anything worse to you than what you did to me.”

But perhaps because she had kept speaking as though mocking him, this time Raymond also frowned.

“You told the professor to ask me to be your sparring partner during vacation!”

Since she herself had indeed done something first, Diana flinched slightly this time as she shouted.

“What? Ah.”

But Raymond reacted as though he had only just remembered something he had forgotten.

His face truly looked as though it was nothing important, and for a moment Diana nearly lost her momentum.

She had been so angry that she had come charging over without thinking, and yet he only blinked once as if it were no big deal.

“……That works out well.”

Then, after falling briefly into thought, he spoke again.

A faintly unusual light gleamed in his eyes, as though he had discovered something amusing.

After that, he was silent for quite a long while.

In the end, just as Diana was about to snap something at Raymond, who had fallen into thought while standing there with her right in front of him—

“I wanted to teach you what I’ve been researching, but it seemed like during vacation there would be no way to teach it to you.”

“What?”

“You told me to figure it out. A proper way to serve me.”

Raymond was closing the distance toward her.

“……”

For a moment, Diana lost the words to throw back at him and flinched.

Raymond was coming closer and closer.

And on top of that, the gaze with which he looked at her stayed stubbornly fixed only on her lips, so she could not move, as if her body itself had been held in place.

“But I’m not as smart as you are, so I can’t think of any especially creative methods.”

No emotion rose on Raymond’s face as he continued speaking.

His attitude was calm, as though he were explaining the solution to a problem.

“Kiss me again.”

“……”

“Kiss me again, and cling to me like before. I think that’s the only way I’ll feel like forgiving what you did.”

There was still no change in his expression.

But Diana could not shake the feeling that some emotion was rippling behind the eyes looking down at her.

Something was definitely stirring behind his gray-brown eyes.

The emotion he had revealed entirely the first time they joined bodies, unable even to think of hiding it in his fevered state, had now all sunk beneath the surface and was hidden behind a cold mask.

“If you really know what you did wrong, then cling to me with your body if nothing else.”

As Raymond continued, he slowly raised his hand beside her cheek.

The moment that hand drew close enough to seem as though it might touch her face, Diana unknowingly stiffened her shoulders and trembled.

The sun had already tilted low, and outside the window it was almost swallowed by darkness, while inside the locker room only a single lamp hanging from the ceiling swayed and cast unstable light.

Within that, the large build filling her vision, the lowered gaze, and the stifling air unique to an enclosed space overlapped, and for an instant her body reacted first.

The tremor was as brief as the beat of a single inhalation, so brief that even Diana herself barely recognized it before it passed.

“……”

But Raymond did not miss that subtle silence.

Just before his fingertips touched her cheek, he paused for a moment, then naturally changed direction.

As though he had only intended to go that far from the beginning.

He turned his back just like that and opened his locker.

The dull sound of metal striking echoed in the quiet space, followed by the rustling of folded clothes being taken out and arranged.

His attitude suggested he had finished what he had come to do.

At least for now, it seemed he had no intention of doing anything here.

Whatever that might have been.

Meanwhile, Diana glared at the floor and steadied her breathing.

What had just happened sank into her mind only afterward.

She did not like any of it—the heart that had sped up for no reason, the tension stiffening her shoulders, all of it.

So Diana shifted her thoughts somewhere else.

Somewhere she could at least direct her anger.

‘Cling to him with my body? So then he might feel like forgiving me?’

Repeating it inwardly, Diana bit the soft flesh of her lower lip.

Raymond wanted to press her beneath him.

Just as he always had.

He wanted to crush her down and feel that he had won.

That much was obvious.

‘As if.’

Diana clenched her fist.

She would be the one to win.

She never wanted to lose to anyone.

Especially not to that obnoxious Raymond Black.

As she continued that line of thought, every sensation that had been bothering her a moment ago was swallowed up by irritation.

‘What did he eat to grow that tall? He used to be smaller than me.’

As she looked at the broad back visible beyond the open locker door, the chain of thoughts eventually carried her all the way back to the Everhart family garden where she had first met him in the past.

A garden in full bloom, flooded with sunlight, so different from this dim locker room.

[Hello! Are you lost?]

When she first greeted Raymond there, what kind of expression had he made again?

At any rate, once her thoughts reached that point, the corners of Diana’s lips could rise slightly as well.

Even if his build had changed now, he was still, in the end, that same little kid from back then.

There was no reason to suddenly find him unfamiliar, and no reason to be on guard.

Bang!

With that thought, Diana shoved the open locker door hard shut and stood in front of Raymond.

With the most confident, unaffected expression she could manage.

“So? How far do I have to go?”

In front of the gaze looking down at her, Diana gathered up all her composure and folded her arms.

She intended to show that she had far more experience than he thought, and that a situation like this did not shake her in the least.

Of course, since that was not true at all in reality, there was something rather exaggerated about her posture.

“……”

Naturally, Raymond also picked up on that subtle awkwardness.

Diana’s chest was rising and falling harshly, mixed with anger and a different kind of excitement.

Raymond looked toward the area of her heaving chest, then withdrew his gaze.

“How far can you go?”

He stepped one pace closer.

Since Diana did not back away like before, the distance between them narrowed until their breaths could touch.

Raymond slowly looked over her face as though studying it.

The lamp swayed in the wind, repeatedly stretching and shrinking the shadows of the two of them along the wall.

Between them, the heat of an early summer day shimmered.

“Just don’t collapse weakly again.”

Right after tossing out those words, Diana, without a trace of hesitation, began undoing the buttons of her white shirt one by one.

The neat line that had always remained composed fell apart, and pale skin emerged under the dim lamplight.

And as if in provocation, she grabbed Raymond’s hand, pulled it toward her, and pushed it beneath the fabric of her undergarment.

“Uh.”

When his cool fingertips touched her heated br*ast, a m*an slipped from between her teeth on its own.

Of course, throughout every moment of it, Diana never stopped glaring at Raymond.

Her intention was simple.

She wanted to make Raymond flustered.

He had certainly lunged at her like a mad dog before, but at the time he had been drunk on fever, and they had also been in the private setting of a dormitory room with only the two of them.

But this was a shared space where people could come and go at any time.

It was obvious Raymond had never had an experience this provocative before, so she planned to unsettle him with bold behavior and laugh at the dazed expression on his face.