Tore, Crushed, and Discarded

Whenever Leila struggled, Matthias subdued her; and the harder his grip became, the more desperately she fought back.

Each time she opened the eyes she had squeezed shut as if in death, the landscape filling her vision had changed.

Shaking leaves and sky—and Matthias.

The earthen ground flickering with the shadows of leaves—and Matthias again.

Pale dust rose and coiled around the two of them as they tumbled together. Their savage, fierce kiss looked closer to a fight than anything else.

At some point Leila could no longer even properly understand what she was doing. There was only the terror of not being able to breathe and the desperate need that she must. Yet the Duke’s force only grew more violent as he sucked at her lips and tangled their tongues. She felt exactly like prey being torn apart alive by a predator.

It was the moment Matthias’s lips touched her throat that Leila’s gasping, sobbing consciousness flared back to life. Her blouse, its buttons already ripped free, had fallen open enough to bare her collarbone completely.

While his mouth relentlessly worked the place where her pulse hammered, a hand that had groped its way up her thigh and waist closed over her heaving breast.

“Ah…!”

Leila shook her head so hard she grew dizzy, yanking at Matthias’s shirt. The buttons of the torn shirt soon went skittering across the ground. Where her nails had raked his nape, bright red lines stood out in stark relief. At the same time, the red marks his lips left were branded above her collarbone.

When that mouth began to travel lower, Leila broke into tears. She didn’t understand. She could make sense of none of this, and so she was terrified beyond measure—of Matthias’s heat, of the hands roaming her body, of these shameful and utterly foreign sensations.

Fortunately, he went no further. Braced on one arm, Matthias tilted his head and looked down at her. That was when Leila opened the eyes she had clenched shut.

His breathing was still rough, yet his eyes looked nothing like those of a man swept away by lust. They were only deep and still—exactly as they had been the day he calmly crushed the coin she had dropped underfoot, exactly as they had been the moment he casually shot a bird dead.

The humiliation of that fact made Leila’s face burn even hotter. Matthias watched even that in silence, then slowly closed his eyes and opened them more slowly still. As his breathing eased a little, the working of his throat stilled.

A wind from the forest lifted Leila’s hair, which had been left wildly tangled. Gazing at that golden wave, Matthias let the fistful of earth he had been clutching sift through his fingers, then rose off her body and dropped heavily to the ground. And he looked carefully around him—at the woman lying under the tree’s shade, sniffling; at the yard where well-dried laundry fluttered; at the old cabin; at himself, sitting in a wrecked state inside this absurd world.

Matthias gave a low, hollow laugh and swept the hair that had fallen over his forehead aside. Leila was curled into a tight ball now, trying to steady her breath. Looking at her dust-covered, trembling form only made his laugh emptier still.

Just you.

A long sigh erased the laugh. Matthias slowly wiped his wet lips with the back of his hand. A faint smear of blood came away.

Nothing at all. Just the likes of you…

When he looked again, Leila had all but crawled away as far as the tree. She clutched a stick she had picked up in both shaking hands and glared at him. Tears still spilled bead by bead from her wide, staring eyes.

Matthias looked away from the woman doing something so pathetic and slowly rose to his feet. The gaze he turned on the hand that only moments before had gripped a fistful of hot earth grew impossibly deep and still.

You wouldn’t know. That with this hand, I actually wanted to throttle that slender neck of yours.

He picked up his jacket and turned away without hesitation or haste.

Summer in Berg is short. Before long a cool wind will blow, and the season will change as if by a lie.

Matthias knew that all too well.

Only after the Duke of Herhardt’s figure had vanished completely was Leila able to push herself upright.

She put on the glasses she had retrieved and staggered toward the cabin. Her legs still shook so badly that she staggered and had to stop and rest again and again.

I should have fallen to the ground instead.

Thick regret surged up with a flood of tears. No matter how hard she scrubbed with the back of her hand, with the apron she dragged up to her face, the hideous sensations left on her lips would not be wiped away.

When she finally reached the pump, Leila worked the handle with all her strength. Cold water that the pressure flung out of the bucket soaked her clothes, but she did not care.

“…No.”

She muttered it without even knowing what she was denying.

No. No. No.

By the time her irregular breathing had begun to mix again with the words she kept repeating as she shook her head, the bucket was full.

Leila clenched her trembling hands and cast anxious glances around her, as if something were chasing her. Everything was the same. The place she loved more than anything—Uncle Bill’s cabin, the coziest place in the world.

Leaves rippled in the wind and birds sang. Under the golden sunlight of a late afternoon nearing sunset, the forest looked only beautiful and peaceful. Yet Leila’s heart still hammered with unease. Just as she did not know what she was denying, she did not know what she feared either—but the fact that she had to flee from it was unmistakable.

Leila took off her glasses and washed her face over and over with the full bucket of water. She scrubbed the nape where red marks mottled her skin. She washed her ears. But the sensations the man had left behind remained vivid still.

Staring blankly up at the sky, Leila suddenly gritted her teeth and lifted the bucket. When the cold water poured over her from the crown of her head, her whole body shuddered as if with a chill.

Even so, she shuddered at the memories that clung so stubbornly to life. Shaking violently, she drew water again. This time she scooped it up in both hands and rinsed her mouth thoroughly.

She spat.

She had thought that if she spat the water out, the memory would be discarded with it. Yet somehow that strange, shameful thing kept rising again and again.

She spat and spat and spat.

Rinsing her mouth again and again, Leila ended up swallowing the water by mistake.

She choked, coughed, teared up—and drew water once more.

Matthias walked the garden at an unhurried pace, as if merely out for a stroll, and stopped where the rose beds met the marble steps leading up to the mansion.

Even after he brushed the dust away, traces remained here and there. Of course that hardly mattered. The problem was the memory. The farther he walked, the clearer it grew.

The moment he had taken Leila into his arms, every rational judgment had vanished. There had been only the hunger of wanting to possess that woman—exactly as if he had become some beast in heat.

Matthias bit his lip and swept the hair from his forehead.

He almost wanted to see the end of this hideous desire. It would be meaningless, hollow, and ultimately trivial anyway. If Leila, who had known so astonishingly little, had not wept. If he could have tolerated the sight of himself running wild and base for the likes of a woman like that. Perhaps.

When he lifted his head, the mansion stood in the golden afternoon light. And when he slowly looked back, the forest beyond the garden looked like nothing but a desolate world of emptiness. A place with nothing, amounting to nothing—just that, and no more.

A trifling interest and desire for a beautiful woman. As if erasing something so worthless that it made him ridiculous for having been stirred by it, Matthias slowly closed his eyes. Then he opened them again and seized a rose from the bed in full bloom as if to tear it free.

The fragrance of the flower crushed in his grip rose thick and vivid. It was a scent that resembled the smell of that woman’s body.

He tore it, crushed it, and cast it away.

With that repeated, deliberate motion, petals torn and mashed scattered in disorder at his feet. Following those petals, one by one, the memories of the little girl who had come and gone through this garden rose to the surface.

Every time he returned to Arvis, the child had invariably grown a little more. The landscape where that child stayed had been full of roses. Snow had fallen quietly. The time in which the seasons repeated and the child grew into a woman passed through his mind like a continuous sequence of scenes.

But in the end, it was nothing at all.

Matthias wiped his lips with a hand steeped in the scent of roses and stepped over the ruined petals. As evening drew near, a cool wind rose—the kind that made one sense the end of summer.

Until he climbed the steps and entered the bright light of the mansion, Matthias did not look back once.

The western sky where the sun had set now wore a deep violet.

Darkness slowly spreading stained the room, but Kyle did not light a lamp. He sat deep in the chair by the window and watched only the sky as it changed from moment to moment.

Ever since returning from the cabin at Arvis, Kyle had kept this seat. When he was not wearing his playful smile, his brown eyes could look rather cold.

He and Leila had eaten lunch together as if nothing were wrong. Because she had tried so hard to act as usual, Kyle had done the same for her. But he had known. That moment had been nothing like usual, and if he failed to find an answer, he would ultimately lose Leila.

Kyle scrubbed a dry hand down his face.

Leila had said she wanted to be good friends for a long, long time. That for that to happen, they had to grow distant. He understood now what those words meant. But Kyle’s thoughts were different. He would stay by her side for a long, long time—but he did not want to be merely a good friend.

So I can’t put it off any longer.

Once the conclusion was reached, Kyle rose from his seat with resolve. It was time to bring out the feelings he had hidden because he had not wanted to spoil these good days with Leila.

Taking a deep breath, Kyle opened the door and walked steadily down the corridor. A faint light was spilling from his father’s study. Before that door Kyle straightened his clothes and steadied his breath once more.

He knew what the young noble ladies his mother had introduced at the Duke’s party had meant. He had not been able to understand a mother already thinking of engagements and marriage, but today he was grateful for that very impulse.

I’m never going to lose you. I’m not going to grow distant either. How could we ever do that?

Recalling the words he had given Leila, Kyle knocked firmly.

“Father, it’s me.”

“Come in, Kyle.”

His father’s voice from beyond the door was as warm and kind as ever. Drawing courage from that, Kyle slowly opened the study door. Dr. Etman, seated at his desk, welcomed his son with a smiling face.

Instead of dropping into the chair across the desk as he always did, Kyle stood straight before his father.

“I have something to say, Father.”

“You don’t seem like yourself—must be something rather serious?”

“Yes.”

Kyle clenched his fists hard to find courage.

I was going to say this soon enough anyway.

Encouraging himself, he swallowed dryly.

Next year he would enter university and leave for the capital. And Leila would remain in this city and become a teacher.

For a long time Kyle had never been able to accept that fact—that a day would come when Kyle Etman was not at Leila Lewellin’s side. And he had thought: What if we went to university together? What if we studied side by side there, and I became a doctor, and you became a scientist who studies birds? And what if we lived our whole lives together, as we always have—as friends and lovers and family too?

“Mother seems to be thinking about my marriage now.”

At Kyle’s words, Dr. Etman burst into a cheerful laugh.

“Your mother did get a little ahead of herself that day. Don’t let it bother you too much, Kyle. I understand how she feels, but I think differently. There’s no need to rush.”

“No, Father.”

Kyle looked at his father with resolute eyes.

“I want to think about marriage as well.”

“Marriage? You, Kyle?”

Slow creases formed at the corners of Dr. Etman’s eyes as he faced his son.

“Yes.”

Kyle answered with a heart that had grown almost light.

“I want to marry Leila and go to university with her, Father.”