Chapter 11: "You've fallen in love with me?"

The transition between spring and summer is a busy time of year. The ‘Day of Rebirth’ commemorating the founding of the Protected Area, and the birthdays of the Consul and Crown Prince, are all within two months of each other. Martial law accompanies an enormous volume of commemorative events. The bosses at least have increased orders as consolation; as for the bottom-layer workers, it’s a horrid, busy, stressful time.

“It was better a couple decades ago,” an older worker in the factory complains. “The last Consul was born in September. Things were less busy when they were spaced out.”

“Never mind a couple decades, it was better a few years ago!” returns a younger person. “The last ‘Crown Prince’ was born in—”

His friend gives him a kick. The older worker and the eavesdroppers around them quickly disperse. The last Consul was the father of the current one; he’s safe to talk about. But the last ‘Crown Prince’ was not, in fact, the current Consul. The Consul has quite a few sons and daughters, quite a few of them alphas. The last ‘Crown Prince’ had died suddenly of illness, and had been buried in a rush, accompanied by a sizable purge in the official ranks. Even today, no one dares to speak of it out loud.

It’s been more than half a year since 329 met Yasha. In the meantime, he’s lost another job, the night shift one. It was probably Yasha’s doing—not to say that she did anything, just that she didn’t do anything. She appears most often in the evening, and while the reasons for absence she provides to his morning and afternoon jobs are flawless, she often didn’t do anything for his night job, allowing 329 to be marked absent.

“If you weren’t fast and cheap, I would’ve fired you ages ago!” his boss roars. “Even if you were knocked over the head on your way here and dragged off for a fucking, I expect you to report in! What do you think I spend money hiring you for? Do you think this is a charity!”

Anyway, 329’s fired. A few days later, he’s hired on by a furniture company. He’s recorded as a Misc. Unskilled Worker on the rolls, but his actual job is to test out various beds and fitness equipment. His salary’s about the same as it used to be on paper, but the job provides food and housing, instantly making his life a lot easier. When 329 discovers that he’s somehow the only resident in the new worker dorms (comfortable environment, just a little farther location-wise,) and that his worker card is marked as Out For Business after every absence, he’s completely certain whose beneficence is behind this job.

The transition between spring and summer is pretty busy; most people in the Protected Area spend it rushing to and fro. Yasha is no exception. She often complains that she’s so busy she can hardly breathe. She rests her head on 329’s lap, wanting him to give her a massage. 329’s never learned any massage techniques—it ends up less a rejuvenating massage than some random rubbing and hair-stroking all over Yasha’s head. Yasha closes her eyes and sighs, the picture of contentment.

Advanced technology keeps her as radiant as ever. Her exhaustion can’t be seen from her outward appearance. But 329 can tell a little from her actions and expressions. It’s probably because they’ve known each other for a while, but Yasha isn’t as dignified in front of him as she used to be. She’ll suddenly flop over in some corner of his dormitory like a boneless cat.

“So busy.” She sprawls on the sofa, lying atop 329’s thigh. “I’m exhausted. You don’t realize how tiresome some tasks are until you have to do them yourself.”

She never tells him what she’s busy doing, and 329 doesn’t ask, although he has his guesses. At fifteen, the poor are busy working, the middle-class are still in school, and the children of the powerful are probably already learning the ropes of the family business from their parents. Technology can compress learning time many times over, as long as you can afford it.

“Can I do anything for you?” asks 329.

He’s powerless to lighten Yasha’s load, but he hopes he can do something to improve her mood. Yasha plays with his fingers, laughing softly; he feels the vibrations in her chest in his leg. She says, “You’re a big help just being here!”

“Once you master these new things, you won’t be as tired,” 329 comforts her.

“Yes, once I master them,” says Yasha, half confidently and half irritably. She buries her face in her arms, like an ostrich burying its head in the sand. 329 laughs silently, combing her hair with his fingers.

Her red hair is curly and voluminous, past her shoulders but not to her waist. She considers anything longer inconvenient and anything shorter not to her taste. It isn’t braided right now, draping over Yasha’s back in a fire-red cascade. When he combs it with his fingers, his fingers drown in it, sinking into a soft, lush, fuzzy sea.

Yasha’s back gently rises and falls. After lying there for a while, her breathing slows. She’s fallen asleep, just like that. Ever since she started getting busy, she’s taken 329 out less, but stayed over for the night more often. The dorm has a big bed, so she doesn’t have to bring much with her when she comes. 329 sits for a while longer on the couch, then carefully extricates himself, picks her up, and lays her down flat on the bed. It’s not good to sleep on your stomach. Even if the difficulty of breathing doesn’t wake her up, her back will be sore the next day.

She doesn’t stir at all when he moves her, or when 329 draws the covers up over her. 329 tucks the corners in and dims the lights, doesn’t fully turn them off. Under the weak lamplight, Sleeping Beauty snores away, smacking her lips in slumber.

A curl hangs over Yasha’s forehead, flying up when she exhales, then falling back down when she inhales. Yasha’s hair is wild and untamed; only now, seeing her with her hair down, does 329 understand why she has to keep it neatly braided—that’s not to say it looks unattractive down. With her hair bound, she looks like a princess; with it down, she looks too rambunctious, as if in the next instant she might run off barefoot to roll and frolic in the grass, until her head is adorned with stray leaves.

329 tucks the curl to one side. The moment he lets go, it springs back into place. He duels for several minutes with the curl before throwing his hands up in surrender, forced to let it stay. It bobs at him in smug satisfaction. “I stay where I want!” 329 imagines it declaring, its voice and attitude identical to its owner’s.

The young alpha occupies his bed; it feels completely different from the first time they met, like a bird perched on your windowsill. His cheap rental from before didn’t have a window, but this dorm does, a very small one, completely unadorned, just a bare frame of concrete. That kind of window, if a bird lands on it, is completely transformed. 329 doesn’t know how to say it. Just, there’s something there .

He wants to feel Yasha’s face, the way he wants to feel a sparrow on the back of its head. When Yasha’s awake, she lets him touch her hair, the top of her head, but he’s never tried to touch her face. It seems too…intimate, too ignorant of his place. Under the faint light, her face glows rosy in the way of flower petals; the fine down on her cheeks looks very soft. 329 unconsciously reaches out a hand, then takes it back. His fingers are rough and covered in thick calluses. He hesitates, then feels her with the back of her hand.

That’s when Yasha opens her eyes.

She opens her eyes, and looks at 329. 329 prays she’s not fully awake. He immediately takes back his hand, but doesn’t have a chance to take back his gaze from Yasha, or his expression. Yasha looks at him, stunned. The words burst out. “You’ve fallen in love with me?”

From that, he can tell she really isn’t fully awake, or she’d never have said that. 329 smiles stiffly. In that moment, he can’t think of any quip with which to brush it off. He doesn’t make a joke in time, and he’s lost the opportunity to immediately refute her. If there’s anything worse than that, it’s the expression on Yasha’s face.

She sits up, blinking rapidly. She’s clearly astonished, but at the same time, her face reveals hesitation. Yasha isn’t an easy person to get the measure of, but she’s open with her emotions and expressions around 329, and he’s gradually learned to read her. He still can’t guess her next move or her specific thoughts, but at the minimum, he can understand Yasha’s face.

A face perturbed by an unexpected occurrence.

329’s heart lurches and plunges straight down.

Who knew that someone so decisive and smooth-talking could reach for words in vain. Yasha’s clearly at a loss, seemingly trapped by her manners and good upbringing, not sure how to go on. “Er…” she says. Just from looking at her, 329 feels like a ruptured hot water bottle, all the heat in his body rapidly leaving him. When she next opens her mouth, 329 can’t stand it anymore. He abruptly stands up and says, “I just remembered I didn’t close the faucet.”

He flees, races into the bathroom, and turns on the faucet. Water rushes out, like a peal of thunder in the quiet of night. The dorm has much higher water pressure than his old place. 329 had forgotten in his panic. He hurriedly turns off the water, but it’s too late, she must have heard the water from outside. His lie was idiotic.

329 rubs his face, closing his eyes. It’s like Yasha’s face is engraved onto his retinas; it jumps out at him the moment he closes his eyes.

I really love you. Because I like you. My honor. As long as you’re here…

If she truly meant it, would she have reacted like that upon discovering the possibility of being loved back?

Shock. Regret. At a quandary. There was delight, too, but the first three were too painful to behold, and incomprehensible to 329. How do you feel regret amid happiness? Delight amid difficulty? But if you understood ‘delight’ to be something else entirely, it all became clear.

Yasha has said that she loved him, more than once. Even though he knows he shouldn’t argue with it, sometimes 329 wants to ask, “What’s there to love?” From an outside perspective, 329 plain doesn’t think there’s anything about him worth loving—not to mention that someone with Yasha’s status could probably have whatever she wanted. He’s no longer young. He’s dead-eyed and covered in scars. If he has to come up with something, there’s maybe only the sense of accomplishment that comes with rescuing one of the unfortunate, and the sense of novelty a rich person might feel picking through trash. 329 sometimes gets the urge to ask, but he won’t, he doesn’t even really want to. Like before, a person has to have some agency.

Yasha’s expression answers this question.

Novelty. The desire for conquest. Maybe she likes precisely the fact that he doesn’t love her. He’s a challenge: the wealthy, powerful young alpha found herself a long-term goal, not expecting that her opponent would fall to her so quickly. She’s not done playing, but the level’s already cleared.

Wonderful. But what a pity. Such a dilemma. She’s pretty fond of him, after all. She never planned to wrap things up so soon.

329 turns on the faucet. The stream of water splatters against the sink, hualala . He lets his brain go empty for a little while. Then he turns off the faucet. The water bill isn’t cheap. He should start to think about practical matters, about survival. He doesn’t have room to be sentimental. But he can’t yet control his own brain. It’s a mess in there.

He feels…naked, worse than he did the first time he orgasmed under Yasha. He feels stripped naked, slit from throat to groin with a sharp knife and completely pulled open. His organs fall out, huala — “You’ve fallen in love with me?” —In vain, he kneels on the ground, trying to stuff heart and liver and intestine and stomach back into his body.

He fucked up.

Footsteps approach from outside. 329 looks down, turns on the faucet, and starts washing his hands. A pair of arms circle from behind. He stops, watching water flow between his fingers and rush down the drain.

“I just got a message. I have to go,” Yasha says from behind him.

She doesn’t bring up what happened. Whatever she was hesitating about, she’s made her decision.

“I’ll be really busy for a while. I might not have much time to visit.” Yasha speaks slowly, as if deliberating each word. “Please…don’t worry, everything will be better soon!”

“Okay,” says 329.

She probably won’t be back.