“Your eyes are closed, right?”
“Yes.”
After waving his hand several times in front of Les’ eyes, Cesar Mehin grabbed his sharpened razor. Cesar looked at Les in the mirror in front of him, swiping his dirty, straw-colored hair several times with his fingertips. Having roughly decided in his mind where and how to cut it, Cesar’s blade moved without hesitation.
Snip, snip, and the cut off hair fell to the floor. He must be able to feel the blade approaching even with his eyes closed, for his closed eyelids trembled with every cut. Without taking his attention away from the nervous and shaky breaths, Cesar quickened his hands even more as he cut his hair.
“It’s done.”
As he tapped his shoulder lightly, Les gasped for breath. A cold sweat had formed on the nape of his neck, and his face had gone white. He accepted the cup that was handed to him without a word and emptied it at once, his hand trembling slightly.
“3 decats.”
Without a glance at his distressed friend, Cesar had brought a large broom and was sweeping the floor. Looking at his hair that covered the floor as if it was shedding season, Les touched the back of his neck, which felt empty now.
“Kinda expensive.”
“I’m not a philanthropist, you know.”
“Could you please cut it down to 1 decat, my brother with such beautiful muscles–?”
He was cut off by a thick hand striking the back of his head. Bent over, Les complained as he rubbed the back of his head.
“That hurts.”
“Any luck finding a job yet?”
“They don’t want me anywhere.”
“What about the professors? They used to praise you so much.”
“Professor Sodeberg, Professor Bernheim, and Professor Raden all stepped down. As their disciple it just doesn’t feel right to ask them.”
“The most useless thing is to worry about people who are doing well on their own.”
“Still, I have a sense of honor, you know. If I become a reject from society, then I should do it alone instead of taking others down with me.”
“What a pointless sense of honor.”
Even at such words, Les smiled. Cesar clicked his tongue at his fool of a friend, then finished throwing away the cut-off hair and cleaning the tools he had used. Les quietly followed his movements with his eyes.
“Aren’t you going to ask?”
“Ask what?”
“Why I’m not clinging to the princess for help.”
A week ago, when he had gone out to answer the doorbell that rang first thing in the morning, what greeted Les was a woman with enough sophisticated beauty to appear in any fashion magazine’s pictorial. Her gorgeous curly blonde hair ran gracefully down her back, and she was wearing a white turtleneck sweater underneath a light brown trench coat. She quickly swept her gaze up and down, with a subtlety that wouldn’t have been noticed by the average person.
‘Are you Sir Les Kishir? I’m Princess Leticia’s chief secretary, Tesira Jarden.’
It was the chief secretary of the princess, who was known to earn a higher salary than the prime minister and who oversaw the managers of the twenty-five businesses of the country’s richest princess. Tesira Jarden, who was capable of being extremely polite while never making herself seem like a subordinate to the other person, turned halfway round as soon as she had straightened her deeply bowed waist, revealing the long string of humans standing in line behind her.
‘These are gifts the princess has sent, while apologizing for her mistake at the banquet yesterday. She asked that you would think of it as her heart for you, and she earnestly hopes that you would be willing to accept them.’
And, as if it had been planned, a mob of reporters suddenly gathered around like a cloud and their cameras began flashing.
As he recalled the events of that day, Cesar’s blunt face hardened even further. Each and every one of those people who had appeared with boxes were the managers of high-end stores that were well-known in Brussels. He hadn’t been able to check the contents, but there was no way that the princess would have sent anything below the absolute high quality. This woman had gathered all of these people and gifts here, declaring in front of all those reporters that the princess had sent these gifts as an apology. It was a heavy burden that a mere military veteran such as Les shouldn’t dare to refuse.
However, Les Kishir turned down every single one of the gifts without even opening them.
‘The princess has already sufficiently apologized. These gifts are excessive to someone like me, so if she insists on still giving them, I will donate them in the princess’ name.’
That day, Cesar saw an expression of shock on the face of the secretary who was famous for her ability to keep a straight face. After Les committed the brutality of actually donating the latest-edition watches from the Ramiere men’s line to the soup kitchen, the secretary didn’t show up any more, but the gifts continued to arrive every day for six days. The latest gift, sent yesterday, was a state-of-the-art rifle that had even tempted Cesar, who normally prided himself on his disinterest in material goods. It was the model from the stage right before the latest model, which was restricted from being exported due to military secrets.
Les had donated this rifle to the museum.
“Why aren’t you telling me that I should just have fun, pretend I’ve won the lottery or something, since it’s not like the princess’ enormous wealth will be affected at all if I were to help myself to some of it while acting as her lover?”
As he asked this, Les slowly tightened his loosened tunic straps closer to his chest. He couldn’t wear short sleeves anymore, nor could he wear any clothes that were tight around his throat, and he could hardly bear to see bright colors; so all of his clothes were now either black or white and loosely fitting. Now that his shaggy hair had been cut off, the nape of his neck was clearly visible, which made his bony figure all the more prominent. Cesar, watching his friend’s slender wrist sweeping over his head, frowned.
“Aren’t you tired of hearing the same thing over and over yet?”
“I’m unemployed, remember? I don’t have much better to do.”
“Well, enough people will ask you those questions, so there’s no need for me to also pry into that.”
Les, who had opened his eyes wide at him, smiled. Cesar glanced at the figure once more, furrowing his brows and tousling his hair roughly.
“Still, I do feel rather thankful to the princess.”
“To the princess?”
“Since she made the guy who was struggling to eat, finally eat with his own hands.”
“Haha.”
Smacking the back of the guy who laughed as if it was funny, Cesar moved to the window and opened it wide. It had been a while since he’d cleaned the place, and the cool morning breeze flowed into the room that had felt stuffy until now.
Honestly, he wasn’t very close with Les. Unlike Les, who took combat and elite courses in the military academy, he was in the mechanical engineering department from the very beginning, so their paths were completely different. It was only because they had ended up becoming roommates in his last semester due to certain circumstances that they had written down each other’s names as their emergency contacts.
They had become roommates again now because there had been no family or other contacts to accompany Les after he had been discharged from the military hospital.
When he was first discharged, he was really just barely alive. His leg was injured and left unattended for a long time, so he wasn’t able to walk properly, and he wasn’t able to eat for several days after being discharged. His fever boiled, and then at times it barely cooled down, but then immediately skyrocketed again.
On the day when he had finally, just barely recovered enough and was called to the victory banquet, Cesar had half-expected that Les might return as a corpse.
But on the contrary, Les, upon returning from the banquet, found and ate food with unprecedented aggression. This man, who had previously struggled to even lift a finger while lying down, was now fighting through his rehabilitation even while sweating profusely. Whatever had happened, it was welcome news for Cesar.
“Well, I can’t keep encroaching in your space forever, so I have to become self-reliant sooner or later.”
Contrary to the laughing tone in it, his voice was dry, as if swallowing sand. He opened the drawer, lined up all the medicine containers, and swallowed a fistful of medicines without any water, all while slowly rubbing the nape of his neck. Just looking at him seemed to block his throat, so Cesar frowned and turned his gaze away.
“…Hmm?”
Having inadvertently thrown his gaze into the alley outside, a strange expression came over Cesar’s face.
The splendid carriage of Princess Leticia, with the emblem of the royal family of Levanstein, symbolized by an eagle with a blue moon in the background, as well as the emblem of the Luschen Heights merchant which was engraved with galleys and killer whales on either side, had not appeared today until noon. He had originally thought maybe Les’ tactic of complete refusal had finally worked to fend her off, but today the atmosphere was a little different.
First of all, the reporters who had always flocked around her like a pack of dogs were strangely absent. There was also no bustling procession of people following the princess’ carriage and carrying gift boxes. Instead, a bright red luxury-brand car and three black cars that were following it all stopped silently in front of the door of their boarding house. The suffocatingly narrow road, with its crowded buildings and the street vendors who had arranged seats in front of these buildings as makeshift shops, was now fit to burst with these four expensive cars filling the street as well.
People in black robes, who couldn’t possibly be anything other than private bodyguards, exited the vehicles and silently lined either side of the stairs in front of the house. And the red car’s rear door opened to reveal its passenger.
Cesar’s jaw dropped.
“Uh, hey, hey Les? There’s, outside –”
Rrrrrring!
The doorbell rang before he could finish his sentence. Without any rush, Les Kishir tidied his clothes once more before opening the door without any sense of hesitation.
“Hi!”
And on the other side of the open door, the princess waved her hand, boasting a dizzying beauty that literally seemed to spill out from her face.