I Need the True Ending to Graduate - Chapter 75

【 Commotion 】

I continued preparing for the conference presentation while waiting for Evan Bell to call for me.

As I focused on what I had to do, time passed quickly. I was struggling with magic circle design, something I was doing for the first time in my life, and I didn’t have any room to think about anything else.

From time to time, Evan Bell’s face would come to mind, the face that had looked at me with a hollow expression where even tears wouldn’t come out, but after pushing the thought aside once or twice, what happened that day gradually faded.

And when I thought about it carefully, Evan Bell didn’t like me that much in the first place.

Unlike Ruad or Jeran, he hadn’t acted strangely kind or close from the beginning. He hadn’t hidden the hatred and hostility he felt toward me, and he had even made proposals that couldn’t really be called good.

‘If he truly loved me, he wouldn’t have done that.’

I didn’t know the reason, but Evan Bell hated me more than anyone in the world and wanted me to regret it.

He wanted to enjoy my face twisted in shame and pain, and hadn’t he actually done exactly that by feeding me suspicious things, preparing a dildo, and making me masturbate?

It was just that he hadn’t hit my ass. Aside from that, Evan Bell had done everything he could.

Compared to what he had done, me speaking a bit harshly wasn’t all that terrible.

‘He doesn’t seriously think that it’s fine if he bullies me, but not if someone else does, right?’

I didn’t know what had happened between Evan Bell and Lucia, but just as I began to wonder whether what I’d said was really enough to shock him that much, I received word from Evan Bell.

4:30 a.m.

It was dawn before the sun rose, a time when even the birds were still asleep.

I woke up half-asleep to the sound of someone knocking on the door, and a servant handed me a letter. It was from Evan Bell.

‘Why a letter all of a sudden at this hour?’

With sleep-heavy eyes, I turned on the desk lamp and opened the envelope to check the contents.

There was only a single line written in the letter.

[Come to me right now.]

“…?”

‘Did I misread it because I’m still half-asleep?’

I rubbed my eyes and read the letter again. But the sentence didn’t change. It wasn’t that my eyes were wrong, nor that I’d misunderstood the words.

“….”

I briefly looked away from the letter and checked the clock. The hands were pointing to around 4:40 a.m.

‘He called me at this hour?’

It was so absurd and ridiculous that all my sleep vanished. According to the contract, I was obligated to respond to Evan Bell’s summons, but I’d never imagined he would recklessly call someone at such an early hour.

Even so, I couldn’t ignore the letter he’d sent.

That wasn’t simply because of the terms written in the contract between Evan Bell and me.

First, the handwriting in the letter bothered me.

The lines were crooked, as if he’d forcibly written the sentence while holding a trembling hand, and there were places where mistakes had been roughly crossed out with lines.

I’d received letters from Evan Bell many times before, but he had never written this carelessly. He always sent letters written in handwriting so neat it looked printed, without a single typo.

Next, what bothered me was the content of the letter.

Separate from how displeased Evan Bell was with me, he was always polite toward me in his letters. He had never once suddenly addressed me casually or summoned me in a commanding tone like this.

‘It feels like something is going on… Surely it can’t be because of what happened last time, right?’

Even as I hoped it wasn’t, an uneasy feeling lingered in one corner of my chest. No matter how I thought about it, I had a bad premonition that the reason Evan Bell had called me at this dawn hour had to do with what happened before.

In the end, to take responsibility for the water I’d spilled, I gathered my clothes and put them on, then headed outside.

In the cool pre-dawn air, I made my way to Evan Bell’s residence by using the shop’s secret back door that I’d learned about by chance through the employees before.

Perhaps because it was still before daybreak, the residence had settled into a deep, dark silence.

There were no servants moving about, so every step I took echoed through the empty corridors.

It was so quiet that it instead gave off a chilling atmosphere.

Feeling like I was watching the opening scene of a horror movie, I pulled my thin coat tighter around myself. Then, carefully checking left and right, I walked down the corridor.

That was when it happened.

All of a sudden, I heard the sound of a door bursting open from the side, and before I could even scream in surprise, a strong force grabbed my arm and dragged me inside.

“…!”

When I came to my senses a moment later, I was lying on an unfamiliar bed.

Soft bedding and a mattress comfortably cradled my back, and in front of me, a large-framed man was pressing down on me with his body.

“W-who….”

I struggled, trying to break free from the man, but realizing this, he pulled me even closer and wouldn’t let go.

“Lucia….”

At the man’s low voice calling my name, I finally realized that the man who had dragged me into the room was Evan Bell.

I lowered my head and checked the man’s faintly visible face.

The room was dark, so I couldn’t see his features clearly, but I was certain it was the Evan Bell I knew.

“Boss.”

I called out to him, but there was no response from Evan Bell. Instead, he buried his face in my chest and simply kept taking deep breaths in and out.

The hot breath spread fiercely across my chest, then faded, repeating over and over. It was warm, like someone had placed a space heater against my chest.

‘Why is his breath so hot? Is he sick somewhere? Or does he have a fever?’

Wondering if that was why he was so out of it and couldn’t come to his senses, I gently patted Evan Bell’s shoulder.

“Boss. Please lift your head for a moment.”

“….”

“Do you have a fever?”

“….”

“Or cold symptoms?”

“….”

I asked several questions that might help me check his condition, but Evan Bell remained silent throughout. It seemed my voice wasn’t reaching him at all.

‘Haah. What should I do?’

Just like the last time we’d argued, Evan Bell was currently in a state where conversation was impossible. Even if I asked why he’d called me here, it didn’t seem like he would answer.

‘How did he even manage to write me a letter in this state?’

With that small question in mind, I absentmindedly turned my head and looked around the room, and a table near the bed caught my eye.

There were several objects standing side by side on the table, and when I looked closer, they turned out to be liquor bottles. Judging by their shape, they weren’t beer or wine, but looked closer to whiskey.

‘Don’t tell me… all those bottles standing there are whiskey?’

The bottles on the table were clearly not just one or two. There were at least three, and even if one had been left unfinished, it was certain that at least two bottles had been emptied.

‘He drank that much alcohol?’

There was no reason to keep alcohol drunk a week ago in the bedroom, so that meant he’d drunk two bottles just today.

“My god…”

Startled, I let out a small exclamation without realizing it.

‘If he drank that much alcohol, of course he’s not in his right mind!’

When I thought about it that way, everything fit perfectly. His breath being strangely hot, the crooked handwriting in the letter unlike usual, and the endlessly rude phrasing of the sentence were all because of alcohol.

The fact that he didn’t react no matter how much I called him was also likely just drunkenness.

‘The letter he sent me is like a call from an ex-boyfriend who drank himself silly and then contacted me in the middle of the night saying he missed me.’

In the darkness, I silently looked down at Evan Bell’s face pressed against my chest with pity.

I’d been dragged out here at the crack of dawn without knowing why, but I wasn’t that angry. It was because I could guess why he’d drunk that much.

‘Were the words I said back then really that shocking?’

I thought he’d shake it off quickly and get back up.

Evan Bell’s affection was at 40%, and while it was the highest among the three capture targets, objectively speaking, it wasn’t that high.

He wasn’t the type to speak gently to me in the first place, so I’d thought he would recover quickly even from my harsh words, but it seemed that wasn’t the case.

‘Why do I have to clean this up when I’m not even the one who said those things?’

Grumbling inwardly, I shook Evan Bell, who was sprawled on top of me, trying to wake him.

“Boss. Wake up.”

“….”

“You drank too much. I think it’d be best to get up and drink some water first. If you could move aside for a moment, I’ll call a servant….”

I was just about to say that and try to move Evan Bell off me for a moment so I could free myself from being pinned down.

That was when he, who had been silent all this time, suddenly opened his mouth.

“Why are you… not happy?”

“…What?”

“You’re supposed to always be happy. Always having fun, never running out of laughter…. You shouldn’t have to do rough things, shouldn’t ever starve because you don’t have money, and sometimes you should be happy receiving expensive jewels on special days…. You’re supposed to be in a place like that.”

As he spoke, the hand Evan Bell had wrapped around me tightened. The light coat I was wearing was miserably crumpled in his grip.

Meanwhile, I was completely baffled by Evan Bell, who was pouring out increasingly nonsensical words.

I couldn’t tell what he was talking about, and there wasn’t a single thing I understood.

What he was describing didn’t match me at all.

I was sometimes happy, sometimes enjoyed myself, but my laughter didn’t never run out. I’d gone through plenty of rough things, nearly been expelled from the academy because I had no money, and I’d never once even laid my eyes on jewels.

‘Is he just saying whatever because he’s drunk? Or did he have an ex-girlfriend, and he’s mistaking me for her while he’s drunk?’

While all kinds of guesses ran wild in my head amid the confusion, the heavy weight on my upper body suddenly lightened.

When I lifted my head, Evan Bell, who had been clinging to me desperately like a lifeline, raised his body and met my eyes.

His vivid blue eyes, visible through his disheveled black hair, shone pitifully.

I’d seen many sides of Evan Bell until now, but this was the youngest and most fragile he’d ever looked. He seemed so delicate it felt like he’d shatter if touched.

That Evan Bell asked me a question. His voice was low and rough, filled with an unfamiliar emotion I didn’t recognize.

“Every night I couldn’t fall asleep, just what kind of heart did you live with?”