“Phew…”
Don’t be hasty. Lucas took a deep breath in and out to calm his increasingly excited heart. It wasn’t good to blindly increase the level based on a mere possibility, without certainty of the treatment’s effectiveness.
Honestly, progressing this quickly was already close to a miracle. Lucas knew that Iberis was pushing himself in many ways to accommodate his insistence. He needed to adjust the pace to avoid the risk of reaching a limit if pushed further.
Above all, Lucas didn’t want Iberis to accept him swept up in momentary emotions or desires. If he only wanted Iberis’s body, he wouldn’t have confessed or put in so much effort from the start.
What Lucas wanted was Iberis’s sincere feelings. Selfishly, he hoped that going all the way with him would happen after their hearts truly connected.
It might seem hypocritical, given that he was gradually building physical intimacy through self-interested guiding to break down Iberis’s defenses. But that’s precisely why he wanted to fully connect with Iberis only after officially becoming lovers.
He was aware that he had used tricks, exploiting Iberis’s weakness to others’ warmth and physical contact.
That’s why he had declared that he had no intention of forcing Iberis if he didn’t want it, and that he would try to endure somehow until they became lovers. Although the order was already messed up by targeting Iberis’s body before his emotions, he wanted to properly maintain the most important thing.
So rather than pushing recklessly, he needed to slowly close the distance with patience. There’s a reason for the saying “more haste, less speed.”
Knowing this, days like today still inevitably brought impatience. The desire kept bubbling up, feeling that with just a little more pull, Iberis would fall into his hands, that with just a little more shaking, Iberis would accept him.
“What are you doing there?”
“…Major.”
Lucas snapped out of his thoughts at the familiar voice that came with the sound of the door opening. He put down the test results he was holding on the table and checked the clock on the wall.
“Are you done bathing? It took longer than usual.”
Iberis’s shower time, including a half-body bath, usually took about 30 minutes. But today it took nearly an hour. Lucas acted as if he didn’t know why Iberis came out late, even though he could guess. He observed Iberis wearing his usual fluffy pajamas.
“Today it’s a snowman pattern, I see.”
Lucas casually commented as he looked Iberis up and down, fully dressed from head to toe as always.
“Huh? Oh…”
Iberis wrinkled his nose as he glanced down at his pajamas. What he was wearing was a sleep set that his adjutant, Brenda, had specially imported from Korea for her superior who was particularly sensitive to cold.
The cute patterns like snowmen, chicks, and rabbits that children would likely wear were a bit embarrassing to show others, but Iberis wore these Korean sleep sets year-round because they were softer and thicker than other clothes, providing excellent warmth.
Since he only wore them inside his quarters and there wasn’t really anyone to see, he hadn’t paid attention to the patterns before. But when Lucas directly mentioned it, he felt unnecessarily embarrassed. Clearing his throat with a “Ahem,” Iberis spoke with an awkward expression.
“Is it strange? It doesn’t suit my age, right?”
“It’s fine. It suits you well.”
Lucas answered as if there was no problem at all. It wasn’t just flattery; it really did suit Iberis well. Partly because Iberis looked young for his age, but truthfully, Lucas would find him pretty even in rags.
“What does the design matter? As long as it’s warm and comfortable for you, Major.”
Having just entered autumn, it was still muggy during the day, but at night the temperature dropped sharply, making the air chilly. Even though his condition had improved thanks to consistent daily guiding, his innately low body temperature hadn’t disappeared. It was especially important to be careful during seasonal changes with big temperature differences.
For Lucas, who was aware from past medical records that Iberis often caught colds during season changes, this was rather welcome.
“How about a warm cup of tea? Or should I heat up some milk for you?”
“I’ll have tea. Is it rooibos?”
“That’s right. It helps with good sleep when drunk before bed.”
Lucas poured the pre-prepared rooibos tea and handed the cup to Iberis. Then his gaze suddenly fell on the socks with cute snowmen drawn on them. Perhaps because of what happened in the afternoon, today he found it particularly hard to suppress his curiosity about the name hidden inside those socks.
“What are you looking at… Oh.”
Iberis wiggled his toes and rolled his eyes as he felt the gaze. He could roughly guess why Lucas was looking at his ankle.
“…Are you curious?”
“Pardon?”
“About my name.”
“…I can’t deny that I am.”
Lucas, with a sheepish attitude, voiced what he had been wanting to ask for a while.
“Your name, Major, it’s on your right ankle, correct?”
“Yes.”
Iberis nodded slightly and blew on the steaming rooibos tea. There was no point in hiding it now that it was all out in the open.
“When did it appear?”
“About 10 years ago, I think…”
“That’s quite a while ago. …Have you never thought about finding your name match?”
Lucas hesitated for a moment before asking his next question. Now that the topic had come up, it seemed a good opportunity to have a proper conversation about it.
“I tried a few times. But I couldn’t find them.”
“…I see.”
So he hadn’t failed to search, but failed to find. Lucas felt both relief and anxiety at Iberis’s answer. If Iberis had met his name match, Lucas would never have become his exclusive guide.
Don’t you want to meet your name match?
The question that rose to his throat dissipated in his mouth without becoming sound. He felt he couldn’t maintain his composure if the answer was that Iberis wanted to meet them.
If the name match were to appear later…
At this unpleasant hypothesis, a dark shadow fell over his bright golden eyes. No matter how excellent an S-class guide he was, he could never achieve the high matching rate and guiding effect of Iberis’s name match.
Considering Iberis’s aftereffects and the possibility of a cure, receiving guiding from the name match would be far more effective.
That’s why he was anxious. The mere fact that someone else’s name was on Iberis’s body, besides the marks he had left, was very irritating and made him jealous. There was no way he could endure seeing that.
Lucas let out a bitter laugh at himself for worrying about and resenting something that hadn’t even happened yet. But he couldn’t help it. Love had a way of making people childish.
“You seem to be very reluctant to expose the part where your name is. Is there a special reason? If my actions earlier made you uncomfortable, I apologize. I didn’t mean to…”
“Earlier? Oh.”
“If you find it unpleasant when I touch your ankle, I won’t do it again.”
Lucas asked as nonchalantly as possible, hoping his voice didn’t sound strange.
“No, it’s fine. I was a bit surprised, but it wasn’t unpleasant. Um, there’s no special reason, it’s just become a habit from being careful just in case…”
Iberis trailed off, seeming unsure how much to explain to Lucas.
When his name appeared, there were no adults or peers around him he could confide in and discuss it with. The doctor couple he had trusted had suddenly passed away, and to make matters worse, the name that appeared was the same as their son’s. Because of this, Iberis never told anyone about his name and kept it hidden.
There were various suspicions that the Armand couple’s death wasn’t a simple accident. There were actually circumstances that warranted such suspicion.
Fortunately, hiding the name wasn’t difficult. Due to the nature of his ability, Iberis often worked alone, and there wasn’t much need to remove his socks during treatments or examinations. There were a few times when his ankle was exposed in front of others, but no one saw the name engraved on his ankle bone.
‘You… what’s that on your ankle?’
Then, a few years ago, an incident occurred. Ryan, who was administering emergency treatment to Iberis after he collapsed from mana overload, saw his name.
‘Look at your expression, tsk tsk. Don’t worry with such a devastated face. I only saw one letter.’
‘Team leader…’
‘Still, you should be more careful from now on. There’s no guarantee that what happened once won’t happen again. If you don’t mind others seeing it, that’s fine, but judging by your reaction, you don’t want people to know you have a name… In that case, you need to hide it thoroughly.’
Ryan comforted Iberis, who was greatly flustered by the unexpected situation, and gave serious advice.
‘It’s the first time I’ve actually seen it, but I’ve heard that for Espers with names like you, when they fall into severe guiding deficiency or overload to the point of life-threatening, something like today can happen.’
