Royally Kissed | ✓

31; the painful beginnings

—thirtyone—

the painful beginnings

AT HACKETT UNIVERSITY, the day after the breakup, Paige never expected that Arthur would turn up in one of their classes together.

He was late during Marketing, and all heads turned to him as he approached their professor, exchanging hushed words with him for a moment. It seemed as though Arthur was informing him about his whereabouts for the past few days.

But his dark, princely stature wasn't what caught the rest of the students' attention.

Paige couldn't help but stare at the relatively big purplish spots right across his cheekbone and his jaw on the other side of his face. It wasn't the nicest match to his white turtleneck and camel overcoat. He was like a white-collared worker, an executive even, who had just got into an accident.

But she knew any better. It raised suspicions among the others, and so in her. This didn't look like an accident at all. Did he get into a fight?

As he scaled up the lecture room, his eyes scanned around for some vacant seats. Unfortunately, for both of them, the only one empty was the seat next to hers, where he usually sat before.

Mossy green orbs then captured her grayish-blues as if it were mechanical. His eyes squinted rather slenderly that suggested he was returning the favor. Because Paige could've averted her eyes away from his, but it was too hard to look away, especially with those bruises forming on his face.

Just as she realized that he was pointedly staring at her, the spell snapped, making her focus down on the lecture. Although the knot sitting in the pit of her stomach was an exception. Even more as he finally occupied the seat beside her.

Who could have roughed him up? Paige shook those thoughts away. Why did she even care?

But, worst of all, why should she not give a damn about someone whom she truly and genuinely care about, anyway? She had been lied to, got her heart trampled on as if it were dust, but hypocrisy wasn't in her book of facts.

Not caring was easier than done. And knowing that now the person who'd made her feel so much was sitting inches away from her, acting like it wasn't a big deal to her would be wiser, although not what she was tough enough to perform.

Because she could almost actually feel, hear her heart being torn apart. Her love for him was bursting at the seams; and just imagine how much pain she had to endure for the rest of the class, for the rest of her life loving him, really, to make up for the amount of losses on that emotional investment.

Accounting insolvency. The net worth appeared to be negative if she were to sort things out on a balance sheet. The liabilities were far greater than the assets.

But this was no accounting, this was real life. This was much more than just a 'loss'. Loss was something you could replace, and for her, it was lethal. This was death.

And so pretense it was−she let her head hung low as her hair fell down on one of side of her face so that he couldn't see her expression. Her eyes fixated on her notes, but she could peer at his fingers drumming haphazardly on his leg every now and then.

His knuckles didn't have a single hint of wound, which seemed to suggest that he didn't fight back to whoever gave him those contusions. It was as though he'd taken all the anger because he knew he deserved it.

But who did it?

"I'm going to fucking kill him," Owen had said to her last night upon returning to the practice.