Mermaid Effect 《人鱼效应》 Chinese BL Translation by: 黑猫白袜子

Chapter 17

A voice is talking to him.

Rand instinctively obeyed his words, and this again took a very long time (of course, it was probably only a moment), it was then he realized that the person speaking was Rogers.

His brightly colored hair in his blurred line of sight is practically a stab of pain to human's eyes.

He was kneeling on the floor, one hand holding Rand, and the other hand holding a brown kraft paper bag over his mouth and nose. Rand looked at him from an extremely close distance and found that Rogers had a pair of abnormally light gray eyes.

These two eyes look simply reptile-like at a certain angle. There are no proper emotions that human beings should have, causing people to instinctively tremble with fear—  of course, this feeling only lasted for a very brief moment, even Rand himself wasn't aware of it because another feeling confused him: familiarity.

Rand's consciousness swayed for a split-second, it was as if this scene had happened many times before.

(Someone used to emotionlessly fix their reptilian eyes on him, practically suffocating him)

Rogers's hand was propping up Rand by his neck, his hand was unusually stable compared to the anxious expression he was showing. It was abnormally ice-cold, like the hand of a dead man who had been chilled for a long time in a freezer's icebox. His skin slightly shrunk back under the effect of the cold air, there is a wrinkled-paper-like feel—  but, damn it, what was he thinking!

Rand suddenly shook him off and then the whole world finally came back to him

The air was warm, Rogers's voice was tense and loud, and under his body, there were coffee beans. Not too far away, some daily necessities were disorderly scattered on the ground, evidently, Rodgers's leather bag had been carrying them before.

"Hey, I think I'm good."

Rand leveled out the rhythm of his breathing a bit and he finally had the strength to slowly push Rogers's hand away.

Rogers blinked his eyes, his fake eyelashes and around his eyes were covered with small rhinestones, he stared at Rand.

"Man, don't you know anything—  if you have asthma, you should keep your inhaler at your fingertips!"

He exclaimed in fright and then as if he had finally come back to earth, he sat down on the floor with both of his hands propped up on the floor behind him.

"You almost scared me to death!"

After a while he opened up his hand and patted his chest, adding on that if he could overlook the resin rose flower decorations on his fingernails, he would indeed appear frightened.

Rand couldn't help but feel apologetic for him instinctively resisting in that split second. After all, Rogers now seems to be sincerely worried about him.

"Sorry," he said insipidly, "I didn't anticipate it either... it's just neurofunctional asthma. I haven't had this ailment relapse for a long time. I thought it already got better."

Rand very slowly supported himself with the kitchen counter to stand up. His legs were still a bit wobbly, but he was already almost completely returned to normal.

"Neuro...functional asthma?"

"Ah, that's right, it's kind of..." Rand struggled to look for the exact words in his still muddled mind to explain, "It's an issue of the psychological nature, I think."

Rogers looked straight at Rand and he blinked his eyes once again (Rand was unable to ignore him blinking because those rhinestones were really way too shiny), he parted his lips, but in the end, he simply said: "Oh. That sounds like it's somewhat troublesome." Then he thought for a moment and once again added on another sentence, "But everything will be fine, right?"