Chapter 22
Side Story: Do You Like Bianca Shamal?
His name was Carlisle Schultz. Nineteen years old.
On the surface, a being for whom everything was perfect.
Antiope Academy's resident libertine, and at the same time one of its finest minds.
That the principal had personally scouted him is a fact already well known to anyone who would know it.
But was that really all? Carlisle Schultz was never short of women.
Black hair and golden eyes.
Long, cleanly drawn legs and squarely set shoulders. Bold, striking features.
The sort of looks most ordinary female students would cheer over.
On top of that his grades were good, and he could even fight.
That distinctive air of his was famous enough in its own right.
Chic, cool. If you had to give it a name, the ‘bad boy’ type.
That all three of the girls called the academy's Three Flowers had liked him at one time, or liked him still, was hardly a secret.
But with his final semester now in sight, Carlisle Schultz had cut off relationships with women entirely.
For no particular reason.
He was simply sick of it.
However many women he dated, he could never work out what the feeling of liking someone actually was. He couldn't grasp it.
Which was why scenes like this happened so often.
“…You piece of trash.”
The female student's resentful face carried real venom in it.
Whatever she'd said when things were good, in the end it was always Carlisle who got dumped.
Lindsey, one of Antiope Academy's Three Flowers, with her long violet ponytail and haughty red eyes, spoke.
“Be honest with me, just once. In all this time, has your heart ever raced for me? Even once?”
Carlisle held his silence at that, and then admitted it honestly.
“…No.”
Because it was the truth.
What she wanted from him was an honest answer, so he gave her what she wanted.
Crack-
A slap to the face. And then the sound of crying.
He understood the slap, but he couldn't stand a woman crying. It wasn't as though any urge to comfort her rose up in him, and crying was an act that asked for empathy.
That day the two of them broke up, naturally enough.
‘Let's stop this. Enough.’
The thought came to Carlisle out of nowhere.
Every last one of them was exhausting. Women, as a species.
He'd already been through some version of this more than ten times.
Keeping in touch was a chore, paying attention was a chore.
And yet in the end the problem always seemed to be him.
So Carlisle decided he was done.
The women he dated always wanted back as much as they had given him. Though he had never once asked them to give it.
But he was a person too. He had a conscience.
Which was why he didn't deny it when he was called a piece of trash, or when he got slapped at the end.
Though if he were to offer an excuse.
Go out of contact for even a little while and they'd cling, as if they meant to bring him to heel.
‘Why, though?’
Carlisle had asked one of them the reason once.
-Because you're too good-looking.
An absurd answer was all he got. Meaning, presumably, that she was anxious he'd let his eye wander.
He had tried, in his way, to meet these people where they were, but it rarely went well.
From early childhood the women around Carlisle Schultz had offered him their goodwill freely, for no reason at all.
[I like you, Carlisle.]
He had heard those words more times than he could count, and not once had his heart beaten faster for them.
Well, most of the women who came to him did so having seen nothing but his face.
Of course Carlisle understood perfectly well that this was a blessing of sorts, and that compared to most people it bordered on unfair.
But there was a very clear lack inside him. Carlisle could not bring himself to believe in other people's affection.
***
A person has many sides to them, as a rule.
Unlike his presentable exterior, unlike that unfailingly unhurried manner of his, Carlisle Schultz had been born an orphan in the truest sense.
Never having received a parent's love, raised in an orphanage.
Perhaps because of that upbringing, he had held firm standards since he was small. Which is to say there were plenty of times he was deeply serious.
In the orphanage teacher's assessment, a precocious and pessimistic child.
The young Carlisle had once said to that teacher:
-I don't think staying here long is good for me. I don't think it will help.
-But then what do you want to do, Carlisle?
-I want to be independent as soon as possible.
Contrary to the teacher's assessment, Carlisle simply thought of himself as realistic.
The welfare system was good enough that he could have stayed until adulthood, had he wanted to.
‘If I just drift along like this, the way the world has decided for me, will anything actually change?’
Carlisle Schultz thought about it.
His own seat was by the window.
Every evening after dinner, the glittering night view outside the orphanage, and people with happy faces on them.
Watching affectionate families, say, or a man and woman who were clearly a couple, Carlisle would sketch his own future over the top of them.
‘Someday, without fail…’
He wanted to live an ordinary, reasonably happy life like that himself. Together with someone precious.
But an ordinary life like that felt impossibly far away to a child, from the moment he was born.
So at around fifteen, Carlisle steeled himself and walked out of the orphanage.
He would succeed, no matter what. He believed this path would serve the rest of his life, and from then on he handled everything alone.
There was hardly a job he hadn't tried.
He worked construction sites, he handed out flyers. Carlisle covered every won of his living costs with his own hands, and whenever a spare moment came up he studied magical engineering theory.
There was no special reason. He'd heard that jobs handling magical engineering paid well.
-Impressive, for a kid so young.
-Grew up fast, that one.
The adults he worked alongside said things like that often.
Then, by pure chance.
An adult who had been a patron of the orphanage took a favorable view of him and pushed him further along.
He lived fiercely like that.
But every so often there was something Carlisle simply could not help.
When the loneliness of being left alone in the world came over him without warning. Because in fact he was alone.
That, at least, was beyond the reach of a precocious boy carving a pitch-dark future open with nothing but will and confidence.
And from that point on, Carlisle set himself a single goal.
‘Let's start a family, quickly.’
By meeting a woman he loved.
Because it was the one thing he had never once had.
Someone to lean on when things were hard, and to be leaned on in return. Someone who would take his side with no reason and no price attached. That was the person Carlisle came to wish for.
He had wanted it all along.
Which is why he kept dating women, and there was a time when he threw himself into it too.
Well, he was a man. He couldn't claim never to have been swept up by desire. Still, that he never once forgot contraception, perhaps that came of being born an orphan? Carlisle had no intention of skipping that particular habit of his before he was certain. It was only common sense besides.
Strangely vain, or clinging more than was necessary.
Or putting on far too much of an act. There were plenty more besides, but at any rate not one of these women suited him.
‘Why, though. Seriously.’
However much effort he made, he couldn't come to like any of them.
Because no woman ever pulled at him and made him think, this one, these days Carlisle was more than half resigned to it.
Perhaps his standards were too high. Perhaps he was simply peculiar.
Since he thought so himself, he cleared away the endless string of relationships entirely, and was killing his own boredom and marking time when-
[Hey, get lost!]
A woman appeared.
Red-gold hair streaming behind her, violet eyes glittering.
She was wearing a short skirt with no safety shorts underneath at all, and for all that didn't seem the least bit embarrassed about it.
‘What is this girl…?’
Lately he had been keeping his distance from women on purpose. But somehow the one in front of him felt interesting.
She was coming on to him this boldly, this freshly?
Carlisle found it absurd, and found her cute besides.
‘Shall I play along a little?’
That faint flicker of curiosity, begun right then, took no time at all to get beyond his control.
***
A pleasantly cool autumn night.
On the second floor of a handsome building in the middle of the main downtown strip, there was a cocktail bar.
Soft classical music and colored lighting in just the right measure.
A refined drinking establishment by the name of Migliore.
Late in the evening this place tended to fill up with young women who came looking for the atmosphere.
“Carlisle! Get out there!”
“Yes, boss.”
Carlisle Schultz was at that moment in a neat waiter's uniform, working the floor.
His image at the academy ran closer to libertine, but in reality he lived a life that was, well, fairly upstanding.
The academy accommodated him considerably precisely because they knew he was busy earning a living.
A full year had gone by since he started at this bar, so a thoroughly practiced Carlisle moved briskly.
After confirming an order.
Shhk- shhk-
Filling cocktail glasses with a trained hand, then carrying them out. Clearing a vacated table quickly and cleanly. He had been going back and forth across the hall like that for a good while.
“Um, excuse me…”
When he went over to take her order, a woman with a reddening face spoke as if embarrassed.
“Um… sorry, but. Could I maybe get your number?”
Having half expected it, Carlisle answered politely.
“I'm sorry, ma'am. I'm on shift at the moment.”
A roundabout way of declining.
The woman who had asked looked disappointed, but soon lowered her head.
“Sorry to bother you, then.”
Carlisle moved off again.
In truth, most of the eyes of the women who came to this cocktail bar, to Migliore, were on him.
“…He's good-looking. Seriously.”
“Tall, good build… completely my type.”
“Go on, talk to him.”
Women murmuring quietly among themselves like that was hardly an unusual sight in this place.
His short allotted break. Carlisle Schultz leaned against the wall and pushed his fringe back a little.
Hot. More than usual today.
Because of all the work, maybe?
An endless tide of customers. Which made this break something like rain after a drought.
His shirt clung to him with sweat, unpleasant, and Carlisle abruptly found himself faintly ridiculous.
‘…What am I doing.’
So, how to put it.
Normally he didn't take extra shifts like this. He himself had no idea why he was doing it.
But that question-
‘…Did she reply, maybe?’
Vanished like wind the moment a certain face came to mind. Carlisle took out his phone with a small flicker of hope, but the answer was exactly as he'd expected.
[What are you up to, Bianca?]
No reply had come in beneath it. But after checking that it had been read, Carlisle broke into a small smirk.
“Playing hard to get again.”
An honestly ridiculous woman. Though the trouble was she was cute with it.
Not once until now had a woman played hard to get with him. Even after they had slept together.
And conversely, Bianca Shamal was the first woman he had taken to contacting steadily, first, himself.
He had no idea why. But there it was.
So Carlisle sent one more message.
[I'm working. I miss you, Bianca.]
Deliberately laying it on a little thick.
Say something like that where she could see his face and the reaction would be quite something to watch.
‘Because teasing her is a pleasure in itself.’
Of course, Carlisle would never know that on reading that message Vita, thoroughly irritated, had said:
“Ugh, seriously. Should I just block him?”
Not a chance he'd ever find that out.
***
By the time work ended it had become the dead of night.
Back in his room, Carlisle sank into thought for a while.
His conversation with the boss came back to him.
[What's got into you, Carlisle? All this time I've asked and you never would. Now you're taking extra shifts, and you keep checking that phone. Come on, out with it. Something going on with you?]
The boss appeared to have gotten quite the wrong idea.
[It's not, what, debt collectors hounding you or anything like that?]
[It's nothing like that, boss.]
Carlisle had laughed it off at the time.
Something was going on, though. Lately he'd acquired one extremely distracting sulky brat.
And on top of that he'd happened to overhear a conversation.
[What? Are you serious?! You've never been to an amusement park?!]
[It's not that I've never been… I went when I was very small.]
[Just go with your boyfriend!]
[…B-boyfriend. I've never had one of those…?]
Carlisle's ears had pricked up at that.
‘Right, that's it.’
That was the thought he'd had.
A way to win the heart of a woman who kept cutely playing hard to get.
He didn't understand it himself. But that was why Carlisle had been taking extra shifts lately. He had savings enough to buy the tickets, but he had to refill whatever came out.
He was well aware from the start that doing this was irrational.
Honestly, lately even studying wasn't happening the way it should.
Carlisle had always studied alone until dawn after getting off work, but these days his head was full of just one person's face.
‘Still, will she like it?’
Carlisle was thinking that he simply wanted Bianca Shamal to go there and enjoy herself. That just watching her would surely be fairly cute.
With that quirky charm of hers, those cute, vivid expressions. It would be good if she'd laugh with that red-gold hair catching the sun and those cat-like eyes.
A woman with a charm all her own, so that watching her was enjoyable in itself. Because she was a type he had never come across.
‘And for all that, her body is filthily lewd…’
Certainly the caresses went gently. And at the same time, when he let something wicked slip out of his mouth.
She seemed to respond while being quietly talked down to. So he had obliged that taste of hers in his own way. It happened to be a preference Carlisle leaned toward himself.
Such a lewd body, and pure at the very same time.
Truly a strange thing.
Built so unmistakably like a woman, and yet the personality blunt and easygoing. All of it fresh, and all of it pulling at him.
Carlisle checked his magic phone often without meaning to. Still no reply, of course.
Yes, like this.
She kept playing hard to get, and it kept him on edge.
He sighed for a moment, finally broke into a small smile, set the phone down beside him and looked at the ceiling, thinking.
What this present feeling was.
He couldn't be certain either.
A question to himself.
‘Do you like Bianca Shamal?’
If he were to give this feeling a single shape, if he were to try putting it into words and conveying it to her.
“I like you, Bianca…”
Was this the right one after all?
Only after saying it out loud for no good reason.
He found it hard to believe in this version of himself, in what he was feeling right now.
“Maybe I… do……”
Carlisle dry-washed his face in the darkness. His face felt oddly hot.
In front of her he was always the one pressing forward, always wearing that smooth, unbothered manner.
But not at times like this, sunk alone in his own thoughts.
What was certain was that he was being drawn to Bianca Shamal.
And the very next day.
The two of them went to Wizney Park together.