‘Why does Rastan have business here? Could it be that he’s trying to give me a goodnight kiss?’
Unable to guess his purpose at all, I followed him with a slightly uneasy gaze.
But he didn’t come to this side of the bed, to where I was lying. Instead, he went to the opposite side.
And then….
“Uh?”
He climbed into the bed and lay down right beside me.
Now there was no helping it, and I turned to look at him with eyes widened in shock.
“W-what are you doing? Why are you here…?”
For a split second, I wondered if he had gotten some bad idea, and I pulled the blanket up to my neck.
But Rastan settled in as if it were the most natural thing in the world, then turned onto his side facing me and propped his head up with one arm.
“We are engaged now, are we not? We can share a bed.”
If this were Korea, maybe. But since reincarnating into this world, I had never heard logic like this, and my mouth fell open.
“What do you mean? Even if we are engaged, until marriage we are supposed to strictly use separate rooms—”
“It seems you did. Well done.”
His even tone, as if talking about someone else entirely, left me dumbfounded.
‘Don’t all nobles do that?’
There was no codified law, but in conservative noble society, that kind of atmosphere existed implicitly.
And Rastan stood at the very peak of those nobles, a prime example of a high-ranking aristocrat steeped in strict etiquette.
‘That has to be the case… right?’
He simply smiled inscrutably.
“You did not know? Between an engaged man and woman living under the same roof—there is no such thing as ‘absolutely’.”
“Excuse me?”
This time, I was truly flustered and blurted out something foolish without realizing it.
“On the surface they pretend otherwise, but behind the scenes, everyone does what they want.”
This was genuinely the first time I had heard such a thing. It didn’t align with the etiquette and common sense I had learned.
‘But sadly… objectively speaking, there’s a higher chance that Rastan is right.’
Rastan was someone who had been actively engaged in the outside world for a long time, while I had grown up almost shut inside the house because I never had the money to dress up and attend social gatherings.
‘So then…. everyone really does, with their fiances…’
Once that thought crossed my mind, lying in the same bed as him suddenly made me far too self-conscious.
And then Rastan went a step further.
“Sleeping with just a wall between us doesn’t seem sufficient anymore.”
As he said that, he stretched out his arm, wrapped it around my waist, and pulled me in.
“Ah…”
In an instant, I ended up in his arms.
We had hugged plenty of times already, but the problem was where we were.
‘Doing this on a bed is a bit…!’
On top of that, wasn’t this the Duchess’s bedroom? The room where generations of Dukes and Duchesses of House had slept together.
I opened my mouth to protest, but Rastan spoke first.
“Holding you like this before sleeping makes me feel at ease.”
Still in his arms, I lifted my eyes and looked at his lips, which were still flushed red.
“No matter how vicious my dreams were, I could not avoid sleeping with a human body. So I used to take strong sleeping medicine in large amounts, trying to sleep as deeply as possible. I did that for quite a long time.”
A bitter smile touched his lips. Setting aside the situation we were in, I found myself focusing on his story without realizing it.
“…Did it help at all?”
“Not really. It might help with insomnia or ordinary nightmares, but mine are caused by a curse.”
“Then how long has it been since you slept properly?”
“…A very long time.”
Curious how long “a long time” was, I guessed a number that felt long.
“Um, more than ten years?”
“Let’s say that.”
Rastan answered ambiguously, neither fully affirming nor denying it.
“That must have been really hard.”
“It was. Not knowing any solution, it felt like wandering through eternal darkness.”
Holding me in his arms, he looked at me for a moment, then lightly kissed my forehead.
“Ah…”
I widened my eyes in surprise.
Even though it was just a brief touch, the spot his lips touched felt like it was burning hot.
Rastan was looking at me with eyes that seemed a little more languid than before.
“And then, when I met you and finally saw a clue to a solution, you cannot even imagine how I felt.”
Listening to him, something suddenly came to mind.
“Ah, right. You said that once we get engaged, you would tell me all your secrets.”
“I did.”
He answered right away, but somehow there was no enthusiasm in his eyes. It didn’t look like he intended to properly talk about it right now.
“Huh? You promised.”
“Yes, I did.”
As he said that, he pulled me into his arms again.
“Just in case, I promise I will explain everything after we put the engagement contract on paper tomorrow.”
Which meant, in other words, that he would only explain after our engagement had truly become impossible to undo.
“Wow, even when you buy something, they explain everything in advance. And you are saying you will tell me something that is important only after the engagement contract is done?”
But Rastan wasn’t an easy opponent.
“It is not a real engagement anyway, is it? It is also not something you absolutely need to know in advance to carry out the engagement contract. I only said I would tell you honestly because you were curious.”
Step by step, his reasoning was flawless.
‘Just as he says, it’s not a real engagement, just a time-limited contract.’
For some reason, a faint feeling of disappointment suddenly surfaced, but I pretended not to notice it.
“Hmm, fine. It is something unrelated to carrying out the contract, right?”
“Yes. It will not put you in any kind of trouble.”
“Alright. Then I will trust you and ask later.”
Rastan smiled easily and lightly kissed my forehead again.
“Shall we sleep now?”
“Ah, like this?”
I looked up at him with surprised eyes, wondering if we were really going to sleep like this, in the same bed, holding each other.
But Rastan only smiled faintly, without a trace of joking.
“I am actually looking forward to seeing what my dreams will be like tonight.”
The thought of sleeping pressed up against him made my head spin, but at the same time, I was curious about what his dreams would be like.
In the end, I gave up on pushing him away.
Rather than just brushing against him briefly during the day, sleeping with my body fully touching his might have an effect on his dreams on an entirely different level than before.
“…I am curious too.”
At that, the corner of Rastan’s lips lifted a little higher in satisfaction.
“That is a relief. Then let us sleep now. Good night.”
Until just moments ago, I had been slightly tense at the fact that I was lying in the same bed as a man for the first time. But hearing those words, strangely enough, my eyelids grew heavy.
Well, my body had only just recovered, we had held a small party earlier, and I had even had some wine not long ago, so it made sense that I would feel sleepy.
Even so, I found it strange that I was falling asleep while being held in the arms of an unrelated man.
‘Even if I trust Rastan, how am I falling asleep like this?’
Just as the boundary between reality and dreams was about to collapse, I realized belatedly, in my fading consciousness.
When Rastan climbed into the bed earlier, I could have screamed, gotten angry, or even chased him out.
But before I knew it, the situation had smoothly passed by.
‘So Rastan diverted the topic by startling me, saying that other nobles do this too.’
While I was startled by an aspect of noble society I hadn’t known about, he had already settled completely beside me and lay down.
‘But do other nobles really all do that…? This is genuinely the first time I’ve heard of it.’
Since that kind of detail wasn’t explained even in the original novel I came to know after regressing, there was no way for me to know.
Wondering whether I was simply naive, or whether Rastan had exaggerated, I slowly closed my eyes.
And shortly after, I was sitting under the shade of a tree where a gentle breeze was blowing.
Rastan was lying with his head resting on my lap, atop a picnic mat.
Brightening, I looked down at his face with his eyes closed.
“Rastan.”
When I gently stroked his fine, black hair, Rastan slowly opened his eyes.
His cool, smoothly drawn eyes and the way they opened languidly were so beautiful they looked like a work of art.
“Evelyn.”
“How does it feel? Before I came here just now, did you have any other nightmares?”
Rastan caught my wrist and pulled it slightly, then let out a shallow but long breath and pressed a slow, gentle kiss to my palm.
Tickled, I hunched my shoulders, and he looked up into my eyes while still holding my wrist.
“Not at all. The moment I fell asleep, I came straight here.”
In his voice, low as usual but faintly trembling, I could feel a subtle thrill.
“This is the first time. The first time since I was cursed.”
