28. I Have a Boyfriend (2)
The next day.
As usual, Flame came to class, radiating obvious annoyance while still attending lessons more diligently than anyone else.
Because she knew that every single moment like this could change the future, she did not waste her time carelessly.
But something felt…
off today.
The atmosphere was strange.
Should she call it restless? Or more like there were suspiciously many eyes on her?
‘Did my pants tear?’
Or did I get something on my face?
After class ended, she went to the restroom and turned this way and that, checking herself, but there was nothing especially strange.
‘Hmm, what is it?’
The girls passing by kept glancing at her and whispering among themselves, but it didn’t seem like they were insulting her exactly. And when she looked at them as if to ask what they were talking about, they would jump in surprise and turn their heads away instead, so she couldn’t even ask.
But given Flame’s personality, she wasn’t the type to sit there suffering over something this trivial.
One lecture ended, and while she was walking down the corridor toward the next class, a group of girls coming from the opposite direction approached in an odd way and deliberately bumped her shoulder.
“Oh my, maybe you should try watching where you’re going?”
For a moment, Flame was so dumbfounded that she smacked the girl right in the forehead with her palm.
Thwack!
“Aah!”
It really was a satisfyingly crisp sound.
“Are you out of your mind?”
“Wh-what… what are you doing right now…?”
“What. Want to get hit again?”
“Tch!”
The instant Flame raised her palm again, the girl who had been struck instinctively shrank back.
Even though she was at least ten centimeters taller than Flame, she had been instantly overwhelmed by the force of Flame’s pressure.
“Hey, forget that. Just tell me what this is about.”
“Wh-what it’s about…?”
“God, you little shit, I’m trying to make this easy. Hey, you. Come up to the rooftop with me. Let’s talk while you get beaten a little.”
“Ar-are you insane? How can a vulgar woman like you be Young Master Jeremy’s girlfriend… hup!”
The girl clapped a hand over her mouth midway through the sentence, but Flame had already heard everything.
“What? I’m whose girlfriend?”
The girls glanced at each other, then ground their teeth as they spoke.
“You’re pretending now? You sly fox! The fact that you wagged your tail at Young Master Jeremy has already spread all over campus!”
“…No, seriously, what kind of bullshit is this?”
Sincerely unable to understand what the hell she’d just heard, Flame scratched her temple with a ballpoint pen.
“I wagged my tail at who? I feel like I might’ve swung a bat at someone, but not that.”
“Hah. There’s already proof.”
The girl pulled a photograph from her clothes and showed it to Flame.
And there it was.
A clear shot of Flame, dressed in pajamas, visiting the boys’ dorm late at night and speaking with someone.
Although the person standing inside the dorm wasn’t visible, it was not hard at all to identify the place as the S-Class boys’ dorm from the color of the corridor and the ornate design of the door itself.
‘This is… from last night?’
It was definitely the sort of photo that could spark controversy. A girl visiting a boy’s dorm late at night in her pajamas implied that they were lovers…
or perhaps something even beyond that.
But if so, why in the world had a rumor spread specifically saying she was Jeremy’s girlfriend?
The man in the photo wasn’t even shown.
And for it to spread so quickly overnight, as though someone had intentionally circulated it…
…No.
Last night, when she had gone to his dorm, there had definitely been no one around nearby.
Who had ordered someone to secretly take this photograph was painfully obvious.
‘Well, damn.’
Flame let out a hollow laugh, utterly dumbfounded.
‘Jeremy, you insane bastard. So this is how you’re going to play it in the end…’
It struck her as a very childish plan, and yet it also sent chills crawling over her skin.
To manipulate a situation like this, he had his students running errands for him inside the school, and he even had the drive to spread rumors all through the academy.
‘Then again… in the original romance fantasy novel, he used to pull off things even worse than this like it was nothing.’
The headache pounding at her temples made her press her ballpoint pen harder against them.
“Whatever. I’m confiscating this photo.”
“Wh-what?!”
“And for the record, it’s a bullshit rumor, so don’t believe it.”
“A bullshit rumor…?”
“I’m not involved with him, you idiot.”
“Y-you… such vulgar language…!”
She could roughly guess why these girls were picking a fight for no reason too.
Thanks to that innocent-looking face of his, Jeremy boasted a fanbase that could put modern idols to shame, so of course if some fox-like bitch were rumored to be wagging her tail at him, they’d lose their minds.
Even in the modern world, when rumors broke out that a male idol was dating an ordinary woman, there were often extreme sasaeng fans who would go terrorize the woman’s home or send her threats over social media.
‘God, this feels so fucking nasty…’
No matter how much she denied it, once the rumor had already spread this far, it would be hard for a single person’s voice to stop it.
What else could she do?
It wasn’t as though she could skip class, so Flame silently attended the rest of her lectures.
There were not many students who openly picked fights with Flame like those girls from before.
Rather, most were excited over the new juicy gossip, treating it like some kind of “romance between the crown prince and a commoner girl.”
Was it a mistake to decide to just endure quietly until the end of the day’s classes?
The rumor that ‘Flame and Jeremy are that kind of relationship’ only snowballed more and more as time passed, until it was almost accepted as fact.
Afternoon, final lecture of the day.
As soon as the lesson ended, Flame was about to head straight back to the dormitory when the classroom door opened, and Jeremy walked in.
“Oh my?”
“Young Master came in person.”
With a warm gaze in his eyes, he approached the silently standing Flame and spoke.
“Flame. Would you like to go have dinner together tonight?”
At once, reactions burst out around them—small in volume, but intense in force.
‘S-so the rumor was true!’
‘Oh my god! Flame and His Highness the Crown Prince were really that kind of relationship…’
‘This is insane, actually insane!’
Only then did Flame fully understand Jeremy’s intention.
The rumor that had been quietly circulating around campus.
There was evidence, and there were witnesses, but because the people involved had not spoken directly, the issue had simply continued burning like a massive pile of firewood, without anyone settling it one way or the other.
And now Jeremy himself had come to invite Flame to dinner?
He neither affirmed nor denied the rumor.
But that one simple action was effectively the same as putting an end to the matter by declaring that the rumor was true.
‘This is driving me insane…’
If she loudly denied it and ran away here, it would do no good. There was already a photo right there as evidence, and Jeremy himself was acting as though it were true, so people would obviously just spin it into something like, “Flame got overwhelmed and ran away.”
Fine.
Let’s say she somehow forcefully insisted, “I’m not your girlfriend.”
Maybe she could escape the situation for now.
But Jeremy’s plan was like pulmonary arterial hypertension, slowly tightening around the airways, until finally, like acute myocardial infarction, it completely bound the other person up so tightly they could no longer move at all.
This rumor fiasco could be called the ‘seed’ of that plan. Even if she escaped somehow right now, the seed could still gradually grow until she was trapped by him.
Flame clenched her hands, slick with cold sweat.
Because she knew just how meticulously Jeremy had tightened the noose around Eizel in the original romance fantasy novel, she couldn’t help but tense up.
‘Just running away won’t mean anything.’
She had to kill the seed completely, so that it would never sprout at all.
“Flame, let’s go.”
Even while she was thinking, Jeremy kept slowly approaching.
What should she do?
How could she snuff out this ridiculous rumor all at once?
Flame desperately searched for a way out of the situation, and then suddenly remembered a romance webtoon she had seen once before.
“…Hey.”
“Mm?”
“Why exactly would I go eat with you?”
Jeremy smiled as though he had expected this response.
“Ah, sorry. I wasn’t being considerate enough. If there are this many people around, maybe that makes you uncomfortable… I’ll go ahead and wait.”
Jeremy said only what he wanted to say and turned as though to leave.
Flame didn’t stop there.
“No, why do you keep acting like we’re involved somehow?”
“Hm? Well, because…”
“I already have a boyfriend.”
Stop.
For the first time, a crack seemed to appear in Jeremy’s expression, which had maintained a smile the entire time. It stiffened awkwardly.
The reaction around them was the same. The students who had been burning with all kinds of mixed emotions—cheering on romance, feeling jealous, and everything in between—also fell silent in an instant.
Flame pulled out the photograph she had confiscated from the girls earlier and fluttered it in the air.
“This picture—there’s a rumor going around that I went to your room, right?”
Jeremy still smiled calmly and asked back:
“Mm. If it wasn’t me, then who was it?”
“I told you.”
Boyfriend. Male friend. Lover.
Flame desperately searched for an excuse she could actually use in this situation.
She had once lied to Jeremy half as a joke, saying, “Actually Eizel is my girlfriend!”
But that was the kind of lie nobody would truly believe.
And besides, Eizel was the kind of fragile little kid whose mental state shattered at the slightest touch, so Flame didn’t want to drag her into a rumor this enormous.
To begin with, since the background in the photo was the boys’ dorm, that lie wouldn’t even work.
‘First-year S-Class, and a male student…’
Someone who could play along with her excuse, and who, no matter what rumors spread or what claws Jeremy extended toward him, would just ignore it all and walk his own way regardless…
She desperately thought of a first-year S-Class boy like that.
‘…There is one.’
Just one.
She felt truly sorry to him, but…
if she wanted to survive, she’d have to borrow his name.
“Baek Yuseol.”
“…What?”
“My boyfriend is Baek Yuseol.”
“Ha ha… Flame. Why are you suddenly doing this?”
Jeremy was visibly flustered.
It was working.
Flame pressed on, still fluttering the photo in her hand.
“This photo is from last night, when I got caught sneaking over to Baek Yuseol’s dorm. But for some reason, I guess a rumor spread that I had gone to your room instead.”
Jeremy’s expression grew colder and colder.
“I’m sorry, Crown Prince Jeremy, that you got tangled up in such an unfortunate matter with a mere commoner. Anyway, I’ll be going now. I have dinner plans with my boyfriend.”
Without looking back once, Flame quickly left the classroom.
The room was instantly swallowed by silence.
No one could easily move, because they were all watching Jeremy’s reaction.
Rattle.
And in the middle of that, there was one person who stood up first like some kind of savior.
“What are you all doing? Aren’t you going to eat?”
It was Princess Hong Biyeon.
When she strode roughly out into the corridor with an irritated expression, the other students also hurriedly got up, forcing awkward conversation between themselves.
“R-right. Dinner, dinner.”
“Haha… dinner sounds good.”
“Ah~ I-I’m so hungry.”
And so, one by one, all the students filed out, leaving Jeremy alone there in the room. Only after quite some time had passed did he lift a hand and wipe it over his face.
Then he smiled faintly.
“Ha ha… as expected, she isn’t easy.”
An ordinary person would already have been caught in the trap at this point.
But Flame had slipped past even this with ease.
And that only excited him more.
The pleasure that would come when he finally possessed something so difficult to have—
he was looking forward to it so much.
Wasn’t that already the case right now?
His chest was bubbling and burning so hotly that… right this instant, he wanted to rip her limbs apart, shred them to pieces, gouge out both her eyes, kill her—
‘…Hm?’
Kill her?
Why did he want to kill her?
For a brief moment, Jeremy failed to understand his own emotions, but he didn’t think much of it.
