#39

“…Huh?”

Momentarily dumbfounded, I stupidly asked back. The question that came back to my bewildered self was unexpected. Unpleasant? Shouldn’t you be the one feeling unpleasant? Is this some joke I’m failing to understand? However, Johannes asked again, quite seriously.

“Giovinetta. Am I filthy?”

“No, how could you be filthy…”

“You must remember too.”

Johannes closed his mouth for a moment.

His eyelids seemed to sink into a quiet melancholy, and the arm around my waist disappeared. It was because Johannes suddenly straightened his upper body. Soon, even the knee he had bent was now kneeling. Slowly, he bowed his body and buried his forehead on my knee.

The hot breath he exhaled at length reached my skin through the fabric. Johannes slowly shook his head, rubbing his forehead. His golden strands of hair scattered over my thighs, as disheveled as his movements. It was a gesture he would occasionally show. Animalistic, and in a way, like a whining child.

Johannes murmured softly.

“There’s not a part of your body I haven’t put my mouth on, Giovinetta.”

From below, there was a soft sound of nightclothes rustling.

“Every time you got excited for me, how much… How happy I could be because of that… Each time, how much I…”

Slowly, his hand that had grasped near my ankle was now stroking inside the hem of my skirt, coming up to my calf. Rather than a caress desiring something more, it felt like a touch tinged with desperation, as if grasping a lifeline.

“Surely you must know.”

Johannes moved his lips beyond the thin fabric.

“…Filthy? If I had ever considered it filthy, I couldn’t have done such things. As much as I wanted you to feel more, Giovinetta. I was enraptured by every part of you. I was so overwhelmed with emotion that it was hard to express… I was glad to get wet together with you. Do you find me unpleasant…? Was I filthy? Is that it?”

“No, what are you saying… That’s… clearly differ, different…”

Nothing came out coherently from my flustered tongue. As his hand, which had been steadily rising, was blocked by the inside of my knee and could no longer advance, Johannes raised his head. Our gazes entangled up and down. The corners of his mouth curved gently, drawing a bitter smile.

“Don’t make that expression. Even if you find it disgusting now, I have no choice.”

“No. It’s not disgusting. Why, why are you suddenly saying such things…”

I grabbed Johannes’s hand. Johannes, who had laughed weakly once, kissed my knee with an audible sound before standing up.

“The point is, it’s not filthy at all. At least not to me. I’m sincere. So if it’s because of something like menstruation, it would be better to depart as we are.”

There was no time to stop him. He walked briskly to the dressing table and started rummaging through drawers with a clatter. He seemed to be looking for the jewelry box. For a moment, I watched dumbfoundedly as Johannes scattered various trinkets like handkerchiefs and combs haphazardly on the dressing table as they got in his way.

Then suddenly, all of Johannes’s movements came to an abrupt halt as if by a lie. At that moment, I did not realize.

That the density of darkness filling the room was changing, that a viscous blackness was pouring down like a downpour only at Johannes’s feet.

“That’s just your thinking. Do you know how arduous it is? It hurts, it throbs, it’s embarrassing, it’s bothersome. Johannes.”

Only then did the thought of stopping Johannes return, and I cried out softly in surprise. But Johannes seemed to have suddenly gone deaf. Without any reply or reaction, Johannes, who had been frozen with his hand in the drawer, staggered slightly. It was a subtle yet dramatic movement, like a rock-solid boulder starting to crack with a splitting sound.

Johannes picked up my dagger.

He immediately set it down on the dressing table with a thud. As if touching something filthy, he quickly withdrew his hand after grasping it.

It was a gesture mixed with shame, fear, and disgust. Like a bird accidentally killed in childhood, or as if showing an utterly unspeakable shame before God.

That of a sinner.

I called out to Johannes.

“Johannes!”

“……”

Johannes remained motionless for a while. At the time, knowing nothing, I was just frustrated by his silence. Because the me of that time knew nothing.

But now I know. That the dagger was the blemish Johannes wanted to hide more than anything else. It was an object that proved the memory of dirty and filthy emotions, or himself.

The situation where I, of all people, had stolen his filth and kept it behind his back must have been so horrifying that he surely couldn’t come to his senses.

Still, you abhor me.

At that moment, Johannes might have despised me. He might have found me horrible for a moment, for clinging on despite newly realizing his ugly side, and then trying to leave when I couldn’t endure it anymore.

If I had known that then, I would surely have comforted him.

But I knew nothing.

“…If not today.”

Johannes, who had been silent for a long time, suddenly opened his mouth. I, who was about to jump up from my seat unable to bear it any longer, stopped in an awkward posture.

“When.”

I couldn’t answer. Johannes, who had been staring at the dagger, turned his body.

I remember that face, wiped clean of all emotion in an instant, like limestone, turning towards me. A chill ran through me. Only then did I feel with my toes the dark energy that had long since overflowed from where Johannes stood. I sank down onto the bed as if slipping. Johannes called out to me.

“…Giovinetta.”

So low it seemed to drag on the floor.

“Do you have the heart to leave?”

It was a voice quietly ground out between his teeth.

“Answer me.”

Goosebumps.

They crawled up my legs. At that moment, I sensed it. Something was wrong with Johannes. An aura that had never been there before was swirling around Johannes’s expressionless eyebrows, mouth, and his entire body devoid of emotion.

Like someone who had once been buried alive, an aura that even felt like the vicious determination of a survivor crawling out of a swamp, swearing desperate revenge. Johannes looked as if every hair on his head, every piece of his skin had been utterly shattered.

Because I didn’t know the trigger or cause, I initially backed away. No, backing away was impossible in this situation. I just lifted both legs onto the bed and pressed myself against the headboard.

Meanwhile, Johannes approached.

He put one knee on the bed as if about to climb on right away. My toes touched his knee.

Johannes stood there with his arms hanging down. Despite the extremely loose posture, there was not the slightest gap. The kind of meticulousness where he could easily catch me with one hand whether I tried to escape to the right or left.

“Why… do you deceive me.”

Johannes asked quietly. Like a helpless beast facing a predator, I was almost mesmerized, caught in his gaze. But every nerve in my body was focused like wide-open eyes on my toes touching his knee.

As if that knee were alive and breathing separately, shackling me, with the feeling that I could only escape if I shook off that knee. But my paralyzed body wouldn’t listen.

“Why are you…”

“……”

“Trying to deceive me.”

Johannes’s tone was dry. Somehow, that lack of intonation was frightening. It was a different kind of fear from the reaction to a direct threat.

Have you ever seen your shadow on a bright day?

What would you feel if you suddenly saw your shadow one day, and witnessed a faint afterimage of it moving differently from you, then startling back into place?

Fear. A chilling terror rising up even though not a single knife shard has touched your neck. It is the fear of discovering the signs, the signs of tragedy, just before the familiar everyday transforms into the unfamiliar.

The fear I felt that day at that time was like that. A creeping sensation ran up my spine, as if my Johannes was not actually Johannes.

“No.”

I answered reflexively. It was an instinctive denial, completely removing any rational process. I should have stopped right then. The steps rushing towards catastrophe always take the same shape. Wrong choices.

The crash when lies piled upon lies to cover up falsehoods and even greater lies to cover those up all collapse in an instant is more tragic than any other noise. Unable to take my eyes off Johannes’s face, which was slightly relaxing its facial muscles and returning to a somewhat human-like expression,

“I’ll go with you. So, when my period ends… let’s talk again then…”

I placed the last pebble on the precarious tower.

“…Period?”

Johannes questioned. His chest, which had been rising and falling slowly, gradually became rougher over time. Like dust flying from a cracked stone wall, little by little, his brow furrowed.

His face, which seemed like tears would well up like glass in his murky retinas, unable to bear the weight of the rising, miserable anger – that question was the sound of Johannes’s last patience breaking. He grabbed both my ankles.

“Ah!”

Pulled helplessly by Johannes’s grip yanking mindlessly, my nightgown rode up almost to my thighs. I suddenly looked indecent. Lying down with Johannes’s knee between my legs, I frantically pulled down the hem of my nightgown.

My whole body was so hot that steam seemed to rise from my nostrils. I wanted to get off the bed somehow, but I couldn’t get up. It was because Johannes had twisted and gripped both my thighs.

The grip that felt like it was twisting all my flesh is still vivid. Fearing others might hear, I couldn’t even groan loudly. I couldn’t even lie down properly because I was trying to check my lower body.

“Move your hands, Giovinetta.”

Johannes, who had pinned me down, instructed. Ah, it was clearly an order. I had neither the strength to refuse nor the ability to leave my place.

I was shocked by his overwhelmingly forceful attitude, feeling like my soul would slip away. Johannes was poised to push my hands away at any moment. I asked, desperately keeping my hands on my clothes:

“Why… Why!”

“……”

“Why are you doing this, Johannes!”

It can’t be.

More weight was added to my thighs. It was because Johannes, who had fully climbed onto the bed, had mounted on top of me. His hands were soon withdrawn, but due to our considerable difference in build, I couldn’t move an inch. It felt like being on land, trying to breathe with non-existent gills.

The air I hastily inhaled and exhaled didn’t seem to circulate as blood. There was woefully insufficient air to breathe. My already dizzy brain felt like it would completely shut down then. Johannes was also breathing heavily.

For the first time in a very long while, I saw in his eyes the expression he had when he used to have seizures. That blood-boiling look of trampling and pressing down on something he couldn’t spit out even while rampaging and destroying everything around him, that face full of seething emotions that couldn’t fully boil over.

All sorts of fears mixed in an instant. I was afraid of Johannes himself, but most of all, I was afraid of the fact that I was the one who had stirred him up.

It was clearly a lie I had voluntarily told in order to leave Johannes. While thinking it was righteous anger on one hand, I still couldn’t bear the fact that Johannes might come to hate me completely.

And I was even afraid of such self-contradiction. I felt like I had suddenly lost my way in pitch darkness.

Johannes’s hand covered my wrist that was clutching the hem of my skirt.

“I need to check.”

He forcefully spread my arms.