5 - Reasons To Stay - OCIEN (1)
A beam of light touched my eyes and I gradually regained consciousness, perhaps it had been years since I had slept as well as I did this time.
Who am I kidding… As long as I've been aware, I've never had a night's sleep where I woke up so refreshed.
I felt how soft the mattress was beneath me, however my back was pressed by Reina's body. I could feel her hands entwined between my neck and chest and one of her legs over mine.
I heard the girl's slow breathing, she must have been keeping an eye on me most of the night to make sure nothing went wrong.
The shame of exposing my plans and my incompetence in executing them affected me in a strange way.
I was happy to be there.
Happiness that I hadn't experienced since my first years of life, the warmth of human feelings that I was receiving now compared to my earliest memories.
I didn't need to deserve that treatment, she was simply there with me.
While I was thinking and enjoying these sensations, Reina opened her eyes and noticed that I was awake.
"Good morning Ocien". – she said waking me up from my thoughts.
"Morning Reina." – I replied without much enthusiasm, but feeling a little warmth in my stomach.
The day before she was ashamed of the situation, whereas now I'm the one who's ashamed.
"If you promise me you won't do what you were going to do anymore, I'll let you go." – she said, more begging me to change my mind than asking for an answer.
I took a deep breath, organizing my thoughts.
Perhaps every man is lacking in affection and only a few are capable of knowing it in a more complex way.
There, in her arms, I had no reason to think about all the hardships I'd been through over the years, or at least I wasn't affected so drastically by those thoughts.
I was receiving attention and, in a way, affection.
My heart forgot for a few moments the world where I didn't fit.
Risking all my chips on something that could go very wrong in so many different ways, those words escaped my mouth before I could think them more clearly.
"I don't feel like leaving while I'm with you, Reina." – She said in a low voice.
These words came out in a whisper, but the way she tightened her arms and leg around my body made me understand that she had heard my words very well.
After three seconds she let me go and sat on the bed waiting for me to do the same.
When I sat on the bed she was hugging her legs while looking at me with an attentive gaze.
"I didn't mean to offend you." – I tried to apologize, thinking that I had been too bold in my words.
She looked at me piercingly with those honey-colored eyes. A shine I had never seen before was present in those eyes, something that made me feel lost.
"You're even thinner than you were when you were at school." – she said, finally breaking the silence.
"When you arrived, everyone knew you were different. After all, not everyone can be admitted in the middle of the year." – she continued.
An embarrassed smile appeared on my face, despite being desperate, my study times were much calmer than my recent times.
"Most thought you had done something and been grounded during the first semester." – she continued.
Punishment is a good analogy for what happened to him, the only thing was that he was not responsible for what had happened.
"Others already believed that you came from a prominent family and that you were sent here hidden due to some conflict." – she said with a little more enthusiasm, indicating that this was the aspect she believed in.
Little did she know that both possibilities were very close to the truth, together they almost became the correct answer to the enigma of his origin in the minds of her former colleagues.
Seeing that she was expecting something, Ocien shifted on the bed as if she was trying to find a comfortable position, which was impossible when it came to that.
"Both are right." – I replied in an embarrassed tone.
Reina's eyebrows rose in surprise, exposing her honey eyes even more, which caused me to catch my breath.
Those eyes seemed to hypnotize me every time I saw them, it was something I couldn't explain rationally.
"What happened to you?" – she asked after a few minutes of silence following my vague revelation.
I took a deep breath, she would probably be the only person interested in my story. Some say that we need to let off steam from time to time, keeping everything inside is harmful to our health.
"My family is influential in the city of Paales, my father is the strongest wizard in the family and my mother comes from another influential family in the city." – I started counting.
"Because my mother was a Warrior, the family's internal politics made my father lose the chance to become patriarch and so all the responsibility for increasing his status in the family ended up falling on me." – I continued speaking while Reina listened attentively.
I paused to take a deep breath, until that moment it was just my anxiety that existed, the real problem would start from then on.
"I awakened in both paths, but to satisfy my father I chose the path of Mage. I entered the 3rd Level Academy of Paales and was always at the top of the class, being one of the first to reach the peak of the 1st Star." – I continued the narrative.
Reina's eyes lit up when she heard that I attended an Academy, something too far away for someone who lives in a city like Almage.
"While my colleagues overcame the barrier of the 2nd Star, I was unable to do so, so I was found as a Lent." – I said in an apathetic tone, but it didn't escape Reina's eyes.
She was also a Lent and even though she had never been near an Academy she knew that they didn't accept people like her.