18 Chapter 18

His face lit up and he smiled. "Then there is a chance of us being friends?"

"Just a tiny bit." I looked at him from the corner of my eye.

He beamed at me. "That's enough for me."

"I still don't like being the center of attention, though, so I might resent you a little for it. " I said.

"Is there a reason you hate attention so much? To the extent that you have various aliases to manage businesses... It's completely normal for a noble lady to have a business or two in her name."

"Of course, there is a reason." I smiled. "Well, my shy disposition as a child didn't help much, but there is another reason for it."

"YOU... used to be shy?" He asked, baffled.

"Is it THAT hard to believe?" I asked, slightly annoyed at his tone. "You hadn't seen me then, but I was very fat. I like sweets and my parents love pampering me, so I ended up that way. Back then, everyone made fun of me and I just hated it."

He looked at me, dumbfounded. "A chubby Aster..." He mumbled.

"Don't try to imagine it!" I exclaimed. "Anyway, I was a shy child. And then, during mother's tea party when I was ten, the First Prince was outright disgusted by me. He even called me vile..."

I looked into Luis' eyes with determination. "That is when I swore to take revenge against that fool."

"Was that the thrashing you gave him at the ball, last week...?" Luis asked.

"Yes. I swore to utterly disgrace that fool in front of everyone. And the earliest I could do that was four years after the incident. In those four years, I worked hard to thin down and to study."

I smiled.

"I thinned down pretty soon, but studying took a lot of effort. I was ignorant about most topics as a child so I had to study everything from the basics. I hired tutors to help me with my studies. They... helped me, but were mostly there in order to have connections among the high society. They weren't of much help so I studied by myself with the help of books in my free time. It was so much better. I had even come to like accounting and history. I just... couldn't hide my progress... The tutors would get surprised. Some only tried to butter up more, some... got envious. One, in particular, was trying to fill my head with wrong ideas."

"At first, he would tell me that educated noble ladies wouldn't be liked. Sometime later, he started trying to influence me into becoming a useless person. He tried to make me quit studying altogether. When that didn't work, he tried to get me in an accident... It was then that I realized that standing out brought out the ugly feelings of jealously that people usually kept in control. That tutor used to be a very bright mind. To think that jealousy would turn him into something so hideous..."

Luis frowned.

"He was dismissed immediately after that. But I was now aware of how people would behave once cornered. I... uh, don't tell my mother... I started looking for ways to escape... If there was ever a situation where I couldn't continue living on as 'Aster Saravelle, Daughter of Marquis Saravelle', I wanted to be able to survive independently. I started several businesses at different opportunities under different aliases. If I had to fake death, or if my family was to be implicated because of me... I planned to disappear and take up the lives of one of my aliases... I know that I am being paranoid... but I don't want my family to be affected because of me..." I looked down at my feet in shame. No matter what the reason, trying to run away from my family was something shameful to do. But I couldn't help it.

"That... must have been hard..." Luis said. I raised my head in surprise. "Still, you could have made do with one or two aliases, why so many? You really are a bit excessive."

"Huh?" I raised my brows in disbelief.

"What? Don't I do something similar? I act like an arrogant sod to stay under the radar of scheming nobles." He stated with a shrug of his shoulders.