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Geomma doesn’t know what real love is.
At least that’s what Chloe tells herself. On sleepless nights, when the moon fails to fall, she tells herself it. She swears by it.
Geomma doesn’t know what love is, he’s never seen it before. Chloe wishes he would just look further. Beyond the edges of his Sashimi knife and the tip of her katana. If for one moment he would just respond, reply, or reciprocate. He doesn’t know, but Chloe could show him.
“She’s nothing but a nuisance.” He would say, every time Saki had complaints.
He looks at her like she’s something to tolerate, and never something for him to keep. He doesn’t think himself cruel, but he is. He speaks to her the same way he would a stranger, as if everything she’s done, everything she’s given, didn’t matter at all. Chloe thinks she would prefer it if Geomma hated her. Instead of pretending not to see her diary, to at least shut her down plainly. Stringing Chloe’s hopes along with tutorials on fish cuts and warm embraces.
Millions of choices, and yet the one she can’t distance herself from is Geomma. Just friends, he says, but the heavy stare he bears communicates affection. Geomma values Chloe, at least that’s what he told her.
He didn’t mean it, not really. Chloe was never a main character, was never the object of his first affections. Chloe was nothing but an extra, as if Geomma himself wasn’t an extra. He stole the future of his peers, of which he would say was accidental, but the stain in Chloe’s heart says otherwise. She’s already been set aside, neatly placed somewhere out of reach
“Your number is restricted information, Chloe. You’re an assassin.” The response she was given after he had been texting back and forth with Saki, consistently. Admittedly, not a bad thing. But Chloe broke her legs for that man, and he never even visited her, she had to come to him.
“You’re important to me Chloe. You matter.” He whispered in her ears one day, turning a blind eye to the pinkness in her cheeks.
Head pats, late night dinners, afternoon training sessions, tutoring, and that stupid club. She wasted all her connections and burnt away her own family. All for that man. True, she was tortured mentally and physically by said family since birth, but her brother loved her. It is days like this where Chloe just wants to hide away.
“Who ever finds him, keeps him!” Exclaimed Rachel, commenceing the hunt for their oblivious love.
Chloe does not hate them. That would just be too easy.
Saki, Abel, Rachel. Pretty girls who laugh loud, who sleep instead of study, who reach for him like it’s nothing. Chloe has watched them, long enough to know they are not cruel, not like the girls she grew up with. They are soft in ways she has never learned to be and could never dream of being as. Earnest and just, they provide affection and interest.
Chloe likes Rachel A lot. Rachel is like a big sister, one who shares sanitary products and womanly advice. Chloe understands that Saki has put more work into her bow than Chloe’s own grandfather has put into her bloodline. Abel is mean though, and Chloe knows Abel views herself above.
Abel gets everything on a silver platter but acts like she worked from trenches up. Chloe’s training had her tied to a tree and beaten until she couldn’t flinch by her own grandfather. Abel’s grandfather bought her a pony for her eighth birthday. But Abel is kind. Kind enough to set aside her justice for Chloe’s assassination.
So yes, Chloe does not hate them, but that might be the worst part.
Because when they open up and their voices tremble, when their hands find Geomma’s sleeve, when they wrap their arms around him from behind like they already belong there, something shifts in Chloe’s brain.
The story bends for them. Geomma listens, softens, remembers them.
It weaves together as if they were meant to be there. Chloe was always just an extra in the background. But Chloe kills when Geomma asks. Chloe uses her connections when he asks. Chloe lets herself be offered up, piece by piece, because if it is him asking, then it must mean something.
But it never does. Not in the way it does for them, the main leads. It is then that Chloe understands that this is all she was ever meant to be. An extra. Unloved, unwanted, and irrelevant.
A nuisance is all she’ll ever be to him.
So why can’t she leave?