It was an impulsive visit to avoid a nameless, tick-like man.

Moreover, the members of the shooting club seemed to take some sort of pride in their pack. This was the kind of coven Anita hated, for such people usually liked to regulate and peck at those who belonged to their pack.

I was going to go to a gathering of disloyal members who would forget there was a meeting and just put together a reasonable assorted….

Anita bit her lip in disappointment. She should have grabbed the application the moment it was in Richie’s hands. If she had risked the embarrassment just once and backed out of my decision, she would have felt much more at ease by now.

Anyway, the water had been spilled, and it was too late to change it now.

In that sense, the rain was sweet.

The members, who seem to be obsessed with decency, wouldn’t be meeting on a muddy floor on a rainy day.

“Oh. Shoot. Tell them to kill me.”

She heard a rather exaggerated sob. Anita glanced up and realized what was happening. A test was scheduled in the near future.

An exam.

What better excuse to skip a meeting?

She’d already done all the studying she needed to do, so she wouldn’t have to do any extra studying, but it would be a great excuse.

To take an anatomy lecture, you have to cross to the next building. Anita held her thick book at her side and headed towards the entrance of the building.

The doors to the building were wide open, the floor became damp as we got closer to the entrance, probably due to rainwater coming in between them. Water splashed under the heels of my shoes. I felt a bit uneasy.

Raindrops flew at her diagonally. Anita took a step back. She wished they’d tied the buildings together when they were built.

On the lawn beyond the entrance, students were running around, shouting profanities. Anita had no intention of running out into the rain with a jacket or book over her head like them. She’d rather skip the lecture.

“Anita.”

“……?”

She had been looking off into the distance and hadn’t seen what was right in front of her. When she heard her name called, Anita turned her head, dumbfounded. The man running a hand through his dripping hair was Rutger.

“Let’s go out?”

Anita shook her head and took another step backward, the water dripping from the hem of his shirt soaking through to her shoes. He must have realized this because a scowl crossed his face.

“You hate water.”

“I do.”

Anita hated water, and she hated rain even more. She hated the coldness that soaked through the hem of her clothes and seeped into her skin.

Anita’s eyes swept the man before her from head to toe. The sight of his thin shirt clinging to his forearms made her shudder. She felt sorry for Rutger, but she didn’t want to look like that.

Anita decided to just skip today’s lecture. She wasn’t enthusiastic enough to go in the rain. Three absences would bring a warning letter, but one would be fine.

Walking into the dark, formalin-scented anatomy lecture hall on a day like this, with thick blackout curtains covering the windows, was depressing.

Anita turned without hesitation. The anatomy lecture hall was in the next building, but the library was in building 2, where Anita was, so that’s where she was going.

“Where are you going? I thought you had an anatomy class.”

Walking to the other side of the hallway, Anita whirled around with a puzzled look on her face.

“How….”

“Because you’re holding an anatomy textbook?”

The look on his face made her want to hide in a rat hole. She couldn’t be this stupid. Anita coughed and turned the textbook to the other side. To hide the cover.

“I’m not going.”

“What, you’re going to skip class?”

His eyes widened in disbelief.

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Because my heart tells me to.”

Anita wondered what on earth would cause Rutger to react like that, but then she remembered that he was quite the model student. At Pennon Hall, the all-boys school before he came to Aberdeen, he was a conscientious student who never missed a day of school. For that matter, his uniform shirt was never worn properly, and his tie was always tossed.

Anita, on the other hand, wore her uniform to the point of stuffiness, but she was absent quite often.

“So, you’re going to the library, then? I’ll come with you.”

Rutger offered nonchalantly, wringing the water out of the hem of his shirt. Anita nodded, staring blankly at the drip, drip, drip from the hem of his shirt. He often told her she was boring and predictable. At first, she’d taken offense, but now she’d grown tired of it.

It wasn’t exactly untrue.

“Don’t you think you’ll get kicked out by the librarian if you look like that?”

“You go ahead, I’ll go wash up and get dressed.”

“…Where are you going to wash up?”

“There’s a shower room for the swim team.”

“Why don’t we just go back to the dorms?”

“Why bother.”

Why bother taking a shower at school? With those words, Rutger disappeared somewhere on the first floor.

In the hallway, there were students wandering around, soaking wet, just like Rutger. Anita, who was the only one who remained immaculate in the already half-flooded hallway, walked along, careful not to bump into them.

Unlike the damp and uncomfortable first floor, the second floor, where the library was located, was dry and cool. Rubbing her arms futilely to shake off the moisture clinging to her clothes, Anita walked down the hallway.

The lecture halls on the second floor were dark and quiet, except for the library, which often held afternoon lectures rather than morning ones.

No one was in the library. The librarian must have gone to lunch.

It was quiet, which can’t be a bad thing.

The library was huge, with two floors connected by a spiral staircase. There were plenty of books, but most of them were dictionaries and treatises, so there was nothing interesting to pass the time.

Looking for a place to sit, Anita chose a seat away from the large windows. On a rainy day like today, sitting by the window would be cold enough to make her breathe.

Anita opened her anatomy book. It was easy to concentrate for the first half hour or so, but after that time, her gaze naturally drifted to the clock on the wall. After staring at the clock for a while, she regained her focus and returned her attention to her book.

But her concentration wasn’t as strong as before. Unable to concentrate, she began to mumble her way through the book.

She found herself reading the same lines over and over again.

Finally, Anita sighed and closed the book. Now she realized that she was waiting for Rutger. This is so inefficient. She hadn’t planned to talk to him, she just happened to be in the right place at the right time.