Slime Evolution

Chapter 491 - Euphoria

What he felt was something much warmer and much stranger, a kind of silent euphoria, the calm certainty that a door that had always been locked had opened, and that from now on that door was going to stay open, and that what had happened in the garden was not a rare accident, but the beginning of something that was going to repeat, again, and again, and again.

He went back to the car, got in, closed the door, and bumped his forehead against the steering wheel, with a laugh that escaped before he could hold it in, muffled, trembling, absolutely ridiculous.

’Haha,’ he thought, and the blue light on his forehead flared so brightly that it lit up the entire dashboard. ’Haha, this is going to happen again.’

And then, because no one was watching, he punched the air once, very gently, so as not to break the roof of the car.

Inside the mansion, Isabella came in like a silent hurricane.

She crossed the entrance hall with her shoes in her hands, her face red all the way to the tips of her ears, and the only thing going through her head was to reach her room before anyone looked at her.

Two maids, who were arranging flowers in a large vase beside the staircase, raised their heads at the same time, and one of them, the older one, the same one who had brought the juice to Lohan, opened her mouth to say something.

"Welcome back, miss..."

"Thank you, good afternoon, I’m great, I don’t need anything, bye!" Isabella fired it all off in a single breath, and ran up the stairs two steps at a time, leaving the two maids standing there with wide eyes.

The hallway on the second floor was long, and she covered it in a sprint that would have embarrassed any athlete, opened the bedroom door with a shove, closed it with both hands, and turned the key, and only then, with her back against the wood, did she let out the breath she’d been holding since the gate.

She looked at the room, large, elegant, silent, and at her own bare feet, and at the shoes still hanging from her fingers, and began to laugh, a low, uncontrollable laugh, that kept rising until it turned into a muffled little scream.

Then she ran to the bed, threw herself face down on the mattress, pulled the covers over her head, and buried her face in the pillow.

"AAAAAH," she screamed, into the fabric, with all the strength she had, and kicked the air with both feet, like a sixteen year old girl, and when the scream was over, she stayed there, panting, with her heart beating so hard it felt like it wanted to escape through her mouth.

She had kissed him.

The sentence spun in her head, nonstop, like a scratched record.

She, Isabella Vance, the heir to the empire that controlled the energy supply for half the sector, the woman who had made entire boards fall silent with a single look, who had faced board meetings with the calm of an ice queen, had leaned over a stone bench in a floating garden and kissed Lohan Hayes, of her own free will, with no one pushing her, no one asking, no plan at all.

She, who had never kissed anyone.

Isabella pulled the blanket down, only to her eyes, and looked up at the ceiling of the room, dark, beneath the layer of fabric, and felt her lips tingle, as if the memory of the touch were still there, pulsing, warm and alive.

That had never happened before.

She had had suitors, of course, an endless parade of them, sons of executives, heirs of other families, handsome faces and rehearsed speeches, and not one of them had made her heart race.

She had spent her whole life with the walls up, so high that sometimes she herself forgot how to get out from behind them, and that boy from the Low Zone, with his worn coat and his strange way of acting, completely different from everyone she had ever met, had simply crossed all the walls, one by one, without making a sound.

And the most shocking part, the thing she still couldn’t process, was that she was the one who had taken the initiative.

She remembered the exact moment, the instant he said "I want you," those three simple words, and how the whole speech she had rehearsed for three days had evaporated, and how her body had moved on its own, without consulting her head, leaning toward him as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

She had felt her own heart pound so hard, the whole way, that she was sure he would hear it, that it would come out of her mouth, that she would die of embarrassment right there.

And she hadn’t died. On the contrary, when his lips touched hers, everything had gone calm, a calm so deep and so strange that she had even forgotten to be afraid.

Isabella let out another little scream into the pillow, and rolled to the side, and stared at the wall.

’I kissed him twice,’ she thought, and brought both hands to her face, which was still burning. ’Twice! I kissed him twice, and I even gave him a petal as a gift, like a character in a soap opera!’

"Do you think he thought I was silly for that?!"

It was then that she remembered the ears.

She raised her hands to her head, patting slowly, and found the two of them, soft and furry, upright and quivering with pure emotion, and realized, with a delicious horror, that they had been out the whole day, during lunch, during the garden, during the kiss, during the goodbye, during the walk into the mansion, in front of the maids.

"Oh no," she murmured. "Oh no, no, no."

Outside the door, in the hallway, a muffled sound could be heard, a kind of giggle, followed by a whisper.

"Did you see her face?"

"Red as a tomato."

"I said that young man had something special about him."

"Do you think he...?"

"Shhh! She’ll hear!"

Isabella groaned, covered her head with the pillow, and her voice came out muffled, but unmistakable.

"I CAN HEAR YOU!"

Perhaps even without her enhanced hearing, she might have been able to hear the maids talking in that manner; but now, with her senses so acute, and her fox ears even left exposed, it was impossible not to hear it.

The giggles on the other side of the door turned into a small explosion of stifled laughter, and their footsteps retreated quickly down the hallway, leaving behind the silence, and an Isabella wrapped in the blanket like a cocoon, her face buried in the pillow, with her ears trembling with embarrassment and an enormous, completely uncontrollable smile stretched from one end to the other.

She stayed that way for a long time.

And while the sun sank outside and the golden light of late afternoon came through the window, drawing warm stripes across the bed, Isabella Vance, the Ice Queen, lay on her back, her eyes fixed on the ceiling, and thought, with a simple, calm clarity, that she had never been so happy in her life.