Chapter 151: Date or Babysitting?

Adeline’s POV~

He slowly wiped the last tear from my cheek with the soft pad of his thumb.

Then, without a word, he pulled his hand back and shoved it deep into his jacket pocket, snapping his composure back into place like absolutely nothing had happened between us.

I stared at him, my eyes narrowing. "You cried."

"No, I didn’t," he said smoothly.

"Liar." I crossed my arms tightly over my chest, stepping right into his path. "Your eyelashes are literally wet, Adrian. Your eyes are bloodshot red. I literally heard your sobs. You were definitely crying right into my hair."

He didn’t even look at me. He just stepped around me and kept walking down the bridge, his posture completely relaxed.

"I didn’t cry," he said, his voice maddeningly calm. "Stop making things up in your head, Adeline."

"What?!" I let out a loud, disbelieving scoff and had to jog a few fast steps just to catch up with his long stride. I pointed a finger directly at my own chest.

"Seriously? Now, I’m making things up? Me?! Are you serious right now? You are a big, fully-grown alpha, and you can stand under the moonlight and lie straight to my face without even a single shred of guilt? You are an absolutely terrible liar, do you know that?"

He chuckled low in his throat, keeping his eyes fixed straight on the dark trail ahead.

"You are so annoying," he murmured, a low rumble in his chest. "Do you know that? You are honestly just like an annoying, stubborn little sister."

"Oh, really?" I snapped, matching his pace. "Wait, You have a sister?"

"No." A tiny, wicked tilt appeared at the corner of his lips. "But if I had one, I know for a fact she would be this exact level of annoying. Thankfully, the Goddess spared me and I don’t have one."

"Wow. Thank you so much, Adrian. That is truly the sweetest compliment I have ever received."

"You’re very welcome," he replied softly, without missing a beat. "And by the way, you are completely ruining our date right now with all this interrogation."

I froze in my tracks for half a second, staring at his back. "Oh. So this is an actual date now?"

I hurried up right beside him again, tilting my head to glare up into his side profile.

"Why didn’t you tell me sooner? Because I honestly thought this was some kind of babysitting session, where I was stuck babysitting a giant, stubborn crybaby."

That finally made him stop walking. He turned his head slowly, his dark eyebrows pulling together into a sharp frown.

"What did you just say? This is not a babysitting session. You are definitely not babysitting anyone out here. And who on earth are you calling a crybaby? It’s certainly not me. It’s you."

"Me?!" My voice jumped up an entire octave in pure outrage.

"Did you completely lose your memory in the last two minutes?! Did you forget who was hugging who, and who stood there crying over whose past?! You were the exact person who said all those heavy things and made me cry! And then you broke down and cried right along with me! And now you won’t even have the courage to admit it! You are the crybaby here, Adrian. A big, lying, stubborn crybaby!"

"I did not cry!" he insisted, stepping closer, his voice dropping into a intense, low hiss.

"Then what was it?!" I demanded, leaning in. "Explain it to me!"

"It was nothing! It was just... it was..." He stopped mid-sentence, his jaw working tightly as he searched his mind for an excuse. "It was literally nothing, Adeline!"

"Nothing? Oh, wait! I get it now," I said, nodding my head in dramatic realization, making my tone as sickeningly sweet as humanly possible. "Your eyes weren’t crying at all. Your eyes were just sweating! Because it’s obviously so hot and boiling out here in this freezing, pitch-black night wind!"

He looked up at the dark sky for a silent second, taking a slow breath. Then his gaze dropped back down to mine, and a small, stubborn smile tugged helplessly at his lips.

"Yeah," he said, his tone entirely deadpan. "Maybe something got into my eyes. A bug or something."

"A bug," I repeated. "A bug flew straight into both of your eyes at the exact same millisecond, and this magical bug made you sniff, and it made you sob right against my shoulder."

"Yeah," he nodded, his face a complete picture of innocent seriousness. "It was a really big one, too."

A loud, hysterical laugh burst out of my chest before I could stop it. I couldn’t hold it back.

Only a few minutes ago, I had been shaking in his arms, feeling like my entire world was ending. Now, my stomach was aching from laughing so hard.

I didn’t understand how he was doing this to me. I didn’t understand how a man I barely knew could make me feel something that I wanted to feel for a long time and then make me laugh until my chest hurt, all in the span of ten minutes.

"You are completely impossible!" I wheezed. "Do you know that?! A big bug?! You couldn’t even invent a better excuse than that?!"

"I’m telling you the absolute truth, Adeline. It was a massive bug. It was this big."

He pulled one hand out of his pocket and held his thumb and index finger barely a millimeter apart. Then, looking down at his fingers, he shook his head with a serious expression and spread them wider.

"Actually, no. It was bigger than that. It aggressively attacked my face."

"Stop! Please just stop!" I gasped, grabbing my side as my ribs throbbed. "You are going to make me cry all over again, and then you’re going to turn around and blame me for being the crybaby!"

"Well, you are the crybaby," he said casually.

"Excuse me?!"

"I’m just stating the plain facts of what I witnessed with my own eyes," he shrugged, shoving his hand right back into his jacket pocket with a smug look.