The Lustful Villain: Every Milfs and Gilfs are Mine!-Chapter 182. Aisella Noticed Everything. That’s Exactly Why I Like Her
Rex just looked at her with an expression that indicated he was weighing whether a response was warranted.
It wasn’t discomfort but something akin to quiet attention, which felt somehow worse than if he had laughed or deflected.
"I’ll add it to my list of credentials," he said after a moment.
"Please do," she said, pointing the fish knife at him. "Right after ’can calculate refraction but gets it slightly wrong.’"
"Twenty-nine point five," Rex replied. "I was rounding."
"You were rounding up."
"Conservatively."
"Incorrectly."
He almost smiled. She noticed it—the way the corner of his mouth twitched before he suppressed it—and tucked that observation away without saying anything.
’There it is,’ she thought. ’He’s got a sense of humor in there...’
’He just keeps it on a very short leash.’
’I kind of want to find out what it takes to let it off the leash.’
She opened her mouth to say something else, but Rex’s head turned slightly toward the northern treeline.
"I should go check on Aisella," he said.
Talyra followed his gaze. The light was getting lower, and Aisella had been out on the rock shelf since afternoon.
"She’s probably fine," Talyra said. "If she weren’t fine, she would be making a lot of noise about it."
"Probably," Rex agreed. "But she’s been out there a long time."
’He keeps track of where everyone is,’ Talyra noticed. ’Not in a controlling way...’
’Just... he always knows. Like background awareness, he never turns off.’
’That’s either very reassuring or very dangerous. I haven’t decided yet.’
"You know what? Just go check on her," she said and waved him off with one hand. "I’ve got this."
"You sure?"
"Just move your ass up before I change my mind." She said with a giggle.
Rex picked up his field pack from beside the fire pit. He paused for a moment, the way he did when he was deciding whether something needed to be said.
"You were right about the refraction," he said.
"I know," Talyra replied.
He left in the direction of the northern rock shelf without any further ceremony, his footsteps quiet on the dry ground, and Talyra watched him go for exactly three seconds before she turned back to her work.
’Decent enough arms,’ she thought again, and then immediately hated herself a little. ’Really, Talyra...’
’That was the word you went with... Decent.’
’He’s probably... going to think about that.’
She stabbed the knife into the prep board a little harder than she needed to.
’Or worse... he’s not going to think about it at all.’
"Hahhh... forget it."
...
Aisella owned the second half of the afternoon.
She had come back from the northern edge with a collection of specimens that took up most of the work surface and organized them in a way that Rex thought would make a research paper that was good enough to be published if anyone in the surface world knew enough about plants to judge it.
Rex looked at what she had collected and put it into three groups: food, medicine, and things he didn’t know what to do with. The unknown category was the biggest, which meant that she had been finding things that weren’t in the regular catalog.
He asked, "How many of these are brand new?"
"Fourteen confirmed," she said, moving a pale blue flower with serrated petals to a different part of the room.
"Maybe nineteen, but five of them could be regional variants of known species instead of new ones." She stopped. "The entire flora profile here is different from the mainland baseline to a degree that suggests isolation for at least several hundred years."
Rex said, "The island’s geological age."
"Which the profile says is about eight hundred years after it was formed," she continues. "So whatever grew here came in the first century after the island became stable, and everything since then has been growing on its own."
She looked at the collection with the same look she had when she was thrilled with what she saw. "This is amazing..."
"I don’t think the assessment committee thought anyone would find work of this quality."
Rex picked up the light blue flower and turned it around in his hands, and he marveled at the delicate petals, their unique hue shimmering in the sunlight.
"It’s like nature has been crafting its own masterpiece here," he mused, his excitement contagious as he gestured toward the vibrant display surrounding them.
"What are you doing?" Aisella raised an eyebrow.
"I’m just appreciating the beauty of it all," he replied, his voice filled with wonder. "Don’t you think we should take a moment to really soak this in?"
"No, dummy. Don’t touch it until I’ve figured out what the surface compound is," Aisella said in the same calm tone she used for everything else, but with a hint of urgency that made it clear the matter was important.
"Ohh..." Rex put it back down. "Then... what’s the compound?"
"I don’t know yet," she said. "That’s why you shouldn’t touch it like that."
She expressed her thoughts politely, which was typical of her communication style. Then she put her hand on the work surface and turned his palm up.
She then ran a quick diagnostic pass over the hand that had held the flower.
It only took about four seconds to pass. Her hands were cool compared to the air, and she moved them with the precision of her job.
Rex watched her face as she worked, which was the face of someone who was quickly processing information and coming to a conclusion.
"Nothing is absorbed," she said. "It needs to touch the mucous membrane directly to work."
She let go of his hand. "But please don’t touch things I haven’t put in the catalog yet."
"Noted." Rex stared at her. "That was a very good reason to pay attention to your classifications."
"It was also the truth," she said.
"Well..." Rex said, "Both things."
She looked at him for a moment with the same look she often wore when she was trying to figure out something that was more than just physical. And he had learned to recognize it.
"You’re being deliberate," she said.
Rex raised an eyebrow.
"About me," she continued, and the directness was typical of her.
"You are being deliberately gentle with me, and you are doing it with enough consistency that it is clearly a choice rather than a natural variation in your behavior." She paused. "I’m not saying this as a criticism."
Rex asked, "What do you mean by that?"
She thought about it.
"An observation," she said, finally. "I observe things, and I noticed this one, and I decided that pretending I hadn’t was not something I wanted to do."
"You’re right," Rex said as he looked at her. "I am being deliberate."
"Why?" she asked, sounding like she really wanted to know the answer.
Rex said, "Because you respond well to gentleness."
"Not in a way that makes it seem like you need it, but in the way that most people respond well to being treated as exactly who they are instead of as a general idea of who they are." He stopped. "You are an elf with a healer’s diagnostic reflex and the kind of perception that comes from noticing things that other people miss."
"The gentleness is just right for what’s really there."
For a long time, Aisella didn’t say anything.
And then she said, "That’s the most accurate description of me I’ve heard from someone who’s known me for less than two weeks."
Rex didn’t say a word.
"Which," she added in a voice that was a little different, "is going to make me think about why you’ve been paying so much attention, and I’m going to start by assuming the answer isn’t simple."
"It isn’t," Rex agreed.
She looked at him for a moment longer, then went back to cataloging with the look of someone who had gotten information and was taking their time to figure out what to do with it.
But when she reached for the next sample, Rex noticed that her posture had changed in a small but specific way that made him realize she was no longer keeping the distance she usually did.
A few minutes later, when he walked around the work surface to see what she was pointing to, the space between them was smaller than it had been, but she didn’t move away from it.
[AISELLA MOONBLOOM: DESIRE LEVEL — 63/100 → 74/100]
’I bet she’s going to be a fun one when I finally maxed her out...’
Rex leaned against the work surface with his arms crossed, watching her catalog the next specimen.
The space between them was still smaller than it had been before. She hadn’t moved away from it, and he hadn’t moved to close it further.
It existed as a kind of agreed-upon fact between them, unspoken and unaddressed.
"This one," Aisella said, indicating a small cluster of dark green leaves with white-veined undersides. "The vein pattern is structurally similar to a known analgesic compound on the mainland, but the pigmentation suggests a different active component."
"Meaning it might work better or worse?" Rex asked.
"Meaning I don’t know yet, which is the more honest answer," she said, picking up her notes. "I prefer not to speculate beyond what the data supports."
"That’s one of the things I find interesting about you," Rex said.
Aisella glanced at him sideways. "Which thing, specifically?"
"The way you say ’I don’t know’ like it’s a complete sentence." He watched her hands move over the specimens. "Most people treat not knowing as a gap to be filled immediately, usually with something that sounds like an answer but isn’t."
"You just... let it be what it is."
She was quiet for a moment, writing something in her catalog.
"That," she said carefully, "is a strange thing to find interesting about a person."
"Is it wrong?"
"No," she admitted. "It’s just precise..."
"In a way that suggests you’ve been watching how I talk for longer than is strictly necessary for fieldwork."
Rex said nothing after hearing that.
Aisella set her pen down and looked at him with the expression she used when she had reached a conclusion and was deciding how to present it.
"You’re doing it again," she said.
"Doing what?"
"Being deliberate," she tilted her head a fraction. "But this time it’s a different kind of deliberate."
Rex looked at her. "Is it?"
It wasn’t a question, exactly. It was the kind of statement that left room for the other person to decide where to take it.
Aisella held his gaze for exactly long enough to make the point that she was not someone who looked away first, and then she went back to her catalog.
"The vein pattern," she said, "on closer inspection, branches at a thirty-two-degree angle rather than the standard forty."
She made a notation. "That’s a significant deviation."
"It is," Rex agreed, without looking at the specimen.
She noticed. She chose not to say anything about it.
But when she reached for the next sample jar, her elbow made contact with his for about one second longer than the space between them required, and she didn’t acknowledge that either.
A small thing. The kind of small thing that meant exactly what it was.
