12. Pen

Lance had attended school before, but it was not a private one. It was for designated delinquents who had been in contact with the law. He wasn't often there, but as the male lead, he had no problems.

The villain and the male lead both had to be intelligent, the female lead a white lotus, and everyone else had to be stupid. That was the gist he gathered from reading a few romance novels in the weeks before school started. So not only was his character fresh from a template, but his good and bad traits were as well. 

He had been lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, questioning whether he was even a person or merely fiction created for Paige's entertainment. He concluded that even if a 'real' person like Paige were imprisoned in this paper world, he had nothing to worry about. The distance between reality and fiction was irrelevant here. 

He then began to consider his 'golden finger,' a term he had learned from those novels. His golden finger was Paige because, essentially, what she knew were not only characters in this world but also the future. He decided to take a few shortcuts, as compensation for his difficult life thus far.

You could say he wanted his fee for acting since childhood for every person reading about the traumas he endured and spying on his privacy, getting aroused by his supposed future sex life with the girl beside him, laughing at him from behind their little screens and— 

Snap!

"Is everything all right?" Natasha flinched and gestured at the pen he had broken in his hand. He smiled charmingly at her and said,

"Yes."

Natasha nodded absentmindedly.

He really didn't care about his identity as a male lead. As he contemplated this, he picked up the two pieces of the pen he had destroyed and threw them in the trash can behind him.

The lessons at school couldn't truly faze him.

What always posed a problem was the food on the table. After the kidnapping, when he was a young child, he escaped a few years later.

He remembered his name, but he had a long period of aphasia and couldn't write. Perhaps he just didn't want to return to a family he barely remembered, or he didn't want to face the people who had failed to protect him.

So, he lived in an orphanage where neither the caretaker nor the children were particularly kind. After being beaten a few times there for fighting, he took off to the streets, getting by with pickpocketing.

Then the orphanage found him. Again, he ran away and continued to steal. Copy, paste and repeat, it was an endless cycle.

Eating was, obviously, not a certain occurrence for him.

Sometimes he regretted not 'allowing himself to be found' as a child after the kidnapping.

However, with Jace as his substitute, maybe he would have been killed by the person who had orchestrated the whole DNA test thing.

Snap!

His next pen broke as he thought of all the scenes described from his life in a fucking book.

"You are so strong!" The female lead praised foolishly.

This was another issue: why would he fall for someone—he let his eyes roam over her perfect face, with the fingerprint on the spot he had touched and smeared the makeup—like this?

He had never considered having a romantic relationship with anyone. And regarding future sexual urges, he would surely prefer someone with more… His eyes flickered in Paige's direction. With some more… assets. He felt rather doubtful.

Maybe Paige was simply a fifteen-year-old with chunibyo syndrome?—another term he learned after making a brief trip to the anime world in an attempt to cleanse himself of the romance novels he had encountered.

That… could be quite possible.