[MARGARET]

One more hour had passed before Brent and I finished our dance practice. We also changed the song that we were going to use for the practicum so our final decision for the choice of song would be the one titled "When Love Finds You".

Right after the practice, Brent asked me for us to just wander around and walk leisurely for the rest of the day. Honestly speaking, I didn't know what this guy ate a while back and he really asked me to go somewhere. But then, do I even have the rights to complain? No.

So I just let him do what he wanted.

So there we were at the moment--right by the ice cream cart where Brent first took me, or rather pulled me. I just thought this guy possibly like ice cream so much. And he just wanted to have some company when it comes to the things he liked.

"It seems you've been coming here more often, Brent. Does your face heat up too much these past days and you just wanted to cool it down?" Mr. Ice Cream Seller joked while handing the ice cream that Brent bought.

I think this mister had a weird sense of humor. Since when did ice cream could be used to cool down faces? And what did he say? His face heated up?

Like... blushing?

I soon looked at Brent. I wasn't sure if I should be confused or would just laugh at the sight that greeted me. It wasn't his face but his ears that had actually turned red.

"Mister... Will you stop joking around?" he responded to Mr. Ice Cream Seller who just laughed in return. "I just want to go here and buy some ice cream. You know that ever since I was a kid, the taste of the ice cream you're making has always been my favorite."

Well, Brent wasn't joking about that fact. Even me before, during those times that I was still living here in San Rafael when I was a child, I would always buy ice cream here. I remembered that my half brother would accompany me just for me to be able to buy this ice cream since my father would never allow me to go out without a companion.

"The taste of your ice cream hadn't changed, Mister. It's still delicious," I commented truthfully.

Mister smiled widely after I said that. "Wow! Thank you for saying that, Avie. My son would be happy when he would hear that."

This man was one of the few people who would call me "Avie" from my surname Avellana.

"Avie? Is that your nickname?" Brent asked me with a frown.

"That was just one of my nicknames. Well as for you, I think your nicknames would go like this--heartbreaker, casanova, conceited, playboy, jerk, crazy, irritating, and idiot."

I couldn't help smiling when I saw Brent coughed, as if he got choked or something. Seriously, this guy could be really weird when he wanted to. Since when could an ice cream cause you to be choked? You would just swallow it.

"It seems that Brent had a really bad impression on you, Avie," Mr. Ice Cream Seller commented with a laugh.

"You have no idea how bad his impressions really were to me."

Soon after, Brent was able to recover from that. "Is my image really that bad to you? And you two knew each other? With the way both of you are talking right now, it seems that you knew each other for a long time."

"To answer your first question, yes. That's how your image turned out to me and you should've accepted it by now because some of them were already your nicknames in Oceanside. And as for the answer to your second question, Mister and I knew each other for a long time now. I was born and had lived here in San Rafael before we moved to Aurora 9 years ago."

Wow... I ended up telling that to him all of a sudden. But since he asked the question properly, I might as well answer it the same way, right?

"How come I didn't even know about that?" Brent asked with a pout while eating the ice cream he was holding.

To be honest, I thought I was looking at a 5-year-old boy at that moment rather than an 18-year-old because of the way he was acting. Seriously, this guy was a weird person.

"It's only obvious that you're not even going out of your hole," Mister said. "You're like a hermit with the way you're hiding in your family's mansion. I think that if you didn't have any plans to buy ice cream from me, you wouldn't even come out of the mansion."

"Hey! You're too much, Mister. Of course, I still come out of the mansion. It's just that I would always go to the tree."

I frowned just because I heard the word "tree" coming from him. "Tree? What kind of a tree? Guava tree? Mango tree? Pine tree?"

Brent faced me soon after. "You didn't know about the tree by the sea cliff? The one planted on the lot owned by the Cervantes clan and the dela Vega clan?"

A tree near the cliff? Wait a minute... Was that the same tree that caught my attention once before?

"There! That's the tree I'm talking about." And then he pointed a certain direction.

My eyes followed the direction he was pointing at. And I was right. It was the tree I saw before. The tree that made me feel something weird and mysterious even though I only saw it from afar.

"But why are you staying there when you were a kid? And to think it was near the sea cliff," I inquired Brent when I faced him again.

"That certain tree is famous for its legend, Avie," Mister replied to me. "Though it was only famous to a few people who knew the legend since that tree was planted on the land owned by the clans of the roses."

Rose Clans-- that was the term used to refer to the two most influencial clans in San Rafael since they were using roses as their flower emblems. Red rose was the flower emblem of the dela Vega clan while the Cervantes clan used the white rose as their flower emblem.

If I wasn't mistaken, both Brent and Neilson belonged to the Cervantes clan because of their mother-- the second youngest of the family's previous generation named Rio Cervantes. Well, she was already using Villaruz as her surname.

"A legend? I never thought even trees had their own legends."

"That was because it wasn't a simple legend, but it was also something that would make someone laugh if they heard about it," Brent responded in a somewhat serious tone. It was a tone that, to be honest, I wasn't used to hearing from him.

I frowned because of that. "What do you mean?"

"That tree near the cliff was said to have been planted because of a promise--a promise that two people who truly loved each other had uttered together," Mister explained.

"You mean... like a promise of love?"

Brent nodded. "It was actually a 500-year-old legend in our family. That tree was the proof that there is a kind of promised love that was said to be able to last till beyond eternity."

What? A love that could last beyond eternity? What kind of craziness was this?

But then, I asked myself. Don't tell me Brent believed in that?