Chapter 6. She…for whatever reason thought she could make mc Realize that her fiancé wasn’t in love with her (the princess) by convincing her that she (the princess) was super manly and gay
THAT'S right. I'd started rereading from chapter 1 so I could find what you meant but saw your reply before I got that far in.
I'd forgotten that little gambit from Caroline. Re-reading it, she wasn't trying to seduce Nicole--she was trying to play up the fact she always considered herself more a man than a woman/princess, and thus Nicole needn't worry about her and Keios, because Keios always saw Caroline as a 'male friend'. And then Keios and Caroline got into a fight(of sorts) in front of her, and two librarians came by and broke it up.
It wasn't until after they were chased out of the library by the librarians, that the student body rumor mill
twisted the incident into Caroline trying to seduce Nicole out from under Keios.
So now I at least remember.
The funnier part to me--is that Keios is here getting upset about Nicole asking Caroline out to the Market, and the irony for
me is that Keios is mad that he thinks Nicole is being taken from him by Caroline. When this whole mess started because he was so close to Caroline, to the point that Nicole thought he was being taken away from
her.
It's a flipping of their circumstances, centered around the same third party. Which is a neat little narrative mirror of where this series' primary point of contention began.