Monogatari Series - Volume 3 - Chapter 5.3

003

June thirteenth, a memorable day for me.

It was supposed to become one.

And it had absolutely nothing to do with volleyball shorts, school swimsuits, or the like. It all started with a remark by Hitagi Senjogahara, my girlfriend as of Mother’s Day last month, May fourteenth.

“I’ll go on a date.”

It happened that afternoon during our lunch break.

The words came from nowhere as we sat on the courtyard benches side by side and ate our lunches in what must have looked like a friendly arrangement. I was so astonished that I dropped the rolled omelet that I was picking up with my chopsticks.

Excuse me?

What did this woman just say?

I looked at Senjogahara.

She wore her summer uniform.

A fad was quietly beginning to take off among the girls at my school where they took the already short sleeves of their uniforms, folded them back even further, and pinned them there to make it look like they were wearing sleeveless tops. I’d assumed that Senjogahara was the kind of girl who disapproved of following such trends, but that didn’t seem to be the case. She was apolitical about it. This was a new discovery for me. Incidentally, while Hanekawa didn’t complain about those kinds of crazes, she didn’t partake in them either. Maybe model students differed among themselves depending on whether they were dyed in the wool or not. As far as her skirt went, however, Senjogahara’s was still the same length as ever.

She was eating, which meant that her hair in the back and the bangs that she seemed to be growing out lately were tied up with red rubber bands. Some might have found it a stupid-looking hairstyle, but I really enjoyed the way she showed off her neat, pretty forehead, plus it felt good to be able to see her with “her guard down.” It was as if she was opening up to me somehow.

“Umm… Huh?” I said, at a loss as to how to react.

“Hmm.” Senjogahara used her chopsticks to scoop a bit of white rice out of her lunch box and held it out toward me. “Say ahh.”

“………”

Ack!

What…was going on here?!

This was a well-worn scene in manga and the like, something I knew lovey-dovey lovebirds did, but I wasn’t happy about it at all! I wanted it to stop, no, I was straight-up scared!

Meanwhile, Senjogahara had on the same flat, expressionless face… I would have been happy to oblige if she’d done it with a bashful, awkward look, but this was one situation where both parties really needed to know how the other felt…

I couldn’t help but wonder what she might be planning.

She had to have an ulterior motive.

Maybe ulterior was all there was.

A record with two B-sides.

It might be a feint. Was she planning to laugh at me if I opened my mouth like an idiot?

“What’s the matter, Araragi? C’mon, say ahh.”

“……”

No…

Why be so mistrustful of your girlfriend?

Senjogahara could be mean, but she’d never do something that horrible. We’d been going out for a month, not what you’d call a long period of time, but long enough to get each other. We’d formed a relationship of trust. What was I thinking, almost destroying it?

I was Senjogahara’s boyfriend.

“Ah, aahh,” I opened my mouth.

“Take that.”

Senjogahara smooshed the rice against my cheek, just right of my opened mouth.

“………”

Hold on, hold on.

True, it was an obvious punch line.

“Heh, heheheh,” Senjogahara laughed.

It was a quiet, irritating laugh.

“Heheheh… Ahaha. Haha.”

“…I’m delighted to see your smile.”

She used to barely ever laugh.

She still only laughed at times like these.

In general, she was just expressionless.

“Araragi, you have rice on your cheek.”

“You put it there.”

“I’ll get it for you,” she said, putting down her chopsticks and reaching toward me with her hand. One by one, she carefully picked the grains of rice off from my cheek after having smeared them there herself.

Hmm.

This wasn’t bad…

“Okay, it’s gone,” she said before tossing the clump of rice into a nearby trashcan.

She’d just throw it away? As I watched, too…

Well, not like I thought she’d eat it, of course.

“All right,” Senjogahara briskly started over again.

Like she was pretending that nothing had happened.

“I’ll go on a date,” she repeated.

But then, for some reason, she started to look worried. Ehh, she tilted her head as she considered something.

“No, that’s not it. A date…”

“…?”

“Could I…bother you for a date?”

“………”

“What would you…think to…about a…date…”

“……………”

Wait a second!

Did she really not know how to make a request?!

I was shocked.

Well, something else was an even bigger shock─Senjogahara had been the one to propose a date, and she’d been so decisive and sudden about it.

Speaking of having gone out with her for a month.

Over that time, I’d openly, and at times even boldly asked her on dates, and she never so much as lifted a finger. And yet… Hitagi Senjogahara, she as still as dawn, still as midmorning, still as afternoon, and still as night…was asking about a date?

We had been firm, as if we had signed a pact of silence, in keeping our relationship a “Platonic” one, as my junior Suruga Kanbaru would say. Now we were finally going to go on a date?

What change of mind was this?

As with the “Say ahh” just now, could it be some sort of trap? It was pretty questionable of me to be feeling so paranoid about an offer to go on a date, when she was my girlfriend according to both of us, but that was how shocking it was.

“What,” Senjogahara said flatly. “Do you not want to?”

“No, I do, but…”

“By the way, I heard.” Senjogahara turned on me a dauntless look that usually isn’t meant for your boyfriend. “It sounds like you had quite a bit of fun on your date with Kanbaru. I hear the two of you got intimate and ended up spending last night together?”

“Oh…so you mean you heard from Kanbaru?”

“Yes…though she was quite tight-lipped.”

“………”

Why go acting like she had something to hide?!

Flap your lips, because we didn’t do anything at all! Keeping it a secret made it seem like something did! Man, people with semi-tight lips were the worst troublemakers!

“She begged me not to blame you.”

“Why’s she covering for me?! We didn’t do anything!”

I’m innocent!

Not guilty!

Falsely accused!

“In any case,” Senjogahara said. “I’m glad the two of you seem to be getting along.”

“……”

What─was that supposed to mean?

Sure.

Senjogahara probably felt indebted or bad toward Kanbaru─and also knew that Kanbaru and I were rivals in love over none other than Senjogahara herself. So it wasn’t exactly incomprehensible that she might feel that way about Kanbaru and me getting along─but there seemed to be some other nuance to her words.

It reminded me of what Hanekawa had told me the day before.

I think that when Senjogahara sees that side of you, it makes her pretty insecure─

The other nuance to her words─

This woman.

What could she be thinking?

“So now,” she said, “Kanbaru is worth something to you if she were taken hostage.”

“She was thinking of something heinous!”

Hostage?!

Did she just use the word “hostage” in a regular conversation?!

“Kanbaru is so cute, isn’t she…” she continued. “And, you know, that cute girl is more than happy to obey my every word. How does that make you feel? Completely as a side note, wouldn’t you love to see such a cute girl walking around school on all fours, naked only from the waist down?”

Senjogahara let the hostile line loose with a sigh and an air of forced gloom. Having been born and raised in a peaceful country, I’d never imagined that a threat could wrap itself in such still and nonviolent mannerisms…

Hitagi Senjogahara.

You’ve just proved that you’re no tsundere, you’re an awful person, that’s all…

“How rude, Araragi. That’s the first time anyone ever said that about me.”

“Really?”

“If anything, people often tell me the opposite. ‘What a lovely personality…’”

“They’re being sarcastic!”

Hell, if she was okay with it, I’d gladly say it!

What a lovely personality you’ve got!

“Excuse me? Are you saying those people were being dishonest with me? I won’t stand for anyone, even you, Araragi, casting doubts on their words!”

“You’re sticking up for people who’re insulting you, dammit!”

And so on.

We were just kidding with these conversations.

We were testing each other’s wit.

“All right,” Senjogahara started over yet again, though the lead-in wasn’t remotely all right. “You’ll go on a date. With me.”

“So that’s what you’re going to settle on…”

It wasn’t too inappropriate a way to phrase it.

In fact, no way to phrase it could be more her.

“Any complaints…I mean, questions?” she followed up.

“No, ma’am…”

Then I’ll give whatever excuse and head home early after school, so come pick me up once you’re done preparing for the culture festival, please─Senjogahara summarized before returning to her meal as though nothing had happened.

It was very much like her to prioritize our date and skip the culture festival prep as a matter of course, but I certainly wasn’t unhappy about getting to go on a date with her. What’s more, it would be a nighttime date, a detail with profound implications. As far as where we would go and what we would do, Senjogahara said to leave all the planning to her. I didn’t see any particular reason to object, so I simply decided to look forward to what was to come as I mentally pumped my fist.

What a long journey it had been…

Getting my girlfriend to go on a date requiring so much effort was unexpected… I’d overshot and gone on one with her junior Kanbaru beforehand, but all’s well that ends well.

In any case.

June thirteenth was going to be a memorable day for me, that of my first date.

However.

A few hours later.

As I made to head home after school once the culture festival prep was done, I found Nadeko Sengoku, my younger sister’s old friend, waiting for me outside and was handed volleyball shorts and a school swimsuit; spotted by Hanekawa, I earnestly pled to her, “Please! I’ll pay you fifty thousand yen, so don’t tell anyone about this!” (Of course, she gave me a serious talking-to in response: “People are endowed with dignity, and you should be ashamed of trying to buy one off.” There I stood, holding volleyball shorts and a school swimsuit in my hands, scolded by a classmate by the front gates) before pedaling a little faster than usual on my bicycle to get home, where I changed from my uniform into something more appropriate and doubled back toward Senjogahara’s place with nothing more than my wallet and cell phone with me.

It was past 7:30 when I arrived.

I wondered if I was a little late, but Senjogahara greeted me with a “You got here faster than I expected,” followed by a “That’s fine, though.” It seemed like getting there too early could have been a problem.

Senjogahara had changed out of her school uniform, too.

She had her hair in two bunches in the back. It was a personal rule for her to wear her hair straight down when she was at school, aside from when she ate and during P.E. (which she’d recently started not to skip), and to tie up her hair when she wasn’t. Wearing it in two bunches, she took on a vague similarity to Class President Hanekawa, but it added up to a movement-friendly and stylish choice.

I thought her clothes made it look like we were going to go somewhere, and just as I expected, she said, “Okay, let’s go. Follow along now.”

But that was as far as my expectations took me.

Some unexpected twists and turns were in store.

Hitagi Senjogahara led me to a jeep parked outside of the Tamikura Apartments, where she lived.

We traveled by car.

That much was fine.

I lived in a motorized society. I had no questions or complaints about that.

The issue was that both Senjogahara and I were strictly forbidden by our school rules to acquire a driver’s license. We weren’t allowed so much as a scooter, to say nothing of cars. So it followed that both Senjogahara and I got into the jeep’s back seats.

So then, who was driving?

Hitagi Senjogahara’s father.

“……………”

My girlfriend’s father was chaperoning us on our first date?

A date that was more like torture…

Memorable, but how…

The mood in the car, no matter how you spun it, was awkward. We exchanged hurried greetings before the jeep departed. Even then, I couldn’t bring myself to ask where we were headed. Actually, our destination didn’t even matter to me anymore.

This was, of course, my first time meeting Daddy Senjogahara.

It would be one thing if he were open and sociable, but I had the hardest time dealing with his type, which you might guess, even if I didn’t bring up Sengoku, is the silent sort. It was one thing to face a taciturn girl who was younger than me, but a man who was my elder? Daddy Senjogahara was dressed sharply like he’d just come back from work─no, as if he was still on the clock, and quietly operated the steering wheel. He worked at a foreign-owned company or something…

He looked like a stern man. My paranoia was acting up like never before, but it felt like he might get angry at me for just about any reason.

Still…if you put all that aside, while he did look to be on the older side for a father of someone around my age, he cut a pretty cool figure with his full head of salt-and-pepper hair. Like he was an actor. He was “aging gracefully.” At the risk of sounding like a doting lover, Hitagi Senjogahara was enough of a beauty that some called her a cloistered princess. But it made sense now, girls like her had fathers like him.

Hmm.

Your father cutting a cool figure netted more points than doing so yourself…

“What’s the matter, Araragi?” Senjogahara, who was sitting next to me, asked after we’d driven for a while. “You’re awfully quiet.”

“Hey… Do you not understand the predicament I’m in right now?”

“I sure don’t. When is ‘now’? How do you spell ‘predicament’?”

“You don’t even understand that?!”

Look at her, playing stupid like that.

Did she have no compassion?

“Araragi,” she said, “I don’t blame you for feeling nervous on our first date, but you need to relax. The night is long.”

“Yeah…”

It wasn’t because this was our first date…

I truly missed that epoch in my life when I believed a nighttime date had profound implications. I was happy back then. The fact that the night is long was quite simply terrifying. Why did the night have to be long? All I wanted was for it to end as soon as possible…

“Hey, Araragi,” Senjogahara said in her flat tone.

She didn’t sound nervous at all…

“Do you love me?”

“……!”

What a way to harass someone!

So not only did she have an acid tongue, she was capable of this, too?!

“Answer me. Do you love me?”

“……”

“What’s wrong? You’re not going to answer me? Hold on, Araragi, could it be that you don’t love me?”

This was harassment… Ultimate harassment…

“I-I love you…” I said.

“Oh.” Senjogahara didn’t even smile. Ultimate expressionlessness… “I love you too, Araragi.”

“Well…thank you very much.”

“Not at all.”

…Wait a sec.

So she was unfazed by this?

Totally unfazed that she was having this conversation in front of her real-life father? No, never mind. If it meant being able to harass me, she didn’t mind taking collateral damage.

In which case, I thought, furtively casting a sidelong glance at the driver’s seat (too furtively for head-on to even be an option). Senjogahara’s father, however, had barely reacted. Driving occupied his full attention. What a cool guy… Our jeep seemed to be driving toward the highway. Highway… Were we headed somewhere far? Well, if we weren’t, not even Senjogahara would bring her father along on our date, I wanted to think…

Ten minutes later, the jeep did get on the highway. There was no escaping now. Not that I had any thoughts of escaping to begin with, really.

“You’re awfully quiet, Araragi. You’ve hardly opened your mouth, when you’re always so voluble. Are you in a sucky mood today?”

“Forget my mood…”

“Oh. Your IQ’s what’s sucky.”

“You couldn’t resist taking advantage of my confusion, could you?!”

“You’re as spry as ever with the comebacks, at least. Fine, then. As an act of kindness, I’ll introduce a topic of conversation myself. All you need to do is reply,” Senjogahara said. “What about me do you love?”

“I definitely know what about you I don’t love!”

What was she up to?

In fact, it felt like this entire date was a grand harassment plot designed to pit me.

I was starting to want to escape.

“Damn…” I muttered. “And I was actually looking forward to this… It almost felt like a dream come true!”

“Dream? Oh, don’t exaggerate,” Senjogahara said blankly. “You know, there’s no ‘m-e’ in ‘drea’… Wait, how did that go again?”

“Right now I’m wishing there was no ‘I’…”

Both were in “nightmare,” of course.

Thus a new saying was born.

“Araragi, I can tell that you’re suffering… It’s so vexing that all I can do is cheer you on from the sidelines.”

“No, you know what, I think you can also apologize…”

But.

An apology wasn’t going to do anything for me.

If apologies were all it took, who needed the police?

“And I’m not suffering,” I said, “so much as feeling very, very exhausted.”

“U V-W-X.”

“Wha? Oh, I see…”

I wasn’t in the mood to laugh for her, though.

There was no room in my heart for it.

At any rate.

“Hey, Senjogahara… Seriously, what do you think you’re doing?”

“Senjogahara? Are you referring to me when you say that, or to my dad?”

“………”

This woman… If it’s the last thing I do─

No, I needed to calm down. Giving voice to my thoughts now meant a breakup for sure…

“Araragi has something to say to you, Dad.”

“Miss Hitagi! I have something to say to you, Miss Hitagi!”

I dared not address her any more casually.

Miss Hitagi.

Just the other day, Kanbaru and I had this same moment where we decided to call each other by our first names. Who could have guessed that the same scene would play itself out like this with my actual girlfriend?

“What could it be, Araragi?”

“……”

You’re not going to say mine back?

Not that I cared.

“So, Miss Hitagi. I’ll ask you once again… Tell me. What do you think you’re doing? What are you planning?”

“I’m not planning anything. Anyway, Araragi. You know the famous mystery writer Agatha Christie, don’t you? If you rearrange the letters in her name, you get ‘a hag is theatric.’ Do you think that was on purpose?”

“Who cares about that! If anyone’s a theatric hag, it’s you!”

“I can’t believe you’d say that about me in front of my parent.”

“Urk…”

It was a trap!

I fell right into it!

“Dad, it seems like your daughter is a theatric hag.”

And now she reporting it to him…

Daddy Senjogahara, as always, had no reaction.

Perhaps he was already used to this kind of act from his theatric hag. Yes, now that I thought about it, she was his daughter…

There was no point in getting so upset, then.

She was making me dance like her little monkey, but no song was playing.

“Oh. You’ve gone quiet again. Did I bully you too much?” she said, looking at me. “You react in such good ways that it makes me want to keep putting you down.”

“That line makes me feel more down than anything else you’ve said yet…”

Honestly.

All right then, I’d try a counterattack.

I wanted to see Senjogahara feeling put down for once.

“So what about me do you love?” I asked.

“How kind you are. How cute you are. How you’re like my prince who comes dashing in to save me whenever I’m in trouble.”

“My bad!”

Why did I ever think I could fight back?

This wicked woman didn’t just have a leg up on me when it came to this, she had a mannequin factory’s worth of legs up on me. Why try to fight her ill will with ill will?

Senjogahara was calmness personified.

Did she have no emotions?

Meanwhile, even though I knew that her reply was just a riposte to my harassment, my heart was hammering…

“I don’t understand… Why… Where did I go wrong to be walking down this path of thorns…”

“What’s wrong with a path of thorns? Elegantly walking down a path filled with roses in bloom is such a gorgeous and beautiful image.”

“Don’t give it a nice spin!”

“In the language of flowers, roses mean─a foolish man.”

“Liar! Stop making stuff up just because you feel like it!”

“By the way,” Senjogahara said. She hopped between subjects as she pleased. “By the way, you garba…sorry, Araragi.”

“Did you nearly call your own boyfriend ‘garbage’?”

“What are you talking about? I wish you wouldn’t make such groundless accusations. Anyway, how did you do on the skills test the other day?”

“Hunh?”

“You remember how I minded you, at my home, the two of us alone, day and night?”

“………”

Why phrase it that way…

Why bring up being at her place in her father’s absence in front of the man himself?

“All the tests came back last weekend,” she said, “but you’ve avoided talking about it. I assumed that meant your results were absolutely miserable, so I pretended not to care, but I asked Hanekawa today and it sounds like you didn’t do so bad?”

“Hanekawa?”

“She’s tight-lipped, so of course I couldn’t get out the particulars, but she’d tell me if you actually failed.”

“………”

Senjogahara must have asked in some awful way.

When Hanekawa turned the talk to Senjogahara in front of the school gates, I did think it was a bit unnatural, but now it made sense. That was the background.

I’d told Hanekawa about my skills test results at the bookstore yesterday… But regardless of Senjogahara’s phrasing, I probably was being a bit ungrateful not to speak a word of it to her after all she’d done. I’d somehow demurred thanks to the university issue, which I’d also discussed with Hanekawa.

“Why are you being so reluctant?” she pressed. “Now hurry up and give me the exact scores. If you put on airs, then I’ll bend every joint in your body backwards until you paradoxically look kind of cool.”

“It won’t look cool, in any way!”

“It would look uncool?”

“‘Uncool’ doesn’t begin to describe it!”

“It would look ‘lol’?”

“It’d be no laughing matter!”

“So hurry up and tell me if you don’t want to walk around in a back bridge for the rest of your life.”

“If I had every joint in my body bent backwards, I’d be even worse off!”

I would die.

I would die about five times over before she was done.

“But yeah, I should have told you earlier. Sorry, okay? I did better than I thought. Even at math, which I was always strongest in. It’s all thanks to you. Thank you, Senjogahara.”

“Dad, Araragi is thanking you about something, won’t you listen?”

“Thank you, Miss Hitagi!”

Holy mackeroo.

In any case, I gave her my detailed scores for our six courses in five subjects. Nodding uh huh, she had me tell her which questions I got wrong, what I didn’t understand, and so on… I was a little surprised to realize that she seemed to remember every question on the tests we took. Then again, she was gifted enough to get the seventh highest score in our school year even while fussing over me…so maybe my surprise was misplaced.

We were finally having something resembling a regular conversation between students.

I could relax a little, even in front of Daddy Senjogahara.

This was my chance to come across as a serious guy.

“It’s best, though,” remarked Senjogahara, “if we compared answers immediately after a test. But maybe it’s unfair to you to demand that much so soon… Anyway, you got decent scores. That’s a little unexpected, even if I instructed you myself.”

“Unexpected, huh?”

“Yes. It’s such an unfunny punch line for you.”

“I didn’t have you teach me for the laffs!”

“I was looking forward to a development like, ‘He studied so hard but ended up doing worse than usual!’ I’m disappointed in a way.”

“And you don’t think looking forward to such a development is unfair to me?!”

“Is that so.”

With those words.

Senjogahara plopped her hand down on my leg.

Around my thigh.

……

What was she trying to pull?

By the by, the car we were in may have been a jeep, but it wasn’t that big. The two of us were actually pretty close to each other as we both sat in the back…enough so that our bodies touched when the car turned a corner.

Be that as it may, I didn’t know how to respond to her going out of her way to touch my thigh…

“Well, that was impressive,” she said. “You did a good job.”

As if her right hand’s movement were completely outside her jurisdiction, Senjogahara advanced the conversation without batting an eye. Why didn’t her expression ever change? I had to wonder if she was wearing a well-crafted mask.

“I rarely tell people they did a good job. I wonder how many times I’ve told people that in the past? You know, I might not have since sixth grade, when this classmate who sat next to me won three times in a row at Reversi.”

“That’s ages ago, and it’s not that impressive!”

“I lied.”

“Well, I figured…”

“But it’s true that I rarely praise people.”

“Yeah…I believe you.”

“Of course in this case, I’m only telling myself that I did a good job in a roundabout way. I’m terribly proud that my sage advice lifted up a dummy like you, Araragi.”

“……”

Well.

That was also technically true.

“If I do say so myself,” she added, “how did I ever manage to improve a dummy like you who used to spell ‘mandrill’ as ‘man drill’?”

“I’ve never made that mistake in my life!”

“And it seems like a lot of your wrong answers were due to careless mistakes… Hmm. At this rate, Araragi, you may be able to aim even higher.”

“Even higher─you say.”

College entrance exams.

Post-graduation options.

“Araragi, I don’t mind continuing to help you study as long as that’s what you want.”

“I couldn’t─”

Realistically speaking.

I was still nowhere near the stage where I could tell Senjogahara that I was considering the national university she hoped to get a recommendation to─but that didn’t mean I had any reason to turn down her offer.

“─hope for anything more.”

“Is that so,” Senjogahara said with her composed expression, and nothing more.

A thought ran through my head.

Hanekawa was tight-lipped, plus I had made her promise up, down, and sideways not to tell. There was no way she’d let Senjogahara know about my intentions, but maybe this woman had figured them out anyway.

That would be that. Even if she did know, she seemed ready to wait until I told her myself─

It was like we could communicate wordlessly, which felt good.

“……”

More importantly, not satisfied with touching my thigh, Senjogahara started to caress it, working all the way to my inner thigh. What could it mean?

Wasn’t this like groping?

Is it something you did in front of your father?

…Well, behind your father, to be precise.

“In that case,” she said, “you’ll be studying at my place every day.”

“E-Every day?!”

I never wordlessly communicated that to her!

Wait, hold on…

Could that be how much I needed to study? But every day… Every single one? I did study during classes, didn’t I? Was I going to have to after school and on Sundays as well?

“What? Is something the matter, Araragi?”

“W-Well…I was just thinking that I guess smart people do study that much.”

“Nope. I don’t, it’d be a pain. It’s a program designed for you, who else.”

“………”

A natural…

She with the seventh best grades in my year just told me that studying was a pain…

“Smart people are smart from before they study,” she said. “Grades only measure your ability to understand and memorize.”

“Huh… Oh, but what about Hanekawa? She said she comes down with a headache if she doesn’t study, or something.”

“What she means by ‘study,’ Araragi, is sadly on a different level from what we mean by it.” Senjogahara paused before continuing, “Hanekawa is the real deal. She exists in a different world than the one you and I live in.”

“…Huh.”

So─even Senjogahara saw her that way.

So there was a divide.

Seventh in our year, and first in our year.

Both in the single digits, but a difference that vast existed.

“The real deal─huh.”

“Maybe more. Unreal, or ‘monster’─might be a better way to put it. I mean, doesn’t it creep you out? When someone is that sharp, we’re no longer talking about wits.”

Senjogahara’s usual venom─

This didn’t sound like it.

She was always this way, somehow, when it came to Hanekawa.

It wasn’t antipathy, but─

She did maintain an odd distance.

“Did you just say ‘you and I’?”

“Yes,” replied Senjogahara. “You and me both. Just as Hanekawa and I might look similar to you─I think she looks at you and me as being on the same level.”

“Really?”

“Really. It’s highly humiliating.”

“Oh, so that’s humiliating…”

Highly, too.

She really did like putting me down, didn’t she?

“Still,” I said, “it’s not like Hanekawa always gets perfect scores, right? Well, I guess she almost always get perfect scores…”

“When Hanekawa doesn’t get a perfect score, it’s because a test question was faulty… I don’t know, though. When I think about how much pressure that must put on her…I can’t honestly say that I’m jealous.”

“Pressure, huh?”

“Or maybe stress.”

“Stress.”

Tsubasa Hanekawa.

A girl with a pair of mismatched wings─

“At the same time, we’d be wrongheaded to commiserate with her on that account.” In any case, Senjogahara brought our conversation back on point. “Araragi, you who’re crawling and writhing at the bottom, far from the real deal, just need to grind it out. So. You’re studying at my place every day.”

“Yes, yes…I will.”

“You need to say yes three times, Araragi.”

“Yes, yes, yes! …Wait, why do you want me to sound so excited?!”

“That’s just how much motivation I want to be seeing from you. Because I’m offering my home to you as a study spot.”

“You are?”

“If you prefer, I could come to yours.”

“My place isn’t a very good study environment… My little sisters are loud.”

“Kanbaru’s house might work out, too, from time to time.”

“Why are you bringing her up now?”

“Just as I have to help you study, I need to go and play around with that kid once in a while. I promised her,” Senjogahara said, her tone markedly flat.

I could tell that the flatness was marked.

With me, she was an awful person through and through, but at least you could honestly call her a tsundere when it came to Kanbaru…

Well, to the hostage.

Suruga Kanbaru.

“The kid seems to be doing fine in the academic department,” Senjogahara said, “but am I the only one who wants to hang around with Kanbaru?”

“Well, sure. She’s fun.”

A little too fun.

Not to mention.

“She admires in this excessive way, and I don’t even know why… I think she sees me in too good of a light.”

“I may be partially responsible for that,” Senjogahara explained. “I did tell her that you saved a drowning child and that you spend every Sunday volunteering at a retirement home.”

“So you’ve told her nothing but lies!”

“Just kidding. I told her the plain truth.”

“Huh…really?”

“When I say the plain truth, I mean badmouthing you, so Kanbaru admiring you is entirely her own decision.”

“…………”

Badmouthing me, eh?

I’d rather you didn’t, Senjogahara.

“Even if I’m talking to a junior and a friend,” she said, “it’s embarrassing for me to praise my own boyfriend. It’s my way of hiding my feelings.”

“Well, you could also just tell her you feel embarrassed… Oh, that’s right, Senjogahara.” Lowering my voice so her father in the driver’s seat wouldn’t hear, I brought up a new topic. “There’s one more thing about Kanbaru…”

“Dad? Araragi wants to tell you a secret─”

“Miss Hitagi!”

God, she never missed a thing!

She never let an opportunity to torment me get by her!

“What about Kanbaru?” she asked.

“Why is she so pervy?”

I spoke concealing my mouth with my hand.

It was like I was a pitcher trying to communicate with my catcher, but I had no choice because Daddy Senjogahara might read my lips in the rearview mirror.

“Pervy? Kanbaru?”

“Yeah. Was she like that in junior high, too?”

“Hmm. You’re asking about the past…but is she, to begin with?”

“You’d say otherwise? Even Oshino sees her as a pervy rather than sporty character.”

“I don’t know about that. Maybe it’s only from a male perspective that seeks chastity in women that she looks that way to you and Mister Oshino? It’s guy thinking. She’s simply true to herself, that’s all. I don’t think she ever goes too far.”

“I see…”

Is that how it was?

I wasn’t sure.

“If you have a chance, Araragi, try reading boys’ love novels and manga for middle schoolers and up. You’d never call someone like Kanbaru ‘pervy’ again.”

“Okay… Uh, I don’t think I’ll actually read any, though.”

Especially not BL fiction.

I’d be doomed, for good.

“Fine,” Senjogahara said. “But I can’t allow myself to sit back and let my adorable little junior get maligned as a perv.”

“What exactly are you going to do, then?”

And malign?

I actually saw myself as a sort of victim… This wasn’t working. Senjogahara was going to side with Kanbaru unconditionally and unlimitedly no matter how long we discussed her.

A hostage though she was…

Hold on, wasn’t I the hostage here?

“You want to know what I’m going to do? I’m going to undermine your standards and values. That way, you’ll start to see Kanbaru as a positively innocent girl,” Senjogahara said, leaning toward me.

Instead of just lowering her voice, she brought her lips right next to my ear, as if to conspire openly.

Cupping her hand over her mouth.

“─#@&$.”

“……!”

Gah!

What did she just say to me?!

“I’ll @&~* that $&#~ into #&@~ so #&─and *@ with #&^&─~&@ in @&─”

“U…urk!”

Hitagi Senjogahara…

Wh-What an embarrassing, indecent thing to say!

~&@ in @&?!

Of all the combinations, that?!

And she was saying it all in such a flat, businesslike voice!

I couldn’t believe it…how could someone find their passions so ignited by nothing more than words?!

“S-Sto─”

Ack… No, I couldn’t yell!

Daddy Senjogahara was right in front of me!

I had to seem natural!

“^#~─and $&# while @%%─”

“Nkk…”

B-But the faint tickle I felt on my ear on top of it from her breathing… Hold on, what was this situation?! My girlfriend was caressing my thigh and whispering dirty things into my ear─in front of her own father! This wasn’t practically torture, it was literally torture! What did I have to confess to in order to make it stop?!

I don’t know anything!

Really, I don’t!

I see…I see it now, mystery solved─you were Kanbaru’s master in the ways of perversion all along! All I needed to do was think about it, given how much of an influence her senior, Senjogahara, once had on her… Dammit, my standards and values were being undermined and were collapsing… Ah, Kanbaru isn’t pervy, she isn’t a perv at all…

“Haumph.”

She bit my ear!

Like, between her lips!

No, no, no! Now she was doing something unmistakably erotic!

“So like that,” Senjogahara said, backing away as though nothing had happened, calm and collected. “What do you think, Araragi?”

“Have your way with me…Miss Hitagi.”

I was no good anymore.

This was, in no way, the date that I’d wanted to go on… My hopes, dreams, and fantasies─she really was going through them and smashing them one by one…

Time had flown all the while.

We’d gotten off the highway, I noticed. As far as I could tell from looking out the window, we were in an even more rural area than the remote town we lived in.

Where was I?

Where had they taken me?

While I was having a stupid conversation…

“We’re almost there,” Senjogahara said, likewise looking out the window. “About thirty more minutes─I think? The timing seems…just right. I feel like complimenting myself.”

Whatever was just right, shouldn’t the credit for anything time-related go to Daddy Senjogahara, and wasn’t she going to thank him?

Hmm.

Maybe they didn’t get along very well.

Speaking of which, Senjogahara and Daddy Senjogahara hadn’t really exchanged words apart from a simple back-and-forth before our departure.

But─they couldn’t be on bad terms. She’d raised Oshino’s hundred-thousand-yen fee for his assistance with her aberration by helping out at her father’s job.

Well.

Parent-child relationships were going to be complicated at our age─it was the same for me, and Senjogahara had unusual family circumstances to deal with, too.

Even Hanekawa.

……

Oh, now I remembered.

Hanekawa’s headache… It’d gotten lost in the brouhaha over the volleyball shorts and school swimsuit, but… (and I didn’t know about it getting lost over that, but…) Her headache.

Her head ached.

I wondered if I should talk to Oshino.

True, it wasn’t good for me to be so quick to rely on Oshino─just as he’d told me, it wasn’t as if he was going to be living in that abandoned building forever─

One day he would leave.

I didn’t know when, but in the near future.

“Hey, Senjo─Miss Hitagi.”

“Silence.” Rather than applauding me for noticing halfway through and correcting myself, Senjogahara smacked me down. “You just keep going on about this, that, and the otter.”

“O-Otter?”

“We’re almost there, so try staying quiet for at least a small bit of this trip?”

“……”

Where was this coming from…

“Araragi, I’m neither the kind of idler or fiddler who would bother putting up with your idiotic talk.”

“So you’re saying a fiddler would?”

And where were we almost?

It didn’t seem like it would hurt if she told me already.

If she wasn’t so that I’d be excited, I hoped she knew that I’d already had my fill of excitement.

But while I say that, I was also starting to reach the end of my rope when it came to this torture chat in front of Senjogahara’s father. In a sense, her words were exactly what I wanted to hear. Got it, I slumped into my seat.

“Ugh, you’re so loud.”

“What? But I didn’t say anything?”

“I’m talking about your breathing and your heartbeat.”

“Hold on, what you’re doing is telling me to die.”

And with that conversation.

Senjogahara stopped talking, too.

I wondered why.

She was nervous for some reason─or at least it looked that way.

Was she taking me somewhere worth being nervous about?

Our car seemed to be going up a mountain road.

A mountain─and not a small mountain like the one I had climbed with Kanbaru yesterday and the day before, but a full-blown mountain. The jeep made use of its horsepower as it climbed the large, spiraling path. The road was properly maintained, another difference from the earlier mountain.

Were we headed for the summit?

Another shrine?

A shrine visit as our first date…

She had to be kidding.

“I feel like I’m asking this too late,” I said, “but…where exactly are we going?”

“Somewhere really nice.”

“……”

“Somewhere. Really. Nice.”

“………”

She could say it seductively all she wanted…

She had to be lying.

“And anyway, Araragi, forget about where we’re going. We’ve already arrived. Look, right over there. That’s the parking lot.”

I did as she said and looked ahead. She was right.

We arrived.

It was now close to ten…which meant we’d been on the road for over two hours. It was a breathtakingly terrifying trip, and I was able to at last take a regular breath. Daddy Senjogahara displayed some impressive parking technique to stop the jeep in the corner of the deserted parking lot. Sheesh, I thought as I tried to get out of the car, but Senjogahara stopped me. She didn’t stop me by grabbing my hand, but astonishingly, by stabbing her fingernails into the thigh she’d been rubbing.

What was she, a wild animal?

Or some cat?

“Y-Yes?”

“You wait here a second, Araragi,” Senjogahara said. “I’m going to go by myself first and get ready.”

“Get ready…”

It involved getting ready?

And wait, Senjogahara, if you go ahead on your own in this situation and make me wait here─

“You have a friendly little chat with my dad, okay?” she uttered the unthinkable words in a throwaway tone.

Then she really got out of the jeep alone.

She was gone…

I never thought the day would come when I’d describe myself in this way, but there was no other description…I felt like a dog that had been abandoned by its master.

I couldn’t believe her.

Leaving me in this predicament…

I felt crossed and double-crossed.

Even crisscrossed!

…I was in such a panic that I didn’t know what I was saying anymore.

But this was no betrayal because Hitagi Senjogahara had been dragging me into this predicament from the very beginning.

Even so, I couldn’t believe it…

I was stuck in a cramped car with my girlfriend’s father…

It wasn’t even torture at this point.

It was a sentence.

You would search all of Japan in vain for high school seniors going through an experience as cruel and harsh as mine, probably? What a plain and real misfortune.

A f-friendly little chat?

Keeping my mouth shut felt awkward in its own way…but I didn’t want Senjogahara’s father to get a bad impression of me. Still… outside of relatives and teachers, I’d barely had any opportunities to speak with someone who was easily twice my age…

Then.

As I sat there hesitating, lo and behold, Daddy Senjogahara was the one who got the ball rolling.

“Araragi─is that your name?”

“……”

That was my name…

It felt like he was starting the bar high…

He really did have a nice voice, though, like an actor… It’s surprisingly rare to meet someone whose voice strikes you as cool.

“Y-Yes…my name is Koyomi Araragi,” I replied.

“I see.” Daddy Senjogahara nodded. “Take good care of my daughter from now on.”

Excuse me?!

What was this dude saying all of sudden?!

“Just kidding.”

That’s how he continued.

…Just kidding…

A dad joke?

Was it an authentic dad joke?!

He’d spoken without so much as a smile─and didn’t seem to be getting a kick out of my bafflement… What was I supposed to do? There was nothing I could do, was there?

“I think you’ve heard already, Araragi─but I’m like the very definition of a workaholic. I barely get to spend any time with Hitagi.”

“Right…”

Hitagi, he said.

Naturally, he called his daughter by her first name.

He made it sound so natural, too.

I guess that’s what it meant to be someone’s parent.

“So this might not sound very convincing coming from me─but it’s been a long time since I last saw Hitagi having this much fun.”

“……”

Did he understand what he was saying? He was describing his daughter tormenting a classmate as “having fun”?

Ah, er, Daddy Senjogahara tread water at that point. It seemed that he wasn’t as eloquent as his daughter─if anything, he was a fairly poor speaker.

“You’ve already heard about Hitagi’s mother, yes?”

“…Yes.”

“Which means you’ve heard about her illness, too.”

Hitagi Senjogahara’s illness─he called it an illness, but he was referring to that aberration.

The crab.

The crab─aberration.

The illness had already been cured, thanks to Oshino’s help─but it wasn’t so minor an issue that getting cured meant it was over and done with.

Especially from her family’s point of view, I assumed.

“It’s not the only reason─I’m in no small part to blame for focusing on nothing but my work…but Hitagi really closed off her heart.”

“Yes─I know that.”

I knew that well.

We’d been in the same class throughout high school.

My first and second years.

The first month of my third year.

I knew very well─just how closed-off her heart had been.

“I don’t have any excuse for it─parents might be responsible for what their children do, but children don’t bear any responsibility for what their parents do.”

“Responsibility…”

“When you close off your heart, there are only two categories of people to whom you speak your mind: people you don’t mind being hated by─and people who won’t hate you.”

“……”

When I first came in contact with Senjogahara and she brandished that stapler at me─she had to have seen me as belonging to the former of the two. She threw off her mask of the cloistered princess and revealed her true and terrifying nature to me only because I was an enemy who had learned her secret.

But now?

Did she really put that much trust in me? Even if she did, was I qualified to receive it?

“There’s everything that happened with her mother. And─the illness, too,” Daddy Senjogahara said as though to himself. “She’s someone whose nature it is to love─she just doesn’t know how.”

He wasn’t saying anything outlandish when I thought about it, but I felt like I’d been treated to an incredibly poetic remark thanks to his cool voice.

“Araragi, I think you’re handling someone like Hitagi very well.”

“You think so?”

I did feel hurt each time, okay?

Like I was getting sliced up, okay?

If my figurative heart could bleed, I’d have died long ago of massive blood loss.

“She’s always like that,” I said. “I’m even wondering if it was just to find ways to put me down that she made you accompany us, Dad.”

Oops.

I accidentally called him Dad…

W-Was I going to hear it now? That legendary phrase, “You’ll never call me Dad”?!

“I doubt it.”

He didn’t say it.

A generational thing?

“Well, it might be her way of spiting me,” he suggested instead.

“Spiting?”

…Huh?

Oh─right.

His daughter flirting with a boy he’d never met before in the backseat of his own car couldn’t have been pleasant─obviously. That was the exact reason why I couldn’t take it anymore, but had she been trying to harass her father that way, more so than me?

“No,” I disagreed, “I don’t think that’s true… Even, uh, Miss Hitagi, wouldn’t do that to you…”

“Someone she doesn’t mind being hated by─I’m one of them,” Daddy Senjogahara said. “Whether or not she succeeds, I’m still her father. She did see me in a lot of ugly arguments with her mother… By now, Hitagi probably can’t recall her parents ever getting along.”

“Ah─”

An uncontested divorce.

A single-father home.

Of course.

All this time, he never said “wife,” and every time─it was “Hitagi’s mother.”

“So yes─spite. I could practically hear Hitagi saying that she’d never become like us. In fact─I think she’s right. You two honestly looked like you were having fun.”

“Well… I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t having any fun at all, but…I don’t know, I’m used to her acting like a total nutjob.”

Wait.

Was that an impolite thing to say?

What if he took it at face value and heard it as an insult? I thought I was almost praising her, but friendly trash talk could be interpreted differently on the receiving end, depending on the occasion… Hmm, I didn’t know where to draw the line.

Hold on, why all this solo wrestling?

Was I being, like, incredibly lame?

“She’s someone whose nature it is to love,” Daddy Senjogahara said, “so she leans in and gives all of herself over when she finds the right person. To love is to demand. I know this is my own daughter I’m talking about here, but I think she’s too heavy of a burden to have as a girlfriend.”

“Too heavy─of a burden.”

That, there.

How ironic.

“Though I couldn’t be any more ashamed of the fact, I wasn’t able to support Hitagi. That’s why she stopped depending on me a long time ago.”

“………”

“I forget when, but she went on a rampage swinging a stapler… I think that was the last time.”

She’d even done that to her father.

Was that domestic violence or…

“But the other day─for the first time in a while, a long, long while, Hitagi asked me for something. She said─she wanted to help me with my work,” Daddy Senjogahara said in quiet contemplation. “And now, this. Both times─you’ve been involved. I think you’re something special if you’re able to cause a change in that girl.”

“…I’m flattered that you think so highly of me, but…I think it’s all just coincidence,” I said at last, unable to take it any longer. It felt like I was being praised due to a misunderstanding. I hadn’t earned it, and to be honest, I couldn’t call that a good feeling.

“Really? I heard you played a part in curing Hitagi’s illness, too.”

“Yes, and again─it could’ve been anyone but just so happened to be me… Anyone else could have taken my place, and Miss Hitagi just got saved on her own to begin with. I ended up being present for it, that’s all.”

“That’s enough. The simple fact that you were there when she needed you to be is enough. There’s nothing more you had to do to earn her gratitude.”

And then, for the first time.

I thought I saw Daddy Senjogahara smile.

“I wasn’t able to carry out my duties as a father─I still don’t think of myself as caring for my daughter. That girl is all but living on her own. I wasn’t able to be there when she needed me. My hands are full trying to pay off the debts Hitagi’s mother created for us, to be honest─even this jeep is borrowed from a friend. But despite all my failings as a father, I’m still proud of my daughter. I trust her eye for people. And if you’re the one she brought, you must be the right one.”

“……”

“Take good care of my daughter from now on─Araragi.”

“…Dad.”

Now this─had become a strange conversation.

Still, I thought.

She probably wasn’t trying to spite him.

If anything, Senjogahara might have asked her father to accompany her on her first date because she wanted to show him that she was okay now.

It wasn’t to tell him she’d never become like her parents─

Rather, he didn’t need to worry about her anymore.

I felt like I could hear her saying it.

…But it wasn’t for me to tell him. Not sticking your nose in other people’s family environment─there was that common sense, but more so, I felt like there was no space between Senjogahara and Daddy Senjogahara for me.

So it wasn’t for me to tell him.

That he wasn’t someone she didn’t mind being hated by, no matter how I thought about it─but someone who wouldn’t hate her.

I couldn’t possibly tell him.

There was only one person in the world who should say those words.

“By the way,” I asked, “where are we?”

“If Hitagi’s keeping it a secret, then I can’t tell you. But─we’re in a place…that the three of us visited a few times.”

“The three of you?”

Meaning…Senjogahara, Daddy Senjogahara, and─

Mommy Senjogahara?

“You know, picking this spot for her first date makes me think she’s quite─whoops. It looks like the princess has returned.”

What a dad-like way to put it.

That would have been my retort if I were talking to someone my own age, but I exercised restraint.

Anyway, he said Senjogahara had returned…and indeed, through the window I could see her taking her time walking toward us. Ah, until just a moment ago I’d been meaning to gripe at her when I saw her next for abandoning me to my predicament, but now it was as if an angel were descending from heaven to rescue me.

What a con.

“Thanks for waiting, Araragi,” she said in an unconcerned and flat voice after opening the back door. She then turned straight to the driver’s seat. “Dad, could you give us two youngsters some time alone? Thank you for bringing us here. We should be back in about two hours, so please, do get back to your job.”

“Sure,” Daddy Senjogahara consented and flashed his cell phone. I’d imagined it to be the case, but he’d agreed to interrupt his busy work schedule to drive us around…and he was getting back to work on his phone.

Hm.

Which meant…his chaperoning ended here?

“Okay, Araragi.”

Senjogahara extended her hand toward me. I took it, with fear and trepidation in my heart. I exited the car as if Senjogahara were pulling me out of it.

She let go of my hand a second later.

She really was chaste.

“I appreciate it, Dad.”

Finally thanking him, she closed the jeep’s door.

Well─not that it meant anything, but…at last we were on a normal date. I felt a little awkward about leaving Daddy Senjogahara in the parking lot when he’d taken us all the way into the mountains on a weekday night, but he seemed to have work he could do, so I let it slide.

“…So, where exactly are we, Miss Hita─”

Oops.

I could drop that now.

I did feel a little reluctant to let it go.

“Senjogahara. Where are we?”

“Hmph.” Senjogahara tossed her head to the side. “Have I ever once answered any of your questions?”

“……”

Um.

Yes, I think so?

Senjogahara’s attitude toward me was so brusque that I began to think that maybe I was one of those people she didn’t mind being hated by.

“Asking me a question,” she spat. “I think you’re getting a big head.”

“I’m not even allowed to ask you questions…”

“I don’t remember allowing you to so much as kneel.”

“I don’t want to kneel!”

“You mean you’d rather kowtow?”

“Do you have some kind of issue with me standing?!”

I could quip to my heart’s content now that her father was out of the picture.

Koyomi Araragi was firing on all cylinders.

I followed behind Senjogahara as she briskly forged ahead. We may have been in the mountains, but the scattered streetlights in the parking lot meant it wasn’t what you’d call dark… Wait, do you still call them streetlights even in the mountains? The inconsequential thought ran through my head.

“I’m glad the weather turned out to be nice, though.”

“The weather? Is that important?”

“Yes.”

“Huh… Well, they do call me Mister Sunshine.”

“Sorry? Mister Dumb Swine?”

“There’s no way you could have misheard me like that!”

“Look,” Senjogahara said around the time we left the parking lot. “Do you see the sign over there? Try reading it.”

“Hrm?”

Ordering me in such an offhanded, almost sulking way… But I did as Senjogahara said and looked where she was pointing. There was indeed a sign there, and written on it were the words “Home of the Stars Observatory.”

An observatory?

In other words…

“Hiya!”

Senjogahara used her right hand to stop my head when I reflexively looked up toward the sky. Grabbing my head from above, she kept it in place.

“What are you doing?” I complained.

It was pretty humiliating to have that done to me at my age…

“You can’t look up yet, Araragi. You can’t look ahead, either. Just look down at your feet as you walk. This is an order.”

“I can’t follow such an unreasonable order!”

“Well, if you won’t, I’ll start screaming and crying and run back to that jeep where my dad is waiting.”

“……”

“Or maybe Kanbaru will meet a bit of an unfortunate fate tomorrow. Which do you like better? A high school girl cosplaying a kindergartener, and taking classes─or a high school girl with a sign that says ‘I’m being punished because I’m a very slutty girl’ hanging from her neck, and standing out in the hall?”

“…I’ll do it.”

You hear about using the carrot and the stick in negotiations, but she was appallingly all stick… Lowering my head instead, I gazed down at my feet. Hitagi Senjogahara didn’t let go of my head, though. With her hand still in place, she said, “Shall we?” and began walking again.

Oh god.

I was like a dog being walked.

“…You really are s-scary, you know that?”

“What’s the extra ‘s’ for? But think of it as part of my brand of hospitality. I want you to feel a bit scarred.”

“And you added an extra ‘r’! Listen to you, you say the meanest things! Treat me some with heart!”

“I sure can, with heat.”

“That’s where you got the spare ‘r’ from?!”

“Oh, stop whining. It’s only polite to add a little espresso to any conversation.”

“Too bitter for a high school student’s palate…”

Of course, the right word was esprit.

It grew dark as soon as we left the parking lot.

Even so─we were by a mountaintop observatory, and I could tell even without looking up that it wasn’t pitch-black, thanks to the starlight. We lived in a fairly remote town, which meant we could at least spot the constellations in the sky at night, but it was probably no match to out here.

Oh.

That’s when I finally remembered.

“You know, about Kanbaru.”

“Yes? Is this concerning her unfortunate fate?”

“Why would I discuss that?!”

“Well said. If she’s going to meet an unfortunate fate, you want to decide all the details on your own from A to Z.”

“I’m not going to let Kanbaru meet an unfortunate fate at anyone’s hands! Even if those hands are yours! That’s not what I’m talking about!”

“Then what is it?”

“Kanbaru and I were talking about constellations the other day. Two days ago, I think?”

Ophiuchus.

Going too far into it would touch on Senjogahara’s birthday, so I had to keep it simple.

“Kanbaru told me something then,” I went on. “She attends these events at an observatory in another prefecture two times a year. Could this be where?”

Senjogahara had influenced Suruga Kanbaru down to their perviness, so it was entirely possible.

“Must be,” Senjoghara replied sure enough. “But it’s been a while since my last visit… I do remember telling that kid. Hm… So Kanbaru does that.”

“She asked if it seemed out of character for her, come to think of it. So that’s what she meant. Man, what an adorable little junior she is.”

“Yes. So much so that I wanna do her.”

“In what sense?!”

Oh… Now I recalled one more thing. That day I first visited Senjogahara’s home and told her the whopper about knowing a lot about astronomy…something about what the moon looks like. I remembered sharing my half-assed expertise and Senjogahara turning the tables on me.

Agh, how embarrassing.

I wished the memory had stayed forgotten.

Of course she’d turn the tables on me.

This was the first time I’d ever been to an observatory.

“Looks like there’s no one around, though,” I said.

“This isn’t a particularly good time for observing stars. Plus it’s a weekday. Anyone that is here is probably inside that observatory over there.”

“Over where?”

I tried to raise my head, to no avail.

Or rather, I felt nails digging into my scalp.

“Hey, Senjogahara… Are you aware that you’re definitely doing something a lot meaner than you think right now?”

“Really?” My kind admonition was greeted with total indifference by Hitagi Senjogahara. “If anything, you should feel fortunate to have one of my delicate hands on your head.”

“I’ll give you that, if you mean delicate like glass…whole shards of it.”

“What a wonderful thing to hear. Am I so clear and sharp? You really know how to compliment a girl. I feel like rewarding you.”

Her nails dug deeper into my scalp.

It was a simple yet effective way of delivering pain.

Was she actually made of the stuff? Senjogahara’s hollow, emotionless eyes were nothing if not glassy, in fact.

I see, so that’s what my girlfriend was…

Hitagi Shard.

“Anyway,” I asked her, “there’s an observatory around here?”

“Yes. With a large reflecting telescope.”

“Huh. I don’t quite get what’s so amazing about that, but…we’re going in there?”

“Nope,” Senjogahara shook her head right away. “It costs money to enter.”

“……”

“I’m poor, I’ll have you know.”

I didn’t see the point in saying it with such pride, but…

I guess it was the truth.

“I don’t mind paying,” I said, “since an observatory probably doesn’t charge too much. I’m sure I have the money on me.”

“I applaud your readiness to take the bill, but I’ll have to turn down your offer for today. I have a spot I recommend over looking through a telescope in a building─ah. This way.”

Senjogahara left the path to begin climbing a hill. She stepped through the cropped grass, and I followed in her footsteps.

She stopped about halfway up the hill.

A plastic sheet had been placed on the ground there.

Ah, her preparations.

“Close your eyes and lie down.”

I didn’t feel like opposing or defying her when I’d come so far. Senjogahara’s intentions were clear to me now. I did as she said, closing my eyes and lying down on the sheet. Her hand left my head, and I could sense someone lying down next to me. I say “someone,” but that’d be some incredible magic trick if it weren’t Senjogahara.

“You can open your eyes now.”

I did as she said.

And then, the heavens were full of stars.

“……………………………………………………Whoa.”

To be honest.

I was surprised less by the beautiful starry sky than by myself for still being able to find a starry sky beautiful at my age.

Humans could feel this moved?

The stars seemed to rain down on us.

If I may be so unrefined, it could have been in part because I was lying down… But it was simply fantastic to have stars covering every inch of my vision. Trying to somehow maintain my self-consciousness by searching for the reason that I was moved was already dishonest, but I at least understood why Senjogahara had gone so far as was to stick her nails in my head to keep me from taking a sneak peek. She’d wanted me to see this sky from this perspective first.

Somewhere really nice.

She was right. There was nowhere nicer.

Ah… Somehow I felt like I’d been fully repaid.

Like all of the pain and trouble so far was being washed away.

“So, Araragi─what do you think?” Senjogahara asked by my side.

She─must have been looking at the same sky.

“Wow─honestly, I don’t have the words for it.”

“So your vocabulary is lacking,” she said, putting a damper on my emotions with her acid tongue.

But─that was the extent of it.

Even her venom was tempered under this sky.

“There’s Deneb. Altair. Vega. The famous Summer Triangle. Go aaaall the way to the side from there, and we get to Ophiuchus. Which means Serpens is those stars in that area.”

Senjogahara gave me an eloquent explanation as she pointed at the night sky.

Running commentary, though she had neither a flashlight nor a planisphere.

Even so, it was somehow easy to understand.

“That conspicuously bright star is Spica…which means Virgo is around there. Cancer is over there… Oh, maybe it’s a bit hard to make out.”

“I guess I know the Big Dipper.”

“Yes, and the Big Dipper is part of Ursa Major─right next to it is Lynx.”

“Like the cat?”

“Yes.”

Senjogahara continued to name every constellation we could see and to tell me about each one. It was as if I was listening to a fairy tale, and her words seeped into me soothingly.

If she’d let me.

I wanted to drift off to sleep.

“You can’t fall asleep,” she said.

What a clear no.

What a sharp girl.

She continued, “Or as I’d say if we were mountain climbers stranded in a blizzard─’You can’t fall sleep! I’ll kill you if you do!’”

“You’re doing the killing?!”

“Well, in any case,” Senjogahara spoke in a flat voice─having wrapped up her commentary on the constellations. “That’s everything.”

“Huh? What is?”

“Everything I have,” she said, still looking at the stars. “Being able to help you study. My cute little junior and my curt father. And─these stars. That’s all I have, really. That’s about everything I can give you. That’s it, everything.”

“Everything…”

Oh…was that the deal?

The thing with Kanbaru the day before yesterday… No, since we first started dating a month ago on Mother’s Day, was that what Senjogahara was thinking the whole time? Never betraying any interest when I asked her out on a date… Making up with Kanbaru might have been unplanned, but had she been waiting for our skills test to be over and for her father’s schedule to open up?

I remembered something Hanekawa had said─

Senjogahara is a tough one.

“Well, technically speaking,” she corrected herself, “I do also have my acid tongue and verbal abuse.”

“I don’t need that!”

“And I guess I do have this body of mine.”

“……”

This body of mine…

Her euphemisms were so naked.

“Do you not need that, either?”

“Er, well… Um.”

I─couldn’t say no, could I?

But something about the scene made saying yes feel off, too…

“But you know, don’t you?” she said. “That a long time ago─a filthy man tried to assault me.”

“Oh…yeah.”

The crab.

It was─the reason for that aberration.

One reason, at least.

There were reasons for aberrations.

“And frankly, I’m scared of doing with you what that filth tried to do to me. No─I don’t intend on using fancy words like ‘trauma.’ I don’t think I’m such a wuss. I’m simply…scared. It wasn’t that bad before we started going out─but now, I’m scared of hating you, Araragi.”

She was scared.

Not of the act, but of the result.

“Now I’m scared of losing you,” Senjogahara said matter-of-factly.

I couldn’t read any emotions into her voice.

Her face was probably expressionless, too.

“It’s funny, isn’t it? Being scared of hating the person you’re dating, being scared of losing the person you’re dating… It’s like which comes first, the egg or the sunny-side up.”

“The egg, I think.”

“To tell you the truth, I’m afraid I’ve become a stupid woman. I was supposed to be a tragic, beautiful maiden who suffered from a mysterious, unknown illness─but now I’m a lovestruck, beautiful maiden who’s always thinking about some guy.”

“So you’re a beautiful maiden in either case…”

“Anyway, I even resent you for turning me into such an uninteresting, dime-a-dozen woman.”

“Uh huh…”

Nah…you’re plenty interesting.

Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt.

“As you’re aware, though, Araragi─I haven’t led the happiest life up until now… But I think I could call it all even if I see it as what let me meet you.”

“……”

“If it was my unhappiness that caught your attention─then I’m glad it happened that way. That’s how taken I am with you. So no matter how small the chance, I don’t want to see you in the same light I see that filth. Of course, I don’t plan on being this selfish forever… I do feel like I’m being childish. Like I’m being a baby. A naive widdle baby…”

Why repeat it in a lamer way, Senjogahara?

“If you’ll allow me a shallow line, losing you would be like losing half of my own body. So I want you to wait, just a little.”

“Just a little─”

“Yes. Until next week.”

“So soon?!”

“Please satisfy yourself with Kanbaru’s body until then.”

“Did you really just say that to me?!”

“And while you do that, I’ll use Kanbaru to rehab, too.”

“Kanbaru is getting the best of it! Only she gets all of her dreams to come true?”

“Well, next week isn’t realistic─but I swear I’ll make it work some day. So please, I want you to wait, just a little. As far as what this lovestruck woman can give you─these stars are it for now… When I was younger, we used to come here often. My dad, my mom─and me.”

With her dad and her mom─the three of them together.

I thought about what I knew of her family situation─and realized that must have been quite a while ago. Even so─Senjogahara remembered.

No.

She recalled it.

She’d recalled something she’d forgotten.

“This is it. My treasure.”

It was a pretty cliché turn of phrase for Senjogahara─but that only added to the sense she was sharing her unadorned, true feelings with me.

This starry summer sky.

This sky she once saw with her family.

This was it─everything.

“…………………”

At the very least.

I could say I was now sure of one thing.

Hitagi Senjogahara…was quite smart, and extraordinarily calculating, but she had zero combat ability when it came to romance. It was obvious enough on Mother’s Day during the events that led to us going out, but this woman was, how to put it, foolhardy, like an RPG hero who charges into a cave without a torch. She thought showing me all her cards and leaving the decision in my hands, her diplomatic blackmail of a methodology, was a good approach to take to something as subtle as falling in love? Where was the sentiment in that? That come-on was bound to give pause to ninety-nine out of a hundred people. Talk about feeling scared. Even someone as devoid of romantic experience as me knew that much.

Well.

If she was adopting the strategy fully aware that I was the one remaining person in a hundred─then dammit, I had to take my hat off to her.

Uh oh.

So adorable.

So moé, it wasn’t funny.

I actually felt like riding the momentum and hugging Senjogahara─but didn’t want to lose her, either, over such a thing. Not that I had any cards to show her… But I was okay with our relationship being this way for now.

It’s not as if I didn’t need it, though.

We could lie on our backs and look up at the stars.

We were fine as that sort of couple.

A Platonic relationship.

“Hey, Araragi,” Senjogahara deadpanned. “Do you love me?”

“I do.”

“I do, too. I love you, Araragi.”

“Thank you.”

“What about me do you love?”

“Everything. There’s nothing about you that I don’t love.”

“Oh. I’m happy to hear that.”

“And what do you love about me?”

“You’re kind. You’re cute. You’re like my prince who comes dashing in to save me when I’m in trouble.”

“I’m happy to hear that.”

“By the way,” Senjogahara said as if she’d just realized, “that filth was only after my body─he didn’t even try to steal my lips.”

“Huh? What do you mean?”

“I’m saying that filth showed no interest at all in them… And so, Araragi.”

Then─utterly free of abashment or affectation, Senjogahara spoke the words.

“I’m kissing you.”

“………”

Scary.

You’re being scary, Miss Hitagi.

“No, that’s not it,” she told herself. “Could I… bother you… for a kiss? What would… think to… about… a kiss…”

“……………”

“Let’s kiss, Araragi.”

“So that’s what you’re going to settle on.”

It wasn’t too inappropriate a way to phrase it.

In fact, no way to phrase it could be more her.

And so─today became a memorable day.

For us.