Our Dating Story: The Experienced You and The Inexperienced Me - Volume 1 - Chapter 3.2

As she was short and seemed delicate, her entire body emanated an aura that made a guy want to protect her.

“Damn...”

“She’s not some celebrity, right? Because I can totally see her in a Sakamichi idol group.”

“She’s way too cute!”

While the classroom was abuzz with comments, there was one other thing that took me by surprise.

“Kurose...Maria...” I muttered the name our homeroom teacher had written on the blackboard, as if to check whether I was seeing things.

I knew her. As for why...

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that...”

Even now, I could hear her seemingly hesitant voice ringing in my ears.

“I do think of you as a good friend, Kashima-kun...”

There was no doubt about it. The transfer student was the girl who had rejected me in my first year of middle school—Kurose Maria.

“Kurose-san moved away from here three years ago, but now she’s back due to family circumstances and has transferred to our school. Be nice to her,” said the teacher.

“Of course!” exclaimed a frivolous, sunny guy, breathing hard through his nose as he raised his hand.

And he wasn’t the only one. I could tell that all the guys in my class couldn’t wait to talk to her.

All except for me.

“Introduce yourself, Kurose-san,” said the teacher.

“Yes, sir,” she replied. “I’ve moved back to this area after three years. I still don’t know much about this school, so please tell me about it later.”

“You got it!” exclaimed a classmate.

This time, not only was that same frivolous guy raising his hand, but several others were as well.

“Thank you. Please take good care of me,” said Kurose-san.

With a slightly bashful look on her face, she scanned the classroom...and as she did, her eyes met mine.

We stared at each other in silence for a moment. All expression instantly vanished from her face and she stood with her mouth slightly agape.

I immediately averted my gaze and looked down, but she seemed to have noticed me anyway. It was way too awkward.

The girl who had rejected my confession a long time ago had just transferred into my class. Back then, I’d been convinced she liked me, had gotten so excited that I’d ended up confessing to her, and in the end, had been pathetically turned down.

Then again, I now had a girlfriend by the name of Shirakawa-san who was too wonderful to be with me, so my trauma had already healed to some extent.

To Kurose-san, I was probably just someone from her past whom she didn’t have any particular reason to remember, so I figured I’d try to keep away from her as much as I could.

And yet...

“Do you mind if Kurose-san sits here?” asked the teacher. “I’d like her to be somewhere she can easily ask teachers questions until she gets used to the class.”

Our teacher had Kurose-san sit in front of the teachers’ podium, and each of the students who sat in the row beside me moved one seat back to make room. That meant she would sit right next to me.

When she settled into her desk, she first spoke to the guy sitting on the other side of her. “Nice to meet you.”

“Y-Yeah... Nice to meet you,” he replied. He was blushing slightly and gazing at Kurose-san with vacant eyes.

I had a good idea of how he felt. After all, her beauty put idols to shame. Had I not gone through what I’d gone through, I would probably have reacted that way too.

After greeting him, Kurose-san then turned her head my way.

Here it goes... I said inwardly, bracing myself while keeping my eyes down and pretending not to notice.

She stared at me in silence for a few seconds. I didn’t look, but I could sense it.

“Um... You’re Kashima-kun, right?”

At that point, left with no other choice, I looked up at her. Wow, she’s really, really cute... Though of course, I was now committed to Shirakawa-san.

“Y-Yeah,” I replied. It wasn’t like I could just ignore her.

Then, she gave me a pleasant smile. Had this been my old self from two weeks ago, I would surely have fallen in love all over again on the spot. Hers was a killer smile—it was way too cute.

“What a coincidence that we get to sit beside each other again, huh? I’m looking forward to it.”

“Yeah... Same.” Keeping my replies short, I cast my eyes down once more.

As Kurose-san faced forward again, the girl sitting right behind her immediately poked her back and said something to her.

“Yeah, that’s right. We went to the same middle school,” Kurose-san replied. Apparently the girl had asked her about me.

I hadn’t been wrong about her—everyone wanted to get closer to this beautiful transfer student. There was a risk that it’d come up in conversation that I had confessed to her in the past, which was why I thought it was best to keep as much distance from her as possible.

However, she kept talking to me again and again after that.

“Good morning, Kashima-kun,” she would say with a smile every single morning. Occasionally, she would lightly touch my arm too.

One day, she shared a cookie with me from her plastic container, saying, “Kashima-kun, you can have one if you want. I made these yesterday.”

Another day, she told me, “Sorry, I forgot my textbook. Could you show me yours?” The two of us ended up sharing my textbook in math class, our desks side by side.

“Hey, Kashima-kun,” said Kurose-san, leaning in close to me when the teacher left to get class materials from the staff room and the classroom got noisy. Her faint soapy scent tickled my nostrils.

“Wh-What?” I asked, startled.

She gave me a slightly apologetic look. “Sorry about back then,” she whispered.

“Huh...?”

Was she talking about the time she’d rejected my confession? As I watched her, she continued.

“It’s not that I disliked you. But back then, I still didn’t really know what dating was even about...” She got even closer to me, and still whispering, said, “Now I might understand what’s good about you.”

“What...?”

I moved back slightly in surprise, getting away from her on impulse. What did she mean? She couldn’t possibly be in love with me, right...? But wait, Ryuto, think well about this. She had only said she “understood what was good about me,” with insurance in the form of “might.” If I got the wrong idea here, I’d be repeating my mistake from my first year of middle school.

Actually, it didn’t even matter if I misunderstood her or not, because I had Shirakawa-san now. There was no need to waver here.

Kurose-san gazed at me with glistening eyes. She probably had no makeup on.

To suppress my desires, I spoke up with a face as empty of expression as possible. “Thanks. But I already have a girlfriend.”

At that moment, the light disappeared from the large pupils of Kurose-san’s eyes and her face went stiff. Immediately afterward, she put on a smile again and leaned toward me.

“Oh, really? Who is it? Is she from this school?” she asked.

“Uhh, well, that’s...” I began, looking away and racking my brains in vain on how to reply. I hadn’t expected her to press the subject.

“Come on, why not tell me? I won’t tell anyone!” she pressed.

I thought this over silently. It was true that Kurose-san had only just transferred to my school and didn’t particularly get along with anyone yet. I felt like there wasn’t anyone she’d go telling about this.

If she learned that my girlfriend was the stunning gyaru Shirakawa-san, perhaps she’d refrain from talking to me in the future. But as I wavered on the subject of keeping my relationship a secret, considering telling only Kurose-san about it...

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” said the math teacher upon returning to the classroom, putting an end to all the chatting.

Then, come break time, I felt Kurose-san’s stare from beside me. And as I wondered whether I should tell her or not, in case she asked me again...

“Hey, you’re Kashima Ryuto, right?” came an intimidating female voice.

I didn’t remember doing anything wrong, but it still gave me a fright. Looking behind me, I saw a girl in an imposing stance diagonally to the rear of my seat.

“Y-Yes...” I replied.

I knew her. In fact, she was Shirakawa-san’s best friend, the super gyaru Yamana Nicole.

“I need a word with you.”

“What...?!”

What could she possibly want with me...?

***

That day after school, I was drinking a shake in a fast-food café in front of the train station, with Yamana Nicole across the table. She’d been eating french fries without a word for some time now, scrutinizing me the whole time.

Fashionwise, she was a gyaru. Her brown-dyed hair was even closer to blonde than Shirakawa-san’s. A necklace sat on her open chest, earrings hung from her ears, and she had flashy nails—but other qualities, like the sharp look in her eyes, gave the slight impression that she was a delinquent. So when she’d told me to come with her alone, I couldn’t help fearing she was going to challenge me to a one-on-one or something.

She hadn’t said anything even after I’d stayed silent for a while, so I finally spoke up, no longer able to put up with the weird mood.

“Um, uhh... I’m very sorry... Did I...do something...?” I knew she was my classmate, but I unintentionally spoke with undue politeness.

Yamana-san furrowed her brows and glared at me. “Huh?”

The menacing nature of her glare made me shudder. I felt like grabbing my bag and hightailing it out of there.

But then she said, “Just so you know, I’m not mad at you or anything. I was born with these eyes.”

“What...?”

Now that she mentioned it, the look in her eyes may have been sharp, but I couldn’t really call her expression grim. In Japanese, Nicole’s name was written in a cutesy way that could be interpreted as “to smile”—so much for that.

“French fries taste like shit when they’re cold, so I’ll talk after I eat, okay?” she said.

“Oh, okay...”

In contrast with her french fries, my shake needed to be left alone for a while before I could even drink it—it was frozen stiff. I tried to sip at it anyway while I waited for Yamana-san to finish eating her meal.

Then, once her sleeve of french fries was finally empty, Yamana-san wiped her fingertips with a paper napkin and looked at me again.

“So, like, didja know Runa’s birthday is Sunday next week?”

Her words left me speechless all of a sudden. “Huh...?”

“You serious? Guess you really didn’t know,” she said, looking at me with mild astonishment on her face. “Aren’t birthdays one of the first things you wonder about right after you start dating? Then again, this is you we’re talking about, so I figured you probably didn’t ask her.”

“Huh? What do you mean...?”

In response to my question, Yamana-san shot me a glance. While she probably wasn’t actually angry, that sharp look of hers was nothing but a source of fear for me.

“You don’t look the smart type.”

I didn’t know how to reply to that.

“Ah, I’m not trash-talking you here or anything. It’s the smart guys that cheat, so.”

Judging by what she was saying, Yamana-san saw me as a guy who wouldn’t cheat. I supposed it wasn’t bad to hear that, if that was what she meant...

“So, didja get that? Do something for her birthday,” she said.

I nodded. “O-Okay...”

“Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for you. Just wanted to talk about it without Runa around.”

Yamana-san was moving to leave, but I hurriedly called out to her. “Um...!”

She looked at me, standing with her tray in her hands. “What?”

Her sharp gaze made me nervous. “Could you tell me what Shirakawa-san likes?” I asked. “I want to know what to give her for her birthday.”

Yamana-san frowned a little. “Why don’t you ask her yourself? You’re her boyfriend and all. Isn’t it faster that way?”

“I guess, but...” Casting my eyes down, I gazed at my Mabbit-encased smartphone on the table. “Shirakawa-san gave me this phone case.”

“I know. I went with her to get it,” Yamana-san curtly replied.

I bowed deeply. “She didn’t say a word about it to me until the one-week anniversary of our relationship. She gave it to me as a surprise, so I thought I should surprise her this time.”

Hearing that, Yamana-san gave me a worried look. “Can you, though? You don’t look the type who’s good at that sorta thing. Runa will be happy even if you don’t try too hard and just do something normal.”

“I don’t know if I can, but I want to try. I think Shirakawa-san is a girl who always tries to make her boyfriend happy.”

She’d consistently been like that ever since she’d attempted to have sex with me on the first day of our relationship.

“She was trying to please me when she got me this phone case too...” I continued. “I think that’s because she herself is the type who’d be happy to get something as a surprise.”

Yamana-san’s expression softened once she heard my words. Instead, she directed a probing look at me.

“Maybe Runa was right,” she uttered after a pause. “You are a little weird. I thought you had your head stuck in the clouds, but some of the stuff you say...”

I wasn’t sure whether she was complimenting or disparaging me, but she seemed to be smiling just a little.

“Fine,” she said, placing her tray on the table and sitting down again. “I’ll tell you about Runa, so you better make her birthday a good one.”

“I-I will!”

Thus, Yamana-san and I held a secret meeting where I got a lecture on what Shirakawa-san liked.

***

The next day, as I was heading to school in the morning, I ran into Shirakawa-san at Station K’s ticket gates.

“Morning, Ryuto.”

“Huh?! Morning... Wait, what are you...?”

“I can’t talk to you at school, right?” Keeping her greetings short, Shirakawa-san showed me her smartphone. “Is this true?”

It seemed like there was a LINE chat window up on the screen.

Runa, Yuna, Akari (3)

Yuna: Nicole was on a date in McDonalds with some plain guy from our class lol

Akari: For real? Lmao

Upon seeing the photo this Yuna person had then sent, I let out a small shriek. It showed me and Yamana-san from a distance as we talked at McDonalds the previous day.

“You saw Nicole?” asked Shirakawa-san.

“Ah, yeah...”

It appeared Yamana-san really hadn’t told her anything.

“Shirakawa-san,” I continued, “are you free Sunday next week?”

“Huh? Why do you ask?” She seemed taken aback. “H-Hey, answer me first. What did you and Nicole talk about?” Shirakawa-san started to look anxious.

“No, seriously, are you free Sunday next week?” I asked again. I was desperate to advance the conversation too.

“Huh? Sunday? Sure, I still don’t have any plans. Why?”

“Then would you mind letting me do something for your birthday?”

She opened her eyes wide at those words.

“Yamana-san told me your birthday’s coming up,” I explained.

For a while, Shirakawa-san stood silent with her mouth agape. In the next instant, her face brightened up.

“Oh, so that’s what it was!” Her anxiety had vanished without a trace. “Man, you should’ve just told me sooner.”

“Ah, sorry... I just thought I should invite you before talking about your birthday.”

Being an introvert, this was a bad quirk of mine—I couldn’t have a conversation if it wasn’t going the way I’d planned beforehand.

“Oh well,” said Shirakawa-san, looking completely back to normal.

I bowed to her. “Sorry I didn’t give it more thought... I never even asked you when your birthday was.”

“It’s okay, I’m the one who should be sorry for ambushing you like this.” With that, Shirakawa-san readjusted her grip on her school bag and turned toward the escalator. “Well, I’ll get going to school ahead of you. It would be bad if people saw us together, right?”

“Ah... Yeah. Thanks,” I replied in a hurry.

She lightly waved at me, then disappeared into the crowd at the station.

“What was that all about...?” I wondered, heading to the platform by myself.

I thought about her face from when she’d pulled up the LINE chat. She hadn’t seemed like her usual self, and she’d looked anxious when she’d thought I was trying to change the subject. I wouldn’t exactly say Shirakawa-san had looked angry, but her face had said that something didn’t sit right with her.

“You saw Nicole?”

“H-Hey, answer me first. What did you and Nicole talk about?”

Was it...jealousy?

“Yeah, there’s no way,” I concluded.

Shirakawa-san couldn’t possibly get jealous because of me. Although I would be happy if she eventually came to like me enough to get jealous.

I was going to steadily deepen our relationship without getting impatient. That was one of the reasons I wanted to please Shirakawa-san on our upcoming birthday date. And I would use the week’s time I had before that to prepare a perfect date itinerary.

Secretly burning with enthusiasm, I got on the train that had stopped at the platform together with a large crowd.

***

And then it was Shirakawa-san’s birthday.

I’d done everything I could over the past week. Using what Yamana-san had told me about Shirakawa-san’s preferences, I’d gone around the city practically every day after school, by myself, to scout out where I would take her on our date. I’d even said “Happy Birthday” over LINE at exactly midnight the previous day.

Since I’d let Shirakawa-san decide where we would go on our first date, this was my first time bringing her somewhere.

“Morning, Ryuto!” exclaimed Shirakawa-san as we met up inside Station A.

We’d agreed to meet at 11 a.m. to make sure she got enough sleep, even if she’d talked to Yamana-san until late the previous night.

She was cute as always. Her tight pink minidress had a bold, sexy design: while it was high-necked, a rhomboid cutout revealed her cleavage. Her thick-soled, high-heeled sandals and silver-colored handbag were very gyaru-like too.

“Where we going today?” asked Shirakawa-san as we headed to the platform.

“Well, I was thinking of heading to Harajuku. Does that sound good?”

As she heard my reply, her eyes began to sparkle. “For real?! Hell yeah I wanna go! I love Harajuku!”

Seeing her joy, I recalled what Yamana-san had told me.

“It’s all about Harajuku with Runa. If you don’t know where to take her, just head there or to Shibuya and watch her get all fired up.”

She hadn’t been kidding...

I could already feel that things were going well on this date.

As we arrived in Harajuku, I first took Shirakawa-san to a particular café. It was a place with a small storefront in a back alley off Takeshita Street—a street full of young people.

“Here you go,” I said, handing her a bubble tea outside the café. It was their specialty.

“Thanks!” She took a big sip, then said, eyes sparkling, “I love it!”

“Runa loves bubble tea. She says there’s no limit to how much of it she can drink. We don’t have much money though, so she can only afford to drink one every time.”

“Man, there’s nothing like bubble tea! Thanks, Ryuto!”

Just like Yamana-san had said, Shirakawa-san was really enjoying herself.

“How much was it? I’ll pay for mine,” said Shirakawa-san.

As she reached for her wallet in her bag, I motioned for her to stop.

“Oh, no, that’s fine. I’ll treat you,” I replied.

“Huh? But...”

“It’s your birthday, so...consider it a present.”

Creases formed between Shirakawa-san’s brows and she looked troubled for a while at my words. Eventually, she said, “Okay, I’ll take you up on that, then! Thank you, Ryuto!” with a happy smile.

Seeing her like that, I produced a piece of paper from my shoulder bag.

“Hm? What’s that?” she asked.

“Shirakawa-san, how was the bubble tea you had just now?”

“What do you mean? It tasted great, of course.”

I unfolded the paper. It was a printed map of Harajuku with bubble tea cafés circled in red. Written in the margins were my impressions after I’d actually gone to a given café and tried the bubble tea it had to offer, as well as my analysis of the taste of each. I could’ve done all this on my smartphone, but doing it on paper felt like doing independent research at school. That made it all the more fulfilling.

“Wow! What is this map? It’s amazing!” exclaimed Shirakawa-san in surprise, looking at the fruits of my labor.

It was difficult to say how much bubble tea I’d had over the past week. The fare to Harajuku hadn’t been covered by my commuter pass, and I’d had to pay for the drinks themselves, so in the end, I’d used up a substantial amount of the money I’d gotten on New Year’s. I’d brought the remainder of it to use today.

“The bubble tea you had just now has not only a high concentration of milk, but a fairly strong tea aroma as well. Also, the size and the chewiness of the boba are just right, so overall, it’s the most balanced one around. That’s why I had you try it first.”

Eager to show the results of my hard work over the past week, I couldn’t help talking rapidly. I wanted to stop since it might creep Shirakawa-san out, but thinking about it only made my speech faster and faster.

“Using this one as a point of reference, if you’d like it sweeter, I recommend Tapioca Monster. If you prefer more of a plain milk tea with a richer tea flavor, we’ll go to Aroma Tea House. Or, if you like chewy boba—well, it’s a bit far, but we can go to PruPru. Otherwise, if you don’t care too much about it tasting like milk tea, I recommend the rich brown sugar milk tea from Tiger Café.”

Crap. I was in gloomy nerd mode. I knew I was being cringe and wanted to stop myself, but having come this far, my desire to put all of my knowledge on display was too strong.

“In the first place, I have to wonder if milk tea really goes best with tapioca pearls. The pearls have no flavor by themselves, and even if you give them one by soaking them in brown sugar syrup or something, it’s still hard to get it to permeate to the center of the pearls, right? And you know how you have to chew them for a while on top of that? What that means is that, inevitably, there will be a moment when the pearls lose their taste in your mouth. I think the reason tapioca pearls are served in a liquid—milk tea—is to make up for that, but like, isn’t there only so much milk tea can do? I mean, milk tea by itself is already a complete, delicious beverage, right? You can make it a little sweeter or raise the concentration of the milk, but you kinda can’t make it fully escape its original form—at the end of the day, bubble tea is still only ‘something tasty even if you drink it as milk tea.’ After all, pearl milk tea is called ‘milk tea’ for a reason, and it has its pride to protect as such. Still, I think the best drink to go with tapioca pearls should be something sugary with a more viscous texture. In that sense, I think the coconut milk drink with tapioca pearls that was popular in the nineties was a more complete dessert. When I learned about it the other day, I looked for it in supermarkets and gave it a try. I found that since coconut milk is rich in flavor and sweetness, and because the tapioca pearls are smaller, the pearls do a good job of accentuating the taste of the milk. They’re like croutons in soup. Those are almost flavorless too, but if you eat them when you’re tired of the soup’s homogeneous taste, they neutralize the saltiness. And they’re fun to eat because they’re firm, right? In comparison, I think it’s hard to call milk tea and tapioca pearls a match made in heaven in almost any kind of pearl milk tea. If you ask me, brown sugar milk tea is the most delicious among the currently trending bubble tea flavors. It’s overwhelmingly sweet thanks to the brown sugar dissolved in fresh milk, but when you chew the pearls soaked in brown sugar syrup, they still eventually lose their flavor, so in the end, that’s the best you can do. Either way, that’s my top recommendation today.”