Our Dating Story: The Experienced You and The Inexperienced Me - Volume 5 - Chapter Ep

Epilogue

The wind grew even stronger. We were walking past the rows of cherry blossoms toward the train station, when...

Runa stopped in her tracks. “Ah! I almost forgot.” Separating her hand from mine, she gave me the paper bag that she’d been carrying in the same hand as the branch. “Here’s your birthday present!”

“Oh... Thanks.”

“I wanted to give it to you earlier, but I was using it to weigh down the blanket. It totally slipped my mind.”

I’d actually been wondering if my present had been inside it. As Runa had said, it’d been windy today, so we’d needed weights on the four corners of the blanket. We’d actually had to use everything we’d had on hand to keep the blanket down. The wind had picked up so much by the end of our picnic that the blanket was lifting up anyway, so we’d had to pack up in a hurry. I could understand how she had forgotten about it.

“Open it,” she said.

“Okay.”

I sat down on the curb separating the sidewalk from the slope with cherry blossoms on it and looked inside the large paper bag. I opened up the wrapped gift—it was a black backpack.

The backpack was stylish and had a simple, straightforward design. It looked sturdy and mature.

“I thought you might want to replace that backpack you use for cram school. Whatcha think?”

Suddenly, I remembered that while we had been studying for our exams, she’d seen that bag of mine with a hole in it. Had she really remembered such a tiny detail when choosing my present?

“I asked Akari about it since she’s really into bags. It’s great, right? I went for a daypack since I figured you prefer those.”

“Wow...”

There was a logo on the bottom right of the backpack—it was that of a famous brand of men’s bags that even I had heard of.

“Wasn’t this expensive, though...?” I asked.

“I wanted to give you a proper gift, so...” Runa smiled at me. “Akari said that bags that only cost a few thousand yen are just stylish throwaways with a focus on style—if you carry heavy things in them every day, they’ll get ruined real quick. This one is made of good materials and is well constructed, so it’ll serve its purpose until your college entrance exams. You can probably use it even after getting into college too, on days when you need to carry lots of stuff.”

It wasn’t like Runa to give long explanations like that, and as she’d said, this had all apparently come from Tanikita-san.

“I’ve been earning my own money for the first time, and I have my first-ever job. I wanted to give you something you could use for a long time.”

Runa was a bit shy as she said all that and looked at her cherry-blossom-colored nails. Her face looked a bit more mature than usual.

“Thank you...” I said. “Truly...”

The first present I’d gotten from Runa had been that Mabbit phone case on our one-week dating anniversary. I’d received so many things from her since then—both tangible and not. But this present was special, even among all of that.

Runa had put a lot of time and effort into earning her first paycheck, and she’d probably had to give up a rather large part of what she’d made to buy this backpack. For my sake, she’d given things serious consideration when choosing my present.

The thought of it moved me so deeply that I could almost cry.

Runa smiled happily. “Do you like it...?” she asked. “This little pocket here is for good-luck charms!”

With that, she opened the fastener of an external pocket on the backpack. There was a mesh net pocket inside it with something like a key holder there. I recognized the good-luck charm hanging from it.

“I put one in for you,” she said.

Hanging in that spot was one of the good-luck charms Runa had bought at the Jishu Shrine in Kyoto. She’d gotten a pair that day, and I’d left mine with her at the time. I had completely forgotten about it since.

“This will protect you when I’m not around.” Runa smiled a little, gazing at the charm.

“Thank you... This really makes me happy.”

I had so much to tell her about how I felt, but I couldn’t find the words... That was the best I could do, and I filled those words with as much emotion as I could.

Runa looked fondly at me. “And also...” She hesitated but went on. “It would be kinda cheeky to call it a present, but...” She paused there and her cheeks turned red in an instant. “There’s another thing I wanna give you, now that you’re seventeen. Would you take it...?”

“Huh?”

As I wondered what she was talking about, my heart skipped a beat at the possibility—we were that age, after all.

“Hey, remember what you told me when we started going out?” she asked.

I’d been thinking dirty things, so my reaction was belated. “Huh? Huh...?”

“You said the way I liked you was weak—that it was on the same level as liking a friend.”

“Oh, y-yeah...”

I remembered having said that. I’d ended up dating the prettiest girl in the school, so how could I—an introvert like me—have even said something like that? I still felt a cold sweat come on whenever it crossed my mind.

“You were right. Now that I’m dating you, I realize that I was just playing around before. In my previous relationships, I was pretending to be the girlfriend of guys who were pretty much just friends.” Biting her lip, Runa hung her head. “I didn’t know I could feel like this back then... Didn’t know what it was like when your chest feels hot and tight when you think about a guy and to think that nobody could replace him. That it has to be him...”

“Wait... So...?”

What about now? Can I take this as her feeling that way toward me now?

“I was worried,” she admitted. “Up until now, I’ve left everything up to my boyfriends, and I’m probably pretty bad at it for how much I’ve done it... I was thinking you have high expectations and that I might disappoint you.”

I was speechless. I never could have seen this coming. Runa had been worried about something like that?

“But that night, when we kissed, I realized something. It’s like my body moves on its own when I’m with you. I wanna feel good...and to make you feel good too.”

Runa looked at me with a smile full of kindness and unconditional love.

“I really love you...Ryuto.”

“Runa...”

As I stood there, filled with emotion, Runa suddenly averted her eyes. Her face clouded over in worry.

“We’ll do our best together from now on... Maybe I won’t do so well, but...can you try not to be disappointed?” she asked.

“What?! You mean...?” My heart pounded so hard it felt like it could explode, and I couldn’t contain my excitement. “Are you saying you want to...?”

“Wait!” Runa said, interrupting me. “I’ll say it.” While she was blushing a little, her face was filled with resolve. “You already said you’d wait for me to want to have sex. And I promised I’d tell you when that happens. So...I wanna do it. Now. And so badly...”

I held my breath as she spoke quietly but decisively.

“I never knew it was so embarrassing and took so much courage to say that I wanna do it.” She brought her hands to her chest. “You won’t be my first...” she said with a sigh, her voice trembling. Then, she slowly looked up at me. “But can I become yours?” Her eyes wavered with what seemed to be slight regret, but there was enough anticipation in them to drown out that feeling. “I wanna become one with you.”

Joy erupted from deep inside me and surged through my body. I wanted to embrace her tightly right away. But it wouldn’t be like me to do so, and I was nearly shaking with impatience.

“Hey, Ryuto...” Runa looked at me with upturned eyes. “Wanna do it?” Her face told me she was enduring the shame. “I wanna have sex...if it’s with you.” Saying that bashfully, she lowered her eyes, and a happy smile appeared on her face. “This is the first time I’ve felt this way in my whole life...”

Just then, another strong gust of wind blew past us. It swept over all the cherry blossom trees at once, sending their blossoms up into the air. That wind had come not from the river, but from the south.

Spring had finally come. The spring of change.

My relationship with Runa was about to change too.

I’d rejected her on the first day of our relationship like I’d forgotten my place. I’d squirmed around on my bed in regret afterward. It had been almost ten months since that day. Such a long time...or maybe it actually hadn’t been that long? No, it really had been.

I was honestly impressed with how well I’d endured so far, and I wanted to praise myself for it. But I was really glad I’d managed to put up with it until today. I felt that way from the bottom of my heart.

I loved Runa. So much.

She was too good for me—it was hard to believe the prettiest girl in the world wanted me in both mind and body.

I was so happy that it felt like my brain would go numb and I’d turn into an idiot.

“Runa...”

Mom, Dad.

Thank you so much for bringing me into this world.

My name is Kashima Ryuto, and I’m seventeen years old.

When we next see each other, I will no doubt already be an adult.