Her voice shook, and she sounded feeble.
Then, it hit me.
Back in our second year of high school, Kurose-san had been assaulted by a molester at a dark shrine with no lights around. Perhaps she’d trembled the same way afterward as she was now.
I couldn’t push her away from me. Stumped as to what to do, I looked up at the dark ceiling. And at that moment...
“Oh,” I let out.
The fluorescent lamps flickered, and the lights came back on. The outage was over—maybe the building’s backup power had kicked in.
“Th-The lights are back on, thankfully...” I said cautiously to Kurose-san, who was still clinging to my chest as she shook.
For a while, she didn’t move. But once her shoulders shifted up and down a few times like she was taking deep breaths, she finally, quietly, said, “Yeah.” Slowly letting go of my chest, she then took three steps back. “Sorry. Let’s get this work done already,” she said with an awkward smile on her face as if nothing had happened.
When we stepped outside after finishing for the day, the rain had already ceased. We were starving, so I accepted Kurose-san’s invitation to go to the same izakaya as last time.
“I need to tell you something, Kashima-kun,” Kurose-san said after she’d finished her first mug of draft beer. “I’m scared of men.”
As I wondered what this was about, she lowered her eyes.
“Simply passing a man I don’t know on the street at night is enough to startle me. It’s weird, right?”
“Is it because of that molester by the shrine?” I asked timidly.
Kurose-san glanced at me. “Yeah. I guess that’s when it started.” She hung her head again. “When I was a freshman, I started working part-time at a stylish café,” she said, keeping her eyes down. “I don’t know if it was purely a coincidence, but there were many extroverts there, and all the guys touched the girls like it was nothing. It scared me, so I quit in two weeks.”
Even I would want to quit in that scenario. People like that are just too different from me.
“Everyone in the editing department is a gentleman. Maybe they’re just introverts, but so am I. It’s a good match,” Kurose-san joked and then smiled in self-deprecation. “When the lights went out earlier, I was surprised. Surprised that I’m still not scared of you. I even clung to you of my own accord.” As she spoke, there was an intricate smile on her face with lingering elements of self-derision.
I recalled her touch and scent from when she’d held on to me earlier. It further led to me remembering that encounter we’d had in the gym storage room in high school—it shook me up and made my cheeks burn.
“Um, I...” I began in a shrill voice. “I’m planning to marry Runa after I graduate.”
I myself didn’t know why I said something like that. It wasn’t like Runa and I had talked about it. I simply wanted to do something to drown out the lingering sensation of Kurose-san’s body on mine.
“Okay. Congratulations,” she said, glancing at me with upturned eyes and smiling. “Heh heh.”
I didn’t know what she’d found so funny.
“All this time, I couldn’t tell what I should do with my feelings for you. But now, I see... I guess when the time comes, you’ll be my brother.” Kurose-san stared at the corner of the table with a fond look on her face. “Maybe that’s how I should act toward you...” After vocalizing her thoughts with a happy expression on her face, she looked at me and added, “Brother.”
Her smile then turned into a mischievous one, which shook me up a bit again.
Kurose-san averted her eyes from me and went on in a calm tone. “It’s not very consistent with what I said earlier, though. I’m scared of men, and yet here I am, being attracted to one. Even I think it’s weird.” She then looked off nowhere in particular with dreamy eyes, as if she were gazing into the distant horizon instead of some spot in this bustling izakaya. “I’m scared of them being taller than me, of their broad shoulders, of their large hands...but some part of me wants to touch those things anyway. If those belonged to the one special guy in my life who wouldn’t hurt me, and who would instead treasure and protect me.” Lowering her eyes, she smiled bashfully. “When I touched you earlier, I recalled these feelings that’d been dormant inside of me.”
Kurose-san started fidgeting again a little, but at that point, her second mug of draft beer arrived. She began drinking it in large gulps.
“Ah, where oh where can I find a faithful guy like you?” she said after removing the mug from her lips, sounding a little peevish.
“I-I think there’s quite a lot of them,” I stammered. “Neither Icchi nor Nisshi would act overly familiar or go around touching girls, and I doubt they’d cheat either...”
Kurose-san frowned at that. “Nishina-kun still loves Nicole-chan, and you know that if I made a move on Ijichi-kun, Akari-chan would kill me, right? Give me someone else.”
“Eh...?”
“What about your friends from college? If there’s someone suitable, can you set me up with them? It’s about time for me to experience love.”
“Uhh...?”
This was starting to sound like too much of a bother, so I felt like changing the topic.
“Anyway, did you see the special feature in this month’s Cromag? It was in a galley proof from earlier...” I said.
“Oh? What’s it about?”
While I managed to temporarily shift the conversation...
Thirty minutes later, we were back.
“Hey, Kashima-kuuun! Set me up with a guy! Come on!”
Kurose-san was plastered, all right. She was knocking her empty beer mug against the table. Her cheeks were red, and her eyes were out of focus.
“K-Kurose-san... Calm down, you’re making a scene...!” I said.
So much for the claims of being able to hold her liquor! She’s totally a pain in the ass when she’s drunk!
Though, to be fair, she’d been drinking at a faster pace tonight than the other day—she was already on her fifth mug.
“Heeeyyy, are you listening?! Why aren’t you saying anything?!”
“Wh-What...?”
“I just told you—set me up with a guy!” she whined. “Surely there’s at least one! Some guy who doesn’t have a girlfriend or a girl he’s into.”
“W-Well, I do know somebody, but...”
The one coming to my mind was, of course, Kujibayashi-kun. I didn’t know anybody else.
“Then ask him right now!”
“It’s just, well, he’s not really the right type for this, you could say...”
“Just do it already! Are you my brother or not?!” she complained.
“F-Fine...!”
Starting to mind the eyes around us, I finally gave in. Taking my phone out, I opened the app to send a message.
No Comments Yet
Post a new comment
Register or Login