"I Love You."
I had a dream. Two of them, actually.
The first was of some nameless man filleting me with a Chinese cleaver the size of my own torso....
I couldn't remember anything past the moment he sliced into my side, but I was certain that even as sashimi I would have been springy and beautifully colored.
...On second thought, that didn't sound like something to feel good about.
The second dream was a pleasant one.
I was lying in a field full of crystal flowers, my body so cold it felt like I'd been put into cold storage. Freezing.
I tried to get up, thinking I should at least throw on a coat, but my body felt impossibly heavy. I couldn't move.
I was fretting over whether I'd always weighed this much when Luna descended from the sky.
She had black wings spread wide on either side. Looking at them, I understood.
Ah... Luna is an angel...! But if the wings are black, doesn't that make her a fallen angel?
How had Luna become a fallen angel? I pondered it hard, and then it hit me.
She had fallen because she loved me too much...!
You know how it is in those manga and novels with angels—they fall because they fall in love with someone. Every time I saw that, I always thought the same thing.
How romantic.
A demonic charm that could even seduce an angel. Terrifying!
I burned both dreams firmly into my mind and opened my eyes.
A white ceiling came into view, a shade just a little darker than my own hair.
That didn't mean the ceiling wasn't white. It simply meant my hair was so pretty and white it looked like moonlight was flowing through it.
Still, the dark dust piled up in the corners of the ceiling was extremely annoying.
Does the person who lives here not clean? Aung, so dirty!
I closed my eyes and pictured my own clean house. This was how you were supposed to clean....
As I imagined that spotless home, it suddenly occurred to me that it wasn't me who cleaned my house—Adel and Tania sent people to do it for me.
Then I remembered what it had looked like before they remodeled it.
When I opened my eyes again, the ceiling looked incredibly clean. Wow! So clean!
A pure white, spotless ceiling like this—where on earth was I?
Then a line I'd always wanted to say if a situation like this ever came up popped into my head, and I murmured it softly.
"...An unfamiliar ceiling."
Bucket list: complete...! Even the little pause beforehand had been perfect. My heart was pounding.
"...Eli?"
Tania's hoarse voice—one I'd heard somewhere before—reached me. I propped myself up a little and saw her staring blankly at me, looking exactly like she'd just woken up.
She must have been sitting beside the bed I was lying on, slumped over it.
Waking up to Tania right there—was this heaven? Had I actually died and gone to paradise?
Looking at her half-asleep face, still struggling to tell dream from reality, I decided that probably wasn't it.
What if I pretended this was a dream? How would Tania react?
Curiosity got the better of me, and I decided to do something I would never normally do.
Should I swear? No. Cursing at a beautiful girl was something I absolutely couldn't do unless she wanted me to.
Then should I say I love her? I did love all of them, but I never tossed those words around lightly.
I always felt that saying "I love you" too casually made the love itself feel lighter.
If my memory was right, I still hadn't said those words to anyone yet. Or maybe I had. Whatever.
Anyway, right now I wanted to tell Tania I loved her.
Not because I was saying it lightly—because I was tricking her. Yeah, yeah.
It wasn't that I wanted to say I loved Tania. It was purely to deceive her. I hoped no one would get the wrong idea.
I gazed at her with languid eyes; she still looked half-asleep.
Then, like whispering love to a lover, I softly called her name.
"Tania."
"...Yeah?"
Maybe because my voice was so quiet, Tania—still not fully awake—scooted closer and perched on the edge of the bed.
She leaned in, tilting her upper body and offering her ear. Her jet-black hair spilled down and tickled the back of my hand where it rested on the blanket.
Watching her, my chest started to feel ticklish too, for some reason.
I toyed with the hair that had been brushing my hand, then lifted the ends and brought them to my nose.
She'd clearly spent the whole day here without washing, yet a faint lily scent drifted up, pleasant and soft.
Tania, still not grasping the situation, stared blankly at what I was doing—then gave a little start.
Now...! With the hand that wasn't holding her hair, I grabbed her shoulder and yanked her toward me.
She came without any resistance, eyes flying wide open.
Do you know what ASMR is? Spelled out, it's Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response.
Honestly, I don't know what that means either. But there are all kinds of ASMR, and one of them is whispering ASMR.
When you whisper right against someone's ear, half air and half sound... how to put it. It feels good.
Ticklish and everything. Yeah? Anyway, it feels good. Like your brain is trembling.
Why am I talking about this? Because I wanted to try it.
I gently cupped the back of Tania's head and pulled her a little closer.
Somehow it ended up looking like she was nestled against me, forehead pressed to my collarbone.
Because of the sudden pull, I could feel her hands—braced on either side of my waist—trembling weakly.
In that position, I brought my lips to her ear.
Close enough that if I stuck my tongue out even a little, I could lick it.
I repeated it in my head. Half air, half sound.
Then I whispered.
"I love you."
As if by magic, the trembling in Tania's arms stopped cold.
A brief silence fell. Then she slowly lifted the upper body that had been pulled toward me.
Uh, uh-oh...? This wasn't the reaction I'd wanted....
I'd wanted the Tania who thought this was a dream to snuggle into my arms and shower me with aegyo or something....
Tania quietly stared at me with eyes that had gone cold and still.
Does she not like people whispering in her ear...?
I was starting to feel sorry and flustered when the small distance that had opened between us began to close again, very slowly.
This time not toward my collarbone, but toward my face.
"Ah? Uh, ah. Tania?"
Panicking, I tried to lean back again and put some space between us, but somehow the distance to Tania only kept shrinking.
"Um...."
Once I was fully lying down, her hands planted themselves on either side of my head, boxing me in so I couldn't escape.
One of her legs climbed onto the bed and settled between mine.
A perfect position for Tania to look down at me.
Her spilled black hair tickled my cheek.
Because she was looking down at me, her face was in shadow, but light from the lamp filtered through the strands of her hair, making them glitter like polished obsidian.
Even with the light behind her, her blood-red eyes shone brightly, reminding me of a crimson moon I'd seen somewhere before, drawing my gaze in.
As her face kept coming closer, it felt like two moons were falling toward me.
The lily scent that had seemed faint grew stronger, thickly tightening around my breath.
"......Ah."
Only then did I realize. Tania wasn't looking at me with a straight face—her reason had snapped, and her eyes were unfocused.
If I didn't stop this... well, I'd be fine with it, but future Tania would suffer for it.
I did kind of want to see a suffering Tania, in more ways than one.
But more than anything, what I'd wanted was her acting cute, not her charging full speed ahead while half-asleep.
So for now I had to stop her..., ah....
I reached out to block her approach, but....
My hand froze right in front of her chest.
As Tania's face came closer, her chest came closer too, yet my hand kept the same distance and never quite touched.
"...There's nowhere I can put my hand."
I muttered to no one in particular.
Well. We were both girls, so putting a hand on her chest wouldn't be a problem, right?
Even groping and squeezing wouldn't cause any major issues, right?
Unfortunately, right now it felt like putting my hand there would cause problems on my end.
In the end, the hand that had been grunting and pushing only at the air around her chest lost its place.
Not knowing where to put it, I just gently set it on the blanket.
Before I knew it, Tania's face was right in front of mine. Literally nose to nose.
Her hot breath slid down my cheek.
My heart had started pounding hard, jacking up my body heat until I was breathing roughly too.
Breath tangled with breath in the air between us.
I couldn't tell whether the air I was inhaling was the breath Tania had just exhaled, or my own breath coming back to me.
It was faintly sweet, so maybe it was hers.
If even the breath she exhaled was this sweet, how much sweeter would her lips be?
Tania tilted her head slightly; the tip of her nose brushed past mine with a soft tap.
In that instant my mind went hazy.
Should I just kiss her like this?
I knew perfectly well that "I was half-asleep" wouldn't be a free pass.
Claiming it never happened because it was in a half-asleep state was also impossible.
But... what did that matter?
If I just stretched my neck a tiny bit... just a little... I could taste the sweetest, most tempting fruit.
An angel and a devil started fighting inside my head.
The devil told me to shut up and smash our lips together. The angel told me to smash our lips together before she killed me.
Ah...... whose advice was I supposed to take?
The next moment, what erased my dilemma wasn't me—it was someone else.