A Half-Forced Collab (1)
Saying we'd just been hanging out without a thought in our heads would be about right.
The plans had come together out of nowhere, so today's streams hadn't even been on our minds — and once we started having fun, it had been too much fun.
I still didn't have enough viewers to skip a broadcast on a whim, and Ari had only just come back from a five-day break. If she went dark again right after returning, it wouldn't blow over easily.
Still… if anyone had to give ground, it should be me. I was the one who'd made the plans.
Damn it. My place was pretty far from here. I didn't even have a community tab where I could post a running-late notice. I needed to figure out transit, and fast.
Ah. Wait. Did I leave my wallet behind?
I'm losing my mind.
Ari's expression wasn't great either. Streaming would feel like brushing off a guest, taking me all the way home would mean missing her broadcast, and it wasn't as if I didn't have a stream of my own — she was probably turning all of that over in her head.
I glanced at her, then let out a sigh and dragged my hands down my face.
We'd gotten abnormally close, abnormally fast — but that didn't mean I wanted to borrow money.
A good idea would be… a collab?
Out of nowhere?
Hmm…
"Want to do a collab today?"
Oh.
We stared at each other, both wearing the same startled look. I'd just thrown the words out there, but to be this in sync…
Anyway! Ari's thinking had landed in the same place as mine, and I couldn't come up with any other option. This was probably the best we were going to get.
Ari looked at me with certainty in her eyes.
Once the conclusion was in, you moved fast.
"Ari, let me borrow your computer for a second."
Five minutes left until six.
Fortunately, we hadn't turned the computer off earlier, so I could put the plan in motion right away.
"I'll just log in with my ID real quick."
I connected my account and went live for about ten seconds, then cut the stream.
[Come to Lethe's Stream]
Anyone who actually watched me would see the going-live notification, and the moment they hit my channel they'd see the recent broadcasts list.
I could only hope they'd piece the situation together from the title of that ten-second VOD…
This was the only way I had to put out a notice. I really needed to make a community board already.
Three minutes left, somehow.
This time Ari took the computer back and prepped the stream at a blistering pace.
Insane speed. So this was… what you called experience?
The setup was done in a blink. We settled into something like our places and went live.
On screen, a piece of Lethe fanart a viewer had drawn played alongside a song.
A situation that had flipped completely in ten minutes. All I could do was let out a hollow laugh. Not in a mean way. The situation was just funny, wasn't it?
Ari seemed to think the same — she was looking at me and smiling.
"Huh…"
Ah. Did I mess up?
The chat was reacting a lot faster than on my stream, which startled me a little — and apparently a sound had slipped out of my mouth.
Our Lethe was looking at the newbie streamer like he was cute for being shocked by the chat speed, and…
That stung the pride a bit.
Nothing I could do about it. The song was almost over anyway. I'd pay this back later, for sure.
Hmm. Even in my original world, I'd had a fairly blunt, straightforward personality.
Lately that side of me had been coming out a little too hard, but still. Even so, I had only ever been an ordinary guy.
Becoming Geum Taeyang had toughened up my nerves considerably, but there was a limit to that too. It wasn't as if I didn't get tense.
I was starting to sweat a little. I could tell by how slippery the phone in my hand had gotten.
Five seconds until the song ended.
Four, three…
Tuk— tak—
Oh, you've got to be kidding me. My grip was stronger than it used to be, and I'd still dropped the phone the second I sat down.
I shoved the chair I'd been sitting in backward and ducked under the desk.
The desk was wide to begin with, and the phone had bounced off my leg and gone a little deeper in.
In the middle of all that, the sight of the cables under the desk — organized to a frankly pathological degree — made it hit me all over again that I was in Ari's house.
The phone, if I thought about it, wasn't even that important. I could have dealt with it after the stream. The fact that I'd gone down after it immediately just proved I was definitely not thinking straight.
Ari had turned the cam on, but maybe because of my sudden move, the only thing going out to the stream was a flustered Ari.
"Ah, hello!!"
Damn it. Should I come out now? Feeling like this wasn't right, I hurriedly tried to get out from under the desk, and Ari lightly blocked me with her hand. Not now?
Right. When it came to streaming, Ari was the professional. I'd trust her.
There was no way she'd also just panicked at the sudden move and blocked me without thinking, right?
…It wasn't like Ari had ever streamed with a man under her desk, so I also had to wonder if trusting this choice was the right call.
"Huh? Down here?! No, there's just something… Ah, nothing big is coming today."
Why is her voice shaking like that! She's a veteran! She's got the hours!
No matter how you looked at it, Ari was acting as suspicious as possible.
Watching her panic like that, it was obvious she'd never streamed with a man under her desk.
Things were definitely going sideways.
First, I'd scoot back so Ari wouldn't be uncomfortable…
WHAM—!!
Ah, fuck, seriously!
The sound was enormous. So was the pain in my head.
Was anything going to go right?
Ari jumped and dipped her head slightly to look at me.
Look at the front. The front!!
It hurt so much I wasn't sure I could even talk, but I endured it and whispered.
"Loo a' da fron'."
Hmm. The words hadn't come out, and I hadn't managed a whisper either.
Had that gone out on stream?
I snuck a look at Ari's face… yeah. That had 100% been heard.
"Mmm. This isn't how I wanted to show you this… Haa. Please don't type weird things in chat."
Everyone would have figured Ari was just playing some funny prank with a female guest.
If it had been a male guest, given Ari's personality, she never would have had him make his entrance from under the desk.
In truth, even if Ari brought on a female guest, her chat wasn't the type to throw filthy sex jokes like this — but someone was, in fact, under the desk.
Which meant not a single person.
From beneath a flushed Ari.
A man in a white short-sleeved tee.
A handsome man in a white short-sleeved tee.
A man in a white short-sleeved tee, handsome enough that you barely saw faces like his on television — and yet, with a delinquent's face that veered wildly off from everything Lethe was known to like.
Not a soul could have imagined him crawling out from under there, smacking his lips.
"Ah… tss."
His Adam's apple bobbed roughly with a gulp, catching the light.
Well. He wasn't smacking his lips. He'd slammed his head and was swallowing the saliva that had pooled from the hideous pain, that was all.
I hid the fluster and offered a slight smile.
They say you can't pick a fight with a smiling face, don't they? Even if the smile the camera was broadcasting looked plenty unsavory.
"Hnn…"
Too much bewitching allure to call it a wolf's, too much savage predator in the eyes to call it a fox's. The gentle curve of those eyes held a glint of laughter.
His eyebrows bent into a lazy eight, as if the whole situation amused him, and somehow that was exactly the shape that stirred something filthy in a woman's gut.
And with it, a light came into pupils that had been dull at first.
Lethe's viewers knew this man.
He wasn't the kind of streamer who would have matched the tastes of most of them — people with no interest in aggressive broadcasts — but they couldn't not know him.
He was the first person Lethe had ever openly shown hostility toward in the history of her streams.
He'd given his own explanation, but the fact remained that he'd said something that got under her skin, and that had been the cause of her five-day hiatus.
Yesterday, a few viewers from this very stream had gone after his broadcast, and he had called Lethe directly to show off how close they were. His real name had even gotten leaked in the process.
Honestly, most of it was hard to understand.
Why Lethe seemed this close to a man she'd barely just met.
She said he was a genuinely good person if you talked to him — so why had he started with those weird lines and caused a fight in the first place.
And why that man had crawled out from under that wholesome woman's desk.
On top of that, they'd heard him trying to say something before he came out. Awkward pronunciation, like his mouth was occupied with something else.
"No… we were actually going to come out together from the start, but my phone dropped and I went to pick it up, so I missed the timing. Khuhuh."
"I was so surprised. Taeyang just suddenly went in there. ……Haha."
Lethe's wholesome everyday conduct was famous even on TwizyTV, and her viewers knew it well.
A streamer shooting a pure-love story with her childhood-friend boyfriend. A streamer who only ever showed model behavior. A chat atmosphere wholesome to a fault.
So they could understand that this situation had come from their own misunderstanding — and that those words, which would have been treated as lame excuses in any other stream, were the truth.
Besides, someone with her level of streaming skill wouldn't create a situation this absurd on purpose.
The problem was that there was someone next to her who kept making them imagine weird things.
Licking his lips with his tongue. Constantly smacking his lips.
And if you looked at those eyes, like he was trying to bewitch someone, a strange feeling you couldn't quite name started to rise.
Chat did not settle easily.
"You're asking why I'm here? Didn't you hear the phone call on Lethe's stream yesterday?"
"A collab? We decided while we were hanging out. It's a little sudden, yeah."
"Oh, you're from my channel? I was being all polite for nothing."
"Lethe, doesn't it feel awkward that we're using formal speech? Want to just talk casual?"
Whether it was the synergy between Geum Taeyang — who didn't look tense at all in front of thousands of people — and Lethe, drawing on a streaming career that wasn't long but ran deep…
Or whether it was just entertaining to watch a deadly-serious woman and a slouching, easygoing man laugh and talk…
After a little time had passed, everyone was able to settle into the two streamers' collab.
The roughly seventy viewers who'd come over from Geum Taeyang's stream, with their characteristically numerous and aggressive chats, meshed with a broadcast that was unusually freewheeling today — and comments of a kind you never normally saw on this channel started to appear.
Yuhan had begun to soak into Ari's stream.