Comforting Her
Sniffle… sniffle…
From somewhere in the dark room, the sound of Lee Yebin sniffling carried over to me.
I glanced at her once, then sat down beside her. It wasn't that I meant to tease her or anything — I just had no idea what I was supposed to do.
Sniffle… sniffle…
Yebin just sat on the bed and kept sniffling.
What exactly was I supposed to do for this terrified girl to count as properly comforting her?
No — there probably wasn't a "properly comforting her" option to begin with. When she got this scared, even the things I did right somehow turned into things I'd done wrong.
That said, I couldn't just sit there like an idiot next to a sniffling Yebin forever.
In the end, I decided to pat her.
Pat… pat…
I set my hand on her shoulder and started moving it gently. Feeling the warmth of her body against my palm as I patted her only made Yebin cry harder, more wretchedly than before.
"Hic… hhk… Hwaaaaaah…"
"Hey, I'm sorry… I said I'm sorry."
"Hhk, I don't care, I don't caaare… you awful… bastard… hic…"
Yebin kept crying, tears rolling down her face, calling me a terrible person over and over.
From my perspective, it wasn't entirely fair.
From the moment we'd picked the game, the one criterion I'd used was simple: something that fell under the horror category but wasn't actually that scary.
You might wonder if a game like that even exists, but the horror category is surprisingly broad. It doesn't just cover things that make people feel fear — even supernatural entities trying to kill the player count as "horror."
Ghost Phobia was firmly that kind of game. A game focused on supernatural beings — ghosts — killing the players.
I just hadn't expected her to cry over it.
Hic… hic…
Yebin kept crying, and all I could do was keep patting this crybaby of mine.
"I really am sorry…"
"I don't care, you awful jerk… you awful jeeerk…"
Even while she kept cursing me out as a terrible person, the only thing I could offer was another apology.
Somewhere in the middle of it, I quietly held out a strawberry milk toward her.
"…Hey. At least drink some strawberry milk."
"Mm…"
Hic…
Only then did Yebin uncurl from her crouched posture and take the strawberry milk I offered. The rims of her eyes were red and swollen as she accepted it.
Wait — she'd been scared enough to cry this hard?
I'd known her tolerance for anything horror-related was basically nonexistent, but I hadn't realized it was this bad. Then again, we'd never watched a horror movie together in the first place.
Thinking back, whenever we'd gone to the movies in middle and high school, we'd always ended up watching action films. So that was why.
Suddenly I felt sorry all over again. By pure years of knowing each other, it had been nearly twenty years — and I still didn't fully understand her.
That fresh wave of guilt made me apologize with everything I had.
"I'm sorry."
"Sorry for… what…"
"For making you play a horror game."
"……You bastard. You didn't know I hate scary stuff that much?"
"Nope."
"How could you not know… you bastard…"
"We've never watched a horror movie together, so of course I wouldn't know…"
"Ugh…"
Apparently even Yebin had nothing left to say to that. She just huffed once in irritation and didn't push any further. Instead she simply sucked on the straw of the strawberry milk I'd brought her.
Slurp… sluuurp…
The way she held the carton in both hands and drank looked so different from her usual self — how do I put this…
…No. Not that I actually meant anything by it. A guy can have a stray thought once in a while. Yeah.
Or not. That couldn't be it.
Tsk…
While my head was still spinning, Yebin finished the strawberry milk and immediately turned around to apologize to me.
"……Sorry."
"Sorry for what."
"I, uh… the stream vibe. I completely wrecked it."
So she did know.
"Yeah, that part's true."
"That… I'm really sorry…"
"That's an apology you should be making to your viewers, not me. And they'll probably just go, 'Aww, it's okay~' anyway, right?"
At that, Yebin finally let out a little snort of laughter and nodded.
"Yeah, they would… for sure…"
"If I'd done that, they'd all be filing complaints demanding a twenty-four-hour stream as payback. Total chaos."
"Come on, your viewers cut you a surprising amount of slack too, you know?"
"Bullshit. Those people?"
Absolutely not. They treated me like a toy at best — never anything close to kindly.
Just look at them now. They were already tearing into me nonstop just because I was doing a fake marriage stream with Yebin.
As if there was anything good about fake-marrying someone like her.
"Whew… you calmed down a bit?"
"Yeah…"
"Then I'm heading out."
I stood up to leave.
Tug.
Yebin caught the hem of my clothes.
"What."
"……Can you just stay with me for ten more minutes?"
"Still scared?"
"Ah… n-no, that's… that's not it…!"
Yebin hemmed and hawed, looking at me and then looking away, over and over.
Tsk. She was still scared after all.
This girl was a coward and a crybaby — so completely different from her usual self that if someone told me they were the same person, I wouldn't believe them.
"Alright. I'll stay."
"Really…?"
"Just kidding."
"You bastard…"
"I'm joking. I'll stay."
When I sat back down beside her, Yebin's expression eased into something that looked almost relieved.
I looked at her for a moment, then glanced around the room.
She'd actually cleaned up today. How responsible of her.
"You cleaned your room?"
"If I didn't… you'd just show up out of nowhere again… and start lecturing me."
"Yeah, exactly. If you hadn't, I would've lectured the hell out of you."
"You're seriously the worst."
Come on. I wasn't that bad.
I looked at Yebin again. Watching her grumble, I thought — she really was the type whose outside and inside didn't match.
Well. I'd always known that.
On the outside she was all prickly edges, the kind of person who'd jab you and leave you hurting if you approached wrong. But on the inside she was incredibly soft. Soft enough that the slightest wrong touch made her burst into tears.
Today was a textbook example of that… well, maybe not textbook, but that was the general idea.
"Seriously, you're crying over something this small? You crybaby."
"I'm not a crybaby — you're the one who brought something scary…"
"The death scenes are just hands covering your eyes. That's it."
I shifted behind her, reached around, and covered her eyes with my hands.
"Scary?"
"…No, not really. But hang on — those things look terrifying to begin with! Even their hands look terrifying!"
"It's not that bad…"
"Yes it is, it's scary. Super scary…! Their eyes are all gouged out, their bodies are full of holes, there's blood everywhere, their hair's all wild…!"
"Okay, okay. Okay. I'm sorry for making you play a scary game."
"You can stop apologizing for that…"
Yebin pulled my hands away. In the process, her hand caught my wrist.
And…
…Yeah. Her hands really were small. Her wrists were thin, too. About the same size as mine, actually.
I took her hand and gave her wrist a light squeeze.
Wow. I genuinely hadn't expected it to be thinner than mine.
I'd put on a little weight lately, but I was still underweight. And she was about the same as me?
"…Why are your hands so small."
"Girls' hands are all about this size, you know…?"
"Yours aren't especially small?"
"They're a little… small, but…"
"I knew it."
"Your wrists are thin too. You're underweight to begin with…!"
"I am underweight, but that doesn't mean my bones are weak or anything."
"Ugh…"
Yebin started thumping my arm with her fist. It didn't hurt even a little, so I just sat there and took it quietly.
Only for a moment, though — I caught her wrist again.
"Wh… what are you doing…?"
"I'm just amazed. How is it this thin."
"You pervert, grabbing a girl's hand like that."
"You're not a girl, so it's fine."
"Bullshit."
The teariness that had still been in her voice earlier was completely gone now. Which meant I probably didn't need to comfort her any further.
"You've got meat on you everywhere else, but your wrists are still skinny."
"Meat? Excuse me, my weight is perfectly normal."
"You're over sixty, aren't you?"
"I am not!!"
"Feels like you are."
"One more word and I'm treating this as you picking a fight with me today."
"Sure. But if you're 160, isn't 60 kilos normal? Oh wait — right, you're 150."
"Aaaagh! You're dead, you know that!? That's right — because of you, Tree Wiki has my height listed as 150 right now! Explain yourself!!"
For the record, Lee Yebin's height was 155 cm. A very small, compact height, if you asked me.
"Me? Why?"
"Do you actually want to die? You know what, just die."
Yebin grabbed me and immediately tried to sink those hideous teeth of hers into me.
"Hey, you filthy brat, get those teeth away from me!"
"Grrrrrrr!!!"
Chomp!
"Aaaagh! You're biting me again — do you actually have rabies!?"
"Grrrrrrrrrrr!!!"
Once again, Yebin was chomping down on my shoulder like a dog.
Seriously. I was starting to wonder if she really did have rabies. Why did she love biting other people's shoulders so much?
Only after prying her off did I manage to escape and make it back home.
And then…
"Whoa. I left my stream on."
I'd left the stream running when I went over.
Just in case, I checked Yebin's stream on my phone — hers had been properly turned off.
"Vini's stream was off, right?"
"Anyone who just said the word 'sex' is getting banned. No mercy for you people."
And she thought these people cut me slack?
Yebin, you need to see this chat. You'd be just as pissed.