An Uncool Confession
Senior’s behavior had been off since this morning.
The warm, affectionate way she usually treated me had completely flipped—she wouldn’t say a word, wouldn’t even smile at me.
It felt exactly like the kind of atmosphere Haean had described, the one where she didn’t seem like she’d smile much at all.
If the reason was that I’d rejected her…
Well, that would make sense… except there’s no way it would!!!!!
When was it? When did Senior confess to me? Come on, brain, dig it out already! When and where did I supposedly get confessed to!!??
“Um, Senior.”
“Sniff… What?”
“When exactly did I reject you?”
I finally forced the question out.
God, I’m pathetic…
“…”
Senior just stared at me without a word.
I get it… Of course you’d look at me like that…
“…Yesterday, at the hospital…”
At least she answered.
Still, the hospital…? I had zero memory of that.
“I’m really… sorry, but… I don’t remember.”
“…You said you remembered. You said so at the hospital…”
I said that?
…No. At least, that memory doesn’t exist anywhere in my mental database.
“I told you I only remembered the last thing you said. That I’d forgotten everything else…”
“Ah.”
That part I did remember. Right—I definitely had.
I’d been so shocked that Senior was Kiri that I’d completely blanked on almost everything we’d talked about before that.
“N-no. That was… I meant I only remembered you saying you were Kiri…”
“…What?”
Oh. Senior’s voice came out sounding just as dazed as mine.
“…You said you only remembered the last thing I said?”
“Yes, so… I asked why you weren’t watching your own streams… and after that… you said you were Kiri…”
“…Huh?”
This time her expression was different from a moment ago.
Not angry, not sad.
Just pure incomprehension.
Question marks practically floated around her head.
“Then do you remember what I said after that?”
“What did you say?”
“…”
“Senior? What on earth did you… Ah!”
In that instant it hit me. When I’d learned Senior was Kiri and my brain had short-circuited, she had said something.
Ah. So what she said after that… was the confession…
And in that same moment, a phrase I hadn’t uttered since the army slipped out of my mouth inside my head.
…Talk about the worst fucking timing.
There had been a misunderstanding like this before.
A minor one, born from Senior simply not catching something I’d said properly.
But this time the fallout was massive.
We both realized we’d misunderstood each other, yet one clear, crucial fact still remained.
Senior confessed to me? Then…
My heart pounded.
There was no conversation between us. There had been plenty of silences today already, but the atmosphere itself was different now.
If I had to put the difference into words: until a moment ago it had felt like a winter wind was blowing, and now it felt like a spring breeze.
In that atmosphere I looked at Senior.
“…Hnn.”
She was cupping both cheeks with her hands, face bright red, avoiding my eyes and making some unidentifiable whimpering sound. I wanted to keep watching without meaning to, but I had the feeling she’d get mad if I did, so I turned my head away…
Still, we couldn’t just stay like this forever, so I called out to her.
“Um, Senior.”
“…What!?”
Whoa—she startled me.
I-I called her, but now what?
Honestly I hadn’t thought at all about what to say next, so my mouth just locked up.
“It’s nothing.”
I tried to run away…
“Are you kidding me right now!?”
Ah. No escape. Of course I couldn’t run from here.
Then…
“So… yesterday… did you confess to me?”
“!?”
At my question Senior’s face went even redder and she dropped her head. She stayed still for a moment, then lifted her face again, glared at me—
—and closed the distance in a rush.
“Yes! I confessed to you yesterday! The second I opened my eyes and saw you I was so relieved! And at the same time I was so hurt that you were still only talking about other people! With that feeling… I confessed without even realizing it!!”
Tears faintly gathered in her eyes, her face still red. She shouted at me as if angry, as if frustrated, and a little as if she were scared.
“So… what about you?”
And she asked me back. Even after I’d made her go this far for the person she liked, she was still giving me a chance.
Really… for a pathetic guy like me.
“I…”
“…”
I only managed two syllables and Senior already lowered her head and squeezed her eyes shut.
She must be anxious. Until a moment ago she’d thought she’d been rejected.
I wanted to erase that anxiety.
“I like you, Senior. Will you go out with me?”
Hearing my confession, the words that came out of Senior’s mouth were—
“…Liar.”
“Huh?”
“Don’t lie!”
Denial.
Why?
“I don’t believe you! You don’t like me!”
“No, I do.”
“Don’t mess with me! You don’t like me!”
“I confessed because I like you!”
“I was the one who confessed first!”
“That’s true!!”
Hah, hah.
I’d gotten emotional without meaning to and ended up shouting. Why on earth was Senior rejecting my words so hard?
“I really do like you, Senior. Sincerely.”
“I can’t believe it. It feels like a lie.”
“Why can’t you believe it?”
“Because I’m… Kiri.”
“What?”
“…If you’re with me, you could meet Eve too…”
It had only been a week, but I already knew Senior wasn’t the kind of person who would say something like that. She’d only said it because she was being driven into a corner mentally. And the reason she was cornered this badly… was probably me.
“Hic… That’s why you’re saying you like me…”
To those words from the crying Senior, I answered with more certainty than I’d ever felt.
“No.”
“It’s true I only realized I liked you yesterday. But even before you confessed, I already knew I liked you. No matter who you were, I liked you, and no matter who you are, I have zero intention of using that for anything. I just… like Wa Sol Senior.”
“Sniff…”
I admit I hadn’t given her a single reason to trust me until now. So at least from this point on, I wanted her to be able to believe me.
“Then can you stop watching Eve starting today?”
Be able to… be able to… What was I going to swear next?
Whoa. Hearing Senior’s words just now, my mind went completely blank. Is this okay?
“Th-that… that’s…”
“See! In the end there’s still something you prioritize over me! How is that liking someone!?”
“Ugh, but the fact that I like you doesn’t change!”
“Then don’t watch her! Only look at me!”
“I’ll only like you! I’ll only look at you! But this is a different conversation!”
“I’m jealous! I’m hurt! I want you to only look at me!”
I had no counter to Wa Sol Senior’s shouted words. She was right.
Having someone you like and still watching another girl’s streams could never look good.
Maybe… just like Senior said, I didn’t like her that much…
But I still couldn’t give up Eve… That day, because of Eve… I was here now…
“I…”
The memory of that day rose in my mind.
The memory of finding light alone in that dark, narrow cave.
The voice I’d heard then, the smile I’d seen then.
They’d led me outside.
Those feelings tangled inside my head and I couldn’t continue. Wa Sol Senior glared at me like that.
While we were staring at each other—
“Um…”
“Huh?” / “Eh?”
We both turned toward the sudden voice. A woman was looking at us through a window.
“So… I went to bed a little late last night, so… if you’re going to confess, could you maybe do it somewhere else, or at least keep it quiet?”
In that instant I realized our current situation.
In the hallway of the apartment building, after shouting that we liked each other, we’d fought.
And loudly.
“… / …”
Once the situation sank in, both our faces went completely red.
“I-I’m so sorry!”
“Sorry!”
We apologized at the same time to the woman who’d spoken to us. She waved it off, saying it was fine.
“And… if possible, I think it would be good if you two calmed down first and then talked properly. You two… it’s obvious just looking at you how much you already like each other.”
With those words she closed the window and went back into her room.
…What if people in the other rooms heard our conversation too?
The thought killed any courage I had left to say anything more here. I decided we should change locations and was about to call Senior when—
Senior called me first.
“…Gachi.”
“Yes?”
“Not here for now…”
“Ah, yes. Somewhere… else.”
“…Let’s talk at my place.”
“Yes… Yes!?”
“Shh.”
When I yelped in surprise, Senior quickly put a finger to her lips in a gesture to be quiet.
Oops, without thinking…
“M-me, going to Senior’s place?”
“Yeah… Hurry up and follow me.”
“B-but still. Is it really okay for me to go to your place…”
Senior, who had already started walking toward unit 105, stopped at my words. Then—
with a slightly pouty expression she looked back at me and said,
“If you’re my boyfriend, you can come over to your girlfriend’s place, right?”
At that single sentence every function in my brain shut down and I simply followed her.
“E-excuse me.”
“Come in.”
Except for when we’d moved her things in, this was my first time in Senior’s room. Even then I’d only carried boxes as far as the entrance, so stepping inside was completely new.
Once I was in, I could feel it clearly.
“…This is a streamer’s room.”
“Well, I am a VTuber.”
“True.”
A computer with three monitors, a headset and mouse. There was even a camera mounted on one of the monitors, and the chair was the kind you only saw in PC cafés.
“Sit on the bed over there.”
“Ah, okay.”
Following her directions I sat on the bed. It was softer than I’d expected, and it smelled… nice somehow.
Senior sat in the chair in front of the computer with her legs tucked up the way she always did, and looked at me a little sharply.
“Don’t you have something you need to say to me?”
“Something I need to say?”
“You have to… say it properly.”
“Huh?”
“…I confessed first. So why are you the one confessing?”
Ah. So that’s what she meant.
Finally catching on to her intention, I barely managed to calm my racing heart and spoke with a slightly trembling voice.
The answer I hadn’t been able to give yesterday because I hadn’t heard her.
“I… like you too, Senior. So I want to go out with you. Will you?”
“I confessed first. Why is it a question?”
“…So what’s your answer?”
“Yeah. I will.”
So that meant we were dating now. But there was still something unresolved.
“But… I’m definitely going to keep watching Eve. Even so.”
“It’s fine.”
Senior pulled her knees together on the chair, hugged them, and spoke.
The Wa Sol Senior in front of me no longer showed the emotional side she’d had in the hallway just now.
“I told you last time. I found someone to fight. You just stay the way you are.”
“Ah, at the café.”
“Yeah. It’s the same now. Just stay the way you are. I’ll change it. I can do it…”
No, maybe I was imagining it.
She still seemed a little emotional. How to put it… I could feel her resolve.
“I’m going to make you look at me more. So Gachi… just stay with me.”
“…Senior.”
When I called her, Senior’s lips jutted out in a pout and she continued.
“In exchange, grant me one request.”
“A request?”
“Change the way you address me.”
The way I address her?
She meant how we call each other, right?
“I don’t like ‘Senior’… Last time I told you to do whatever was comfortable out of consideration for you. But now that we’re a couple, I want to be called something more intimate.”
Address terms can differ from person to person. Some couples call each other with “ssi,” some keep using formal speech.
That’s something dating people work out between themselves.
And Senior… wanted a different form of address than this “Senior.”
“…I don’t really know how couples usually address each other.”
“I don’t know either. Just call me whatever you want.”
“Then… Wa Sol… nuna?”
“…Hnnnnn.”
Why was the person who’d asked me to call her something different reacting like that?
Wa Sol Senior… “Wa Sol nuna” buried her face between her knees and kicked her feet up and down. The sight was so adorable I just kept watching, and some time passed like that.
Once she’d calmed down a little, Wa Sol nuna lifted her head again.
“Are you going to keep using formal speech?”
“I’d like to use casual speech if possible… is that okay?”
“Why are you even asking? If you’re my boyfriend… do whatever you want.”
“…Yeah. Got it. Wait, no—got it.”
Maybe because it still felt awkward, formal and casual speech mixed together unless I paid attention. Time would probably fix that part.
“So… we’re dating now, right?”
“Yes… no, yeah. That’s how it is.”
“Somehow… this is really uncool.”
“Reality’s always like this.”
“Haa, I thought we’d have a more romantic confession.”
“I have nothing to say for myself.”
“Formal speech again!”
“That one was on purpose as a joke.”
“Apologizing is a joke!?”
“That was casual speech!”
“Look at you raising your voice the second you drop the formalities!”
“…I’m sorry.”
As the guilty party I could only feel bad.
Wondering if she was still actually mad, I lifted my head and saw—
“Hehehe.”
Wa Sol nuna smiling the way she always did. For some reason it felt like I hadn’t seen that smile in ages.
Just imagining not being able to see Wa Sol nuna smile like that made my chest hurt. Once that thought hit me, there was only one thing I could do.
Do better. So that nuna can keep smiling from now on.
Having sworn that, I looked at the softly laughing nuna with affection.
She must be happy right now, right?
How wonderful it would be if I could know what she was thinking.
Wa Sol’s Side
Wa Sol nuna… Originally I just wanted him to call me by my name. But hearing Gachi call me nuna…
Hehehe.
I’d been holding it in since earlier, but I couldn’t hold it any longer and the laughter finally burst out.
I’d been depressed all night thinking I’d been rejected, but once I realized it was a misunderstanding and that Gachi liked me too, happiness suddenly started filling me up from the inside. And after that the laughter wouldn’t stop.
The Gachi in front of me still had his head down like a criminal who’d committed some crime.
Ah, just now he lifted his head a little and our eyes met. Then he scratched his cheek awkwardly…
Hehe, cute.
No, not just cute.
There’s no way I’d fall for someone this hard in such a short time over just that.
Gachi, do you know?
That I fell for you even earlier than you fell for me. And for a ridiculously simple reason.
Thanks to those words of yours, the knot inside me disappeared, and being by your side made my heart feel light and at ease.
Whenever we ran into each other by chance I’d be the one to speak first, I’d go meet you even knowing it was a misunderstanding, and even when I thought you’d rejected me, just hearing you talk to me made me so happy… that I deliberately treated you coldly.
I like you.