28. Relationships (4)
Approach, so you can manufacture one pretext or another.
Use those pretexts to multiply the meetings.
Gather the trivial little facts, one by one.
Then, by one method or another, pack the relationship down, layer by layer.
Pass through incident after incident.
And devour them gently….
Tap. Tap.
I pressed the vending machine button and tipped my head, turning the thought over.
Looking back on it now, I wasn't sure I'd actually kept even two of those steps in any literal sense.
…Well. Whatever.
The result had been good. Good enough to call the best thing that had happened to me yet.
When I first found Lee Jiyoon lying on a bed in the Academy Infirmary, I'd thought that merely staying reasonably close friends would already count as a success.
I grinned to myself, dredging up something that was already more than a month old for no good reason. The way she'd bristled the moment she saw me, then gone sheepish after the treatment and let me close. The way she'd started throwing some incomprehensible wariness at me once she noticed I'd gotten friendly with her sister. The way her eyes had lit up the instant I used what I'd pried out of Lee Hayun and dangled a line, pretending I was into games. The way she'd swallowed that ridiculous excuse — help me practice, since your sister won't. And then the hidden side of Lee Jiyoon I hadn't even imagined at the start.
You could call it heaven's own luck.
No — not could. It was heaven's own luck.
The original plan had only been to play whatever game she liked and get close slowly, at my leisure. I'm not a mind reader. How was I supposed to know she had a kink for getting fucked by her sister's boyfriend and getting off on it?
She barely even showed up in photos. All I'd known was that her personality seemed a certain way, her skin was white, her hair was whiter, she was built to be stupidly hot, and that if I actually got to fuck her the rush of conquest would be obscene.
Well. Fine.
Thinking about it now, the lack of information was better.
Heroes, by the nature of the job, have their faces and the neighborhoods they live in more or less public, so otaku stalker bastards latch on and won't let go. Nothing about Lee Jiyoon's private life with men had ever come out. And she was relatively young, talked a lot, laughed easily — I could tame her, step by careful step, however I liked. Mm. This was better.
Someday, when she really made a name for herself as a hero, I was curious just how far she'd fall.
"……Ah. Speaking of boyfriends…."
Saying it out loud jogged something else.
Once it came out that a hero with an actual number to her name had a childhood sweetheart she'd been dating since they were little, the unicorn fans had coughed blood and dropped off in droves.
"…."
…Who was that again?
I remembered the trivial parts — her boyfriend was a C-Rank hero, or was it D-Rank — but the name…
Mmm. The name….
Anyway, the unicorns' verdict had stuck with me clear as day: she'd secretly looked like a slut. Her face and her name, though, refused to come back. Probably because the moment I heard she had a boyfriend, I'd shoved her down the list.
Goddamn it. Usually one look and it's burned in.
Remembering it out of nowhere was irritating.
"Nngh…. Ah, my throat hurts…."
I leaned lightly against the wall beside the machine and let the thoughts run a little longer. Then, half-asleep from a night I hadn't really slept, coffee in hand, I started down the hall at an easy pace.
Destination: Class 1-A.
Where Lee Jiyoon was.
"Ah, hello…."
"What's the infirmary teacher doing here at this hour?"
"No idea. Why are you asking me."
"Good morning!"
Maybe it was the white coat. Stirring up the hallway during the morning rush earned me a reasonable number of greetings from students whose names I didn't know.
I say reasonable because every one of them treated me from some vague spot between polite and slouching. Nobody was about to bow from the waist. A little nod of the head, and they were done. I understood. I wasn't complaining. Was there anyone in this academy with a more awkward position than mine? If I'd been in high school and found out my teacher was the same age as me, I'd have been unsettled too.
"Teacher! Teacher! Did you not sleep well last night? You've got dark circles!"
"…Ah, really? My eyes have been dry today, I'll give you that."
"You're a Healing Transcendent, though. You can't treat something like that?"
"As if. If that were possible, I wouldn't be here. I'd be parked beside some famous executive, keeping them awake twenty-four hours a day."
"Hehh~ Then why couldn't you sleep? Don't tell me…."
"I stayed up a little late playing games."
"Oh, you like games too, Teacher? Which ones?"
"Yeah…. Well…. This and that?"
A kid I didn't remember, and a pain about it. I tossed off answers to the chatter and scanned the students filing in.
What I was looking for was a height a little under five-seven, and a snow-white bob.
Not a single person matched. At best, students passing with halfhearted greetings — and one kid sprinting the other way, murmuring cafe mocha, cafe mocha in a cute little voice.
…Shame.
I'd come because I wanted to see what Lee Jiyoon would do if she happened to catch sight of my face. Walking straight into the classroom, though, would pull every eye onto me.
Forget it. Forget it.
I scratched my cheek, shook the students off, yawned, and slipped out from among them.
Where I ended up was the rooftop.
The reason was simple. I was sleepy, and I wanted wind and coffee. No more and no less than exactly that.
"…Ah."
If I'd known a blue-haired spy was already up here, sighing in heavy breaths, I would have quietly found myself a skybridge instead.
"…."
Was she hiding up here to contact Most Wanted? A rooftop, open to anyone, seemed a little defenseless for that. The stray thought lasted only as long as it took me to glance down at the phone spinning round and round in Baek Seoyeon's hand.
I had no interest in getting tangled up with that woman and collecting a headache. A light nod, the rooftop door pulled shut, and I turned my back.
That was the end of it.
Not a single footstep followed me.
Hmm. Finished typing, I propped my chin on my hand and stared at the laptop monitor.
First, number one. Training Lee Jiyoon and Lee Hayun to my taste. I worried over what to do with them from here and picked at a short fingernail.
At the start I'd been sure Lee Jiyoon would be the hard one. Somewhere along the way, the target had changed. Jiyoon compared herself to her sister — more precisely, she whispered that she was the hotter one, and wanted me to fuck her for it. Hayun was… right. Showing the reaction of an extremely ordinary person.
If she'd at least acted like she cherished her little sister to death, I might have looked for a method in that direction. They were such an ordinary pair of sisters, the kind who bickered, that nothing decent came to mind. If they'd been the sort who couldn't live without each other, blackmail would have crossed a line off the bucket list so much more easily. The more I thought about it, the more of a shame it was.
"…Jiyoon will try something, anyway."
Fine. Fine.
Nothing good was going to come out of my own head. Jiyoon was just as interested in a threesome as I was right now. Whenever she was home with her sister, she'd attempt something, little by little.
I stared blankly at the memo on the monitor, then slowly dropped my eyes to number two.
"…."
Han Sua.
Forming a sex-partner arrangement with her had been good, and actually doing it in the infirmary had been good too, but…
Embarrassment, maybe. For nearly a week now she hadn't so much as contacted me, let alone come to the infirmary. Yojora, who reeked of I'm in heat, dropped by. Even Baek Seoyeon, who let a faint wariness of me show, dropped by now and then. Only Han Sua didn't.
"…What am I supposed to do with this one."
A headache arrived without warning. The chair creaked as I tipped it back and stretched.
No matter how generously I tried to read it, the right reading was that she was avoiding me. People say no news is good news, but this was a bit much. Taken to the extreme, contact cutting off because someone had up and died was not good news either.
"Thanks to Yojora I thought this would go easier than expected…."
The road up to sex being a grind, that I could accept. It making more sense that things got harder after we'd already slept together? Please. Once you've done it, isn't the count supposed to climb like mad from there?
The frustrated sigh didn't last. I fished my phone out of the clutter strewn across the desk and moved my fingers.
Not a frontal assault on Han Sua, who was busy avoiding me.
To Yojora, who had to be stewing beside me over never getting a proper reward.
With this sort of thing, the effective move isn't to demand it yourself. You chew out the one below you.
"…."
A minute or so slid past after I sent it, light as anything.
A perfect unread ignore. Even the little 1 beside the sent message hadn't disappeared.
No way Yojora had muted my notifications. And it didn't feel like she was ignoring me on purpose just to piss me off — the face I'd seen last time she came to the infirmary had looked a little urgent.
"Is she in class?"
Fair. The time I'd sent it was awkward. Not on the hour — half past. I didn't really know how the academy curriculum ran, but in high school the breaks had been on the hour, hadn't they? …Hadn't they?
Well. She'd get back to me when she saw it.
I tossed the phone aside again and was pouring caffeine into my stomach when the infirmary got a visitor.
"You in? Oh. You are."
"…If you were curious, maybe knock before you walk in?"
"Sorry. I say that, but I assumed you'd obviously be inside."
"…."
What I'd meant was that knocking is basic manners wherever you go. Too roundabout, apparently. I looked at him with a stiff, blank face for a moment, closed the notepad, shoved my hands into the pockets of the white coat for no particular reason, and turned the chair.
"I sprained my wrist helping with sparring. Ugh. Maybe because it's been a while since I got hurt — it really hurts…."
"Better not to get used to pain. Sit here for now?"
"Yep, yep."
A frivolous man.
And a little short. Not storybook-dwarf short. Just a little short. Lee Hayun was on the small side herself, but I had a feeling that in heels her eyes would sit higher than his.
"…."
"…."
Maybe because I kept looking. The man who'd been grinning the whole time turned his gaze squarely on me.
His mouth was smiling. His eyes were smiling. Objectively, he belonged in the handsome category.
And I had seen him before.
"…Um, the treatment?"
"…Ah. Right."
Baek Seoyeon.
The man who had been standing behind that woman.