14. Taming Han Sua (3)
If I had to put a name to it, I was the type who saved the best bite for last. The strawberry crowning a cake. The prize side in a lunchbox. The chashu pork in a bowl of ramen, and the like. Rather than cramming the good stuff into my mouth and enjoying it before I got full, I preferred to set it on my tongue at the very, very end and savor it there.
The bitter ends, and the sweet arrives.
You endure the tasteless things. You swallow them down. And the fruit that has been swelling all the while finally—pop—lays its gift upon your tongue.
Nor was this particular taste of mine limited to appetite. Lust worked the same way.
The pleasure of forcing my hands onto a Hero who had moved to kill me the instant she saw my face.
And so, a few days later. The pleasure of watching that same Hero's face—the one clawing at the denial, insisting she felt nothing—slowly warp with pleasure and doubt.
And so, a few days later. The pleasure of a Hero who, any other time, would have been busy kicking me off on the spot, swallowing gulp after gulp at the sight of an erect cock laid across her lower belly.
And so, a few days later.
"I'll kill you."
"Pull it out. Right now."
"You disgust me, you fucking piece of shit."
And every other curse she had in her—the pleasure of a Hero whose mouth was the only loud thing about her, even as, on the sly, she drove her ass back onto me, wet slap after wet slap.
And so, a few days later. The pleasure of a Hero who came at me in a rage, swearing she'd have her revenge, only to be pinned in the most absurd way imaginable.
And in the end. The pleasure of a Hero anyone would have recognized, her identity sealed tight beneath baggy clothes, a pitch-black mask, and a hat, tapping—knock, knock—ever so carefully at the door of my place.
The pleasure, once that door was locked, of throwing her mask and hat to the floor the way you'd strip the wrapping off a package, and beginning a caress made of nothing but lust.
...Well. I hadn't managed even the first of those, let alone the last. And if you really pressed the point, it wasn't so much the bitter ends, and the sweet arrives as the sweet ends, and the sweet arrives.
A delicious palate cleanser, then something even more delicious to devour, then something more delicious still to finish on. That's far better, isn't it?
So. I was looking forward to it.
What would Lee Jiyoon be thinking—she who had started sneaking off for secret trysts behind her sister's back on nothing but that threadbare excuse called practice—left alone at home, the moment she heard the sound of me kissing her sister?
"......"
...It probably wouldn't be, I'm glad the practice is paying off.
Snow had been falling since dawn. Not the soft, sweet kind, those fat cozy flakes, but pretty enough in its own right, with a decent size to the grains. Winter was more or less over and it was already early March—how cold did it still mean to be? If it were up to me, I'd stay just like this under the covers and read manga.
"Haa..."
But I was a promotional model for the Hansol Group. A brainless idiot who couldn't even manage studying, the one thing that was supposed to be easy, which meant that today, too, I had a duty to keep neatly stacking up a good image for the Group at the Academy. ...But.
"Ugh..."
Still a pain.
I'd been sprawled face-down on the bed, ignoring the alarm clock ringing beside me, and only after the housekeeper came in insisting I was about to be late and shook me awake by force did I drift, half-asleep, straight into the shower. Too tired for real makeup, I let a cushion compact stand in for the rest. There wasn't time to style my hair, let alone dry it properly, so I dried the roots as best I could and tied it back however it fell.
...Maybe it was the rush of drying it, but something about me today felt a little like a lion. Those characteristic drowsy eyes. A face that left a laid-back impression, even if what was actually inside wasn't particularly laid-back at all. Hair curling every which way, simply because it hadn't dried all the way. The light brown of it, too.
Hmm. Mmmm.
The weebish little review I'd come up with, shaking my head this way and that in front of the mirror, lasted only a moment. I finished an undignified yawn, pulled on a white long puffer, and stepped out of the officetel.
About ten minutes into the walk, I came to a crosswalk packed tight with people.
"Hellooo..."
I said it carefully, to Yozora, who was busy crunching her way through the snow. When I'd first spotted her from a distance, I'd even considered greeting her in Japanese, and then dropped the idea at once. The reason was simple. It would have sounded like a weeb.
Even I, who had never managed a single friend, knew well enough that an image like that generally counted against you. For now, I kind of like manga was plenty. That much didn't make you a weeb. So long as no one found the otaku games buried in a corner of my phone, I'd be fine.
"Oh, it's Sua-chan."
I'd been waiting with my heart in my throat—what if she hadn't heard me?—when Yozora smiled and met my eyes. That cute face pulled an innocent smile out of me, and I slipped into place right at her side.
Maybe it was because I'd just suffered through drying my own hair, but today Yozora's long hair, falling past her waist, looked terribly inconvenient. ...Should I try opening with that? No. Would Yozora find it boring? A fun topic—what would even count? Manga? Wouldn't that sound weebish too? No. Yozora had said she liked manga. Ah, or I could just tell her I'd read the one she mentioned yesterday. And add that I'd liked it, even if I had to lie?
In my head, it seemed like we ought to be able to just say whatever we wanted, naturally. When it came to actually doing it, the words wouldn't come, and after I'd agonized over a topic with everything I had—
"Um. Yozora."
"Mm?"
The light turned green. My voice slipped in among the footsteps fanning out in a single rush.
"...Uh, that manga we talked about yesterday. ...I read it..."
"Oh, really?"
I'd been watching her face and stammering the words out with all the effort I had, and Yozora answered in an extremely bright voice. Good. This had to be a ninety, minimum. A pretty solid reaction, wasn't it? Now if I just said something nice—that it was fun, something like that—I could wrap the conversation up without it going badly.
That was the plan.
"You read it all the way to the end? The manga?"
"Huh? Ah, yeah, I read all of it. Mm."
Right up until Yozora, eyes beginning to glitter, asked in a pronunciation that was somehow far cleaner than yesterday's.
"Then you saw the sex scene all the way, the who—! Mmph, mmph!"
"Hey, Yozora, we're outside...!"
Right up until—because she had shouted sex for anyone to hear, dead center on a crosswalk full of men and women—I felt the stares and clamped my hand tight over her mouth.
"......Pwah. Even the part at the end, where she's face-down and twitching. You saw all of it?"
"......"
Right up until Yozora dragged my hand down the way you'd pull a mask down, and, smiling as sunnily as a child, spoke her Korean one precise syllable at a time.
I'm pretty sure that was how it went. I'd just forgotten every second of it, I was so flustered.
"I... I saw it. Mm."
"You saaaw it.... So you saw it......"
Lewd things aren't allowed. I'd taken that stance, and still come back having read it in a single day—was she like this because she found that funny? Yozora, hands shoved deep into the pockets of a zip-up hoodie as pitch-black as her hair, looked up at my face and grinned and grinned.
I'd only read it on the side because I was embarrassed that, even at this age, I knew less about sex than an elementary-schooler. And once I'd finished, I'd just closed it on a feeling of what even is this? It's disgusting. This is perverted. Seeing a reaction from Yozora far more intense than I'd expected, I got the sense that if I told her how I really felt, she would completely deflate. Did talk about dirty manga really make her that happy?
...Nothing else for it.
Embarrassing as it was, I had no choice but to keep the conversation going somehow. I looked into those red eyes—somehow far stickier than they'd been yesterday—for only a moment. Once I was sure the pedestrians around us had thinned out a little, I lowered my voice.
"It was... fun. The manga."
"Yeah? Which part?"
"Not so much one specific part being fun.... Overall?"
"...Heheh."
The moment I murmured a lie with no particular ornament on it, Yozora started flapping her hoodie like a penguin. ...The truth, it seemed, would have to wait until we were incredibly close.
"The thing at the end? How was it?"
"...How was it?"
"Did it get you horny?"
"Horn..."
Yozora's sudden, naked choice of words stopped mine dead. At the same time came a crunch, a foot sinking into a piled ridge of snow, and then my vision tilted in one clean line—until, with a crash, I lurched.
"You okay?"
"Ugh..."
When I creaked around to look behind me, three or four muddy footprints stood out sharp on the snow that had been shoved to the roadside. I was sure I'd been walking down the middle of the sidewalk until a moment ago. Apparently I'd staggered at what Yozora said.
...Did it get you horny? Where on earth had she learned Korean like that? Why say something like that out of nowhere and fluster a person? My palms and knees, the ones I'd braced against the ground as I fell, were torn and stinging, and all the while the gazes of the men passing by—having seen the whole thing and pretending they hadn't—felt far too vivid. A run had even shot through my stockings.
In the end, the point of the arrow called embarrassment swung toward Yozora.
"It's because you keep talking about stuff like that, Yozora...!"
"What stuff.... Oh, the manga?"
I got up at once and nodded. And then, from Yozora's mouth, still wearing that playful smile, Korean came out one crisp syllable at a time—with a pronunciation that, if I exaggerated only a little, could have belonged to a news anchor.
"You know the scene, right? Where she's screaming that she came, that she's gonna die, clutching the pillow tight and twitching all over, and he's got her ass in both hands—the one with the handprints—and he's pounding into her like crazy."
"......"
"The last scene, I mean."
"......"
"Did it get you horny?"
"......"
One syllable. Then another. Every time strange Korean came out in Yozora's voice, my eyes went, without fail, to the people around us. Fortunately, no one was close enough to catch everything passing between us. The people who'd been near me when I fell had all scurried on ahead, as if they'd promised each other. Only a few who looked like office workers were ambling over from far away.
...I was going to lose my mind.
Was she this uninhibited about that sort of thing because she was Japanese? Wait—was that a racist thing to think? My head was throwing up thoughts at random, I was so thrown. I scrubbed the final scene—rising up on the back of Yozora's description—out with an eraser, grinding hard, and brought my voice out in a whisper.
"U-um. Yozora?"
"Yeah. Sua-chan."
"I don't really know about stuff like that..."
"......"
"I'm sorry.... I... I don't really know if it g-got me... horny..."
Because I absolutely could not say I'd liked it, not even as a lie. Because if I chimed in and agreed that it had gotten me horny, it felt like Yozora, who liked lewd things, would catch on before long that it was a lie. Because I just wanted to end this cheap, vulgar conversation as fast as I could.
Honestly.
"......"
"......"
Fortunately, Yozora's smile was still intact, for now. ...No. If anything, she seemed to be enjoying this even more than a moment ago.
Well. I don't know.... My palm hurts....
The file I'd sent yesterday. The little 1 beside it—the mark that it had been read—had dropped off in what couldn't have been three seconds. So why wasn't there a reply?
Early that morning, fiddling with my phone in the infirmary, I let out a disappointed sigh. She must have seen it the instant I sent it, and yet Lee Jiyoon was aggressively her usual self. It had been the same after I got home from the karaoke date with Lee Hayun and started up a game. The usual briefing. The usual chatter. The usual goodbye. And then nothing.
Lee Jiyoon hadn't shown a single change, not through to this morning.
"...Strange."
She might have been in a bad mood. In reality it had the shape of stealing her older sister's boyfriend, but on Jiyoon's end, she might have taken it for a secret little romance of her own. Or she might have gotten turned on. I'd done kissing practice with Lee Jiyoon, and then I'd kissed Lee Hayun. I'd done Sex Practice with Lee Jiyoon, so I would have sex with Lee Hayun. Inside that consistent sequence, the immoral thrill of getting to have me first—before her sister—on the excuse of practice. She might have gotten horny off the back of that.
There could have been any number of other reactions besides. But she hadn't said a word, so all of it was empty guesswork.
Had I misstepped, because I'd never done this before? Would it be better to shift my approach a little, even starting now? Or better to watch how things sat for a few more days?
I set the phone, spinning round and round between my fingers, down on the desk.
Knock, knock.
That was why. Someone was rapping at the infirmary door.