Please Teach Me (5)
People are creatures whose minds don't work nearly as well as they like to believe, the moment something sudden is set down in front of them.
Say you're walking along the way you always do, and you come to only to find a dump truck bearing down on you from point-blank range. Or picture a fat stack of bills dropping out of thin air and landing right before your eyes. An isekai truck, maybe. Or the charge of misappropriating lost property. Whatever the clever name, what actually surfaces a step ahead of it is something on the order of what the fuck. Go on. Imagine it properly.
Well. Considering that just about any animal locks up stiff the instant something frightening appears before its eyes, leading with a curse when you're thrown off isn't all that unusual a reaction.
...Right.
It wouldn't be a particularly unusual reaction....
A morning washed in warm sunlight. The infirmary sat idle, the opening-day rush long since switched off, in the hour when the students were busy sitting through class. I'd been laying the groundwork at my own pace, working out how best to approach Han Sua next, when the prey came running in of her own accord and said—almost like a threat—that she wanted to get close.
And instead of answering on the spot with Sure, let's get close, I found myself staring at her with a look that amounted to what the fuck.
That, too, wouldn't be a particularly unusual reaction.
"So.... Student Han Sua?"
"You can speak casually. We're the same age anyway, aren't we?"
"...Right. I understand. Give me a second."
That faintly commanding tone brought the Han Sua I'd investigated ages ago flickering through my mind, but only for a moment. I killed the chat screen—Lee Hayun had been chattering away in messages—and turned a steady look on the intruder in front of me.
...What the hell is this.
Wheat. Barley. Oats. Hair a bright brown, like those grains, and beneath it eyes the color of amber. Up to there, this was the Han Sua I knew. But this... atmosphere, I suppose you'd call it. This feeling of being spoken down to as a matter of course the moment we faced each other resembled, to some degree, not the Han Sua I'd come to know after regressing, but the version of her I'd looked into in the past. She still fell well short of the Han Sua who, behind those indifferent eyes, had torn named villains apart with a single sword as if it were nothing. Call it about 0.2 of a Han Sua.
Unlike when she'd come in with a hurt knee, or the bookstore meeting where all she'd managed was to freeze, she was giving off something roughly in that neighborhood now.
...Well.
"If I heard you right, just now, Sua... Student, you said you wanted to be friends with me."
"...Yes."
"Why on earth?"
Why she'd suddenly shown up at the infirmary and been the first to say something like that, I still couldn't say.
"I-I want to be friends. Why would there need to be a reason?"
"No. There has to be a reason to become friends. Similar hobbies, for instance. Or just finding it fun to be next to someone...."
Han Sua had started to argue back in that soft, persistent little voice, then pressed her lips shut. I knew perfectly well this wasn't the moment for perfectly sensible talk—I should have come out with something like I wanted to be friends too! Wow! But it was weird. This wasn't some cult pitching me a membership. Up through yesterday at the bookstore she could barely get a few words out, hemming and hawing, shy to the point of hiding her face, so why was she suddenly stuck to me asking to be friends? With no reason I could guess at, my head was tangling itself into knots. Surely she hadn't piled up a whole store of felt closeness toward me just from running into me once at a bookstore. I didn't think so. And yet, for someone who'd lived her entire life without a single friend, it almost seemed possible....
I was awkwardly scratching at my cheek when Han Sua's voice went on.
"...Um, we met at the bookstore yesterday. The two of us."
"We did."
"Our hobbies... are similar."
"...They are, but."
"Then we can be friends, right?"
"......"
"Right?"
"That's, um...."
My fingertips squirmed, hunting for something to push back with, cycling through one gesture after another, and where that hand finally settled was beneath my own chin. Chin propped on the desk, I stared blankly at the Han Sua in front of me.
Dizzy. Met at the bookstore → similar hobbies → friends! That absurdly simple chain of thought—the one I'd half-dreaded might actually be it—was dizzying enough on its own, and I was dizzy all over again because I still couldn't understand why that alone had her seeking me out and clinging this stubbornly, insisting we be friends. This wasn't that straw-hat pirate cartoon I used to watch on TV as a kid, the one where the captain befriends everybody on sight. What was this?
How had a woman this obsessed with making friends failed to make even one before I regressed? With that face, that body, that fortune, at least one or two guys thinking with their dicks should have been trailing after Han Sua. Questions breeding questions, one biting the tail of the next. I shoved the lot of them aside—they were making my head heavy—tapped my forehead with a closed fist, and answered.
"...Fine. Friends."
I couldn't begin to keep pace with a swing in Han Sua's feelings this steep, let alone make sense of it. But for now, this was the road closest to taming Han Sua. So long as we were tied together by the word "friends," chances to talk would multiply on their own.
Fortunately, once she heard the answer, Han Sua's expression brightened a little. Not that it had shifted much from her usual sharp look, but at least this didn't seem to be something she'd tossed out as a joke.
"And like I said earlier, you can drop the formal speech with me. I'm a student, after all."
"I'll drop it once I'm comfortable. It's still a little awkward."
"Then I can't drop it either...."
"I'll try easing into it, so for now I think it's better if we talk the way we usually do."
"Th... ...okay."
Maybe because I'd put up a bit of a wall. A brief, awkward silence passed, and then Han Sua scraped her chair this way and drew closer. She rummaged through her pockets for something, pulled out her phone, and held it out to me.
"...Y-your number. Please. Teacher."
"...Sure."
At this rate, Yozora might have done something to Han Sua behind my back.... The thought did reach me, in the end. There was nothing I could know right now.
Master.
It had been her first chance to call Seo Woojin Master. She hadn't taken it, and out of the ache of that missed chance she'd spent the whole night face-down on her bed, murmuring Master while she masturbated. The result of it sat right there beside Han Sua: Yozora, dead asleep, snoring softly with a pen clutched tight in her fist.
Han Sua, who wasn't even holding a pen, was gazing blankly at the new profile that had appeared in her messages.
Seo Woojin.
Of all the numbers saved in her phone, it was the first belonging to the opposite sex she'd ever learned, aside from her father's. And it wasn't a number she'd wrung out of him by force, dragging up yesterday and pressuring him until he gave in. It was the first number she'd won by reaching out herself and asking to be friends. Maybe that was why it felt so strangely fascinating every time she looked at it. Like a trophy, if she had to put a name to the feeling....
Well. That was all it was. Not romantic feelings or anything. Just fascinating.
Now all she had to do was learn from Teacher what kinds of things men liked, and the objective would be complete. The dream of finally joining the in-crowd wasn't far off either. Hang in there.
She cleared her throat for no particular reason and started pressing at the screen. The blackboard, packed solid with unidentifiable formulas, didn't enter her awareness in the slightest. Why? Because even if she looked, she wouldn't understand a thing.
From the look of things, Yozora didn't know a thing. I'd messaged her first—What is this?—and she hadn't even read it. Just left me hanging. If she'd given Han Sua a light first seasoning for my sake and served her up half-done, there should have been some kind of reaction. At minimum, she'd have read it and ignored me on purpose, dropping a hint so she could collect her "reward." Or she'd have played dumb, denied the whole thing, gotten me good and irritated, and then collected her "reward." One or the other. Leaving it completely unread and ignored, the way she had, meant what had just happened truly had nothing to do with Yozora.
Which left one question. What on earth had prompted Han Sua—who'd been so shy at the bookstore yesterday—to speak to me at all.
She must have just scraped the courage together somehow. My head hurt, so I wrapped the deduction up without thinking it through any further. From what I'd heard through Yozora, unlike Lee Jiyoon—who'd let her relationships go to seed after getting swallowed up by games—she was a pitiful girl who'd done nothing but study hard since she was little and had never once made a friend. Running into someone whose hobbies overlapped with hers, someone like Yozora or me, she probably just hadn't wanted to let it slip away. A simple, bitter little story.
I breathed out. Either way, I'd secured the position of Han Sua's friend, so all that lay ahead was a comfortable red carpet. Thanks to that, I had considerably less to think about. I could talk with her under the pretext of wanting manga recommendations, the way I had last time, and if I kept leaving the impression that I was someone she could trust, someday I'd be able to choose going to the bookstore alone with Han Sua, Yozora left out of it. Once the relationship deepened from there, she might even start going places with me that she'd never go with Yozora. From that point, take my time devouring Han Sua, and it'd be done. It no longer looked like I needed to put any special effort into the Han Sua front.
Then a little more attention on the Lee Jiyoon side....
Just as I was about to take my eyes off the fish I'd already caught and turn them toward Lee Jiyoon, who was in the middle of resting, the phone on the desk gave a light buzz. A notification from Han Sua.
...Strange. It should be class time right now. Was she messaging me because class was boring and she wanted me to entertain her, the way Hayun usually did? Then again, Han Sua.... For all the studying she'd done, the results had been impressively stupid. Must be a constitution that just doesn't get along with studying.
The chair creaked as I leaned it back and tapped the phone.
But the messages were, unexpectedly, perfectly ordinary. A student asking a teacher about something she didn't know—if anything, a rather model example. The problem was that the teacher in question was me.
Teacher. No matter how many times I heard it, the title made my skin itch, and I cleared my throat for no good reason. Then I put on the kindest act I could manage—the mask of a proper teacher—and answered.
"......"
What the fuck.