16. Words of Love (3)
Yozora's special selection. Twenty-one romance manga.
—Twenty-one dirty comics wearing romance as a disguise.
If you mashed the plots of the comics in that pile together and summarized them roughly, they went like this. A guy and a girl collide over some trivial pretext. Something tiny—like stumbling onto the other person's peculiar private life.
The girl who seemed dazzling at school turns out to be a homey kid, run ragged looking after a little sibling. The cheerful girl who looked as if she couldn't care less about subculture is secretly cosplaying as a hobby. Or, simpler still: the kid you hated for having zero manners turns out, once you actually get to know them, not to be such a bad person after all. Well. Something like that.
From there, the story unfolds entirely in the protagonist's first person. The protagonist usually studies the other person with a steady, measuring look—what's that one's deal?—while the heroine under observation doesn't have much of a thought in her head.
They start talking more often. They run into each other by chance at a festival. They grow a little closer, and someone gets invited home. They clear, one by one, every cliché a story in that genre is required to have. And around the time the heroine's heart and the protagonist's have quietly drawn level—
In the end, they do it.
Whether they went at it roughly or gently, the details differed a little. I'd read straight through, found them nothing but sickening, couldn't get any real enjoyment out of them, and skipped the rest.
Anyway.
In the end, they do it.
S...
......
...Sex.
"......"
Which is exactly why my head hurt.
...To add a little explanation as to why.
Teacher Seo Woojin was following well behind, so it wouldn't be a pain to explain if other students spotted us. I'd invited him over with all that bold momentum, and only now was I busy groaning under the thought that had finally caught up. Wait. Did I just invite a guy home first?
This situation. Woojin might have been Yozora's boyfriend, sure, but didn't it look exactly like something out of those comics and novels? Right now I was playing the observer-protagonist to perfection, and the soft, docile Seo Woojin—texting me without a thought in his head—was playing the heroine. Which meant there was something strange waiting at the end of this, didn't it?
That, shamefully, was why those weeb thoughts kept rising in my head and sinking again, over and over.
"Bit of a letdown."
"…Huh?"
Inside the elevator shooting upward, he offered the words lightly.
"It's not nearly as impressive as I was expecting."
"Wh-what kind of place were you expecting? No—what were you expecting?"
"Something that could put a hotel to shame? I figured it'd be about that level."
"…There aren't places like that around here. And even if there were, I wouldn't want to live in one."
"…Ah. So you couldn't buy one. There weren't any."
"......"
Whether he was trying, somehow, to clear this awkward air, or whether this too was just an extension of conversation practice—I couldn't really tell. If it was the former, he'd succeeded by a hair. If it was the latter, it was a complete disaster, since I'd snapped the thread instead of carrying it on. I couldn't really tell. Seo Woojin was standing right beside me, and I was so painfully aware of him that I couldn't really tell.
"......"
"......"
Thanks to my miraculous communication skills, the elevator had gone quiet. Before long, even the faint hum of the machinery had faded out of hearing. Because my head hurt. Because every kind of thought kept craning its neck in on account of Seo Woojin, and my head hurt!
If I had to pick the most representative cause among them—how, exactly, was I supposed to drive out the lewd little demon squatting in my head. That.
Pressed tight against the elevator wall for no good reason, I pretended not to pay Woojin any mind, pretended to be mulling over tonight's dinner, arranged my face into the most bored expression I could manage, and scrubbed the sweat from my palms.
...One thing I ought to get straight first. Seo Woojin probably wasn't thinking anything of the sort. I knew perfectly well that what I was doing right now was a weeb delusion. But I was a weeb, so instead of the clean image the students saw—the endlessly, endlessly kind infirmary teacher—what kept laying itself over him was that shameful image only Yozora knew. ...Master... or some title of that sort.
Of course, I figured it'd be fine, more or less. I was just making a fuss, and he seemed like a man who knew how to separate the public from the private, the on from the off. There was no way he'd show me the side of himself he only showed in front of Yozora. Right? So I should just stop having the thought at all. It would be rude to Seo Woojin, who was readily trying to help me with nothing asked in return.
"......"
That conclusion, too, was already the twentieth. The twenty minutes from the Academy home—this cycle had been turning once a minute the whole way. ...If only Yozora hadn't recommended those comics, I wouldn't have had this kind of worry at all.
Right on cue, a ding—the sound of the elevator stopping. Breathing out my twenty-first sigh, I hitched the bag I'd let sag back onto my shoulder and took the lead. Behind the shuffle of my sneakers, the unhurried sound of Seo Woojin's solid loafers laid itself over my footsteps.
And so we reached the front door, and just as I was about to tap the pitch-black password keypad, I startled at a voice that came out of nowhere, shoulders jumping.
"Sua."
"…Wh-what?"
Not anyone else. It was Seo Woojin's voice, gazing at me steadily from the side. He was taller than I'd thought. The realization came to me fresh.
"Isn't it better to cover the keypad when you enter the password?"
"…It's fine. You don't know the first-floor entrance code anyway."
"Hmm."
"Ah, or you could turn your head..."
"I was going to, of course. You just seemed a lot more unguarded than I expected. ...I'll stay turned around, so hurry up and enter it."
"......"
An ambiguous way of speaking—somehow like a teacher, somehow like a friend. It didn't feel like he was talking to someone his own age. It felt like I was facing someone about five years older. Then again, even if we were both twenty, he did have a position of sorts as the infirmary teacher. That was probably why.
He turned his whole body aside, just like that, leaned against the wall, and started fiddling with his phone. ...For someone who got called Master, he looked awfully mild. Was he talking with Yozora right now? Or some other girl.... Mm. Don't dig. No telling what I'd find. Getting tangled up with him over girl trouble was obviously going to be exhausting.
I shook off the small curiosity and stepped inside.
"…Oh, welcome...?"
And my eyes met the housekeeper's, hard at her cleaning again today. More precisely, it wasn't my eyes she'd met. It was Seo Woojin's.
"You're here...?"
"......"
Ordinarily we were close enough that she'd tease me now and then, but right now that glance flicking my way, again and again, was terribly hard to take. Something, well.... Because the look in the housekeeper's eyes was the look of someone who had just discovered a boyfriend I'd been hiding. If I let time pass like this, the misunderstanding would only pile higher. I wet my lips for no reason and drove the point in before that sharp-eyed housekeeper could hustle out and leave us the place.
"He's a friend. Just a friend from the Academy."
"Ah. A friend."
"Yes. You say hello too. Quickly. This is the housekeeper who helps with the housework."
"Hello."
Good. A bow of the head was enough. With a soft rustle I slipped off my pure-white long puffer, handed it to the housekeeper, and—before any unnecessary remark could escape—led Seo Woojin into the bedroom.
The cleaning was already done anyway, so that was fine. ...Over there, the bookshelf along one wall of the bedroom being packed solid with manga was a little mortifying, but it was fine. He'd probably caught on, more or less, ever since we'd run into each other at the bookstore.
All right. Practice, now....
Practice. Where? There was nothing in here but the bed. Should we do it standing? Or would the living room be better? But then the housekeeper would have no choice but to see. So doing it in here would be bet—
......?
...W-wait.
Wasn't bringing a guy into the bedroom in the first place far stranger than—
"You like manga, huh?"
"…Huh?"
A soft voice, right on cue. I turned my head and saw Seo Woojin's back, strolling at his ease in front of the bookshelf. He already knew all of this. Why was he even saying that?
"I don't know romance manga that well, but I recognize a few of the famous ones. Summer Snow, for instance."
He hadn't pulled any volumes, only skimming with his eyes, when he paused briefly before one, smiled faintly, and drew it out. Honestly, it wasn't a particularly famous book. It had come out in collected volumes, so I couldn't call it a total flop, but if asked to name works with more cachet than that one, I could have named any number. Of the books on the shelf where Seo Woojin stood, more than eighty percent were more famous than that one.
I sighed. If he'd only gone one handspan farther to the right, he could have picked a genuinely famous manga that had sold over thirty million copies. ...Right, well. He'd said from the start that he was only somewhat interested in sports manga. It was possible he just didn't know the other genres. Not worth being disappointed over. It was only a little funny, him acting like he knew while knowing nothing at all.
I sank lightly onto the plush bed and opened my mouth.
"…You really don't know, do you. That's not a famous manga."
"Yeah? Guess I had it wrong. Similar title, maybe?"
"More than that, the one next to it is..."
"Ah, hold on."
Things being what they were, I was just about to recommend a manga a guy could read without any trouble when Seo Woojin cut me off and pulled out a new volume. Ah, that one had sold pretty well. It suited my taste, too, in its own way. If I were naming a personal top five, it would unfortunately miss the cut, but if I used every finger on both hands, it was the kind of book that could slip in with room to spare.
"This one's pretty famous, isn't it?"
"…Yeah. That one probably sold close to ten million copies?"
"Ten million? How much do you even make off ten million?"
"From what I heard, the author walks away with something like three million dollars...?"
Hearing the figure, Seo Woojin let out a light sound of admiration and gave the book a quick skim. After that he kept pulling volumes out and sliding them back in, asking about them.
"Then what about this? I feel like I've actually heard this title."
"Thirty million. It's especially famous in Korea, so you would've heard of it."
"So that's over seven million. Off this one book."
Among them were straightforward hits, loved by a great many people just as the numbers said, and—
"This one's only two volumes. At that length, is it a short?"
"......"
—works that hadn't gotten that hot, but that I'd personally thought were pretty good.
"You read the ones that aren't famous, too. Do you go looking for these yourself?"
"S...something like that. Yeah."
"Kind of like a deep-sea survey team."
"Ahaha..."
...But. It was a shame to just lump that in as a manga that isn't famous and move on. My mouth kept itching. So I let a few more words slip out, for no good reason.
"Th-that, um..."
"Yeah?"
"That book—it is short, that's true, but the author pressed in only what needed to be there, packed it so tight that it doesn't really feel that short..."
To sum it up: the story was pretty good, in its own way. Read it again and the foreshadowing tucked inside showed itself one piece at a time, and the characters—the heroine especially—were incredibly three-dimensional. I hadn't kept exact time from the start, but I was pretty sure I'd talked for a whole ten minutes, running my mouth about that one book.
And then—
"I see. Hmm."
"......"
He hadn't said a single word for all ten of those minutes, and only now tossed out one idle syllable—and that was what brought me back to reality.
...Had I just seemed way too weeb? The thought arrived late, only after I'd gotten it all out and felt the relief. I hadn't called Seo Woojin over to talk about manga in the first place. I'd brought him home just to practice talking with a guy....
"......"
To practice talking.
While I was turning those words over and over, Seo Woojin pulled a new volume from the shelf.
A thought that came to me only now. It was the first time I'd ever talked about manga with someone for more than three hours.
And with a guy, at that.