How to Heal NTR Trauma: Method One (2)
Asking her to recommend something for me in return turned out to be a pretty solid move.
Riyeon found the idea interesting enough to take me up on it.
Perfect. Now she'd be too busy thinking on her own to keep firing off messages, and I could finally clear the backlog of work waiting for me.
Why was it impossible to escape this woman?
Startled, I glanced sideways—and met Riyeon's eyes. She gave me a little smile with her eyes.
Damn it. That eye-smile was so pretty my face unclenched before I could stop it.
An average guy grinning like an idiot is just a nuisance, so I forced my mouth back into a straight line.
If you only went by genre labels, movies, games, and comics weren't all that different.
Action-adventure would make a decent cover story, I figured.
On the rom-com drama side, Even After Knowing Everything of You sat unchallenged at number one, so she wouldn't dare touch that—and she probably didn't know action-adventure well enough, which meant she'd be buried in Google searches. That would buy me work time. That was the calculation.
Especially none in this particular scene. Online, sure—but that was about it.
Why? And more to the point—why did she keep trying to step over the unspoken distance between us?
Ah. I needed to correct myself.
Riyeon had been alone for a long time. I didn't know exactly what she'd been through, but it showed: she came on strong and treated people sternly on the surface, yet once she decided someone was okay, her sense of personal space completely failed her.
Even that "okay" was probably just the level of a coworker or a fellow otaku friend. As long as I didn't get the wrong idea and managed the distance properly, we'd be fine.
Well, well. Looks like HR's job just got a lot more important.
Instead of text, an emoji flew over.
It was a cool, anthropomorphic cat that looked a lot like her, giving a deadpan "okay."
Nice. Felt pretty good about that.
I'd just had a long, completely pointless conversation with a beautiful woman, and I hadn't even overdone it. My immunity to women was rising by the minute.
Keep this up, and someday I'd finally shake the compulsion to seize control of every conversation and force out jokes just because a woman spoke to me first.
Quitting smoking was going smoothly, talking to women was going smoothly—my body was going to be in fantastic shape at this rate.
After the emoji, Riyeon went quiet.
Finally. Time to get some work done.
I checked the pile of outstanding tasks.
Split the health-check targets by department? Can't you just put a filter on the Excel sheet yourselves?
More overtime on the floor? Well, there were a lot of holidays this month—that was unavoidable. I'd have to write a report taking the floor's side for management.
Someone asking if they have to burn personal leave for reserve training? The country's the one forcing you to go—use official leave, not personal days. When student reservists skip class, even professors don't say a word. Sure, the news has covered a few cases of people ignoring it, but that's illegal.
A day laborer on the floor worked fifteen hours last week and is raising hell about not getting weekly holiday pay? Weekly holiday pay only kicks in if there's a schedule to come back the following week. You don't just get it for working over fifteen hours in a week. And they want me to call the guy and explain? This is exactly where the stress comes from. You're the manager!!
HR stress isn't complicated.
Because so much of the work lives in gray areas, people constantly dump every little task they should be handling themselves onto me wholesale.
Whenever I say this out loud, someone always asks if HR isn't supposed to have a lot of power.
That's for conservative companies.
For reasons I still don't fully understand, the flood of startups has cultivated a culture that looks down on support functions like HR and general affairs—reducing us to a department people assume they can just lean on and wheedle favors out of, no matter how hard the work actually is.
Ha. And these same people still want to claim they care about labor standards.
…
God, I don't want to work.
The whole event with a beauty like Riyeon had made me forget just how miserable this job was.
If I could forget the Mizuki Drug Bulgogi Incident the same way, how great would that be?
For someone with zero company loyalty, the option of "just work harder than you have to" was far too cruel.
You bastards. Learn to sort out your own damn jobs properly.
You're managers. Passing word down to the ranks is your job.
I'm just a single HR guy.
Even if I am the one doing everything by myself.
Not that I don't think I'm a competent HR guy!
My irritation at the faceless mass of people in this company kept climbing as I checked the roughly scribbled task list on my notepad.
About forty minutes until clock-out.
The urgent stuff was all done. The rest would be nice to finish today, but… did I really have to?
Alright. Decision made.
I was stealing these forty minutes as personal time.
A little salary-thief action.
But since I was also the one who processed payroll, it was fine.
Anyone who had a problem with it could get their paycheck an hour late.
I stretched my arms over my head, rolled my neck, and loosened up.
She must have seen me. A message arrived from the seat next to mine.
When you don't want to work and the beauty beside you messages first—that was perfect, welcome timing.
I was in a good mood, so I answered with a double-word reply.
What was she talking about? After work was personal time.
She wanted to keep messaging me after we clocked out?
Well, well.
I checked the calendar.
Today was Thursday. Survive tomorrow, and the golden weekend began—two days of rest that would fly by at light speed.
Two days of sprawling in bed, ordering delivery, and never having to leave the house.
But after yesterday's catastrophe, I was carrying just as much internal damage as Riyeon.
It would haunt me all weekend for sure.
That was something I desperately wanted to avoid.
Conclusion: before the weekend hit, I needed to get at least some of this bullshit out of my system, by any means necessary.
Was our Riyeon's messenger speak a little… dated?
Maybe after years without friends, her chat style had fossilized somewhere over a decade ago?
Still, I had to pretend not to notice and roll with it.
Ah. That would work.
I'd actually been planning to suggest we hit a good restaurant after work and vent, same as yesterday.
To my surprise, Riyeon had already handed me something to focus on. If we poured all our attention into that, maybe the damage would dull a little.
I was about to send a light "sounds good" when another message came in fast.
Her tone somehow felt aggressive.
That was the downside of text-only conversation.
Without voice or nuance, you couldn't tell whether there was real hostility or if they were just talking casually without thinking.
Maybe she was annoyed that I'd started the conversation. I could understand that completely.
I was a working adult, after all. I didn't get bent out of shape over things like this.
For the first time since we'd started talking about Even After Knowing Everything of You, Riyeon read the message and went silent for a long while.
Of course. Time after work was precious.
I'd stuck my nose where it didn't belong.
I was about to tell her not to worry about it when an unexpected reply arrived.
That worked?
I'd deliberately listed conditions she might hate, and she still said it was fine.
I was getting what I wanted—so why did I feel weird about it?
The reason became clear soon enough.
Ah.
Without meaning to, I'd basically asked a woman out to dinner—something date-adjacent!
No wonder I'd felt off-balance!
Still, one thing was a relief: Riyeon had called me a friend.
Even someone as disastrous at romance as me had learned this much through hard experience.
When a woman labels a man "friend," she is not looking at him as a romantic prospect at all.
Thank god. Thank god.
Our Riyeon was finally taking her first baby steps at managing interpersonal distance!
This person, I swear…
The messenger went quiet again.
Exactly two minutes later, a reply came in.
A little snickering sound drifted over from the next seat.
Ha.
This did not bode well.