The Almighty Has Dealt Very Bitterly with Me (4)
Putting a name to one's own feelings is no easy thing. All the harder when the feeling is one a person has never once known in all their life.
And yet an emotion not fully woken to—one never cleanly sorted and sifted out—is by no means absent for the lack of a name. Did Shakespeare himself not say as much? A rose is not beautiful because the word rose has been fastened to it. A flower left with no name at all will still, from the very place it stands, quietly put forth its fragrance.
Which is a long way of saying this.
"Aaaaaaaah!"
Even a dark history realized only after the fact will not kindly strike from the record the memories of the years one failed to see it. The past is a merciless creature by nature.
Ninomae Hitomi had her head buried in the living-room kotatsu, howling. Only her lower half stuck out, and her legs thrashed.
"Um, Hitomi? What on earth has gotten into you...?"
"Gyaaaah...! Graaah...!"
"Hitomi?!"
Her mother, Fumiyo, stared at the spectacle with a thoroughly bewildered face.
"So she wasn't a friend after all."
"And what are you going on about now...?"
"Best to leave her be for the moment. Looks like that advice has finally landed, six years on."
"Hm? What's that supposed to— mm?"
And with that, Fumiyo was half-dragged off by her husband—Ninomae Hajime.
"Auuu..."
Left alone in the room, Ninomae Hitomi let her limbs go slack. She had come back from a short walk outside with Han Seoyeon, sent Seoyeon up to the room ahead of her, and had been like this ever since: caught in a loop of thrashing, going limp, and screaming all over again.
"No. I'm not... that sort of..."
"Oh, this is bad. She can't even get past denial, and that's only the first of the five stages."
Before the upper body she had buried in the kotatsu, a three-heads-tall chibi floated like a hologram. Wings stretched from its back and beat the air; its hair was the color of water; and, crowning the whole display so there could be no mistake that this was an angel, a halo hovered over the top of its head.
"You summoned me out of nowhere, so I assumed something had blown up again. I never imagined it would be for counseling of this sort..."
"B-but the only friend I can talk to openly about something like this is Shion..."
"That is a remark in which I detect, ever so faintly, the darkness of your interpersonal relationships."
Hikari said as much, then sighed.
"Well. Earning my contractor's goodwill while I'm here isn't a bad judgment, I suppose."
She fluttered over and took up a position directly in front of Ninomae's face.
"But even granting that this is counseling... you're reacting this way because, in some corner of your heart, you've already admitted it. Haven't you?"
"U-ugh, but... it might not be."
"You sound remarkably short on confidence. So I was right."
Ninomae fumbled for words. Everything about her said she had very little faith in her own argument.
"Friends! Shion and I are simply friends...!"
"In short, it's this. She was a precious friend, and now you feel as though you've gone and harbored strange feelings, and the whole mood of it is peculiar..."
Or perhaps she simply could not tell whether what she felt for Han Seoyeon was aimed at a precious friend, or at something a little different. The mere size of one's feeling for another person was not enough to draw the line. Were a friendship truly strong, it would not be strange even to stake one's life on the other's behalf. Stories of those who did not flinch from hardship for a friend, if one went looking, would prove plentiful enough.
And that was precisely why Ninomae had been able, all this time, to slap the label of friendship over her mood and skate on past it. Friendship and romantic love were not a matter of one emotion outranking the other; they simply differed in kind. Sometimes a feeling lay stretched across that border, and telling which side it belonged to was no easy thing.
"But consider, Contractor. If you find yourself wanting to do to someone the things ordinarily thought of as what lovers do, isn't that already love?"
"But still... a kiss on the cheek is something friends can manage perfectly well, I'd say..."
"Even so, I don't think people usually smooch quite to that extent. No—argue this all we like and we never leave the starting line."
Hikari resolved to come at it from a different angle. Trying to smash an impregnable fortress head-on would have been a fool's errand.
"All right. Fine. Then let's try it this way. Let's go further."
Her fingertip and the tip of a wing leveled at Ninomae in the same instant.
"A kiss not on the skin, but on the lips themselves. Touching a chest, or being touched. Merely imagining it will do."
"...Even without it going all the way to romantic feelings, I don't think it's impossible. I've seen schoolgirls grab at each other's chests or bottoms and run off as a game... and kissing, too, that is, if the other person were close on the level of family..."
"Damn it. Isn't your category of friend a little too wide?"
At Ninomae's answer, Hikari let her wings droop all over again.
"No—more to the point, what was that pause just now? You thought you wanted to, didn't you? Hm? So you rationalized it and made your excuses, didn't you?"
Ninomae looked away. The best she could manage was a mumble of, "I-it's not an excuse..." The face gone bright red could not be blamed on the stuffy heat trapped under the kotatsu alone.
"Haaah. Then let's step out a little further. An adult's kiss. A deep one, tongues mingling. Well? This leaves no room for an excuse, does it?"
"..."
"If you think it over and find you want to do this too, then you'll admit it, Contractor. Yes?"
Ninomae kept her mouth shut for a while. She rolled nothing but her eyes, stole a glance at Hikari, and looked away again.
"I-it's nooot...?"
"Wow. Genuinely unconvincing. —Quit the nonsense. What good does it do to say that with a female's face?"
"A female's face...?! What is that even supposed to mean?!"
"Shall I lend you a mirror, Contractor?"
Ninomae was struck speechless once more. In front of her, Shirase Hikari's other self darted back and forth through the air.
"Uuugh, fine! I admit it. Admitting it is enough, isn't it...!"
Only after a long silence did Ninomae cry out, her face all but crumpling into tears.
Yes. By now, deny it as she might, she could not deny it at all. The thing she had never managed to look at straight—or had been forcing herself to look away from—had seized her by the head and turned her gaze upon it by force. Every one of those feelings up until now—no, it could hardly have been love from the very moment they first met, so from some turning point onward, the feelings from then until now—had in fact been romantic love. Aware of it at last, Ninomae twisted and writhed all over again.
"So you've finally conceded."
"Uuuuugh...! Yes. I want to do lewd things with Shion...!"
It was, in its way, a declaration of defeat. Defeat at whose hands was a question that invited a tilt of the head—but along with the shame, she was certainly feeling some faint and unplaceable humiliation.
"...!"
In that instant a clunk reached her, and Ninomae shrank in on herself. Judging by the vibration, it was the sound of something striking the kotatsu's tabletop. Her blood went cold. The warmth of the kotatsu was no help whatsoever.
"..."
Squirming, Ninomae crawled out from under the kotatsu. A mug lay overturned on the table, spilling black coffee. And of course, in a situation like this, there was bound to be a human being who had knocked it over.
"...Hm. I remembered I'd left the coffee and came back to fetch it."
"A-ah, Dad?!"
It was Ninomae Hajime. His eyes were opened only a fraction wider than usual, and yet set against the man who almost never showed a feeling at all, there was no mistaking it: he was thoroughly flustered.
"...I'll say it again. If that's what you want, I'll support you."
She had cast a soundproofing spell beforehand, just in case Han Seoyeon might hear her wailing, but its boundary was only ever the room. Let someone step all the way inside, and it meant nothing. Ninomae's face had gone the deep, swollen red of a ripe persimmon on the verge of bursting.
"No, Dad, that's—! It's not...! No, it's not that it isn't, but— I mean, anyway, the thing is...!"
"It's fine. These days they call it political correctness, and it seems the side that rejects this sort of thing is the one that catches the abuse..."
"Daaad?!"
"Miss Ninomae's mother. She truly is accomplished at cooking."
"Y-yes..."
Heading for the room once dinner was done, Han Seoyeon had brought it up. She had heard before that the family once ran a restaurant, and that Ninomae had learned to cook from her mother, but eating the cooking herself was a first.
The result was thoroughly satisfying. Han Seoyeon was hardly the sort to take any particular pleasure in fine dining, and yet even a palate as cheap as hers could tell, unmistakably, that Ninomae Fumiyo's skill was exceptional.
"...Miss Ninomae."
"Y-yes?!"
She had been midway through that praise when Han Seoyeon spoke her name instead, and at the way Ninomae startled and flinched, her brow drew tighter still.
"Are you quite all right? Your manner was rather strange all through the meal."
"A-ah, no! I'm completely normal, though...?"
"..."
"...Ehehe."
Even as she said it, it struck her as the plain reaction of someone with a guilty conscience. But there was no taking back words already out, and she could only laugh the moment off as though she hadn't the faintest idea what he—what anyone—might mean.
"...Is that so."
At that, Han Seoyeon let it pass without prying any further. It was simply the way of things between them not to dig by force into what the other wished to keep hidden—and there was, very likely, just a little of the feeling that she was cute, so what did it matter.
It was a state of affairs that leaned on Han Seoyeon's goodwill—and a touch of desire?—and it was not as though the guilt failed to come. But it could not be helped. Her face was nowhere near thick enough to set it down in front of the woman herself: that what she had felt every time she looked at her had been love, and that only now, knowing it, had her heart belatedly begun to pound.
"Should you ever feel you need my help, please tell me. At any time."
While Ninomae was still tangled in that anguish, Han Seoyeon reached the brisk little conclusion all on her own and pressed a kiss to her cheek. A soft give and a lukewarm warmth touched the skin for an instant, then drew away.
"...Isn't it a bit much? That whole mindset of saying something plausible and adding a kiss, figuring it'll mostly soothe a person's heart?"
"Mm. Was it perhaps too ill-suited to the situation?"
"..."
Ninomae held her silence a while, then turned her head without a word. Worried, it seemed, that the gesture might be taken to mean something else, she timidly pointed a finger at her own cheek—the one opposite where Han Seoyeon had kissed her a moment before.
When Han Seoyeon saw it and kissed that cheek as well, her expression came undone of its own accord into a helpless, silly smile. There was no way it didn't feel good. Lay every circumstance out in the open, and it was a kiss from the person she truly liked.
"..."
Even so, if something still caught at her—
"...Shion, I like you."
"Yes. I do as well."
She had said it while kissing Han Seoyeon's cheek in return, and Seoyeon answered with a faint smile. Ninomae Hitomi stared hard at that face. Her gaze was drawn to those lips as if being pulled in, and unthinking, she swallowed.
Probably, if she demanded a kiss of lips on lips right this moment, Han Seoyeon would be a little thrown and grant it in the end all the same, with a if that is what Miss Ninomae wishes. But Ninomae knew all too well that the I like you they had only just traded did not mean the same thing.
To take the heart of a Han Seoyeon who did no more than hold her dear, and with it slake her own want—where was there an act as ugly as that? She could not possibly go so far. Not Ninomae.
...It's hypocrisy anyway, though.
Of course, if she truly believed that, she ought to have held back even the touch of a moment ago. It was only a difference of degree; this, too, was feeding on Han Seoyeon's ignorance and her kindness. And yet here she was, pinning on one reason after another so she would not have to let go of a sweetness already tasted—a creature sordid past all words. Ninomae sighed at the revulsion she felt toward herself.
If Shion learned of this... would she despise me, I wonder.
She would rather it were so. If mercy were extended even to a self like this and she were taken in regardless, that, she thought, might be harder still to bear. And so Ninomae, feigning that she knew nothing at all, went toward the room with Han Seoyeon's arm gathered in against her... or that was the idea.
"U-um?"
"...Huh?"
When the door opened, thoughts that complicated scattered without leaving a trace.
In the bedroom, the futons had been laid out neat and square. That the bedding sat jammed flush together, she could understand for the moment. The room was hardly spacious; if anything, it was only to be expected.
But however she turned it over, Ninomae could not find a single reason the two pillows had to be pressed completely together.
"Daaaaaad?!"
She cried out, voice breaking, for the culprit of this state of affairs—circumstantial evidence was all she had, but it was surely one hundred percent. For the scene was nothing whatsoever if not, in every particular, the atmosphere of a bridal chamber.
"A-auuu..."
"Miss Ninomae?"
And whatever it was she had pictured, Ninomae's legs gave out. She swayed and slumped against Han Seoyeon.
Eh? Ah, no. Sharing a bed in this situation is seriously impossible. I'll die. My heart's pounding so hard I'm going to die...!
"Um, Miss Ninomae? Can you hear me...? Miss Ninomae?"
"Haaah..."
Ninomae began, in all seriousness, to consider whether her father was attempting to assassinate her by heart failure.