Let the Waters Under Heaven Gather into One Place (4)
A blue sky, and beneath it a sea in a water-blue just a shade brighter. Even in Honshu, the sight was enough to draw an involuntary sigh of wonder—that a shore this clear, this beautiful, could still be found.
The water was so transparent that every grain of sand along the bottom could be made out, one by one. And if the sand was to be spoken of at all, its softness could hardly go unmentioned. It felt as though someone had gone to the trouble of sifting out only the finest grains and scattering them there by hand.
Well. Should the young lady of the Hyakurenno house so much as take a step and have a single pebble lodge in her sole, it would be a disaster—so of course the beach would be kept with every possible care...
And while one was at it, the seabirds just then crossing that sky seemed to deserve a word of their own—
"Shion! How long are you going to stay like that? Come out already."
"No, you see. In a modern society devoted solely to efficiency, might it not also be important, from time to time, to allow oneself the leisure of attending to the beauty in the finer details? The thought simply occurred to me, all of a sudden..."
"Stop saying weird things and just come out. I already showed you once last time, didn't I?"
"Even so... No. Yes. I'll come out..."
The lodging Yuri had prepared was a match for the sea itself: a building of exactly the sort that sprang to mind the moment one heard the word pension. Inside it, Han Seoyeon had only her head poked out the window, very pointedly attending to anything but the matter at hand. In the end she could not withstand Hitomi's urging, and came trudging out toward the entrance.
Beyond the door, which opened with a creak, Ninomae Hitomi stood against the wide-open beach.
What she wore was a pure white bikini, settled on at last after she had tried on this and that during their shopping the other day. To be precise, she had bought two or three others besides—but this was the only one that qualified as a swimsuit in which one could actually go outside. A bright sea-green pareo was tied at her waist, and that was Ninomae Hitomi's outfit now.
On any ordinary day Seoyeon would have praised that beauty until her mouth went dry. Regrettably, she had no such leisure at the moment.
"As I thought—would it not be all right if I went back inside?"
"Why? You look nothing but pretty. Come on, hurry up."
"Nnngh..."
Seoyeon's face was the very picture of a woman in dire straits. Hitomi only smiled, bright as anything, then snatched her hand in an instant and dragged her along.
"Miss Yuri! I brought Shion too."
Smiling from ear to ear, she led her out onto the sand of the beach, and waved toward Yuri, who had arrived ahead of them and was waiting there.
"My. It suits you rather well."
"Doesn't it? Shion has far too little confidence."
Hyakurenno Yuri glanced over Han Seoyeon's figure, smiled, and offered the compliment as if it were nothing. Hitomi, for her part, pressed the point at volume—see, even someone else thought so.
"No... this, I really do think, is not quite..."
"I told you that kind of talk is forbidden. This is what you get for saying the same thing at the department store, remember?"
"So it was a punishment after all, wasn't it?!"
"Ah. That was a slip of the tongue."
The word punishment had escaped Hitomi's own mouth, and the moment Seoyeon seized on it, Hitomi latched onto one of her arms and began to wheedle, smoothing the whole thing over as if she were coaxing away a sulk. Seoyeon was not unaware that the maneuver was a shrewd one. Even so, that alone was enough to sink the objection rising in her all at once, and there was nothing to be done about it.
...It was not because of the soft, yielding give pressed straight against her forearm.
Seoyeon's own outfit was the pale pink bikini Hitomi had forced on her the other day. The bottom, in particular, was hung with fluttering frills, a design that called a skirt to mind. Of course, had it been a real skirt, one could have stacked ultra in front of mini any number of times and still come up short of how perilously little there was of it.
"Come to think of it, where are the other two?"
Hitomi only thought to ask once Seoyeon was already shuddering under the weight of her embarrassment. The two bodyguards who ordinarily clung to Yuri's side, as if competing for the place, were nowhere to be seen.
"Ah, if you mean Chisa and Miss Fuu, they're over there."
And indeed, where Yuri's fingertip pointed, Momomomo Chisa and Ryuumai Fuu were both present.
"...What on earth are those two doing?"
"Preparing for beach volleyball."
"They're growing bamboo. On the sand...?"
"I think they mean to use it for the net posts."
What they were doing was anything but ordinary. Drawing on every kind of sorcery at their command, they were raising this plant and that straight out of the beach—two stalks of bamboo stood up as posts, one to either side, and between them a weaving of vines that was, unmistakably, becoming a court.
"No, but—beach volleyball? Why, in the first place?"
"I said that since we'd come all the way to the sea, I wanted to see it at least once. And I also asked which of the two would have the advantage at beach volleyball."
"Ah... so it was very clearly the latter."
Ask a thing like that and they would have a dueling ground up before the sentence was finished. Hitomi nodded as if everything now made sense. The two of them could not live without each other, in the very worst sense of the phrase; a question of who was stronger was nothing short of a raw nerve—the detonation button itself.
"Miladyyy! The net's all seeet uuup!"
"Then I'll head over myself. They only asked me to keep my distance while they were working their spells... Would you like to come watch too, Miss Ninomae?"
"Ah... I'll be along in a little while. I need to put on sunscreen first."
"Is that so. Then I'll go on ahead."
Eyes sparkling at the prospect of beach volleyball played by professionals in the business of putting down the uncanny, Yuri hurried off in that direction. Hitomi watched her back for a moment, then turned her gaze to Seoyeon beside her.
"Come on, Shion. This way, for now..."
With that, she led Seoyeon over to a parasol set up nearby. Whether it had been there to begin with, or whether the Hyakurenno people had scrambled to put it up, was impossible to say—but parasol, sunbed, and blanket were all neatly on hand.
"Is something the matter?"
"No. I just said, didn't I? I want to put on some sunscreen."
Couldn't she simply put it on herself? The question flickered through Seoyeon's mind. And for that matter, wasn't sunscreen something one applied before ever stepping outside?
While she was thinking it, Hitomi drew a bottle of sunblock from a small bag set nearby and held it out to her. For something she had called sun cream, it was remarkably thin—closer to an oil than a cream. And plainly, at a glance, brand new.
"Ah, I don't particularly need any, so it's— fine...?"
Han Seoyeon said as much and moved to hand the bottle back, only for the rest of the sentence to die in her throat.
She had been reading the letters printed on the bottle. When she looked up again, Hitomi was already lying face-down on a blanket she had spread.
That alone made the intention easy to guess. Thinking back, there was no way Hitomi hadn't known that Seoyeon never wore sunscreen—and only then did Seoyeon understand why she had called it sun cream. In ordinary life she used something genuinely close to a cream, and the name had stuck out of habit. What she held now had, quite plainly, been prepared for this moment alone.
While Seoyeon stood there a little at a loss, Hitomi turned her head, just slightly, and looked back at her with a smile that gathered in her eyes—somehow, unmistakably, seductive.
"You'll put it on for me, won't you? Shion."
"..."
A gulp. Into the bright, clean sound of the waves slipped the sound of Han Seoyeon swallowing.
And then, a moment later—click—came the sound of the sunblock's cap coming open.
Hitomi slowly turned her face back toward the ground. She had been the one to invite this, and yet that did not mean she was entirely without shame.
"Then... I'll apply it."
"Yes. Come here. ...Mmm."
Seoyeon's palm met her back. At the touch of oil still a little cool, the hum had escaped her before she could stop it. But as the hand worked across her, body heat warmed it quickly to something lukewarm, and what remained after that was the slickness peculiar to oil—ticklish, and threaded through with a sensation that was, faintly, indecent.
Shoulders, back, arms: Seoyeon spread the oil with careful thoroughness, and her hands drifted gradually downward, hesitating a moment around the waist.
"Nn..."
The hesitation did not last long. Perhaps she had talked herself into believing she was only applying oil. Perhaps she was simply that accustomed to Hitomi's skin against her own. What was certain was that, when it came to the hips and the thighs, she was conspicuously more thorough than she had been with the upper body.
Down the legs she went, and then she was putting the sunblock on the feet as well...
"Nnh... um, Shion...?"
"...Yes. What is it?"
"The feet—aren't you being a little too persistent? ...Ah—"
"No, there's a spot here that isn't quite covered..."
"Eek?! H-hey, you don't have to do between the toes toooo..."
And Seoyeon's hands, more thorough and more relentless even than they had been upon her backside, set to work on her feet. Fingertips drifting lightly over the soles, tickling; fingers slipping in between the toes, one after another. True to form for a woman with a foot fetish—she had seemed a little better behaved of late, only for the old proclivity to come surging right back.
"Nnh! Enough with the feet! We're done!"
In the end Hitomi, unable to endure the tickling or the embarrassment any longer, twisted her body clean around.
"Ah, the front's still left, so... finish this first. O-once you're done, you can keep going, so..."
She added it with her face gone scarlet.
It scarcely needed saying that Han Seoyeon was looking down at her with eyes plainly kindled, nor that Hitomi, meeting that gaze, shivered through and through with a thrill that felt faintly, deliciously illicit.