Your Chest Is Big
"Hana, why are you washing with your back turned?"
While Yumi and Jiyu bathed, Hana had climbed into the tub and kept her back carefully turned. Turning around in here felt, somehow, like it would make her a criminal. Fortunately, Jiyu and Yumi didn't make much of the odd behavior. Hana had always been a little peculiar. Only after she was sure both of them had finished and gone outside did she start washing herself.
Once everyone was clean and changed, Hana and the others slipped on slippers and walked out to the middle of the garden. Full night had arrived, and the sky was burned black, but bright lamps lit the grounds, so there was no danger of not being able to see. They drifted toward the smell of meat as if something had them under a spell.
"That smells amazing..."
Maru was already grilling. The table was set, so all that remained was to eat. She watched the children coming and laughed.
"Kids! The meat's almost done, so hang on just a little!"
"Okaaay!"
Spoon and chopsticks in hand, Jiyu stared a hole through the center of the grill, eyes like a hawk locked on prey. The sizzle of browning meat, and the smell rising with it, were almost too good to bear. It was easy to see why grilling was about more than flavor alone. Meat this good gave you a deeply satisfying view just by being looked at. It felt as if three or four pieces had already been eaten without a single bite.
"What kind of meat is this?"
Yumi asked around the chopsticks in her mouth. Maru answered with a smile.
"Hanwoo flower ribeye! You don't get to eat this just anywhere~"
"Flower ribeye!"
It was the company's money, so Maru had been bold. She'd bought a heap of meat she wouldn't normally dare look at—the kind of cut that, if this weren't a company meal, would take a whole month's grocery budget scraped clean. That expensive. As anyone could tell.
Under Maru's tongs, the flower ribeye only grew more tempting. What had been pink was browning into something ready to eat. Experts, they said, could tell whether meat was done by color alone, but none of them had that gift. They did have a far more accurate sensor.
"Dig in!"
"Whoa!"
The moment Maru gave the word, chopsticks began to dance, flashing through the air like a sword dance. Hana was first. The instant permission landed, she moved faster than anyone and started in on the ribeye.
Beef dipped in a modest sauce was in a class all its own. This had to be heaven. Hana clutched her cheeks and smiled in pure happiness as she popped a piece into her mouth and chewed. It really was exceptional meat—the moment it touched her tongue, it seemed to melt. Quality like this meant Maru must have gone to enormous trouble to get it.
"It's so good!!!"
"You're the best, unnie!"
Jiyu and Yumi's reactions were violent. They didn't eat buffet-level food with Hana every day, so they had almost no resistance to something delicious. Even Hana, who dined on lavish spreads daily, thought it was incredible; there was no imagining how intense it must be for kids who had only ever eaten home cooking. Hana's own chopsticks flew just as wildly.
The moment meat finished on the grill, the children snatched up the beef in open competition, no one needing to say a word. Maru watched them and laughed. She hadn't expected them to eat like they'd been starving for days.
From the children's side, though, it was only natural. They'd had breakfast, then skipped lunch to play at the sea. Kids in the middle of a growth spurt suffered fierce hunger from missing even one meal, and these three had gone nearly two without eating. Of course their eyes spun at the sight of meat.
"There's plenty, kids, so eat slowly~"
"Mmph—okay!"
The mumbled answers were unbearably cute. It was suddenly easy to see why parents passed food to their children when they ate out. Just watching, Maru felt her own stomach filling, and the sight of them eating so happily left her warm and proud.
"Unnie, aah!"
Reading the moment, Yumi held out a ssam—grilled meat bundled up to eat—to Maru, who was stuck at the grill. It was a kindness for someone who couldn't eat while she cooked. Seeing that, Jiyu and Hana competed to make wraps of their own and feed them to her. Faced with children bringing her food, Maru said in a rush:
"Don't worry about me—eat lots, you three! Unnie's already had so much I don't think I need another bite!"
The wraps alone felt like ten already. Her plan to grill whatever was left at her leisure, once the kids were done, had sailed clean away. She hadn't expected them to wrap so much for her. She'd done nothing but accept what they gave her, and she was already full. Considering how much she'd been fed, fullness was only reasonable.
Maru didn't eat much to begin with, but she hadn't been able to refuse the care in those wraps, and that had done most of the damage.
At this rate she would be the one needing dessert. Fortunately, once she gently turned the wraps down, the children naturally went back to eating for themselves.
They changed the grill plate and switched the menu from beef to galbi. The shift in Hana's expression was dramatic. Maru's timing—sending in short ribs just as the richness started to cloy—was excellent, and Hana watched her grill, willing the ribs to finish.
"Galbi! It's galbi!"
Hana was running circles around Maru. Who knew what could make a person that happy. Were ribs really that good? The beef was the more expensive cut, and Maru often found she couldn't keep up with the children's tastes.
Once the galbi browned nicely, the chopsticks went dazzling again. The children snatched pieces the instant Maru caught a rib in the tongs and cut it with shears. Three growing kids together, and that mountain of meat was already scraping the bottom. The stomachs of children who had held out from a single breakfast all the way to dinner were something else.
As the night deepened, so did the meat. By the end, some of them were so stuffed they could barely move.
After clearing the trash and putting away the plates and all the tools, I went into the room. Maru had said that for the dishes, I could just leave them to soak. Jiyu and Yumi were draped over the sofa like towels—the side effect of far too much meat.
"I'm so full..."
"Me too..."
The TV was on, and they stared blankly, waiting for their stomachs to go down. Then the bathroom door opened, and Maru walked in wearing nothing but a towel. Jiyu and Yumi looked at her without a thought in their heads. I had no choice but to go bright red.
No matter how unguarded she was, to come out dressed like that! Of course, from the outside we were only three elementary schoolers—three girls, no boys among us. A combination Maru couldn't have been wary of even if she'd tried.
"That feels so nice~"
Damp hair in hand, Maru was walking toward me.
Then Jiyu looked at her and said:
"Unnie, your chest is huge!"
Pfft!
It was the kind of line that could make me spray the water I was drinking. But there wasn't a trace of anything lewd in it. She had simply looked at Maru's chest and said exactly what she saw, and she probably didn't even know whether she'd done something wrong.
And really, between people of the same sex, there was nothing to call harassment in the first place. Women touched each other's chests sometimes, didn't they? Maybe that was why Maru barely reacted. If a man had said it, he would have earned a slap across the face on the spot. Unless he was her boyfriend, it was absolutely not something you said.
Maru looked at Jiyu and answered as calmly as if she had expected the conversation.
"You'll get big like unnie someday too, Jiyu."
"Really? They look heavy, though..."
Jiyu said it while patting her own chest. Right now she was flat as a board. Of course, no one knew how that would change as she got older. For most children, secondary sex characteristics arrived in the upper grades of elementary school, and their bodies began to mature.
Jiyu, Yumi, and I were still nothing but little squirts.
There was no sign we would ever turn out like Maru. The future was anyone's guess, though. It would probably take a few years before the outline even showed.