Episode 11: Let’s Kiss Every Day From Now On.

“Mm, ah…! S-still…?!”

It doesn’t end.
How much time has passed since then, I have no idea.

Touch, part, part, touch again.
The soft, wet sound of skin meeting skin shakes my eardrums without pause.

Each individual kiss is barely there — the brush of a feather, lips just grazing lips.
No tongue. Nothing like that.
No slow, clinging humidity either.
And yet the sheer number of them is, and has been, completely aberrant.

“Hiy, ori…! Ah, mm?!”

Like a broken toy, Hiyori keeps pecking at my lips.
From the front, from the right, from the left. The angle changing, the rhythm changing.
When I turn my face away trying to escape, she follows immediately — to the corner of my lips, the tip of my nose, and then my lips again, kisses raining down.

Tick, tock — the regular rhythm of the wall clock reached me, distantly.
How many times has the second hand gone round by now?
Three minutes? Five?
Starved of oxygen, my brain forced to focus on nothing but the sensation against my lips, it feels like an eternity.

(My head… it’s going funny…)

Floating, like being suffocated by candyfloss — something sweet and airless, happiness that hurt.
The feeling in my lips had begun going hazy and numb with the friction.

The arms holding me down pressed in tighter.
Maybe Hiyori herself no longer knew how to stop.
I’d hit my limit.
All the strength left my body at once, and I sank deep into the sofa — and then.

“…Mm, ah, mm…”

One last kiss, pressed on with something like reluctance, and finally her face pulled away.

“…Hah—”
The moment our lips parted, a silver thread snapped between us and dissolved into the air.

“Ha…hah…hh…”

I gasped for oxygen, breathing hard from my shoulders.
My lips throbbed with their own pulse.
They had been pressed against, pecked at, collided with, over and over.
Even the core of my head was hot enough to be numb.

“…………”

I looked up. Hiyori was silent.
No “ahaha, your face is so red!” No “pathetic.”

She just had her index finger resting against her own lips.
Staring somewhere far away, deep in thought.

(…what.)

That silence frightened me.

Is she angry? Disappointed?
Was it wrong of me to resist?

“…Hiy, ori?”
“…Mm. Ah — shall we go?”

She said it briefly, as if waking from a dream, brushed down her skirt with a snap and rose lightly to her feet.
The motion of scooping up my bag was equally unruffled.

By contrast, I couldn’t move from where I’d sunk into the sofa.

“…Right, ugh, here we go…”

I pressed my hands down and tried to push myself up. No good.
My knees wouldn’t work.
My legs were trembling like jelly, unable to bear even my own weight.

(You’re kidding. I can’t stand up…)

Hiyori looked down at me, perfectly composed.

“What are you doing? Here.”

A slender hand appeared in front of me.

“Oh… th-thank you…”

The moment I grabbed it.

Yank.

“Wha?!”

Nothing so gentle as “supporting” me.
Like retrieving a bag that had fallen on the floor — my arm was simply hauled. I was peeled off the sofa and set on my feet like a marionette.

“Whoops…”

Still unsteady, I was caught one-handed by Hiyori — captured, more like — and she peered into my face.

“You can at least walk, can’t you? I’ll leave without you.”
“W-wait…! And my bag…!”

Her expression gave nothing away.
With no idea what she was thinking, I had no choice but to flog my trembling legs into motion and let myself be dragged along behind her.

◇◆◇◆◇

Outside, the world had gone completely dark.
We walked side by side along the tree-lined path to the station.

No conversation — just the sound of two pairs of footsteps and, somewhere distant, a train.
Hiyori walked beside me, touching her own lips from time to time and making small, thoughtful sounds under her breath.

(What do I do. Is Hiyori angry…? Is she about to spread the video?!)

The heavy silence became too much to bear, and I steeled myself and opened my mouth.

“Um, so…”
“Hey, Maya.”

Our voices overlapped.

Hiyori stopped walking and turned around under a streetlamp.

“…I’ve decided something.”
“What…? What have you…?”

(That she’s going to release the video? Or that she’s bored and this is over?)

I braced for the worst — and Hiyori turned to me with a smile so guileless it made my head swim.

“Let’s do this every day.”
“…Sorry?”

I was struck dumb.
Every day? Do what?

“That thing just now. The lips — the squishing.”
“Wha—?!”

Hiyori stepped closer and pointed at my lips with evident enjoyment.

“The very first one was good too, but… right now I think I prefer this kind of kiss.”
“Prefer, you say…”
“It’s kind of like… addictive, you know?”

She poked my lips with her index finger. Boop.

“Your lips are so incredibly soft. The squish when they make contact feels amazing. And the sound is kind of ASMR-ish, it’s calming…”
“…What is that.”
“How do I put it… you know those infinite bubble-wrap things?”

Hiyori took my lips between her fingers and pressed them gently together.

“I feel like I’ve found the lip version.”

Comparing something I endured desperately to bubble-wrap packaging material…!

“This way, we could do it infinitely — break time, after school, whenever, right?”
“Hang on, wait! Every day, that — infinitely?!”
“Yep. You want the video deleted, don’t you? Then give me that feeling every day.”

Hiyori stroked my cheek and whispered.

“Once I find a snack I’m into, I can’t settle down until I eat it every day until I get sick of it.”
“Do you think I’m some kind of chewing gum?”
“But if it’s Yuri-Friend Maya, she’ll take it for me… right?”

To her, I was no lover.
Just a convenient friend to enjoy her yuri with.

“…You’re a demon.”
“I get that a lot♡ Ah, I can’t wait for tomorrow!”

On hearing that self-satisfied reply, Hiyori broke into the most buoyant humming I’d ever seen from her, pressed my bag into my chest, and set off toward the ticket gate with a little skip in her step.

“Hm-hmm, hm-hm-hmm♪ See you~!”

Watching her disappear through the gate, I found my hand pressed against my own lips without knowing when it had got there.

(This might actually be… considerably worse than one intense kiss…)

◇◆◇◆◇

Even after I got home, that analogy wouldn’t leave my head.

“The infinite bubble-wrap — lip version.”

While I washed my hair in the bath, while I dried it — those words followed me like a ghost.

“…Unbelievable.”

I muttered it at my own reflection in the bathroom mirror.
I reached out and touched my lips gently with my fingertips.
My shoulders jumped.
Even though it was my own finger, it triggered the illusion of Hiyori toying with them, and the back of my hips went sweetly numb with the reflex.

And what stung most of all was that the lips looking back at me from the mirror seemed, just slightly, redder and softer than yesterday.

As if they bore the mark of having been worked on by Hiyori.

“…I’m going to forget about it.”

I shook my head hard and fled into bed.

The clock was nearly half past ten.
…I couldn’t even remember how I’d made it home from the station.
I still hadn’t done tomorrow’s prep work, and there was morning duty for the discipline committee.
I couldn’t afford to have my rhythm thrown off by any of this.

“…I can’t let it get to me.”

Last time, I’d thought I would die if things escalated.
But now that it had actually happened, I understood.

If I reacted to every single thing, my mind would actually die.

Then there was only one way to survive.

Empty my heart. Switch off the emotional circuit.
This was just a transaction.
Nothing more than lending out my lips as a body part until Hiyori was satisfied.

If I could get through it mechanically like that, I should be able to avoid any fatal damage —

I was repeating it to myself as I reached for my phone to set the alarm.

Bzz, bzz—!

In the silence of my room, the phone in my hand vibrated.

“Wha?!”

My heart lurched.
I held my breath at the name on the screen.

Asahina Hiyori
— Voice call —

“…What.”

The phone nearly slipped from my hand.
Why? Why now?
Not a message. A call.
Which meant: if I answered, that voice would reach my ear — not as text but as something alive and real, breath and all, directly.

Bzz, bzz.

The vibrating didn’t stop.
I could ignore it. I could pretend I was asleep.
My head understood. But my fingers wouldn’t move.

Because what if I ignored it and she was in a bad mood tomorrow?
“You didn’t pick up. Time for a punishment,” she’d say — and what if the video got sent?

“…Ugh.”

In the end, I had no right of refusal.
Day or night. At school, at home.
There was no escaping the palm of her hand anymore.

Bzz, bzz…

The vibration felt like a chain tightening around my throat — pick up, pick up — and though there was no one else in the room, I was gripped by the illusion that the sweet musk smell was climbing up from my ankle, creeping up toward me.

With trembling fingers, I slid the green button across.