Episode 2: Just Because I Was Doing It Alone Doesn’t Mean You Can Film Me!
The page I opened.
The scene that greeted me there made me catch my breath without thinking.
At first, just a wholesome after-school scene.
Girls in a bittersweet, hesitant romance — the kind where even holding hands felt like too much.
But with every page I turned, the heat of it changed, bit by bit, unmistakably.
A girl pinned down on a desk in a twilit classroom.
Her skirt pushed up, her thighs bare.
The other girl forcing herself between her legs, stopping her mouth with a kiss.
“Mm, ah…no, my voice…!”
“Come on, there’s no one here… let’s do more, yeah?”
Bodies tangled together, skin slicked with sweat, and above all else — the expressions on those girls’ faces, the happiness they showed only to the one they loved.
The words in the speech bubbles were less sweet than they were primal, thick with a clinging desire.
Hands that had been held now found their way to the other girl’s back, clutching the fabric of her uniform tight.
(…what is this.)
You can see everything…
Wait — can high schoolers even buy this?
Don’t they check your age at the register?!
Right. Confirmed. Objectively contrary to public morals.
I should close the book. Write it off and be done with it.
And yet my fingers won’t move.
Next panel.
The girls’ tongues, tangled together, trailing a thread of saliva between them.
“Ah… yeah… hya, ah!”
“Amazing, you’re so…”
The eyes of the girl being pinned down grew liquid, heavy with heat.
Her mouth slackened as though reason had burned away entirely, letting slip breathless, unguarded sounds of pleasure.
Every time the dark-haired girl pressed a mark into her neck, her collarbone, like staking a claim…
The girl who had been so prickly and composed crumbled further into that slack, undone expression.
With trembling fingers I turned another page.
The two of them, layered together on the desk.
Bare skin against bare skin, as though confirming each other’s warmth — the description so close I could almost hear the sound of their damp bodies pressed together.
Through the page, I could swear I felt the humid heat of it.
A world that burned with transgression.
Nothing in it resembled the “school life” I knew.
Only this fierce, mutual unravelling — pleasure and exposure and nothing else.
◇◆◇◆◇
“No. No, no. This is impossible.”
I breathed out and tried to look away.
But my gaze stayed fixed.
My heart slammed, painfully, again and again.
The sweat I’d worked up was stifling inside my tights.
“…It’s so hot.”
Without taking my eyes off the manga, I found myself gripping the pleats of my skirt.
…Oh.
The girl on the page, unable to hold on any longer, let her hips jerk upward, tears spilling from her eyes.
And from somewhere in the margins of the page, a scent drifted faintly.
Sweet, and poisonous. Musk.
— Don’t tell me you’re actually interested in something like this.
Her voice, replaying in my head.
The hand not holding the book slipped down beneath the desk.
Trailing across my thigh, working at the folds of my uniform skirt.
Before I knew what I was doing, my fingertips had been drawn inside the hem of my skirt, where the heat had pooled.
Through the damp fabric of my underwear.
“Nn… ah… ha…”
A wet, sweet sound, and breaths that didn’t feel like mine.
They were soiling the silence of the discipline room, one by one.
Stop. Stop it. If you go any further…
That cry of reason was painted over instantly by the heat coming through my fingertips.
And I sank deeper, as though searching out the true heat I’d locked away inside myself.
◇◆◇◆◇
“Hah… hh…”
How long have I been like this?
I can’t even stop turning the pages. I just keep going, greedy and graceless, moving my fingers.
The heat transmitted through them, the images burned into my eyes — they’ve all run together, and my vision is flickering at the edges.
Everything’s a mess.
All of it. Every last bit.
But right now, none of it matters.
I just want to let out this aching heat that’s built up somewhere deep inside me.
──That was when it happened.
Softly.
Tickling at my nose: the smell of musk.
Stronger than any scent that could have soaked into the manga. So much stronger…
Wait.
…Hm?
Hang on.
Why is the smell getting stronger right now?
As though someone was right beside me…
— Ping.
An absurdly cheerful electronic chime split the silence of the room.
My fingertips were still trembling, still wet with heat, still pathetic.
Carefully, like a rusted machine.
…Creak. I raised my head, as though I could hear the sound of it.
Slender white legs extending from a skirt that was far too short.
I let my gaze travel upward.
Ash-grey hair coming into view.
…No. Why.
Right in front of me.
Close enough to reach out and touch. She was standing there.
Against the backlight, only the lens of the smartphone in her hand caught the glare of the evening sun, flashing sharp.
That jet-black camera aperture had been swallowing my image whole, without missing a single second.
“…Oh wow. Incredible. Yamami-mama’s face right now… this is genuinely one for the archives.”
A familiar voice — usually just enough to grate against my eardrums.
Asahina Hiyori was standing there, phone raised in one hand, looking like she was having the time of her life.
“A…sa…hi…na…?”
My throat was stuck together. Barely any air came out.
“So photogenic. Got every bit of it.”
With the certainty of someone who had already won, she took one more step forward.
The heat radiating off me.
And the perfume I’d been assuming all along was soaked into the manga — it wrapped around me, flooding in from every direction.
A sharp tug.
She lifted my chin and thrust her phone screen at me.
What it showed was me, legs splayed without a care, fingers stained with my own heat.
Breathing ragged, eyes melted with it.
The exact same face as the girls in the manga — the face I’d just been denying.
And on my upper arm, the armband embroidered with Discipline, swaying there like a punchline.
What the screen made plain was one thing only.
Everything I had been until now. My position. My future.
All of it, erasable with a single tap of her finger.
“So. What should I do with this video?”
She prodded my flushed cheek with the corner of her phone.
Dusk closing in around the discipline room.
Her whisper, colder than any electronic chime, painted me over completely with despair.