Episode 3: And After All That Blackmail, You’re Going to Kiss Me Too?!

“Why… why are you here, Asahina…?”

My world collapsed around me with a deafening crash.
My thoughts had ground to a halt, and right under my nose, Asahina was fanning herself lazily with the reflection form.

“Huh? You’re the one who told me to write a reflection.”
“I, well, I said tomorrow, didn’t I…?”
“I’m surprisingly diligent, actually? Knocked it out straight away. …And then I got to see something absolutely amazing. Must be my good karma.”

Oxygen wasn’t getting in properly.
My lungs had seized up in a panic, as if frozen solid.
And into all of that, she drove the finishing blow.

“Also. …Are you going to keep touching yourself, or.”

Only when she pointed it out did I realise.
My right hand was still buried, heat and all, inside my skirt.
Asahina grabbed my rigid right wrist and yanked.

“St, stop…!”

My fingers were dragged free, mercilessly.

Fingertips wet to the second knuckle.
The setting sun lit them up, gratuitously pretty, like jewels.

A thin, clinging transparent thread trailed from my extracted fingers down to my thigh, through the black tights.

“…Wow. Did all of this come out of you, Yamami?”

Still smirking, Asahina shoved my own fingers toward my face as I tried to look away.

“Isn’t this a school rule violation? Look at it. That’s all yours, isn’t it? Ahaha, your face is so red.”

My own embarrassing heat and scent were flooding into my lungs from point-blank range.

“I’m trying to decide what to do with this video. Don’t you think it’d go viral if I sent it to the class group chat? The discipline committee chair, doing that to herself, after school, in the discipline room. The contrast is unhinged.”

On the screen, me — moving my hand without a care.
So graceless, so humiliating.
The moment I looked directly at it, something acidic surged up from the pit of my stomach.

“Come on, listen to the audio too.”

She tapped the screen.

“Nn… ah… ha…”

My own sweet, breathless sounds played back at full volume, filling the silent room.

“Stop, stop it…!!”
“Ahaha, nice voice. Completely different from your usual committee-chair voice.”

The worst imaginable scenario raced through my mind.

If it got shared — the trust I’d built up.
The teachers’ expectations.
The proud look in my parents’ eyes.

All of it, crumbling apart noisily because of a few seconds of footage.
The image of every student in the school watching that video, pointing at me and laughing, played out in vivid detail in my head.

“Please, delete it! I’ll, I’ll do anything! Money? …Homework? I could even use my authority as discipline chair…”

I had no such authority.
And yet I slid from my chair and crumpled to my knees, clinging to her feet.

Asahina looked down at me with cool eyes as I scrambled desperately for words.
That silence pushed my fear to its absolute limit.

“Oh…? Anything?”

She murmured, quietly.

“I will, I’ll do it! So please, please, don’t show anyone…!”

Through a vision blurred with tears, I watched her slowly crouch down.
She peered into my face and smiled, wide and easy.
That smile was so guileless — and that was precisely what made it feel bottomlessly unhinged.

“Then let’s make a deal.”
“…A d-deal?”

A light push against my shoulder.
Before I could resist, my balance gave way, and I was pressed down onto the cold floor.

Lying on my back, my field of vision was suddenly darkened by her shadow looming over me.
Her ash-grey hair fell loose and silky, blocking out the evening sun, sealing me inside a cage of musk.

Her face, drawing closer.

Hot breath, mingling together.
The discipline room sinking into dusk.
The sound of my own heart, so loud it was deafening, became the entirety of the world.

“Wai—!?”

Forceful, and deep.
My lips were swallowed by the soft heat descending from above.

◇◆◇◆◇

“Mm…!?”
At first, I thought it was just a touch.
But Asahina didn’t miss the opening my gasp of surprise left her.

Slick.

A warm, rough tongue forced its way in without mercy, prising my lips apart, pushing through my teeth.

“Mgh, nn…mmh!?”

Against my back, the cold hard floor.
From above, her weight and her heat.

What flooded my mouth was her perfume.
Musk. The smell of it.
Carried on that scent, Asahina’s saliva poured directly down my upturned throat.

“Mmh… ah… ch, p…!”

The back of my throat blazed. My oxygen was being stolen.

Asahina’s tongue pressed in with a relentlessness that left no room to breathe — tracing my palate, coiling around my tongue, pushing deeper and deeper.

My tongue tried to retreat and was caught, sucked from the root — and at that moment, my mind went white, a long, buzzing numbness spreading through it.

In the quiet discipline room, wet sounds rang out.
Whether from my mouth or hers, I couldn’t tell anymore.
Only that those sounds, right at my ear, sent me plunging helplessly to the bottom of my own shame.

(W-wait, what is this…!?)

The sweet poison poured into me from Asahina’s lips seeped, aching and slow, into the deepest part of me.

Like my heart had been grabbed directly and wrung to pieces.

Clack. The clock’s heavy hand lurched forward once. That dry sound dragged me, dazed as I was, forcibly back to reality.