Episode 4: [Yuri Friends] When the Lips Part.

“Mm… hah—”

What felt like an eternity passed, and then the lips pulled away abruptly.
A long, silky silver thread stretched between us.

My brain was still numb with the heat of what she’d poured into me.
Asahina sat astride me, watching with satisfaction as I gasped shallow, rapid breaths in search of oxygen, a low sound of contentment in her throat.

“Mm. Not bad, for a first.”

Asahina smoothed back her dishevelled fringe with her fingers.
Her gaze slid away from me for just a moment — a switch thrown as if none of it had happened at all, effortlessly light.
I managed, just barely, to push myself upright on shaking arms, wiping my lips with a trembling hand.

“…W-wh, wha, what did you just—”
“Hey, you said you’d do anything, didn’t you?”
“Y-yes, but…”
“Then play ‘Yuri Friends’ with me.”
“What’s… that…?”

Asahina didn’t answer directly. She set my self-pleasure video looping on her phone and began murmuring, almost to herself.

“I’ve been dying of boredom, like, every single day.”

Her voice was flat. Faintly hollow.

“Laughing my head off with friends, hitting the trendy places, karaoke… yeah, it’s fun? It’s fun, but. I don’t know, it’s like… not enough.”
“…?”
“I wanted something more — suffocatingly close, all over each other, special, you know?”

She glanced up.
And in her eyes I noticed something that hadn’t been there a moment ago: a strange, particular heat, kindling.

“That’s when I found yuri.”
“Y-yuri…?”
“I mean, isn’t it something else? Girls, like that, with each other. That feeling of getting absolutely everything — body heat, the smell of someone, all of it to yourself — at a distance you could never close with just a friend.”

Hiyori’s pale eyes were heavy and feverish with it.

“It’s not that I want some rosy romantic feeling. I just want to… feel that kind of heavy heat directly, on my own skin.”

She held my gaze, her words deliberate, as if she were making me understand.

“So Maya’s job is one thing. To be my personal Yuri Friend.”
“Personal… Yuri Friend…?”
“Right. No dating, none of that hassle. Friends, strictly.”

Asahina drew closer, as if to smother my bewilderment with her warm breath.

“But you accept everything sweet that real friends would never do — whenever the mood takes me. When I press up against you, you take it quietly. When I touch you, you look back at me with those heavy eyes. …Like a girl in a manga, letting me spoil you however I want, whenever I want?”
“That’s not something I can just—”
“You can. Because… Maya’s already got the aptitude for that sort of thing, haven’t you. Reading yuri manga at school, getting wet and touching yourself.”

A cold shiver crawled up my spine.
The mask of “Asahina Hiyori” — the one who always looked down at me with that bored expression — cracked audibly.
Through the fracture, something I’d never seen before: a face heavy as mud and scorching as a burn.

“You’ll satisfy my thirst. Won’t you.”
“W-wait…! You have loads of friends, Asahina. If you want that kind of thing there are people you could ask—”

A desperate resistance. But Asahina laughed softly through her nose and lifted my chin with her fingertips.

“Huh? Not them. I can do the casual hugging-for-laughs thing with them, sure, but… if I actually tried to monopolise someone the way I really want to, they’d think I was being weird and pull away.”
“…Oh?”
“Getting genuinely obsessive with your friends kills the vibe.”

She said it flatly, like she was spitting out something obvious.

“…But with Maya, it’s fine. Not as close as my actual friends, but not a complete stranger either.”

Her fingers, which had been holding my chin, slid away and traced slowly down my unguarded throat.

“…!”
“Taking someone at exactly that kind of distance and making them my personal Yuri Friend, getting all over them whenever I feel like it…”

She leaned closer still.

“…Just thinking about it. Perfect.”

The sweet musk scent infiltrated all the way to the bottom of my lungs.

“And with Maya specifically — no matter how selfish I am, how much I mess you around, you can’t run. …You get it, right?”

When I drew a sharp breath and tried to pull back, she closed the gap without letting me escape, and smoothly wrapped an arm around my waist.

“Wha—!?”

Closer than anyone who’d just had me pinned to the floor under a blackmail threat had any right to be.

“Hey, wai— Asahina… san?!”

Asahina rested her chin on my shoulder, her lips at my ear, exhaling softly as she spoke.

“Wrong. It’s Hiyori. Say it. Maya.”

Not the voice I knew from “Asahina Hiyori.”
Something more humid, more like someone wheedling a lover.

Impossible.
Absolutely impossible.
Because this is Asahina, of all people.

“Ah, lucky me. Maya’s got a decent face on her, right? As Yuri Friends go, she’s pretty much ideal.”

Asahina’s hand found mine and wrapped around it gently, then wove her fingers through mine one by one with a slightly firmer grip, making sure I couldn’t slip free.

“I’m going to spoil Maya loads and loads. …Just like in that manga, yeah?”

God, it’s sweet.
Too sweet.

The cadence of new lovers whispering to each other in a world of their own.
But this is nothing more than a rotten little game where she’s the one calling all the shots, and the path that led here is drenched in something unhinged.
I was too confused even to shake her off. I just froze.

“…Oh, and don’t go getting the wrong idea.”

Without warning, the arm around my waist tightened.
A declaration: you’re not leaving.

“This isn’t us becoming equals. It’s a transaction, strictly. If you get on my bad side… you know what happens, right?”

I couldn’t produce a single word. All I managed was a small, silent nod.

In that moment, everything became clear to me.
She was simply using me as a convenient “friend” to enjoy her yuri with.
And that with a single touch of her finger, I was entirely at her disposal.

“Okay. I’ve just decided the rules for the Yuri Friends game we’re starting now. Listen carefully.”

Giving not a moment’s thought to my fear, she pulled back in one easy motion, reverted to her usual languid expression, and took out her phone.