Episode 16: But It Felt Good, Didn’t It? ※
I’d made a mistake, I thought.
Right now, in this moment, Yuno and I were looking directly at each other.
Had I woken her? Or had she been awake all along?
It had been entirely an impulse.
I had kissed Yuno on the forehead.
I tried to turn away, but my body wouldn’t cooperate.
Frozen, unable to move. We stayed as we were — holding each other, eyes locked.
“Um… so, that just now was…”
Pathetically, my words came out a fumbling, stumbling mess.
Yuno kept her eyes on me. As if she wasn’t going to let me go anywhere. Those large, faintly glistening brown eyes threatened to pull me under.
Slowly, those drooping eyes narrowed, softly, sweetly.
Yuno’s face came closer, slowly.
And then —
Our lips met, with the barest suggestion of contact.
Just lips touching lips, the lightest brush, feather-light.
“Wai…”
A small sound slipped out.
Again and again Yuno’s lips came back, chu, chu, like a small bird pecking — and then she let out a soft laugh.
The smile of hers at that close range was bewitching and unreasonably lovely, and my heart ached with a ticklish, throbbing warmth.
This time a slightly longer kiss.
I couldn’t turn my face away. All I could do was let our lips meet.
But this really won’t do. If it goes on like this —
“Hey… just a minute…”
I broke away from Yuno’s lips, trying to interrupt the kiss as I said it. And in that moment.
Yuno’s hand came to rest gently at the back of my head. Then, as if combing through my hair, slowly, tenderly stroking.
But it was unmistakably a signal — you’re not going anywhere.
Again her face drew close.
In the moment our lips met, I’d let my guard down, and my lips were half-open. Yuno’s tongue slipped smoothly through the gap.
It searched, deftly, for mine — and wound around it.
Gentle as someone plucking a flower. And yet the movement felt deeply, deeply sensuous.
All I could do was respond to it. Our tongues wound together. Her lips pressed soft against the inside of mine. Yuno shifted the angle of her neck — and kissed me deeper, deeper still.
Mmh…
Slick, wet…
A sweet, sucking sensation and the sound of it, indecent, filling the quiet room. A sound escaped me before I could stop it, and warmth spread slowly through my core.
Nothing like the artless, innocent face she usually wore — a kiss that devoured, hungry, like a predator with its prey.
But that was precisely what was so deeply, dangerously erotic about it, and my heart hammered until my chest ached with it.
Lips pressed deep together, my head going entirely white, I was desperately trying to hold onto some scrap of composure in the small remaining corner of it.
Just a moment.
What am I doing.
This is wrong.
It’s wrong, and yet.
It feels good, and I don’t want to stop.
But this is wrong. She’s just a housemate, she’s so much younger than me.
I don’t want to fall in love anymore. I don’t want to hurt like that again.
If I’m only going to lose her, then from the start —
“Mmh…! …fh…”
I twisted away and broke from her lips.
A thin silver thread drew out between our lower lips and dissolved.
“Hey… this isn’t right. We can’t.”
When I said it, Yuno looked back at me with heavy, hazy eyes, her breath unsteady. A faint flush across her cheeks. Lips still wet.
It was deeply, unsettlingly alluring, and I found myself looking away.
“But it felt good, didn’t it?”
She said it and narrowed her eyes, a wicked edge to it.
“So. Things like this… you have to stop.”
“You’re saying no and stop, and then you kiss like that, big sis. …You’re so cute it’s going to become a habit.”
She said it in a sweet voice and brought her lips to mine again.
The will to resist was thinning already.
The sound of it shifted, became something slow and thick. A kiss that clung to the inside of the lips, sweet and dissolving, taking its time.
Every time Yuno’s breath melted into the gap between our lips, my head went hazier.
Then Yuno leaned over, covering me from above.
And slender fingers found the buttons of my pyjamas.
One button undone. Then a second —
“Wai — hey!”
I pushed myself upright and pressed both hands against Yuno’s shoulders, pushing her back.
Yuno stumbled backward.
She looked at me with a baffled expression. Not sulking, not angry — puzzled, as though the air had gone out of something.
“Why?”
She tilted her head, reaching again for the buttons of my pyjamas.
“Because you’re always saying you won’t throw me away. So…”
“No. Doing things like that just to avoid being thrown away — that’s wrong.”
I looked down and found the words, piece by piece.
“Things like that are for… with someone you… care for…”
“What’s ‘caring for someone’?”
“Eh…?”
“I don’t know. …Because Mama never said it, and none of the others before ever said it either.”
A small pause.
“Does big sis care for me?”
“Eh… that’s…”
“Then do you dislike me?”
“Dislike… I don’t… dislike you…”
The sudden question left me only able to flounder.
Toward Yuno, I feel something — not what you’d feel for a simple housemate, not what you’d feel for a friend, but something else entirely.
That much I couldn’t deny.
But putting it into words as caring — even allowing myself to know it —
was frightening. Because losing it again, being betrayed again, like that time — that frightened me.
“Hey, if I’m with big sis, will I understand what caring for someone feels like?”
The eyes that had been heavy and glazed until just a moment ago were now looking somewhere far away, vacant, lightless.
“…I don’t know. I don’t know how to make it so I’m never alone again… Someone… tell me.”
She murmured it in a voice that was almost gone. That downcast expression was self-mocking somehow, and at the same time reaching for something — a complicated thing.
I couldn’t say anything.
No honest answer, no kind word of comfort — nothing came.
“…I’m going to sleep.”
Yuno said it, lifted the corner of her mouth just slightly, and turned away.
“Good night.”
Her voice was sweet and gentle, and simply quiet.
From me, a small sound — whether it made it past my lips or not, I couldn’t say.
After a while, Yuno’s back in the half-dark began to rise and fall, slowly, steadily.
I lay there staring at the ceiling, unable even to close my eyes.
My heart was loud. Going on and on, a sound big enough to ring through my head.
The room was quiet, and all I could hear was the sound of Yuno breathing in sleep behind me.
Through the gap in the curtains, the sky was beginning to turn indigo.
My eyes would not close.