Episode 3: Working Up a Sweat. Imagining What You’re Feeling

Don’t ask for my empathy. I won’t give you mine either — not you, and not only you.

That was one of the incidental promises made on that day, the day our strange relationship began. In the time we spend together, with the goal of making each other depend on each other, I must never ask Houu-chan for empathy.
The reason is that she wants to change.
Houu-chan, who told me that the person who watches others’ faces for cues, who smiles that friendly smile and acts bright and cheerful, is a fabrication. She still has the same desire to be liked by others; but she was also someone who wanted to be seen as she truly is, carrying that sense of insufficiency through her days. If I asked her for empathy, she would become the dog. She apparently set this promise between us in advance to prevent exactly that from happening.

“This bit’s hard, I don’t get it.”

The study session, started at short notice. The seat across the table from me is empty.

Our calves, just touching. Right beside me, Houu-chan sits with her legs to one side, the same as me. She’s wearing silver-framed round glasses, and her right hand holds a mechanical pencil. But she’s only pretending to study; in truth, she wants to be made to depend on someone.

My body grows warm.

Our bare legs, just touching.
The boundary where our skin meets gives softly, blurring between us, and the warmth in my body begins to build all the more for it.
Even though we’re both girls. Still, my heartbeat quickens, and wanting to hide it, I try to lean away slightly, to put a little distance between myself and her.

Though I can’t quite bring myself to pull our calves apart.

Leaning at that angle, I finally turn my eyes to the notebook and workbook her pen had been moving across.

“Which question?”

I ask.

“You’ve been watching from right beside me this whole time. What, were you spacing out?”

Those dark eyes regard me with suspicion.

The promise. The reason for it. Which is to say, you.
I hadn’t been thinking about anything else.
But I can hardly say that, can I.

When Houu-chan and I are alone together.
I seem to have a habit of not wanting to show her any weakness.
The one being depended on, the one others depend on — I should be the one who holds control, or rather, I want to hold it. I don’t want her doing as she pleases with me. With that kind of thinking in my head, excuses get difficult at times like this, when I’ve been thinking about nothing but her.

“I think you’ve got the wrong idea, Houu-chan. I’m giving up my weekend time right now to sit with you for this study session. If you’re going to be sarcastic about it, I’m not helping anymore.”

Embarrassment always doubles the barbs I end up sending Houu-chan’s way.
I know full well my objective impression is off-putting, and I’ve resigned myself to it, but I don’t want my personality to be off-putting too. I want to be normal with her. I genuinely have that feeling in me, I’m sure of it. And yet I always manage to act, and speak, and present myself to her in ways that seem designed to make her lose interest.

“I wasn’t being sarcastic. You’re oversensitive. I just thought, if the reason you were spacing out was something other than me sitting right in front of you, that’d be breaking the promise, wouldn’t it.”
“………”

The promise she’s referring to is one more among many.
When we’re alone together: focus on each other. Keep her in your thoughts at all times.

That promise was something Houu-chan decided on her own.

She keeps adding promises unilaterally.
The fact that I keep calling her Houu-chan, for instance — that too was a rule she tacked on by herself, and yet I’ve kept it without fail.

Whatever the promise, as long as it is a promise, I will keep it.

And she understands that bad habit of mine.
Which means she understands it, and that’s precisely why everything she just said was sarcasm.
When we’re together, think only of each other. She knows full well I keep that promise too, and still she tries to make me say it.

— I was thinking about you —

That’s what she’s after.

The dog who is supposed to be the one being tamed is trying to embarrass the one supposed to be doing the taming.

Sure enough, when I looked, Houu-chan was resting her cheek in her hand, watching me with a small smile on her face.
What an unpleasant smile.
As if everything I was about to do was already sitting in the palm of her hand. Her real self has a nasty streak. Perversely clever, always setting little traps. I’d love to tell our classmates. Just what kind of creature this dog actually is.

I moved to bring this little farce to a swift end, and pinched the calf she’d been pressing against mine.

“Ow.”

Her bare leg pulls away from mine.
Just a moment ago I’d been leaning away, trying to put distance between myself and that warmth, and now it withdraws this easily.

“Punishment,” I say, one word only.

I place my hand on the bare leg that moved away, and pull. Draw it back toward me.

slowly

The warmth returns.

I look at her.
The smile she’d been wearing is gone. Surely she has no composure left.
Neither will I, before long.
My eyes go to her fringe. The air conditioning is already running in my room, and still it has stuck itself to her forehead without her noticing. The same is true for me.

We’re sweating.

Our cheeks begin to flush, slowly.

Drawing closer.

The air between us shimmers.
Flushed with heat.
Rising colour.

Eyes, not closing.

Wordlessly I say stay.

We stop, close enough that the distance between us is almost nothing.
In the lenses of her silver-framed round glasses, I can see myself reflected.
In the eyes behind them too, only I am reflected.

I confirm that I alone have taken over her entire field of vision, then:

“Close your eyes.”

And I press the shutter.
Her eyelids fall, and surely behind them, only my sullen face is burned in vivid detail.

I tilted my head.
And drew closer.

.

She opens her eyes.

“Is that it?”
“Hardly.”

She closes her eyes again.
Like that, again and again. She opens them on her own, and I close them again.

The seventh kiss ends, and Houu-chan opens her eyes for the seventh time.

By now her face and her eyes and her lips are entirely melted.
In a blurred, heated field of vision, I watch her expression waver.
Watching it, I let my hands begin to move, slowly.

“Nn.”

My hand, reaching without hesitation under the skirt of a girl who has bared her legs freely, my fingertips, grazed the inside of her thigh just slightly.

If everything that’s about to happen is already sitting in the palm of her hand, then.
Going along with it, choosing to play along with full understanding, is something only the one doing the taming gets to decide.
And so I deliberately climb into the palm of her hand. It isn’t that she’s seized control. That’s what I tell myself, as I do.

With a smooth, unhurried motion.

I hooked my fingers into her underwear.

◇

To be held. To be held in a comfortable warmth.
And not to let it fade, I draw the warmth close to my own chest.

That warmth had a taste.

Lick it, and it’s salty.
The taste of sweat.

That warmth swirls fiercely and makes a mess of me.
Then, as if suddenly gone cold, it pulls back and waits for me.

The warmth — that’s her.

She didn’t change her expression, even seeing me unperformed, charmless as I am.
Same as always, brow furrowed, off-putting, still looking at me without looking away.
I want to know her. She probably doesn’t think well of me. Fondness is nearly the same thing as interest, and that’s nothing more than the intellectual curiosity of a girl who happens to be clever.

She’s probably the kind of creature who has nothing to do with falling for someone.

And so right now, the fact that I’m here beneath her, crying out, is surely nothing to her but a step in a process that happens to be covered by the promise.

But that’s not really true. It isn’t.

The promise is just a pretext.
No — the despair I felt that day was real too. But I was drawn to you by something even greater than that despair. Pulled toward you.

I’m sweating.
It’s been warm lately.
And this sweat too — I wanted to work up a sweat with you, that’s why I came here today too.

She doesn’t notice my true feelings.
Even though she’s clever. Even though she’s smarter than me.

She’ll probably never know what I feel.

So I think.
I think it even more.

I want to know.

How I could make her think of wanting to work up a sweat together, the same way I do.
Her thoughts. Her feelings. Everything she holds inside her, all of it.

Thinking it impossible, and yet placing my hope on a maybe, today too I surrender myself to the promise.

I am fond of her.