Episode 4: Telling a Lie. Setting Fire to a Dark-Eyed Night.
“I’m having a sleepover at her place tonight.”
Houu-chan and I each told our own parents the exact same line, and each of us got it approved without trouble.
In the beginning, my mother used to call the other girl’s parents to say, “Thank you for having her, I hope she’s no trouble” — but after enough actual sleepovers, she’d grown used to it, and at some point she stopped bothering with that courtesy altogether.
That familiarity worked out very much in our favour.
“This is different from usual. ……That outfit really suits you. It’s lovely.”
Houu-chan, wearing her public face, that friendly dog-like smile, praises my outfit for the day like that.
Normally I dress casually, prioritising ease of movement and cleanliness over anything else when I put together an outfit. But today wasn’t a day that allowed for that.
“You’re the one dressed grown-up today, Houu-chan.”
She’d curled her hair too, and the toenails peeking out of her sandals were done in a cyan pedicure.
But the thing that caught my eye most about her today might have been her lips.
Since school forbids any noticeable makeup, I’d only ever seen her in pale, faint lip colours. But what she had on today was a clear, distinct shade of lipstick.
Looking at the plump sheen and gloss of it, I found myself thinking that kissing her tonight might bring an entirely different pleasure from the one I already knew.
As if the mere sight of those lips was an invitation to kiss them.
Allure.
That was the exact word for the kind of grown-up, sultry quality her lips, and by extension she herself, seemed to be giving off today.
“If we’re talking grown-up, that’s even less me, don’t you think.”
Saying that, Houu-chan let a faint, smouldering heat show at the back of her dark eyes.
Only I, watching her closely, could see it.
Wearing that public dog-like smile of hers, even so, she seemed to be inviting me too.
The place we’d agreed to meet was the station front of a fairly bustling city, on a Saturday evening. Plenty of people around, naturally, the noise never quite dying down, and I felt the urge to announce loudly, to the passersby who didn’t know us and had no interest in us whatsoever, exactly who Houu-chan really was.
How devoted to the flesh, how deep the darkness in this woman truly ran.
But even if I tried to make that known, nobody actually has any interest in Houu-chan, and I’m not about to cause a scene like that anyway.
I simply simulate it in my head, humiliate her there, in my head alone, and content myself with that.
“Gosh, it’s hot though. This humid heat hasn’t let up on me once in seventeen years, it’s honestly impressive.”
Houu-chan, with no idea she’d just been humiliated entirely inside my head, wipes her bare arm, exposed by her short sleeves, with a handkerchief.
I narrowed my eyes and looked up at the sky.
A sky the colour of madder red. I realise it’s already been two months since the new school year began.
This length of daylight, this red sky and the fish-scale clouds running across it, reminds us both that it’s now late June.
Summer was already right around the corner.
Without warning, my arm is taken.
Entwined, pressed close, I feel the heat of her body.
“Time’s limited, isn’t it. Let’s head to where we’re going.”
Holding my arm, Houu-chan leads me.
When we’re alone together, the lead, the reins so to speak, should be mine to hold. But outside those moments, it’s exactly like this. She walks half a step ahead of me, and I follow along obediently. As if I’d been fitted with an invisible collar, Houu-chan occasionally lets something like amusement flicker through those dark eyes of hers, glancing at my throat.
I feel a faint spark catch somewhere, and every time I see that amusement in her, my hand goes to my neck. There’s no way I could actually be marked there, and still I find myself checking.
And watching me touch my own throat like that, unable to bear it, she finds it funny again, of course, and laughs. Beaming. Like a dog. But far more womanly than I ever see at school. Like a flower.
Seeing a smile like that, my heart races without my permission, which is genuinely unbearable.
Seeing a smile like that, my face starts to heat without my permission, ………
Genuinely, unbearable.
(“But, well, strangely enough, I don’t mind this either, I guess”)
Feeling that way, while outwardly looking put out, I give my arm a small token tug.
Houu-chan feels it and only tightens her grip on my arm in response.
“It’s hot……”
“So hot.”
In the end, our body heat never separated, and if anything we drew even closer as we kept walking toward our destination.
A bell chimed, karan karan, and in the dim interior of the bar, a few pairs of eyes turned to register us as we walked in.
In a space that wasn’t especially large, three people, already beautifully and fashionably dressed, were scattered between the counter and the tables, drifting through quiet conversation, lost in their own evening.
“……This is, kind of intense,” Houu-chan said.
We stopped at the entrance.
Houu-chan was overwhelmed by the grown-up atmosphere of the place.
I felt exactly the same. Having become a high schooler, on the verge of turning seventeen, I’d fully convinced myself I’d already joined the ranks of adults. I think losing my innocence about sex played its part in that too. I’d been looking down on my classmates without realising it, certain that I alone among them had become an adult.
And yet here, overwhelmed by the atmosphere of this place, I found I couldn’t move.
“Welcome. Quite a lovely pair of guests we’ve got tonight.”
A woman seated alone at the counter called out to us, dressed in a sharply tailored suit, her hair cropped in a short crew style that gave her a masculine air.
The school prince. If this woman had been in an all-girls’ school in her youth, that’s surely the title she’d have carried. Her gentlemanly bearing suited her that perfectly.
“Come on over here.”
The woman with the prince-like presence, who’d been chatting until just now with another woman sitting alone at the counter in a dress and glasses, flashed us a refreshing smile and waved us toward two open counter seats.
Following her, we finally got our bodies moving, and settled, somewhat stiffly, into the two seats side by side.
With two empty seats between us, the bespectacled woman seated on my side of the counter was watching us.
Our eyes met.
She looked away immediately.
……She seemed like a serious sort of person. Which made it all the more strange, somehow, that even someone like her would come to drink in a place like this. Her hair tied back in a single ponytail, glasses on, she had the air of someone who’d probably been the class representative back in school, or on the discipline committee, or maybe the library committee.
“What’ll you two have first?”
The voice came from across the counter, and my attention turned to the woman standing there. She was the only staff member visible anywhere in the bar. I wondered if she might be the owner.
“Non-alcoholic, of course, for you two.”
………. Despite all the trouble we’d both gone to dressing ourselves up grown-up for the night, the woman had seen through us as minors at a glance.
Yes. The place we’d come to was a bar with a certain condition attached.
A grown-up establishment tucked among the hotel district. A place of refuge, of rest, for adults who drink and let themselves be worn down by society, seeking some comfort.
Except this one came with the condition: no men allowed.
Which is to say, it was that kind of bar.
A place where women came looking to meet other women.
A place where women could drink freely, without worry.
The suggestion had come from Houu-chan first.
It was on one of those humid, sweltering days, after we’d come together at the end of the usual master-and-servant dynamic.
The bloom of seventeen. The age right on the border between adult and child. Maybe this is the last year we get to take adventures with the full thrill of freedom.
After stringing together excuses along those lines, she said to me:
“I want to try being more reckless, hotter. I want to get drunk, blurry, light-headed, drowning in it. I want to experience that. If a night hot enough to leave a burn becomes a memory, maybe then I’ll become truly addicted to you.”
I nodded. With some lingering doubt about how our depend-on, be-depended-on relationship seemed to be shifting, just slightly, into a relationship built around physical interest. But even so, I was curious about a night hot enough to leave me light-headed.
From there we made our plans, and today, we’d been fully prepared to break society’s rules, to act the part of adults, drink, get carried away, and feel light-headed with it.
Only to be seen through as minors by the owner in front of us, leaving us no choice but to shrink under the pressure she radiated, unmistakable and unyielding even behind that refreshing smile.
“O-orange juice for me…”
“M-me too…”
In the end, that was the only answer either of us could give.