Episode 50
Completely full…
I tidied up after lunch with Fujishiro and returned to the room to study.
I leaned back against the bed, stretching out my too-full stomach. Fujishiro did the same, rubbing hers as she stretched.
“Ahh, so full. But I should study.”
“Yeah.”
Fujishiro said that and got straight to work.
I followed her lead and started studying beside her.
The sound of Fujishiro’s mechanical pencil moving across her notebook drifted pleasantly into my ears.
Relaxed by that comfortable rhythm, I moved my own pen too.
When I hit a problem I didn’t understand, I asked Fujishiro, and she answered without a single sign of annoyance. Because of that I could ask freely, without hesitation, and my studying moved forward smoothly.
But about an hour in, a sudden wave of drowsiness came over me.
Maybe it was partly from being so full.
While I was drifting in and out, Fujishiro draped a blanket over my shoulders from behind.
“Why don’t you rest a little?”
“But…”
“Naps matter too. I’ll wake you up.”
“Then… just fifteen minutes…”
I could barely get the words out, and slumped forward onto the desk, drifting off almost immediately.
The last thing in my vision was Fujishiro’s face, gentle, and it made me feel a small flash of displeasure, wondering why she’d look at me like that.
Because once I knew that kind of gentleness, I felt I’d become greedy, wanting more and more of it.
※
I was somewhere deep in the dark.
Nothing reached me, the way sound disappears underwater. A floating sensation, and at the same time a heavy, sinking one.
Just alone, the whole time.
No matter where I looked, pitch black, no one anywhere.
A sudden anxiety hit me, tightening my chest. But thinking it over calmly, I settled, telling myself I’d probably always been alone from the start.
Accepting my own solitude came easily, and at the same time, I felt a hollow, empty ache in my chest.
For a while I lay curled up like that, until warmth touched the top of my head, and my consciousness drifted back toward reality.
I slowly opened my heavy eyelids, and Fujishiro’s small hand was gently stroking my hair. My eyes met hers the instant I woke, and even so, her hand kept moving through my hair without stopping.
Something restless stirred in my chest, and I caught her hand as if to avoid it.
“What were you doing?”
“Sorry, I thought about waking you, but you looked so peaceful.”
“Don’t do strange things.”
“I wasn’t.”
Doing something that gentle to me and then being able to lie about it so easily, I thought.
Because she does things like that, I end up wanting more of that warmth.
I pulled Fujishiro’s body toward me.
Small, slight, and unreliable as she should have been, and yet the warmth she gave off brought a sense of security.
Since when had I become someone who craved another person’s warmth like this?
I used to think I didn’t need any of it, and yet, foolishly, because Fujishiro was close, it was slowly becoming something I couldn’t do without.
This state I’m in right now isn’t good.
And yet I kept holding her tightly.
Fujishiro’s gentle scent brushed past my nose.
Wrapped in Fujishiro’s warm body heat, my heart moved at an easy, unhurried pace.
Fujishiro’s breathing reached my ears, and my own breathing fell into step with it, matching hers.
I decided it couldn’t be helped, that I’d had a strange dream from napping, and after acting on it, my own behaviour started to feel unbearably wrong, and I pulled away from Fujishiro.
I meant to go straight back to studying, but Fujishiro was wearing an expression I hadn’t expected, and I found myself staring at her face.
Fujishiro’s skin had gone red, not just her face but her ears and neck too, her eyes wavering as she looked at me.
I’d never seen Fujishiro make a face like that before.
Not understanding what had caused it, I kept watching, and Fujishiro, still red-faced, hardened her expression.
“Morishita did something strange.”
“I didn’t.”
Where exactly hadn’t I?
I’m the one telling the bigger lie here, I wanted to say to myself, but it wasn’t something I could easily admit either.
“Morishita’s indecent.”
“How does that follow?”
“Idiot…”
Fujishiro said that and turned back to her desk.
I didn’t fully understand what had just happened, but having woken from sleep, my head felt clear, so I decided to get back to studying too.
Thanks to studying straight through since morning, progress was going remarkably well.
I found myself impressed, for the first time in a while, that Fujishiro’s suggestion had actually been a good one.
Once focused, the afternoon passed quickly, and it was time for dinner.
I don’t have to go home today…
Thinking that made everything feel so much lighter, and a bad thought crossed my mind: wouldn’t it be nice if this went on every day?
Fujishiro packed away the study materials and started preparing dinner again.
“You’re making it again?”
“Who else would make it?”
“No, well…”
That might be true, but there was still something deeply strange about Fujishiro cooking like it was nothing.
Same as lunch, I followed her to the kitchen.
Fujishiro was warming the leftover curry from lunch and pulling something out of the freezer, udon.
“Tonight’s curry udon.”
“I see. Sounds good.”
“Morishita’s being unusually agreeable.”
What I found more surprising than my own agreeableness was that Fujishiro could think of something like this and actually cook it, but I didn’t say that part aloud.
Fujishiro skillfully added hot water to the curry, dropped in the noodles, and had a delicious-looking bowl of curry udon ready in no time.
We sat together at the table, said itadakimasu again, and slurped the noodles.
It should have tasted exactly the same as the curry from earlier, and yet, just by becoming udon, it felt like an entirely different dish, which struck me as strange.
Fujishiro had been watching me with a confident look for a while now.
I could more or less guess what she wanted to hear, and after turning it over, I decided to say it properly.
“Curry udon is good too.”
“Right?! Do you get it now, that I have enough life skills to live alone?”
Right, that had been the whole point of this stay, to prove exactly that.
I’d forgotten all about it, and honestly, whether Fujishiro’s life skills were high or low had nothing to do with me either way.
“I suppose, yeah.”
“Then, will you think about coming to the same prefecture as me?”
“…Well, I’ll think about it.”
“Really?!”
Fujishiro looked genuinely startled and shot up from her seat, staring at me. I hadn’t said I would, and yet she was already jumping to conclusions, hasty as ever.
“Just thinking about it.”
“Please do consider it properly. I don’t think you’ll regret it, young lady.”
Saying something that ridiculous, Fujishiro let out an “ahaha,” her cheerful laugh filling the room.