The smell of charcoal and oil, lemon and liquor, hung thick over the tables. The clinking of glasses and beer steins, the murmur of conversation, the burst of laughter — all of it filled the izakaya in overlapping waves.
In one corner of the place, a group of a dozen or so young men and women had taken over a section of seats. They were lively enough, though by izakaya standards they were practically well-behaved.
“Still can’t believe Hatano actually came to one of these!”
One of the group, a young man with dyed brown hair and an unremarkable face, pointed at a woman and laughed. He’d clearly been at it long enough for his face to flush a deep red. The woman he’d named — Hatano — knitted her brow at him, contempt barely disguised, and muttered “Me?” like she was spitting something out. She’d had a fair amount to drink herself, a faint blush spreading across her cheeks.
Black hair to the shoulder. Understated clothes. Not the type to dress herself up prettily, but the type who kept herself presentable — that was Hatano, twenty-one years old.
“Yeah, you! I don’t know if you think you’re too good for us or what, but you never come to these things! So what gives? What brought you out tonight?”
He could have just asked, if he wanted to know. But he didn’t know how — couldn’t help but make everything an attack, couldn’t seem to factor in the feelings of the person he was talking to. Hatano knew she wasn’t one to talk, but that quality in him grated on her. Among all the members of this university’s Literary Appreciation Club, a gathering of misfits if ever there was one, he was the second person she hated most.
“I don’t understand why a ‘Literary Appreciation Club’ needs to drink together once a week in the first place.”
“There she goes! Being all high and mighty again! Save the big talk for when you’ve actually gone pro, yeah? Still a wannabe, last I checked!”
The young man knocked back his drink and cackled. The others around him offered diplomatic smiles or half-hearted rebukes. This was routine, Hatano had long since stopped rising to it, absorbing the jabs with a sigh and letting them pass, so no one felt the need to intervene too forcefully. But tonight was slightly different.
“Knock it off, Iizuka. I’m the one who invited her. The deadline for that fiction competition was three days ago, we both submitted, so I thought we could celebrate each other. That’s why she’s here.”
The one who stepped in was a man with a strikingly handsome face, watching from closer to the centre of the table with an expression of mild exasperation. His looks weren’t merely notable among the club’s members, it was more that you could have staked out Shibuya station all day and only maybe found someone comparable. More than a few women had joined the club specifically because of him. “If Shijima says so, fine,” grumbled Iizuka, and fell silent; Shijima was not the kind of person Iizuka could argue with.
It was a sorry truth, but hierarchies form even in groups of a dozen people. At the undisputed top sat Shijima, and in this little world, his word was law.
“Sorry about him, Hatano. I was hoping we’d actually get to talk about writing tonight.”
“It’s fine. I just won’t come again.”
Hatano said it with a thread of irritation running through her voice, and Shijima gave a rueful smile and said nothing more.
“Wait, Shijima-san, you’re already a professional, aren’t you? Aren’t those new writer prizes for amateurs?”
The question came from a petite young woman nearby, dressed in something that bared her shoulders, with a face that could stop a room. Her name was Shinomiya, and she was, if anything, even more striking than Shijima, though beautiful wasn’t quite the right word for her. Cute was closer. Chestnut hair down to her shoulders, and dark, pretty eyes that seemed to look up at everything and everyone. She trained those eyes on Shijima now, her face flushed a warm pink, her voice doing something soft and deliberate. Several of the other women in the group watched her with thinly veiled annoyance.
Shijima — to fill in the picture, had won a new writer award from one of the major mystery publishers while still a student, and had since been something of a local literary celebrity. He’d even taken a book prize. Hatano found herself envying him, despite herself; she respected him genuinely.
“Some competitions are amateurs-only, sure. But publishers have different needs depending on the season, and if sales aren’t there, they’ll look elsewhere, so most of them accept professionals too. I’m just trying to find places that suit the kind of work I want to write.”
“Wow, Shijima-san, you’re so driven! That’s so admirable.”
Even Shijima’s composure softened slightly under the full force of Shinomiya’s attention. The other women in the group bristled at what was obviously a calculated move; some of the men were already angling for a way to cut in and talk to her themselves.
Hatano observed all of this from a remove, and let out a quiet breath.
The club, she had long since decided, was made up of three distinct factions.
First: people like herself and Shijima, people who actually read and wrote fiction, who engaged with the literary arts in some literal sense.
Second: people like Shinomiya and a handful of the other women, people who had come because of Shijima.
Third: people like Iizuka, people who had come because of the women who had come because of Shijima.
The moment she laid it out in her head, she nearly laughed. What came out instead was something dry and hollow. She found the whole thing tiresome, and yet she stayed, because whatever the club actually was, Shijima was someone she could genuinely learn from. In practice, though, it was nothing more than a social circle for university students, and while she had nothing in principle against romance, having it imported into something she took seriously felt, not exactly insulting, but like a low-grade friction she could never quite ignore.
“I think I’ve had a little too much to drink…”
Shinomiya tilted her flushed face up at Shijima with those dark eyes. It was obvious to everyone present, probably obvious to Shijima too, but the infuriating thing was that even knowing exactly what she was doing, she still had enough of whatever it was about her that you found yourself half-inclined to let it go. She was trouble, and to be clear: of all the people in this hollowed-out club, she was the one Hatano hated most. More than Iizuka.
It wasn’t the flirting with handsome men that bothered her, not really. What bothered her was that Shinomiya had a face that could have taken her anywhere, and this was what she chose to do with it. Flirt in a second-rate club. There was something close to resentment in Hatano’s feeling, she knew that. She’d lived her life through modest effort and modest reward, grinding along step by step, and someone like Shinomiya, who didn’t seem to fight at all, was maddening in a way that was almost indistinguishable from envy. She probably wasn’t a bad person. But she was intolerable.
That type, that type was the kind of person Hatano hated most in the world.
The lemon sour she lifted to her lips tasted, just for a moment, faintly bitter.
An hour later, around ten in the evening, the gathering finally broke up.
Everyone began drifting toward their own routes home, settling in for another night’s sleep before the machinery of the next day started up again. It should have been a peaceable end to a day that amounted to nothing much, and then a bomb dropped.
It came in the form of Shinomiya’s voice.
“I’m so sorry, I think I’ve had too much to drink… Could someone walk me home?”
She looked up at Shijima with a crimson face and glistening eyes, pressing close to him with an air of helplessness. The women of the club, faces twisted into expressions normally reserved for finding cockroaches in the kitchen, formed a wall of barely-suppressed fury and revulsion that nobody wanted to approach. The more obtuse of the men, meanwhile, were doing a poor job of feigning indifference while clearly calculating their chances. Shijima himself looked apologetic and put his hands together.
“Ah, sorry, I’ve got plans with a friend from home after this…”
Shinomiya’s brow faintly twitched. She looked openly put out for a moment, and then, within seconds, arranged her face into a smile and murmured “I see, that’s a shame…” with a small, resigned drop of her shoulders. Then she swept the assembled men with a sidelong look of quiet desolation, and waited.
“I — I’ll walk you! If that’s okay!”
“I was going to get a taxi anyway, so we could share!”
“You’re a grown woman, you can get yourself home, can’t you? Right, Shinomiya-san?”
It was a grim spectacle. The men jostled; the women pushed back. Hatano was already turning toward the station, she wanted no part of this, when Shijima, that one unsullied thing in the whole sorry swamp, smoothed everything over.
“Now, now, she really does seem to have had too much, and it’s getting late. It might not be safe for a young woman to go home in that state. Hatano, could I ask you?”
The arrow came out of nowhere and went straight through her temple.
She stopped and turned, and found herself looking directly at Shinomiya, whose expression wore exactly the same disbelieving look Hatano’s own face must have had. Two people from opposite ends of the world, who had nothing in common, and for one single moment, they were in complete and perfect agreement.
“Why me.”
Hatano pressed a hand to her forehead and said it flatly, but Shijima pressed his palms together with that expression of genuine remorse.
“You know why. You’re the only one here who can.”
She did know. He was a good person — that was his whole problem. Once Shinomiya had asked for help, he’d have to honour that, but sending a man with her carried its own set of risks. Especially given that she really was drunk. Anything unwanted happening would be a serious problem.
The women in the club would sooner die than lift a finger for Shinomiya. Which left Hatano as the only viable option. She didn’t enjoy being manoeuvred like this — but she had blood in her veins, and it was warm. The thought of something bad happening to Shinomiya was unpleasant to her, whatever she felt about the girl herself.
“H-Hatano’s got better things to do anyway! Let me go with her!”
Iizuka inserted himself helpfully, shooting Hatano a look that seemed to invite her agreement. But his eyes were bloodshot, his trousers were straining, and his intentions were not even slightly disguised — and if she refused, she’d be giving him the perfect justification to take Shinomiya himself. That made it hard to refuse.
Shinomiya was making sounds — “uh” and “ah” and similar — as she hunted for some grounds to object to Hatano’s escort, but she was too drunk to get her mouth working properly, and no complete sentence came out. At least she was drunk the same as everyone else; small mercies.
“All right, all right — I’ll walk her back. Let’s call it a night.”
She would not send Little Red Riding Hood home with the wolves. She gave in, grudgingly, and got a range of responses. The most genuinely relieved of them was Shijima, who said, “I owe you. Come to me for edits, any time” and put his hands together, and Hatano found her exhale just a touch shorter than it might have been.
The gathering dissolved on terms nobody was entirely happy with. Hatano took hold of Shinomiya’s arm and steered her toward the station. The look on both their faces was deeply, mutually aggrieved. No one had won anything.
“This is a nightmare. Why did it have to be you, Senpai…”
“Say it somewhere I can’t hear you, then. I’m walking you home.”
“If I say it somewhere you can’t hear, it’s gossip.”
“If you say it to my face, it’s just rude.”
With none of her carefully cultivated softness in evidence, Shinomiya grumbled with open hostility, cheeks still blazing. Her footing was genuinely unsteady — there would be no polished performance of being-just-drunk-enough-to-need-a-man-to-escort-her here. Months into knowing each other, and Hatano was only learning this now: Shinomiya was not, in fact, capable of that kind of calculation.
“I wanted Shijima-san… anyone would have been better than you…”
Lip pushed out, muttering under her breath. So this is who she really is, Hatano thought — and if the coquettishness was a performance, this proved it. She walked on, absorbing the complaints with a sigh.
“With a face like yours, you could have any man you wanted.”
“…I don’t actually like men, you know.”
“What?”
Hatano turned to her, brow furrowed, and Shinomiya looked back with a vague, tipsy little smile.
“When a man walks a cute girl home, that means he recognises that she’s cute, right? And when he does that, other women get jealous.”
“Which is why it was a disaster back there.”
“Jealousy is admiration. It means they’ve acknowledged me.”
She said it with a certain private pride. Whatever reason she had for caring so much about that, the logic itself wasn’t wrong — the urge to be near someone, the envy of someone being fussed over by men, both of those were in their own way a form of recognition.
“That’s why I hate you, Senpai. You don’t dislike me — but you don’t like me either. That’s the worst thing. Probably the thing I hate most in the world. You, specifically.”
“Good for you. You’re the person I hate most in the world too.”
The words came out more lightly than Hatano intended — playing along with a drunk girl’s ramblings, no more.
“Ah! You said something mean!”
Something a child would say. Hatano had to resist the urge to let go of her arm — but if she went over a guardrail, she’d be dreaming about it for weeks. She gritted her teeth and kept dragging her toward the station.
“So. Which station?”
“Tachikawa.”
“I beg your pardon?!”
Hatano pulled out her phone to check the time, then muttered “That’s the opposite direction” with what was nearly a click of the tongue. Tachikawa from here, and then all the way back — and she lived in the countryside, for her sins. The last train would certainly be gone by the time she returned.
“The last train won’t wait. You’ll have to get home yourself from here.”
“Excuse me?! That’s so irresponsible! You’re supposed to see me all the way back, even if it means a taxi!”
Her words were already slurring at the edges, and her feet were uncertain, her eyes half-closed. Sleeping past her stop was one thing, but something happening between the station and her door was another kind of problem entirely. A taxi to Tachikawa was beyond Hatano’s budget, but leaving her felt equally impossible.
“Know your limits when you drink.”
She lectured her, irritated, and got back: “Men always make sure I get home properly. Some of them are after something, but that’s fine by me” — a response delivered with that same vague smile. The smile, at least; the words themselves weren’t funny at all. It wasn’t promiscuity, exactly. It was something closer to finding the value of one’s existence in being wanted by others — a way of living that was reckless, and unsettling.
Hatano raked a hand through her hair and let out a long, decisive breath.
“…You can sleep at my place tonight.”
“Eh?! Your place?! I’ll catch something!”
A concession worth a hundred million steps, received with a look of distinct displeasure. Hatano felt a powerful urge to tear out a fistful of that chestnut hair — but after a deep, drawn-out sigh, Shinomiya lifted her shoulders in a small shrug.
“…I suppose I have no choice. I’ll allow it.”
I’ll allow it.
They arrived home at an hour when the date was just barely still holding on.
Hatano’s apartment — a cheap single room with the bed, sofa, and table all crammed in together; she worked part-time to keep it — was reached at a point when Shinomiya was barely conscious. Hatano half-carried her through the door, and was met with a faint “good work” breathed out in a dream-like haze. She glared at her with ragged breathing and murder in her eyes. I could kill this woman.
She resisted the impulse — too much effort after the fact — and with what felt like a supreme expenditure of will, deposited Shinomiya’s slight frame onto her own bed. Shinomiya made a small sound, cute in spite of everything. Hatano had nothing to say to that. The girl’s flushed face pressed into the white of the pillow, and almost immediately her breathing deepened and steadied, and that was that.
There was probably no point saying anything at this stage, but Hatano would say what needed to be said before going to sleep herself. She addressed the closing eyes.
“I have class tomorrow, so be up before I leave the house.”
“Mm.”
“I’ll bill you for the cleaning. I’m not sleeping in a bed you’ve been in.”
“Yep yep.”
“And I’m taking the sofa, so be grateful.”
“Ehhm.”
The human language was dissolving. Hatano no longer had the energy to be annoyed. She watched Shinomiya’s breathing settle into a rhythm, decided she would do the same, and let the thought go. She threw the duvet over her — a cold autumn night, and she didn’t want to deal with a sick girl tomorrow — grabbed the blanket for herself, fell onto the sofa, and clicked off the light with the remote.
The first thing she felt was someone else’s breath, not her own. An exhale out of sync with her own lungs. Then a scent — a shampoo she didn’t recognise — reaching her through the cool morning air. Then the light coming through the gap in the curtains, insisting it was morning, and Hatano finally opened her eyes.
And found Shinomiya’s sleeping face filling her field of vision.
In a single instant, the sleep was gone.
“— What.”
Several seconds passed in which her brain simply refused to process anything. She could do nothing but voice the incomprehension. Eventually, in a blurred and sluggish way, she remembered: she had brought Shinomiya back here last night. And — through the fog of a hangover pressing at her temples — she understood that this was why Shinomiya was in the same bed as her.
She almost accepted that.
Then stopped.
She had gone to sleep on the sofa. She was quite sure of it.
This thought made her begin, very carefully, to sit up — and she was immediately struck by the cold, and instinctively wrapped her arms around herself. And then, a beat later, registered that she was wearing nothing at all.
A cold sweat crept down the back of her neck. Some part of her suggested going to make coffee and contemplating reality from a safe distance. But facts had to be established — so Hatano looked, carefully, at Shinomiya, where she lay hidden under the duvet.
She too was completely naked.
The moment it landed, Hatano’s heartbeat lurched.
Her first instinct was self-defence. Which of us — she heard herself whisper it, to no one, voice unsteady — which of us— But she had gone to sleep on the sofa, and the fact that she was now in the bed made it rather evident who had gone to whom, and her rational mind was screaming at her to destroy the evidence before anything else. Get Shinomiya dressed first. Get herself dressed. What then — she didn’t know; she was still working through the problem in a rising tide of panic when Shinomiya made a small sound against her pillow.
Shinomiya turned her face into the pillow, wrapped her fingers around the sheet, pulled the duvet back up — and then, as if remembering something, her eyes opened slowly, unfocused.
Those unfocused eyes found Hatano: naked, drenched in cold sweat, staring back at her.
Several seconds passed in which neither of them moved.
And then, mirror to what had just happened on Hatano’s side, Shinomiya’s eyes flew wide. She reached a hand beneath the duvet, made a small, investigating movement, and stilled. Realised. Looked at Hatano with an expression of pure bewilderment, and said, quietly, the only thing there was to say.
“…Huh?”