“…Huh?”

They stared at each other for a few seconds, both of them wearing nothing. Then Shinomiya’s eyes dropped. The next moment, her face went the colour of a boiled lobster, and she glared at Hatano over the top of the duvet she was yanking up to cover herself.

“Why am I naked.”
“…Well. That is to say.”

Hatano found herself at a loss for words. She genuinely didn’t know. She was the one who wanted answers, but the evidence, as far as any reasonable observer would be concerned, pointed unmistakably at her. She cast around for something to say, sweating, and decided that however damning it looked, the truth was better than a clumsy cover story.

“…Honestly, I don’t know. I woke up like this too.”
“Ugh. That is disgusting.”

She knew it sounded bad even as she said it, and Shinomiya’s stunned reaction only confirmed it. But the thing was, she genuinely had no memory of it. She had been very drunk when she fell asleep, that much was certain, but drunk enough to do that to Shinomiya, of all people? No. She had ways of managing those urges when they arose, and they weren’t currently arising, so it couldn’t have been that.

And yet, when she strained at the edges of her memory, she thought she caught an echo of Shinomiya’s voice. Not the sharp, withering voice she knew, but the same voice, doing something different. Something soft.

Her head throbbed with the hangover as she tried to work through it. Shinomiya was talking again.

“I’m not particularly shocked or anything, it’s just, you’re genuinely the worst. All that performance of being above it all, not interested in anyone, and then you take a drunk junior home and go for it. I won’t report you because this kind of thing happens, but you should be aware that what you’ve done is a crime.”
“W-wait, hold on. For the sake of argument, I’ll grant that something happened. But there’s no evidence it was entirely one-sided.”

Hatano fought to defend herself, and Shinomiya fixed her with a look of pure contempt.

She was genuinely confident, though, that whatever her other failings, she was not the kind of person who would act without consent. She needed something, some shred of proof of her innocence. Her eyes fell on Shinomiya’s discarded clothes, which lay somewhere on the floor beside the bed. A complicated outfit, strings and zips and buttons, all of them fiddly.

“The clothes! Look at this, there’s no way you could have slept through someone getting you out of all those fastenings.”
“Mm…”

That seemed to give Shinomiya pause. She pressed a finger to her chin with the expression of someone who didn’t want to concede a point but could see the logic. After a moment, she tried again.

“But I was drunk. I might not have noticed.”
“That’s not the only thing that doesn’t add up. If you were just going to do something, there’d be no need for either of us to be completely naked.”
“…Maybe that’s your particular preference.”
“And if I’d taken advantage of you while you were asleep, I’d have covered my tracks. Lying here naked together makes no sense.”
“— Which is exactly the kind of reasoning you could use to justify stripping me naked and doing whatever you wanted! And besides, parts of my body feel strange, so you were obviously doing things!”

She pulled the duvet further up over her chest with a pout.

“Something may have happened. But it can’t have been by force.”
“That’s what every sex offender says.”
“If I had, hypothetically, taken advantage of you, I would have taken precautions and filmed it. Leverage, you understand. The fact that I didn’t suggests I didn’t.”

Even she knew that was a terrible argument. “Gross,” said Shinomiya, with a look of pure disgust. But something in the line of reasoning, however squalid, seemed to be landing, because the interrogation lost a degree of intensity.

“Then why are we both undressed?”

A fair question, delivered with the simple directness of someone genuinely confused by the situation. The circumstantial evidence unambiguously pointed toward something having happened between them, but not by Hatano’s unilateral decision, and not the reverse. Which left only one conclusion.

“M… mutual… consent?”

The words came out like Hatano was trying to dislodge something stuck in her throat. Shinomiya’s face did something complicated.

“…Are you an idiot?”

She had a point. There was no universe in which Hatano had desired to sleep with Shinomiya, the person she had publicly declared the most hated in the world, and given what Shinomiya had said the night before, the reverse was equally unlikely. Hatano slowly shook her head, disgusted with herself.

“Sorry.”

Shinomiya let out a sigh of profound weariness and fixed her with a half-lidded stare.

“…You haven’t filmed it, have you. Let me see your phone.”

Hatano hesitated for a fraction of a second. Not because she had anything to hide, but because she had no memory of the night, which meant she couldn’t actually guarantee nothing was there, and that possibility terrified her. Still, refusing would only make Shinomiya more anxious. She hated the girl, but that wasn’t grounds to leave her frightened. Hatano gave a nod, said “you show me yours too,” and fished out her phone.

“From this point on, all phone operations are to be performed so the other person can see the screen.”
“Of course.”
“I’ll go first.”

They each placed their phones on the bed and got to work. Shinomiya unlocked her screen, an anime character, cute, opened her photo and video folder, and held it up. Alongside the unexpected: pictures of stray cats, scenic views. No videos of the relevant kind, at least none visible. Hatano supposed there was a chance she’d hidden something, but honestly, she didn’t suspect her. “Confirmed. My turn,” she said, and opened her own phone with a trembling finger.

There wouldn’t be anything. There couldn’t be. And yet, to Hatano, who genuinely had no memory, this was a black box. Pandora’s box, maybe. If she had, by some catastrophic failure of her own character, not only taken advantage of Shinomiya but recorded it, then she would simply have to hand herself in and accept whatever came next.

She hovered her finger over the album icon, which she almost never used, and made herself breathe for a moment. She ran through the worst case in her mind and tried to figure out what kind of apology would even begin to cover it. But her private anxiety meant nothing to Shinomiya, who ran out of patience and grabbed Hatano’s finger and tapped for her.

The photo library opened. Rows of screenshots, flat and administrative.

And there, mixed in among them, one thumbnail with a play button. A dim room. Pale skin. Small, indistinct, but the figure was female, and she was unclothed.

“…Ah. Well. Evidence, then.”

And the video confirmed, beyond any remaining doubt, that it had not been one-sided.

The blood left Hatano’s face. She couldn’t speak. It felt like watching some internal structure, the trust she had accumulated in herself, the faith she’d kept that she knew what kind of person she was, collapse. This is who I am, she thought, and something close to despair moved through her.

Hatano sat in her cold sweat while Shinomiya regarded her with unconcealed contempt.

There was nothing left to argue. She steeled herself, decided she would turn herself in, and was in the process of forming the most heartfelt apology she could manage, when Shinomiya sighed and pressed play.

“So what did you actually do?”

She had a right to know, obviously. Hatano said nothing as Shinomiya commandeered the phone without ceremony, and watched as she hit play. In the silence that followed, the old phone took a beat before filling the screen.

And then, Shinomiya’s voice came out of the speaker, calling Hatano’s name.

“Senpai, sen-pai, right there — more, I—”\

A voice blurred and sweet with pleasure, mid-appeal, and Shinomiya’s hand snapped out and stopped the video.

“…”

Cold sweat, now on Shinomiya’s side of the bed. The voice calling Hatano’s name had belonged to someone clearly conscious, clearly present, clearly asking for more. Hatano sat with an expression that defied description as the video delivered two things simultaneously: exoneration, and undeniable proof.

For a moment they almost looked at each other. Then both looked away.

What had possessed her, a few hours ago, to do that with this person? What had further possessed her to film it? Alcohol was a terrifying thing, and Hatano felt sure Shinomiya was thinking the same.

Hatano quietly deleted the video. Without looking at Shinomiya, she said:

“Nothing happened. Are we agreed?”
“Agreed. For both our sakes.”

Shinomiya nodded with the expression of someone who couldn’t account for her own behaviour and didn’t want to try.

The question of how it had come to happen, in the end, remained unanswered.