In the single room that still faintly carried Shinomiya’s scent, Hatano sat at her desk facing the laptop. Mild late-morning light came through the window. The sound of keys, irregular, unhurried, rose and fell in the quiet, and characters accumulated on the screen one after another. When she mistyped a conversion she corrected it without expression, and when she had done it enough times the text had piled up into something substantial, and at a natural stopping point she lifted her hands.
“…Hm.”
She exhaled, pushed off from the desk with her feet, and rolled on the castored chair to the side of the bed. From there she tipped herself over onto it, lay flat, pressed her fingers against the bridge of her nose, and pulled out her phone.
She had afternoon lectures. In another ten or fifteen minutes she would need to start getting ready, or she’d be late. Today, she had been thinking this for a while now, was a good day to finally quit the Literary Appreciation Club. No need to make an announcement; that would only create friction. But she had some things in the room that she needed to retrieve.
With this in mind she lay there, dragging the pillow over and putting her head on it.
It had been a little over a week since the night with Shinomiya. She had washed the sheets and pillowcase, and none of her scent remained, but when she thought about everything else that had soaked into the bedding, she felt a peculiar unease she couldn’t quite name. She glanced at her phone for the time and her eye caught the date. Ah. She had just remembered: today was the day the new writer award results were announced.
Her heart gave a small, involuntary lurch. She was fairly confident she had written something genuinely good. She had already passed the second round; she was currently in the third. If she cleared that, it was the final selection. The prize was close; she believed in the work. With a mix of nerves and conviction she tapped the bookmarked results page and opened it.
Third-round finalists: ten names. Unlike the previous rounds, it was the kind of list she could take in at a glance.
She opened the page and scanned the titles and pen names. After a few seconds she let out a long, slow breath, dropped her head back against the pillow with a thud, and sent her phone sailing onto the duvet.
She hadn’t made it.
“…Shouldn’t have looked.”
She lay there in a spread-eagle, speaking to the ceiling. Looking wouldn’t have changed anything, but she could at least have made it through the day with her energy intact. She was half-tempted to skip lectures and stay here. She glanced at the page again, clutching at something, and then her eye caught a pen name she knew. 【Shijima Shijima】, the club president’s name, in full.
She closed her eyes and sat with the gap in ability for a moment. Then exhaled, she’d lost count of how many times, and let it go.
“…Of course.”
By the time she finished her afternoon lectures, the light was already going.
Hatano made her way to the third floor of the club building, to the Literary Appreciation Club’s room, to collect her things as planned. It was a generous arrangement by any measure, a proper club room for a group with vague activity records, low membership, and nothing much to show for itself, and it was entirely Shijima’s doing, his profile as a student writer lending the club a credibility it wouldn’t otherwise have earned.
A remarkable person, truly.
Hatano pushed open the door with envy and admiration turning over each other in her chest. Inside, most of the club’s members had already gathered, clustered around the tables in their usual groups, chatting. They glanced at her briefly as she came in and went back to their conversations. Shijima, notebook open as ever and keeping half an ear on the chatter around him, caught her eye with a look that managed to be apologetic and knowing at once. She understood what it meant, and gave a wry smile.
“Congratulations.”
“…Sorry.”
He heard the layer of warmth beneath the word and looked genuinely mortified. He wasn’t indifferent to competition results just because he was already professional, he would have checked the announcement, and he knew what it meant that one of them had passed and the other hadn’t. It was usually the one who passed who felt awkward; the reversal was almost funny.
“Don’t worry about it on my behalf. I’ve already started the next one.”
She said it while pulling her notebook and the paperbacks she’d been using for reference from the locker and pressing them into her bag. Shijima gave her a look that was something close to admiration.
“Yeah. That’s the way.”
“That’s my line. …Go and win it.”
They were not equals, Hatano knew that. She was still a wannabe, an amateur; he was a professional. The authority behind the instruction was more than a little uncertain. But they were in the same place, held the same commitment, and that made them something to each other, even if no clean word existed for it.
Shijima nodded, with something pleased in his expression and something hungry just beneath it.
“Obviously.”
Good. Hatano felt herself smile, just slightly.
He was the same kind of person as Shinomiya in this one respect, someone with genuine ability. Whether it was talent or effort didn’t matter. What mattered was that he was working to use what he had, pushing toward something higher. That was what separated him from Shinomiya, the way he moved through the world, steady and deliberate, carrying his guilt without letting it stop him, keeping his eyes on his own path. That was what a professional looked like, to her.
Well. She would miss Shijima. But the club was a mixer venue now, and she had things to do. She had decided; she would leave, and leave cleanly. She turned to go.
Then someone cut across the moment.
“What are you two talking about~?”
The voice was soft and deliberate, just above a murmur. Shinomiya: shoulders bare, hair pulled up into a ponytail today, which bared a graceful nape that was almost certainly drawing a line of male attention across the room. The sound of her voice brought the other night briefly and vividly to mind, and Hatano stilled involuntarily and looked at her. Shinomiya, for her part, gave Hatano a single glance and then returned her full attention to Shijima, as though she weren’t there.
“Ah, right… we were talking about the fiction competition. She submitted to the same prize I did.”
“Wow, amazing~! Did you pass, Shijima-san?”
“Yes, the next round is the final selection. There’s nothing I can do about it now, but I can’t help being nervous.”
Shijima laughed awkwardly, visibly unsettled by Shinomiya pressing in close. She was formidably skilled at this, as always. The scene was exactly what it always was, the same gestures, the same performance. And yet something about it looked faintly different to Hatano now, since the other night, since she had heard what Shinomiya actually thought, since she had held her. Hatano glanced at the other women in the group and found several of them visibly fuming.
But Shinomiya, who seemed to treat their negative attention as sustenance, was smiling her bright smile, fingertips pressed lightly together at her chest, drawing the eye subtly to what was there, and she leaned in and said softly:
“In that case, why don’t we celebrate tonight?”
Hatano watched the women’s suppressed resentment and thought: this is going to get complicated. She calculated the right moment to slip away. Shijima, however, seemed unaware of any of it; he couldn’t seem to take his eyes off Shinomiya, standing there like that, and his voice went a little unsteady.
“I, it’s not a win yet!”
“But just reaching the final selection is incredible. Or are you saying that results are the only thing that matters, that effort without a result is worthless?”
She used her eyes to indicate Hatano as she said it, quietly invoking her third-round elimination as a rhetorical hostage. Shijima found himself without a response for a moment. Then, with some effort, he gathered himself and put his hands together, apologetic.
“…I don’t mean that. But, sorry. I really can’t relax yet. And winning isn’t even the final goal, I have something further than that, and right now I need to give the writing more time. Today especially, because of what today is, I want to sit with it a little longer.”
He said it with such genuine sincerity that Shinomiya’s expression shifted, just briefly, into something that looked like tedium, and then into something else, something that wasn’t performance, something faintly like envy. But she smoothed it over quickly into a smile and nodded.
“I see! In that case, I couldn’t possibly get in the way. But, I really do mean it when I say I’m rooting for you. Good luck.”
A warm, clean smile. Shijima looked apologetic but relieved.
Then a voice interjected from nearby, some young man leaning in.
“So how about you come for a drink with me? You’re not busy.”
“Oh, Shindo-san.”
Shindo, one of the better-looking men in the club, actually. Tall, lean, some muscle to him. A third-year, like Hatano and Shijima; childhood friends with Shijima, or close to it. He and Shijima were the club’s acknowledged top tier of attractive men, and the female membership’s attention was roughly divided between them. Iizuka, who had been about to say something, let his shoulders drop and listened to the exchange with a resigned expression.
Shinomiya looked briefly surprised, then glanced at the women, and the corners of her mouth softened, just for a moment, before she rearranged it into a delighted smile.
“Oh, really? Well, I won’t say no to that~”
“I found a good bar near the station. Quite stylish.”
“Wonderful! I’ll have to watch myself, though, can’t drink too much.”
She made a face that suggested she was still mortified about the other night’s lapse. Shindo laughed easily and said “Fair enough, I’ll keep an eye on you.” He was a self-confessed lover of women, but Hatano knew he was the kind of man who kept to certain lines. And he was Shijima’s friend.
He wouldn’t be the type to take advantage of someone who’d had too much. She registered herself feeling reassured by that, and then registered that feeling reassured meant she had been worried, which meant she had been worried about Shinomiya, and looked at herself with some exasperation. So sleeping together had produced some kind of attachment. Apparently.
Given that girl’s way of living, pain was going to come for her sooner or later. And it would be no one’s fault but her own.
That thought was still settling when a loud noise broke across the room.
The source was one of the more socially influential third-year women.
She was sharp-faced, freckled, and clearly furious, she had slapped her notebook down on the table and was standing there, shoulders trembling, face crimson, staring at Shinomiya. Shinomiya turned to her with an expression of genuine puzzlement.
“Is something wrong, Sasaki-san?”
Sasaki erupted.
“Excuse me! Shinomiya-san. If you’re only here for fun, you’re a nuisance and I’d appreciate it if you left. You’re always just thinking about who to spend time with, have you ever stopped to think about the people who are actually trying to do something here? You’re the only one like this.”
All of it, released at once, a torrent of accumulated feeling. Shijima made a face and started to intervene, and Hatano caught Shindo, very quietly and with visible amusement, stopping him.
This is going to be unpleasant, thought Hatano, and watched, rubbing the back of her head.
Sasaki, emboldened by Shinomiya’s silence, pressed further.
“Shijima-kun has his writing career to think about and you’re always pulling him into frivolous things. You only think about yourself. It’s an inconvenience to the rest of us too, you know.”
Several of the nearby women started nodding vigorously.
Hatano, for her part, could only think that no one here except Shijima was doing anything that could be called serious effort. The club technically required activity records to maintain the room, and the only people who had ever submitted records were Shijima and Hatano, and even then it was only because Shijima was a working author and the university had made an exception. In practical terms, no one except the two of them was doing legitimate club activity.
Shinomiya was frivolous, yes. But the only people with standing to say so were Shijima and Hatano.
Still, how would she respond? Not for the same rubbernecking reasons as Shindo, but Hatano was genuinely curious: someone who made enemies as easily as Shinomiya did, how was she going to navigate this? If she turned to Shijima or Shindo for rescue, things would get spectacular. She even seemed to almost do it, her eyes flickered toward them for a fraction of a second.
But she stopped the movement before it completed. She let out a mildly exasperated breath, gave a small smile, and said:
“I’m surprised you’d say that, Sasaki-san. We’re the same, aren’t we.”
The quietly delivered observation turned Sasaki’s face an even deeper red. She opened her mouth, ready to detonate, and before she could, Shinomiya stood up.
“Sasaki-san. You don’t read, do you. This is the Literary Appreciation Club.”
It was spoken softly, in that same sweet register, and Sasaki went speechless. She scrambled to respond, and then, as if the obvious had only just occurred to her, made a sour face. But she tried anyway.
“I, I read at home, I do it all the—”
“Oh really.”
Shinomiya looked mildly surprised, then moved lightly over to where Sasaki was sitting and began touching the items on the table in turn, the snacks, the phone showing an entertainment video, the notebook filled with doodles and assignment worksheets, and indicated each of them. Sasaki watched each in sequence, growing more uncomfortable by the moment, and tried to object.
Shinomiya didn’t let her.
“So then, what ‘activities’ exactly?”
“…At, home—”
“Come to the clubroom, chat with friends about your favourite idol. Eat snacks, work on assignments. Watch videos. That’s what Sasaki-san’s activities look like, in the Literary Appreciation Club. Very healthy, very normal, exactly what you’d expect from a third-year woman whose job-hunting is wrapped up.”
Shinomiya’s smile went just a shade sharper. Sasaki’s face curdled.
Shinomiya did not let up.
“Don’t misunderstand, Sasaki-san. There are exactly two people doing anything real in this club, Shijima-san, and Hatano-senpai. Everyone else is here because it’s fun, taking in the benefits without contributing anything. Just like the rest of us. The only ones actually working are those two. Using their effort as a weapon against someone you want to get rid of, yes, that does bother me a little.”
The trace of real anger visible for a moment behind the smile made Sasaki press her lips together, face scarlet. The emotion on her face had changed, it wasn’t the fury of someone who despises another person. It was the shame of someone who had grabbed a righteous cause to swing at someone she disliked, and had the swing turned back on her.
Shinomiya returned to her gentle expression, and her voice softened again.
“But I’m not going to accept Sasaki-san’s complaints, and I’m also not going to call Sasaki-san a bad person or say she’s wrong. Because it is fun, isn’t it, living by your appetites. So that’s fine. No one’s getting hurt. Right? Hatano-senpai.”
And there it was, she was being pulled in. Hatano, who had been on the verge of getting swept along by Shinomiya’s momentum, blinked back to herself. Tiresome, she thought, and exhaled, and turned away.
“…I don’t have any opinion on this. I was planning to leave the club today anyway.”
That was all she said. She walked out.
Behind her she heard sharp intakes of breath from a few people, and Shijima’s voice, he was the one who minded most, the only genuine fellow traveller she’d had here, scrambling to get up.
“Wait, Hatano—!”
She heard him call out. She didn’t look back.
She felt bad about Shijima, genuinely. The conversations with him, the mutual pushing forward, those had been worthwhile. But she couldn’t have those here, not in this place. Not with Shinomiya and Shindo, but not with Sasaki and the others either. The temperature gap between those who were serious and those who weren’t was what had driven her to this, in the end. A twinge of guilt, but she had always believed, really, that making something was a solitary act of facing inward, and she supposed she could live with that.
In Hatano’s wake, the room went quiet. Shijima stood there looking hollow, jaw tight. Even Shindo looked a little wrong-footed; even Iizuka. Sasaki’s faction, with no particular connection to any of this, registered nothing much. But Shinomiya was wearing an expression that was difficult to read.
For Shinomiya, someone who saw Shinomiya, who acknowledged her, positively or negatively, had value. People who held some degree of attraction or desire toward her were welcome presences; the jealousy and hostility that followed were almost a pleasure. That was why someone like Hatano, who simply wasn’t interested, was the worst kind of person to have around, and yet, last week, drunk and inexplicably out of her own head, she had gone to bed with her.
She was attractive, Shinomiya would grant her that. And her character, genuinely good, actually. You might even call her a person of integrity. Sharp-tongued, yes, but when it had mattered, she had dragged her home through the night in whatever way she could manage. Whatever the ledger said, Shinomiya had some feelings about her. She couldn’t claim otherwise.
But there was no obligation to call her back. And it wouldn’t have been good for her, anyway.
This place was what it was now.
She glanced once more at the door that Hatano had walked out of, and then turned back to the deflated Shijima, standing there with his shoulders fallen.