“Same bare little room as ever.”
“The exit is that way.”
Hatano indicated the third-floor window that led outside, but Shinomiya ignored her and dropped onto the bed.
First thing through the door, and already insufferable.
In the end, Hatano had agreed to lend her the flat. By the time they arrived it was around nine in the evening — a little late for dinner, but the atmosphere wasn’t remotely conducive to it, so neither of them suggested it.
Shinomiya patted the mattress lightly with one hand.
“I’m using the bed.”
“The sofa. Use the sofa.”
Hatano waved her away from it, but Shinomiya was already unhooking her skirt.
“I need enough room to move properly or I can’t enjoy myself. You’re already refusing to help in person, so you can at least give me that much.”
“…I’m charging you for the cleaning.”
“Do love hotels bill guests for the cost of laundering the sheets?”
“This isn’t a love hotel and I’m not management, so yes, I’m billing you.”
“Then I’ll cover the cost — lend me a towel.”
Reasonable enough, in the circumstances. Arguing further would raise the question of why she’d been let in at all. Hatano pulled a couple of bath towels from the wardrobe and tossed them across; Shinomiya missed the catch and received them in the face. “Mphf,” she said, and peeled them off and spread them over the bed.
“Does noise bother you?”
“Not particularly. Do what you like — I’m writing.”
“Ah, right. The results.”
Not mockery, exactly, and not the over-careful treatment of a tender subject either. Simply an acknowledgement of what she knew. But it landed somewhere in the vicinity of Hatano’s sense of inadequacy all the same, and she paused before answering. She pressed a key to wake the laptop from sleep, and nodded, slowly.
“Win or lose — I keep writing.”
That was what she was. The words weren’t addressed to Shinomiya; they were aimed inward. Something in them seemed to catch, because the easy, glancing quality Shinomiya usually wore shifted slightly, and she looked away.
For a moment, silence filled the room.
Then Shinomiya glanced at Hatano’s back and switched her register deliberately, brightening her voice.
“Oh — no filming this time, by the way.”
“We established that was consensual.”
Hatano sounded exasperated but there was a wry note in it, and she fired back automatically. Shinomiya laughed, a small sound, and in the reflection of the laptop’s frame, Hatano saw it — and understood that she was trying to clear the air. It would have been graceless to say so. She didn’t.
There was no rational argument for why the sound of one’s junior engaging in private gratification three feet away should leave one’s concentration intact. But she couldn’t exactly watch, which left writing as the only remaining option. She had no confidence in her focus, but she turned toward the screen and began to type.
After a while, the soft sounds of fabric and breath began to thread themselves between the keystrokes.
By the time Hatano came out of the bathroom towelling her hair, Shinomiya had already bathed and was sprawled across the bed with an air of complete proprietorship, phone in hand. She looked, in every way, like a person who had decided to stay the night. Hatano regarded her with a half-lidded look, plugged in the hairdryer, and settled at her desk.
“You’re absolutely planning to stay.”
“I’m tired. Let me stay.”
Shinomiya pressed her cheek against the pillow and looked at Hatano with the expression of someone who knows the answer is going to be yes.
They spoke with an ease that seemed, from the outside, to ignore everything that had happened between them earlier that evening. The sensible arrangement, for both of them.
“Go home when your clothes are dry.”
Shinomiya’s things — underwear and skirt, specifically — had needed washing, and Hatano, with a flash of practical consideration she couldn’t entirely explain, had put them on. They were in the bathroom dryer now. At present, Shinomiya was wearing a borrowed set of Hatano’s loungewear and underclothes — a decision reached after weighing having a naked junior in her flat against having that junior in her own underwear, and finding both options equally catastrophic.
Shinomiya kicked her feet against the mattress.
“Noooo. I’m staying. I’m staying.”
The performance of a child in a supermarket. Hatano planted an elbow on the chair back and looked at her, unimpressed.
“You may have been indulged your whole life and I can’t speak to that, but I am not indulgent. When your clothes are dry, you put them on and you go home. The last train isn’t for a while.”
At being cut off like that, Shinomiya dropped the act — and what replaced it was something quieter, something a little sulky, a little real. The expression was almost an accusation. It reminded Hatano of what she’d said earlier — I felt like we’d gotten close somehow — and she felt a small, reluctant twinge of guilt. Whether Shinomiya was trying to use that against her, or whether she’d simply taken it at face value, Hatano couldn’t tell. Either way, the guilt was there. As was the resistance to giving in to it.
“You can’t feel comfortable here either.”
She said it, not unkindly. Shinomiya pouted.
“…It’s relative. I don’t dislike Senpai because there’s something inherently wrong with her. I dislike her because I have a lot of people I like around me, and she doesn’t fit that category.”
The people Shinomiya counted as favourites were those who loved her, recognised her, or envied her — who expressed the full measure of their feeling about her, one way or another. People like Hatano, who simply weren’t engaged, didn’t make the cut.
Relatively speaking, she was disliked.
“So you don’t like me. I don’t like you either. Our interests align.”
When Hatano put it that plainly, something complicated moved across Shinomiya’s face, and she lowered her eyes.
“Being alone is worse than…”
She stopped. Didn’t finish. Pressed her face into the pillow.
“…Never mind.”
Hatano didn’t know what she would have said next. But she had a sense of it — or thought she did.
Shinomiya hated being alone. Hated it enough that even Hatano’s flat, with Hatano in it, was preferable to the alternative. And not just in the physical sense — even sorting herself out alone was something she resisted, something she’d said herself she could hardly stand to do. She was, at the core of her, starved of connection. Whether the hunger for recognition had grown from that, or whether the longing for connection had grown from the hunger for recognition — Hatano didn’t know. But the two were bound together, she suspected, at the root.
Shinomiya lay motionless, face in the pillow. Hatano checked, with mild detachment, that she wasn’t suffocating, then shrugged and asked:
“…Do you live with family?”
She asked it while starting up the laptop. Shinomiya heard the question and didn’t answer immediately; when she finally lifted her face, she looked as if she was weighing whether to say anything at all.
“No. I live alone.”
Hatano heard this and turned back to the screen, clicked the hairdryer on, and began to work on her hair. For a while she looked at the screen without really seeing it, thinking.
They were opposites, the two of them — in how they lived, in what they valued. She had always assumed they were fundamentally incompatible. But somewhere between the other night and this one, Shinomiya had become, against all logic, someone Hatano found herself taking care of — a junior who drew out a particular, exasperated kind of attention. The life she lived, which Hatano found genuinely objectionable, and the girl-as-she-actually-was that flickered through it, unsophisticated and full-size — the two couldn’t be separated. It was all or nothing.
The sigh came out involuntarily, longer than she intended. Through the frame of the laptop screen she looked at Shinomiya, eyes downcast, lip pushed out.
Pushing her away was easy. That was precisely why accepting someone — seeing them clearly and receiving them anyway — was the harder thing, and the better one. Not for Shinomiya’s sake. For her own. For the sake of being someone she could stand to be.
Hatano switched off the hairdryer for one moment, and said quietly, without looking at her:
“…Be gone by morning.”
That was all. She turned the dryer back on and went back to her hair.
In the reflection of the laptop frame, she caught it: Shinomiya, genuinely startled, eyes wide. She sat up. Arranged her face into something carefully offhand — as if she hadn’t been caught out by a small piece of ordinary decency — and said something that the noise of the dryer swallowed entirely. Not an insult, Hatano was sure of it.
By the time the hair was dry, Shinomiya was browsing her phone in a visibly better mood, lying across the bed without a care. Hatano, ignoring her, girded herself for the novel, and turned to face the screen.
Shinomiya, reliably, interrupted within thirty seconds.
“Senpai’s never won anything, has she.”
The finger poised to type the first letter stopped. It was said without malice — without any particular attempt to wound — which somehow made it worse. She had identified the exact source of the inferiority Hatano had been feeling against Shijima, and stated it as a simple matter of fact. Irritation flared, and then she exhaled it out and softened her voice.
“…Is that a dig?”
“Why are you being so defensive! I was just asking!”
“You were in that room for most of the same conversations I was.”
Shinomiya tilted her head, as if she genuinely wasn’t sure — was I? — with an expression of vague uncertainty. Hatano wanted to flick her on the forehead, but restrained herself, and gave a flat answer.
“…No.”
“How long have you been writing?”
She started to ask why Shinomiya was suddenly conducting an interview, and glanced at her — and stopped. The expression on her face was not the face of someone looking for a target. She closed her mouth. It occurred to her, at the same moment, that Shinomiya might be making some small, awkward overture — and however begrudgingly, she answered.
“Four years.”
“And you’ve been submitting to competitions the whole time?”
“More or less. From around the end of my first year.”
Brief, but she answered. Shinomiya lay there holding the pillow, thinking. Then she began her next question with something that looked like care.
“…This is genuinely not meant to be unkind.”
Her eyes moved from Hatano to the screen.
A story about a girl who plays forward on a girls’ football team with no particular gift for the sport, growing through the pain of being constantly compared to her childhood friend — the star striker, the one who has everything. An unfashionable sort of youth-sports novel. Watching that girl struggle forward anyway, in love with the thing she wasn’t built for — Shinomiya’s voice, when it came, carried something dark in it, like someone looking at a shape they recognised.
“Doesn’t it hurt. When no one acknowledges you.”
The question seemed to be aimed at Hatano, but also past her, at someone further back. It was about Hatano but also not about Hatano, and the part that was not about Hatano was carrying something unspoken, something private. Hatano noticed. And then she ignored it, and answered from where she stood.
“Of course it hurts. That’s why I write — to make them acknowledge it.”
Shinomiya’s eyes moved, struck. She looked down, bit her lip, and said nothing. There was something there — a flinch, almost — like a person embarrassed by their own reflection. Hatano watched, noted the strangeness of it, and since she had already known, in some approximate way, that Shinomiya was carrying something — she didn’t reach for it, didn’t push. She simply said what she meant to say, to the question that had been asked.
“I won’t say it’s all worthwhile, and I don’t love your methods — but I don’t think the need to be acknowledged is something anyone should have to just cut out of themselves. I understand it. More than a little.”
That was all. She turned back to the screen, and in the quiet that followed, began to type.
Behind her, Shinomiya sat with something dark still on her face, and said nothing more.