My heart skipped a beat at the sudden name drop. “Huh?” I said. Huh indeed. Had Kaho-chan read my mind? Oh god, don’t tell me there were more psychics out there.
“Okay, maybe not her,” Kaho-chan relented. “You’d piss her off too much.”
“Excuse me?!”
For a matter of idle curiosity, Kaho-chan was putting a lot of serious thought into this.
Was Satsuki-san up to no good again? And I was just blissfully unaware? Nah. For all that Satsuki-san was…well, Satsuki-san…she wasn’t the type to cause problems on purpose. She was levelheaded and rational…I thought…? Not super confident on that one.
“’Kay, so picture this. One day, this super attractive, awesome, bee-yootiful girl shows up,” Kaho-chan began.
“Right, I’m following.”
“And this girl gets you to, like, fall head over heels for her. She’s so great that you’re on cloud nine around her. And you start being like, ‘Dang, I wanna go out with her.’”
An image of Mai immediately came to mind. What if there was, heaven forbid, a second Mai? Heck no. I would not make it out of that alive. Okay, so not Mai Part Two. The image in my head became a faceless shadow. Who the heck was that supposed to be? I dunno, but whatever.
“So? If that happened, what would you do?” Kaho-chan asked.
“Hmm. To be honest, I can’t imagine anyone being more attractive than Mai and Ajisai-san both.”
“Ew. Loveposting on main. Fine, she doesn’t have to be more attractive. She can be on the same level!”
“If she’s just as attractive as they are, then there’s no way she’d ever fall in love with me.”
“Oh my gaaahd. You are so friggin’ obnoxious.”
Maybe so, but Mai and Ajisai-san catching feelings for me was a miracle to begin with. It was like playing rock-paper-scissors against everyone in the world and somehow beating them all.
“Fine!” Kaho-chan snapped. “What if that happened to Aa-chan?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like if she met someone hecka cute and said she wanted to date ’em too. What would you do?”
I fell silent. In my head, Ajisai-san sidled up with Tom Cruise in tow. Would that mean I would start dating Tom too? Would we end up on a Tom-kun, Renako (and you know he wouldn’t pronounce it right) basis? I mean. If that’s what Ajisai-san wanted, then who was I to say no? Ajisai-san went along with my weird dating scheme, so I had no choice but to accept Tom. On the flip side, if I just couldn’t reconcile myself with that, then did that mean Ajisai-san and I would break up?
“That’s a really hard question, Kaho-chan,” I said.
“Is that a no to the quadrouple? Darn.” She wiped her brow with all the exhaustion of a scientist who’d failed once more on their quest to bring a person back from the dead.
Still. She had a point. “I guess there’s nothing stopping either Mai or Ajisai-san from crushing on someone else too.”
I was trying my best for them, but plenty of other people were also trying their best in their own ways. I couldn’t be so full of myself as to think that I was the only person to ever be Mai or Ajisai-san’s special someone. I mean, they were dating each other too, weren’t they?
“Maybe Ajisai-san made a pact in childhood to marry a boy,” I said. “Then he went to the U.S., grew up, became Tom Cruise, and came back. Now when he shows up at Ashigaya High, it might rekindle Ajisai-san’s feelings for him. You never know; it could happen.”
“Who? The guy with the jacked-up plastic surgery?” Kaho-chan muttered to herself.
Once I said it out loud, I felt a dark stab of pain race through my heart. My inner voice whimpered, But Ajisai-san’s dating me… And that’s when the realization hit. Light bulb moment × 1,000. Was I jealous? Oh god, this really did feel awful. How dare Ajisai-san have feelings for some random boy! Huh. Dang. So this was jealousy. Real, legit jealousy. FEELINGS OF JEALOUSY added to inventory!
“What am I supposed to do?” I asked Kaho-chan. “What if I can’t accept him? But I need to for Ajisai-san’s happiness. Yet I just can’t! There’s no freaking way I can date Tom Cruise!”
“How ’bout you let Ajisai-san leave the throuple so she can date Tom Cruise?”
“That’s just as bad. Wait. But what if she’d be happier that way?”
And I’d still be left with Mai, which was already more than I deserved. But that wasn’t the point. Man. Three-way dating meant double the girlfriends, but it also meant double the anxiety.
This conversation had long since spiraled out of control. It was stupid to get worked up about a hypothetical scenario, but then again, I was as dumb as a stump. So.
I asked Ajisai-san a few days later if she had a childhood friend who’d left Japan for the U.S., to which she said nah. Thank god. Wait, that wasn’t the point. The image of Ajisai-san smiling as Kaho-chan sat on her lap flashed through my mind.
The words came out before I could stop them. “If you, uh, have a crush on Kaho-chan and want to date her too, I guess I could live with it. Even if that means there’s four of us. I think it could work out if she was our fourth person.”
Ajisai-san went completely silent. Hm? What, was it something I said?
I looked up to ask what was wrong, and at that exact moment, Kaho-chan flicked me on the forehead. Ow!
“What was that for?” I protested.
Kaho-chan smiled at me, but there was zero warmth in that look. “Um, Rena-chin? KYS?”
“Excuse me?! You were the one who brought it up!” The cheek! Why were people treating me like a punching bag all of a sudden?