Mom: Everything Nanami-san will need is in your room. Pajamas and things of that nature. Don’t do anything naughty, though.
That was the message I received, but I was going to ignore it. Actually, was my mom really drunk? Or was she just pretending to be drunk?
In terms of dinner, all we basically had to do was to set out the dishes that the owner had made for us. Food enough to fill three plastic bags, though, was quite a lot.
He had said that the menu was a surprise, so I was curious about what he had made for us. I had at least told him our likes and dislikes, but...
I was pretty excited about dinner, to be honest. But first things first, we took out the items from the bag. There was hamburg steak and omurice. There was also...chicken? It was baked rather than fried. Maybe it was roast chicken. This already was enough, but there was also something that looked like roast beef.
“Is there minestrone in this thermos? Wow, there’s even fries and potato salad,” Nanami said in awe. And we had only gone through two bags.
Wow, the owner had really gone all out. There was definitely way more food than two people could eat in one sitting, and we certainly didn’t need to cook anything more.
When we opened up the third and final bag, wondering what was inside, we found...a cake and a drink. There was a bottle inside that looked almost like wine.
“Oh, there’s a note here. It says, ‘I’ve included cake for two people, plus champagne-style juice that minors can drink too. Merry Christmas,’” Nanami read.
Wow, I don’t think I can ever thank him enough. I’ll work a whole lot from now on to pay him back. I never thought he’d include dessert too.
“Should we transfer these to serving plates, since they’re so nice?” I suggested.
“Yeah, that’ll be a lot more festive...even though we’ll have more dishes to do,” Nanami said.
“If we clean them together we’ll get through it pretty quickly.”
“True. Let’s get to it, then!”
We put the food on plates and the soup in bowls. Since they had cooled down a bit from the chill outside, we warmed everything up in the microwave. The fries we warmed up in the oven, while the roast beef and potato salad we served at room temp.
We laid out everything on the table, but I began to suspect that this was all too much for the two of us to finish. But we could just enjoy whatever leftovers we had at another time.
Once the table was set, I rummaged through the cupboard for glasses. I’d never had champagne-like juice before. It really was just juice, right? Normal cups were fine, but I wanted us to be stylish tonight and drink out of actual glasses. Just as I was telling myself that, I found them—U-shaped glasses. I had no idea what they were actually called, though.
As I poured the drink, the elegant glass made the juice look like real alcohol. The glass was slowly filled with amber liquid, making the image of Nanami on the other side of the glass sway a bit. Had I poured enough? I didn’t know the proper etiquette, so I poured enough to fill about two-thirds of the glass. When I finished pouring and pulled the bottle away, I could hear tiny air bubbles popping in the glass. When the bubbles rising from the bottom of the glass reached the surface of the liquid, they disappeared with a snap. The sound was so soft that I had to listen carefully to hear it.
Once I’d poured two glasses, Nanami and I both moved to sit down. For some reason, neither one of us had said anything the entire time.
The stem on this glass was so thin that I didn’t know how I was supposed to hold it. I tried looking cool, though, by holding it with just my index finger, middle finger, and thumb. When I lifted the glass, I saw that Nanami was holding hers the same way, so I assumed I was probably right. She and I then clinked our glasses together.
“Merry Christmas,” I said.
“Merry Christmas,” Nanami replied with a smile.
We both spoke quietly, in contrast to when we were at the party the day before, and took a sip of our drinks. I assumed it would be sweet, but instead it had a tartness and astringency that spread throughout my mouth. I was a little taken aback—it was really different than what I thought it was going to taste like—but when I swallowed and let it travel down my throat, the bubbles of the carbonation moved right along as well.
And when we both took our lips off of our glasses...
Nanami and I both burst out laughing—first softly, then gradually growing louder.
“Jeez, why are you laughing?!” Nanami exclaimed.
“Oh come on, you started it!” I protested.
“Because you got all weird and started acting all adult and stuff!”
“You too! Jeez, this is too funny...”
There’s no alcohol in this, is there? Nanami and I checked the bottle, but it said that there was zero percent alcohol. Somehow, that made the situation even funnier, and she and I started laughing once again.
“Well, it’s Christmas, but maybe we should just do things like we always do,” I concluded. “What do you wanna eat, Nanami?”
“Omurice first. The one your owner makes is so good,” Nanami requested.
“Got it. I’m gonna practice so that I can make it as well as he can!”
“Why are you getting all competitive? You’re so funny,” Nanami remarked as she scooped some of the omurice I’d served her into her mouth. “Oh, but it really is so good.”
We were nervous because it was just the two of us, but, finally, we had managed to get back to being our usual selves. And in that familiar atmosphere our Christmas unfurled.
Except, at that time, I had no idea that soon I’d be more nervous than I ever expected to be.