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“Oh? So learn to cook for yourself.”
Nayuta stared squarely at the once-again-overbearing Itsuki.
“…Like you know how to cook anything.”
“…Oof.”
Itsuki felt a bit pained at the idea of relying on his younger brother for the rest of his life. He thought he’d like to take over a bit of the cooking, and while he’d never actually do it, it was the thought that counted.
“Hey, look, if I had a god-tier sister like Kobato from Haganai or Komachi from My Youth Romantic Comedy, I bet I’d seriously wanna learn to cook for her, all right?”
“…You’re still that obsessed with little sisters, huh? How about someone a little bossier, like Kirino from Oreimo?”
“Yeah, sure. I’d love to cook a whole spread for her, but I wouldn’t. I’d much rather she pointed at me and went like, ‘You can’t even cook? You really are totally worthless!’”
Nayuta sized up Itsuki, rather impressed at the instantaneous reply.
“…You’re sick, you know that?”
“I’d like nothing better than a sister to infect me! …But seriously, my lack of a little sister pretty much lies at the core of my inability to cook or clean. Life would be totally awesome, twenty-four hours a day, if I had one. Where did I go wrong, I ask you?”
“…I guess you’ll have to ask your parents for a favor or two.”
It was the most realistic option, Nayuta figured. It made the normally loquacious Itsuki turn awkwardly mum.
“…That’s getting kind of…real, don’t you think? Could we, like, steer away from that?”
His father and Chihiro’s mother had been married for three years. They had a fine relationship; the wife was still in the prime of her thirties, and from a biological standpoint, it was entirely possible they could conceive a new son or daughter. But what if that did happen? How should he react? Itsuki wasn’t sure.
“You are such a pain sometimes,” Nayuta said, smiling gently as she shook her head a little. “How’s the work on your new series coming along? The one where your heroine isn’t a little-sister stereotype for a change?”
Itsuki had asked Nayuta to read through chapter 1 of Demon Hunter in Scarlet (final title TBD). She had loved it, begging him to let her see more as he progressed. But Itsuki just frowned in reply.
“Hmph… I wound up trashing it,” Itsuki replied moodily.
Her face flushed with surprise, Nayuta exclaimed, “Trashing it…? Why?”
“I finished chapter two, and that asshole editor of mine insisted that I do a rewrite. I wasn’t that enthusiastic about it in the first place, but if I have to do his bidding to keep my plotline going, I figured I might as well go back to square one.”
“…That’s a shame. It was neat, too.”
Nayuta looked honestly disappointed. It made Itsuki feel a tad guilty.
“…But if you look at it another way, I guess I’m the only person besides your editor who ever got to read that, aren’t I? Makes me feel like I’m someone very special to you.”
“Nah, I had Miyako and Haruto read it, too.”
These were both acquaintances of theirs.
“…So that manuscript was seeing other people? That skank.”
Nayuta pouted to herself a bit again before going back to her fried-rice-nibbling mission.
✦ ✦ ✦
After hanging out and doing nothing long enough to miss the last train home (on purpose), Nayuta wound up spending the night in Itsuki’s apartment.
…I can’t believe how much I love Itsuki. Man, I wanna get down and dirty with him so bad. I wanna just…
She let her consummate powers of imagination as an accomplished author go hog wild as she took a hot shower, conjuring up images far too erotic for publication (or to even say out loud), and let out charming little panting noises as her face melted. It was no expression she’d ever dare to show anyone.
Nayuta had first become smitten with Itsuki at the age of fifteen, when she entered high school. She had been the victim of some vicious bullying at school, which kept her away for extended periods of time. Sometime around then, she happened to pick up his first book. Its story was a complete mess, a giant run-on mishmash scribbled off at breakneck speed, but it was packed with an unmistakable energy. From cover to cover, you could tell that the author truly loved his characters, believed in his plot, and was having too much fun writing it—and living life, for that matter.
The fact that the author was still in high school, revealed in the afterword, came as a shock to Nayuta. One sentence in particular had resonated with her: I’m not that gifted physically or academically, and I don’t have too many friends, but I have this habit of continually daydreaming during class, and eventually it led me to write a novel. It was a pretty innocent, artless thing to say, something Itsuki would never write now, but he brought honesty and modesty into that first piece of work.
In his own way, Itsuki Hashima taught Nayuta that even if you can’t find a place of your own at school, there’s a whole other world out there for you. It made her wonder whether she could turn out like him, too—and if she could, she wanted to, deeply. And thus, well before they met or even knew what the other looked like, she was smitten with him.
She then wrote her first novel, submitted it to the contest just like Itsuki, and won a prize, just like him. And that was all the motivation she needed to drop out of high school—a formality, really; she hadn’t attended in a long time anyway. The prize money, along with the royalties that came streaming in, she handed over to her parents, a token of thanks for all the trouble she had caused them. Even with her current string of hits and monthly paychecks reaching frankly unthinkable figures, Mom and Dad were still handling all her finances. Money didn’t matter to Nayuta—being together with Itsuki was what filled her with joy.
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And if there was one great wish she had in the world, it was for Itsuki to finally accept her, fully and truly.
“…And instead all he cares for are these trite little-sister girls from his novels.”
Leaving the bathroom naked, her face buried in Itsuki’s boxer shorts as she took in the smell and the feel of the fabric, Nayuta sighed.
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The noise from the running water made it hard to focus on writing, so Itsuki put on his headphones and cranked up the music to high volume. That, too, wasn’t very conducive to his creative juices. But it certainly beat imagining Nayuta naked.
✦ ✦ ✦
Nayuta had first confessed her love to him on the occasion when she visited his apartment right after hurling on him.