Later that evening, I let out a long, exhausted yawn as I basked in a piping-hot bathtub. My breath blew wispy patterns in the steam rising out from the water before vanishing into nothingness, and it felt like all my fatigue was dissipating right along with it.
“Is the water hot enough for you, Kou-kun?” called a voice from the other side of the bathroom’s fogged-up glass door.
“Yeah, it’s perfect... Thanks for letting me use your bath...”
“Hee hee, that’s quite all right! Take your time and relax, okay?”
“Yeah, thank you very much...” Well, that was a pretty inane exchange on my part. I couldn’t help it, though. Living on my own had turned me into a slovenly shower person, and I virtually never had the time or opportunity to really soak it up in a bath. This was a rare event.
“Not sure if I should really be getting this comfortable here...” The drowned corpses of the little chibi angel and devil that were supposed to be arguing on my shoulders were bobbing up and down in the bathwater, so I was forced to play out my internal conflict single-handedly.
For the sake of understanding that internal conflict, however, I first have to establish how I ended up kicking back and relaxing in a bathtub in a house I’d never been to before while talking with an adult woman I’d only just met. I’m definitely not kicking off a flashback to buy myself more rub-a-dub-dub time, for the record!
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“Mmnngh... I can’t run another step...”
“Oh, great, more played-out sleep-talking...almost. Kinda. Actually, what? Isn’t it supposed to be ‘I can’t eat another bite’?” There was nobody nearby and conscious enough to appreciate my retort, but I went ahead and made it anyway. Kazuki, asleep on my back, failed to acknowledge my wit. It was well past the time that good boys and girls went to bed, and well into the time when bad boys and girls (plus part-time workers) woke up.
Thankfully, I had both a plan and a destination. I almost panicked at first and was just about ready to take her back to my place when her cell phone rang. The display read “Mom,” and, long story short, I managed to explain the situation and get directions to her house. It was pretty far away, but my own place was equally far in the opposite direction, so I didn’t really gain or lose any time by taking her there.
“Bluhh...”
“Eek?!” I felt a sudden, wet sensation on the back of my neck. Kazuki was drooling on me. I figured that carrying her on my back would look a lot less suspicious than carrying her in my arms, on the off chance somebody noticed us, but I hadn’t considered the possibility that she’d subject me to that sort of attack!
Her assault didn’t let up past that point either. Sometimes she’d squeeze my neck hard enough to half-throttle me, and other times she’d loosen her grip enough to almost fall off my back. It was just one thing after another. I somehow managed to cope with her drowsy offense and follow the directions I’d received to her place.
It turned out to be a perfectly normal single-family home in a perfectly normal residential neighborhood. Kazuki’s family name was written on a plate by the door, so no real ambiguity there, but even if I did have the wrong house somehow, I didn’t especially care. As long as there was a roof overhead, I could just chuck her inside and go home. I rang the doorbell, and a moment later, a voice rang out through the attached intercom.
“Yes, who is it?”
“Umm, It’s Kunugi! We talked on the phone just a little while ago?” I waited, but nobody replied. I don’t actually have the wrong house, do I? Just as a tinge of worry was beginning to set in, the front door opened, and a notably attractive woman stepped outside.
“Oh, umm, thanks for coming! Or maybe I should say ‘welcome home’?”
It was the same woman I’d spoken with on the phone. Her slow, somewhat gentle manner of speech was unmistakable. So this is Kazuki’s mother? She didn’t bear much resemblance to her ever-lively daughter, so I presumed that Kazuki must take after her dad instead.
“I’d say ‘welcome home’ works just fine. Hear that, Kazuki? C’mon, wake up!”
“Oh, I don’t think she’ll be waking up any time soon. I always have the hardest time getting her up in the mornings!”
“O-Oh, okay.”
“Why don’t you come inside for now?”
“Huh? Ah, I mean, sure. Thanks...” I couldn’t exactly dump her on the doorstep and leave at that point, so I ended up accepting her mother’s invitation and walking inside with Kazuki still on my back.
“Hee hee! Welcome home!” She greeted us again as I took off my shoes and put on a pair of slippers. She was talking to Kazuki, obviously, but for just a moment it felt like she was addressing me too. I felt a bit bashful. Then she sniffed me. “Umm, Kou-kun, was it? You smell a little strange...”
“Ah... Sorry ’bout that...” Even after everything that had already happened, the durian was still causing me trouble. I found myself wondering for the umpteenth time why the hell that lunatic felt the need to blow one of those up in my room.
“Hmm... Oh, I know! You should take a bath, Kou-kun.”
“Huh? Ah, but, I was just here to drop off Kazuki... I mean, to drop off Rena-san. I should really—”
“No need to make excuses, just take a bath. Besides, I already made dinner for you after we spoke on the phone. I can’t send you home without even thanking you for carrying Rena all the way here!”
“I, err, I mean... I-I guess I’ll borrow your tub, then...” She was smiling in a perfectly friendly sort of manner, but at the same time, she had this crazily intimidating presence that made it impossible to refuse. I agreed to stay in spite of myself. I discovered that she had one thing in common with her daughter after all: they were both really good at packing a variety of widely varied emotions into their smiles.
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So, yup, thanks to the old man and his durian, I got to take a bath. Rub-a-dub-dub.
“I’ll leave a change of clothes for you out here, okay, Kou-kun?”
“A change of clothes? I can just wear my uniform home; it’s fine.”
“Your uniform was just as smelly as you were, so I already put it into the washing machine. I’ll run it through the dryer, so it’ll be all ready for you tomorrow morning!”
“Huh? Wait, you mean...?”
“That’s right! You’re staying here tonight!”
Staying...here...? Getting covered in durian gunk ended up causing me to spend the night in a house inhabited by two beautiful women. You might be wondering, “How the hell does that follow?” and frankly, same. How the hell does that follow?
“Rena’s clothes might be a touch small on you, though...”
“More than a touch! They wouldn’t fit at all! She’s a year younger than me and a girl on top of it!”
“In that case, I’ll let you borrow some of my husband’s clothes! Oh, my husband’s working away from home at the moment, so don’t let wearing them make you feel uncomfortable, okay?”
“Th-That’s really not the problem here...” She laid out a set of clothes, then left the changing room. I spent a while longer soaking it up in the tub, pondering the fact that over an extended, step-by-step process, I’d somehow been coerced into spending the night.
And don’t even get me started on the house-inhabited-by-two-beautiful-women part! The thought crossed my mind, got stuck, and wouldn’t leave. Kazuki alone was bad enough, but her mother was on a whole new level.
I had a feeling when I was talking to her on the phone, and I knew I was right the moment she stepped out of the house: if the two of them were to go out on the town together, people would absolutely assume they were siblings instead of mother and daughter. She really did look that young, but at the same time, her figure was extremely filled out in a very adult-like manner. Unlike her daughter, who was quite slender on the whole, Mother Kazuki had a classic hourglass figure.
I, meanwhile, was a virgin who’d only just had his first kiss with a partner better left undiscussed. Actually, considering how that whole thing went down, I was even worse off than your everyday virgin! I was in no position to deal with this!
Anyway, I spent way longer than I actually had to in the tub getting beaten down by an incomprehensible, anguished internal conflict and was all pruney by the time I finally got out.
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“Man, talk about a nice bath, Senpai!”
“It’s your house, isn’t it?” After getting out of the bath, I’d made my way to the living room, plopped down on the couch, and sorta just sat there blankly. Kazuki had woken up at some point along the way and got into the bath a little while after me. She toweled off her hair as she walked over and struck up a conversation.
That spacing-out-on-the-couch period had been so unimaginably awkward, I’d wished that I could skip over the whole thing in a single sentence, so honestly, I was pretty relieved when she came over to talk to me. Not that I’d ever admit it, of course.
Her mother told me that she had to finish preparing dinner and holed herself up in the kitchen. Being left alone in somebody else’s house with nothing to do is the absolute worst. Like, seriously, if you tweaked the circumstances just right you could actually torture someone by putting them through this.
“Sorry to make you go to all this trouble,” she said.
“It’s fine. I’m the one who made you chase after me in the first place.”
“That so? In that case, I guess we can call ourselves even! I’m gonna sit down. ’Scuse me.”
“There’s plenty of space to sit somewhere that’s not next to me.”
“It’s my house, isn’t it?” She sat down on the same couch as me, though not close enough that we were bumping shoulders or anything. That was a bit of a relief.
“You feeling okay? Running until you pass out can’t possibly be normal.”
“No worries, happens all the time. Actually, I guess I should say that it happened all the time.”
“Can’t relate, no matter what tense you put it in.” When people get tired, they feel the urge to take a break. The psychological impact of being tired puts most folks out long before the actual physical exhaustion gets the chance.