Ore no Kanojo to Osananajimi ga Shuraba Sugiru

The next day during lunch.

Like always I planned to spend the short break with my best friend.

"Eita, did you and Natsukawa-san have a fight?"

Kaoru asked while drinking a strawberry milk box.

While putting away the empty bento box, which I had just finished, into my bag, I replied:

"You’re really perceptive about these things."

"It"s because the two of you haven’t said anything to each other since morning."

"That might be true."

Even though we weren"t deliberately ignoring each other, it was definitely very difficult to start a conversation. After we said "good morning" to each other when we arrived at our seats, I hadn’t heard Masuzu’s voice. Since Masuzu always disappeared during lunch break, she usually wouldn"t be here.

...It’s not like I"m feeling particularly lonely or anything!

"What’s the cause?"

"How should I put it? Because we both have secrets we keep from each other, eventually we ended up with this awkward atmosphere."

"Secrets?"

"You could call it the so-called "sense of distance"."

"Why is that?"

"Ahh, it’s just like..."

I scratched my head.

"Since I also have a secret, I shouldn’t pry about the other"s secrets. If I’m not going to talk about mine, I can’t ask her to talk about hers. As a result, it feels like we are unusually distant."

Ugh——

I always found it hard to express myself.

However, I was only clear about one thing, and that was Masuzu and me have felt between each other this "distance".

"I see."

Kaoru tilted his head, puzzled.

"Having secrets is bad?"

"Of course, regardless if one’s relationship is friend or lover."

As soon as I finished speaking, Kaoru suddenly replied with a serious face:

"By the way, Eita."

"Yes?"

Kaoru only hesitated a moment and spoke with lowered eyelashes:

"Actually, I"m a girl."

"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahahhhhhahahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh?!"

I cried from my chest with all my strength.

Kaoru lifted my hand with teary eyes and said:

"I have always kept this hidden from you, so please forgive me."

"Wait a minute, wait a minute!"

"In fact, I[1]"ve always liked Eita, so let"s kiss."

"No, wait a minute!"

Kaoru, whose face was extraordinarily beautiful for a boy, quickly l-l-l-leaned f-f-forward.

W-W-Wh-What kind of situation is this?!

In any case, this story was too excessive! This was also not how one should act in a cla.s.sroom during lunch break!

As the tip of our noses almost collided, Kaoru chuckled and said:

"As if, it"s just a l•i•e♪."

"[...]"

Because I was rea.s.sured so suddenly, I almost wet my pants... Even though I was a high school first-year.

"Did that surprise you?"

"Of course I would be surprised!"

Aaahh, I"m dripping cold sweat.

Kaoru could easily be mistaken as a girl from his looks that it was begging for jokes that devastated the heart...

"Do you understand now? Secrets are for this end, for something of this degree."

"No, I don’t understand at all. Where is there a relationship in this?"

"What I"m trying to say is "revealing a secret does not necessarily improve the relationship between two people". When you heard that I was a girl, how did you feel, Eita?"

"Surprised."

"You were troubled, right?"

"I was troubled."

"There."

Kaoru gave a little wink.

"It’s fine if confessing a secret solves the dispute, but if it doesn’t, it might just disturb the other person. Don’t you think that keeping secrets is a form of being "considerate"?"

"...I see."

If you say it like that, it"s quite possible.

That love letter was my own problem and it was not something that Masuzu could solve. The task of "determining whether Chiwa wrote it" was my own responsibility.

The matter of Masuzu’s relationship with her sister was the same. At this stage, there wasn’t anything I could do about it.

"I hate feeling that "concealing a secret leads to a bad relationship". This would make anyone feel suffocated. Does Eita also think like that now?"

Thanks to Kaoru, I swept away the haze in my heart.

Even though my relationship with Masuzu is fake, we undoubtedly have a relationship as cla.s.smates and we are members of the same club.

After all, it"s not like we started going out because I wanted to find out about the secret of that person whose name is Mana.

"I’ll try talking about it with Masuzu."

"That would be good."

Kaoru smiled and nodded.

At this time the school bell sounded, so there were five minutes before the end of lunch break. The girls left the cla.s.sroom in groups holding onto sports bags. The next cla.s.s, fifth period, was swimming cla.s.s, so they were going to change in another room.

I looked at Masuzu’s seat and there was no sports bag, so she must have intended to change clothes directly after eating lunch. I would probably have to wait until after school before I could talk to her.

"See you later, Eita."

Kaoru left empty-handed.

"Huh? You’re not changing clothes?"

"My skin is poor, so I can’t expose myself to the chlorine from the swimming pool nor stay in the sun. Thus I"ll have to sit out. Last year was the same, right?"

"Ah, now that you mention it, I remember."

When we were in the same cla.s.s as third-years in middle school, Kaoru had to sit out almost all of the physical education cla.s.ses, and never attended the few swimming lessons we had in a year. It had to be vexing.

"Thank you for hearing my worries."

"Don"t mention it."

My best friend smiled shyly, and walked out of the cla.s.sroom.

Ah...

If he was a girl for real, "she" would be incredibly popular with the students.

♦

The midsummer sun shined on the pool surface.

After warming up to all sorts of radio exercises, the physical education teacher announced: "Today"s swimming lessons... free time!" Us first-years gave a big cheer.

This was also quite favorable for me —to take advantage of this opportunity, I"d talk with Masuzu a little.

In the middle of the sound of water splashing and people diving into the pool, I looked for Masuzu everywhere.

——Found her.

Masuzu was holding her knees, sitting by the shadow of the of the school fence, with a rather large towel covering her hand and everything above her knees. It was probably to protect herself from the greedy look of boys who would otherwise continuously and perversely look at her.

"H-Hey."

"...Hai."

Masuzu responded softly, with an absent-minded expression, as if she didn"t intend to continue talking with me. Our lines of sight didn"t cross and she stared straight at the swimming pool surface.

"You’re not going to swim?"

"Yeah, I don’t like to get wet."

"It’s a pity, since we finally have a swimming cla.s.s."

"…That"s how it is"

"I-I rather like swimming, though I’m not good at long-distance swimming or compet.i.tive swimming. I prefer leisurely swimming b.r.e.a.s.t.stroke and floating on the water while playing around—"

"[...]"

Wuh! This conversation didn"t go anywhere.

As expected, it has to be because she was still angry at me for hiding the secret concerning the love letter…?

A temporary retreat.

I kept my distance from Masuzu and sat at the edge of the pool.

Just as I was thinking about how to start up a conversation, I heard the sounds of girls whispering to each other in groups while in the swimming pool.

"What"s with that? She feels like being all prim and proper by herself."

"She’s an Ojou-sama, so she probably thinks the school pool is dirty and doesn"t want to swim?"

"Isn"t she just doing that to attract the attention of the boys?"

"Even though she already has a boyfriend, what is she thinking——?"

That"s the good old enviousness as always.

Apart from Chiwa, I have never seen her talk to other girls. Even though having a boyfriend could protect her from the confessions of other boys, she was still helpless against the ill feelings of all the girls.

At this distance, Masuzu could probably hear them.

If it was the usual Masuzu, she wouldn’t even blink from the malicious talk of the "jealous club", but——

"H-Hey, Masuzu."

"...What is it? You have been at it for a while".

"Nothing —I actually don’t feel like swimming today."

As I received Masuzu’s cold glare, I sat down next to her.

So, what should we talk about…?

It was probably too risky to have another conversation about "Maguke".

At a time like this, as expected, we should talk about that —Bizarre Adventures.

"If we could use the Ripple like Joseph and Caesar to walk on water, I think it would be pretty fun. I rather like the Ripple battle from the first and second parts, because the Stands are easy to use and have a lot of variation, which suits well to a weekly publication. But to use ripple, one must practice a lot, you agree? Becoming strong through practice is probably the best part about battle mangas and I especially like the scene from part two, they train Ripple while climbing on the pillar covered in oil—"

At this moment, Masuzu suddenly stood up.

"Wh-What is it?"

"I’m going to swim a little."

"E-Eh? Didn’t you say you hate getting wet?"

"I changed my mind."

Masuzu left me and quickly walked away.

d.a.m.n, I didn’t expect that even the JoJo topic would be unable to go through.

She was rather angry and the situation was perhaps getting worse.

When Masuzu stood at the edge of the pool, the voices from the noisy cla.s.smates suddenly weakened. Everyone’s eyes were on Masuzu and I could tell that they were all looking forward to her removing the towel.

Masuzu pulled off her white colored towel, and hung it on the wall… everyone simultaneously gave a gasp of admiration.

I also could not help but be enchanted.

With her silver hair fluttering in the summer wind, reflecting glistening and shining sunlight; the white of her naked shoulders dazzled the eyes and it made everyone feel that keeping it under the sunlight was a pity; Her navy blue school swimsuit tightly clung against her shiny and elastic skin, showing all kinds of miraculous curves and tone combinations on her body lines.

The boys were, of course, speechless and even those girls who were saying bad things a few moments ago had a stunned look.

As for Masuzu’s fan, Yamamoto-kun from the soccer club, he lost consciousness and fell into the pool.

I thought she would enter the pool like this, but Masuzu only looked at the surface of the water while standing the entire time.

She used the toe of her right foot to dip the surface a little, but she seemed hesitant.

The jealous club again began to murmur and say bad things:

"What’s that? This isn’t a bath."

"Does she actually know how to swim?"

"Kyahaha, so even for that she acts as if she was important!"

Masuzu, who could not bear the all this slander, jumped into the swimming pool with a splash.

She started to swim crawl style.

Honestly, her swimming technique couldn’t be called beautiful even for a stretch —her hands and feet were moving wildly and even though she made huge splashes, she didn’t move forward. Every time she took a breath it seemed like she was nearly drinking water.

With a beautiful maiden revealing this kind of unbecoming scene, the cla.s.s could not help but burst out laughing. The guys who had marveled at her just moments ago, in the end just turned out to be such a group of fickle rascals.

After a short while, everyone got tired of watching Masuzu and went back to playing in the water.

Even I was about to consider going to swim——

"What is she doing...?"

About halfway across the pool at the 25 meter mark, Masuzu’s movements suddenly became very strange.

Even though she was trashing her hands and feet just like before, she no longer moved forward and her swimming cap floated up to the surface and sank. The hands that I thought were furiously drawing water, were now motionless——

"I-Isn"t she drowning?!"

I hurriedly jumped into the pool.

I supported Masuzu’s exhausted muscles above the water, afraid that she had already drunk a lot of water. She was completely motionless. The swimming cap that shed off of her silvery hair looked like a jellyfish’s tentacles drifting on the water.

I borrowed the strength the boys all around me and finally succeeded pulling Masuzu onto the pool deck, but what followed was the real problem.

*pant—* *pant—* Masuzu squinted her eyes very painfully and the sound of her breath seemed staggered and irregular. It sounded really bad, so was it necessary to give artificial respiration?

"Sensei, please come quickly!"

I cried to the other side of the swimming pool, but the physical education teacher was already giving artificial respiration to someone else.

The teacher was rescuing Yamamoto-kun.

This was really an unexpected development.

You are quite interesting, aren"t you?!

You are indirectly killing the Masuzu that you like so much!

—Enough, I guess I"ll have to.

A lot of people flocked to the area around us. Half of them were absolutely confused, while the other half fixated their sights on me with great antic.i.p.ation in their eyes.

That’s right.

Mouth-to-mouth respiration is pretty much kissing.

Everyone was looking towards the rumored couple (laugh), having one of them or "me" giving a one-sided fierce kiss to the other, you could feel the great expectations.

They were mixing up the act of saving a person’s life with a love event from a gal-game.

"I’ll say it beforehand."

I let Masuzu lie face-up on her back, placed my hand on her forehead after checking her respiratory tract was not blacked, and pinched her nose.

I sucked in a big breath.

"Kissing in reality is, just the act of sticking two mouths together, you love-struck minded peoooooopleeeeeee!"

I used my lips to cover Masuzu’s lips, slowly blew air into it twice, and then temporarily pulled my lips away. I counted five seconds, and then blew again, causing her chest to move up and down slightly. I repeated this action quite a few times.

Even though I had the knowledge of CPR, this was my first time practicing it, so I was worried whether or not I was doing it properly —but when Masuzu coughed and spit out a large amount of water, I was so relieved I nearly fell to the ground.

The physical education teacher who has successfully awakened Yamamoto-kun then rushed here.

—Masuzu was saved!

I lied down next to Masuzu’s side and looked up at the sun as I cheered!

Great.

I don"t want her to die just after we had an argument.

Even if we are just a fake couple.

♦

When Masuzu woke up in an infirmary bed, I was on the chair next to her flipping through my English vocabulary book.

Because I was accompanying Masuzu, I skipped my sixth period English cla.s.s. Even though missing cla.s.s just before exams made me feel uneasy, I still wanted to see if she was safe in the end. To this point, you could count it for the better or worse.

"...Eita-kun?"

Masuzu pulled up her upper body to a sitting position, bewildered to find out that she was in the infirmary.

"I was drowning, wasn"t I?"

"A-Ah, yes, maybe, just a little."

I spoke vaguely because the impression of Masuzu hanging her shoulders dejectedly made me feel pity for her.

"How embarra.s.sing, I’m a high school student too."

"...Haha."

For some reason this way of speaking was really cute, so much that I thought that I couldn"t help but laugh.

Masuzu was displeased as she pouted:

"Is there something weird?"

"Well, for instance drowning and being a high school student have no relation with each other."

"Is it like that?"

Her downcast appearance from lowering her head made her look younger than usual, almost as if she wasn’t Masuzu at all.

"Was the one who saved me Eita-kun?"

"Not just me. The sensei and the cla.s.s also helped."

"...Thank you."

I don"t remember Masuzu to have ever thanked me with such an obedient att.i.tude, it"s making me a little nervious.

"D-Don’t misunderstand! I just felt that if you died just after we had a fight, I wouldn’t be able to sleep well!"

Ha, I gave out tsundere vibes, I started to feel annoyed at myself.

After a short period of silence, Masuzu faced me in the eyes for the first time that day.

"My att.i.tude to you yesterday was very strange. I"m sorry."

"...R-Right."

M-Masuzu has—

MASUZU HAS APOLOGIZED!

I can"t believe it...

This isn"t some sign that the earth is about to end, is it?

"No, I am also at fault as I was concealing something as well. However Kaoru said, that by doing that——"

"I..."

Masuzu interrupted my explanation.

"When that child kissed Eita-kun, I felt something extremely unpleasant."

Eh?

"So I didn’t know what kind of expression to put. Kissing is just a mouth touching another mouth, I have always thought like that."

"...So..."

So it was actually about that———

I thought she must have been angry because I concealed my love letter from her!

Because I wouldn’t normally think of that!

By the time she had her first kiss with her boyfriend to claim "It"s a JoJo Reference♪", she is the type of woman that could do that, so I never expected she would be rattled by that kind of kiss meant to spite others!

...If I said that aloud, it would probably make you very angry, Masuzu-san.

"If it’s due to that, then don’t worry about it anymore."

I tried to dispel the emotional uneasiness and made a great effort to speak in a hearty voice.

"It has already been overwritten."

"Overwritten? How"s that?

"Well, is that the... k-kiss; the one from the girl named Mana has been completely overwritten!"

Masuzu looked blank for a moment, but immediately looked as if remembered something. She put her hand to her mouth and said:

"Was it artificial respiration?"

She was really worthy of being Masuzu, for having such sharp wits.

...No, maybe because I blushed, she could probably tell. Since a few moments ago, my face had been hot like crazy.

"S-S-So it"s like that..."

—Hey, why is even your face blushing? And your voice sounds embarra.s.sed?

Shouldn’t you calmly state "I see. It must have been hard for you" without any second thought? That"s how it should be for the anti-romance ones.

"Ah, it’s just like as you said. A kiss is nothing more than a mouth and mouth touching, nothing more. It isn"t any different with artificial respiration, and even the kiss with the girl named Mana. The way I think is "so what?", so… b-basically you can just ignore it!"

"I understand."

After giving a big sigh, a cheerful smile emerged on Masuzu’s face.

"Let"s forget about it, Eita-kun."

"Eh—?"

"Let"s forget everything that has happened these past few days! Let us brush this off in one stroke and forget about it until everything is clean."

"...Let"s do that."

I thought that this was for the best.

Just as Kaoru said, rather than growing distant by caring about the secrets, it was better to forget it and let each other solve one’s own problems.

At least, until the day we could reveal to each other everything that came along.

So—

"I understand and I’ll forget about it. Starting tomorrow I’ll be as usual."

As I replied in this way, I made up my mind.

I was determined to solve the mystery of the "Love Letter" that had been bothering me since several days ago.

Was the person who wrote that letter actually Chiwa?

I would confirm this directly tonight.

"Also, Eita-kun."

While I was thinking about how to confirm this with Chiwa, Masuzu called out to me.

She squinted her eyes and said embarra.s.sedly:

"I as well, really, really like it... the second part of JoJo."

♦

Masuzu did not attend any more cla.s.ses before school ended and went straight home.

Since the after-school club activities were canceled, I had the opportunity of talking with Chiwa ——while we sat together during dinner.

While I was eating fresh tonkatsu, thinking about how to mention the love letter —something happened.

"Hey, Ei-kun."

The soft and quiet sound of the usually spirited Chiwa surprised me. She whispered:

"When you were at the pool today, is it true that you kissed Natsukawa?"

Yes.

If I think a little about it, it"s easy to understand.

Even if my girlfriend and I put everything behind us with one stroke——

This actually didn"t include my "childhood friend"s" say in the matter.