The Beautiful Kuudere Woman Who Always Reads Books While Standing Next to Me at the Laundromat Turns Out to Be the Vice President of One of Our Clients
About 15 minutes had passed since Tsukishima san disappeared into my bathroom. I was sitting on the sofa in the living room, my mind completely blank.
The sound of the shower stopped. Soon, Tsukishima san emerged, looking a little awkward, dressed in a T-shirt and shorts. Her unusual attire, so different from her usual style, caused my heart to race once again.
“…Well, let’s go to sleep. Negotiating over the sofa or the bed is a waste of time. We’ll sleep together in the bed. Is that okay?”
“Yes…”
I nodded, thinking that if Tsukishima san was okay with it, then it was fine with me.
Thus, it was decided that Tsukishima san and I would sleep in the same bed. We moved to the bedroom together and lay down.
Of course, it wasn’t that easy to fall asleep.
We lay at opposite ends of the bed, each of us stiffly. Between us was an invisible wall, like a border. I faced away from her, and she faced away from me.
Her presence right behind me. The faint sound of her breathing. The faint warmth of her body transmitted through the sheets. All of it sharpened my senses like never before.
(…My heartbeat is too loud. Can she hear it…?)
(…Or rather, how am I supposed to face her tomorrow morning…?)
Various thoughts raced through my mind, and my consciousness drifted uncertainly between wakefulness and sleep.
How long had it been like that?
In my dazed state of consciousness, I felt a soft, gentle touch on my back.
“…Hmm…?”
It was Tsukishima san’s arm. She had wrapped her arm around my back while sleeping.
And then, she hugged me tightly.
Her small body pressed closely against my back.
“…Minato san…shall we?”
A sweet whisper in my ear.
In that moment, the last thread of reason inside me snapped with a pop.
I didn’t care anymore.
I made up my mind and tried to turn my body toward her. I wanted to look at her face and tell her how I felt.
Just then…
When I opened my eyes, I was alone, staring at the ceiling.
I jolted awake.
I was in my room, on my bed.
I checked the time on my smartphone—it was 11:11.
…A dream? …..And the time is a palindrome. No, the palindrome doesn’t matter.
I looked over at her. Tsukishima-san was sleeping peacefully with her eyes closed, like a princess from a fairy tale.
“…Hmm…”
She woke up to the sound of me getting up, and with a small groan, she slowly sat up.
Then, she rubbed her sleepy eyes like a child.
At that moment, I couldn’t help but gasp.
Her usually neatly styled pink hair was sticking out in all directions, creating an artistic “bedhead.”
“…Good morning, Tsukishima san. Did you sleep well?”
I managed to suppress the laughter welling up inside me as I said that, and she looked at me with a dazed expression, as if she were still halfway in the world of dreams.
“…Hmm…good morning. Minato san…what time is it now…?”
“11:11.”
“…Oh, I see…it’s a palindrome…ah.. I slept. I slept soundly…”
“Well, if you went to bed at that time, you’d fall asleep immediately…”
“Yeah, right. Hey, Minato san. Doesn’t the resolution drop suddenly when you don’t know something?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, in my dream, Minato san pushed me down, but the mosaic never came off at the crucial part. Well, I’ve never seen the real thing, so there’s no way to remove the mosaic. In the dream, I was desperately trying to remove the mosaic by coding AI.”
“You don’t know that there’s no training data, right?”
“Yeah. That’s right. Minato san, in the dream, I kept saying, ‘This is the limit—the limit !’ while the mosaic kept expanding. In the end, even my face was covered by the mosaic.”
“That’s too much like a guy who got fired for compliance issues !”
It seems like both of us were trying to do what we could in our dreams. Mine was a pretty normal dream, though.
“Huh…yeah, that’s true—fwuah…”
Tsukishima san yawned loudly in the middle of her sentence. Seeing that, I couldn’t help but yawn too.
“Fufu…did you catch it?”
Tsukishima san lay back down on the bed, using her arm as a pillow, and looked at me.
“Yeah.”
“Speaking of catching on, I was thinking last night that we’d probably do something erotic. Not in a dream, but in reality.”
“If you say ‘catch on,’ it sounds like we’re sick or something !”
“Just kidding. But we ended up falling asleep without doing anything.”
Tsukishima san said that with a smile that seemed to imply she had done something.
“From that time on, I didn’t have the energy to do such a thing…or rather, I wouldn’t do it ! You’re talking as if it’s a given that we’d do something ! There’s a proper order to things !”
“Yeah…you’re right. We wouldn’t just jump into the production environment right away. We’d start with the development environment first.”
“Development and production…there are so many meanings to those words…”
“Haha…you’re right. Work starts with development and moves to production, but there’s also production that leads to development.”
The conversation suddenly stopped, and the two of them just stared at each other. It felt like there was some kind of unspoken agreement, but something was holding them back.
Maybe it was common sense, since she was a client.
Thinking about difficult things made me yawn. Then Tsukishima san yawned too.
Then Tsukishima san said, “Hmm. I’m still sleepy” and crawled under the blanket.
“Want to take another nap?”
When I suggested that, Tsukishima san nodded vigorously from under the blanket.
“….Hmm. I agree. My system isn’t fully rebooted yet either….I’d like to keep it in sleep mode a little longer…”
She said that in a muffled voice and stopped moving again. I also decided to make the most luxurious choice of taking another nap.
◆
When I woke up next, the light streaming in through the window was already midday. It was well past noon.
Tsukishima san was awake too. She was sitting cross-legged next to me, scrolling through her smartphone screen. Her hair still had cute bedhead.
“…Good morning, Tsukishima san.”
When I said that, she looked up from her phone and gave me a slightly sleepy glance.
“…Good morning, Minato san…I’m hungry.”
“Me too. What should we do? Want to eat something?”
“Hmm. Yeah. What do you usually eat for breakfast, Minato san?”
“…Octopus-shaped sausages.”
When I teased her about her hair like that, Tsukishima san puffed out her cheeks and looked at me.
“No, no. Actually, I’m a bread person.”
“So you’re a bread kind of guy.”
“Well…I guess I am.”
“Hm. I’m a bread kind of woman too.”
This person’s brain isn’t awake yet !?
“…..What are you talking about?”
“Haha…you’re right.”
Closing her slightly swollen eyelids, Tsukishima san laughed heartily.
Maigetsu