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
It was Friday afternoon. The regular meeting at TechFrontier ended a little earlier than scheduled.
As the meeting room was filled with a relaxed atmosphere, Tsukishima approached me.
“Minato san, are you free after work today?”
“Ah……yes. I’m free. Why is that?”
Was it something he wanted to discuss privately?
“Well, how about lunch?”
“Lunch…sure…”
The moment I answered, Tanaka san jumped into the conversation as if he had been waiting for it.
“Oh, lunch?”
“Ah…um, yeah. There are some things that are hard to talk about in the meeting room, so I thought it might be nice to do something different once in a while.”
Tsukishima san answered with a strained expression.
Tanaka san dragged in my junior colleague from my company and her own subordinates, and in the blink of an eye, she turned our small lunch plan into a six-person meal.
Tsukishima san and I exchanged glances, read the “Oh, no” written on each other’s faces, and sighed softly.
◆
In the end, we ended up sitting around a large table at an Italian restaurant near the office. Tsukishima san is sitting next to me. The space between Tsukishima san and me marks the boundary between the men and women.
She is caught up in the women’s conversation centered around Tanaka san, discussing love stories and fashion—topics I can’t possibly understand—and she’s forcing a smile. On the other hand, I could only nod along to the mundane work-related conversations between my junior colleague and the male employees from TechFrontier.
Even though she was right next to me. The distance felt much farther than it had during the company party the other day.
I occasionally stole glances at her profile. She, too, glanced at me briefly during pauses in the conversation. Our eyes meet. A glance that seems to want to say something, but can’t, crosses for an instant, and then disappears into the noise of their respective conversations.
(……This is frustrating.)
I was thinking about that as I twirled the tomato sauce pasta on my fork, when it happened.
Just as I was about to put the pasta in my mouth, a strand of it slipped off the fork and fell. The pasta, tracing a parabolic arc, landed on…
Splash.
With a small but loud enough sound to stop everyone in their tracks, it hit the chest of Tsukishima san’s white T-shirt.
“Ah…”
Time stood still.
The air above the table froze in an instant. Tanaka san, my junior, and everyone else held their breath, alternately glancing between me and the vivid red stain on Tsukishima san’s T-shirt.
It’s over…my social life is over…no matter how close we are, no matter that we slept in the same bed, she’s the vice president of a client company. Staining her clothes is a major blunder.
As I turned pale and desperately searched for words of apology, Tsukishima san, the person in question, looked at the stain on her chest with a puzzled expression, then looked at my face and quietly said,
“…..Could we try a coin laundry?”
Her voice wasn’t angry or exasperated; it was just a pure, straightforward question. It was like an engineer asking, “This bug is fixable, right?” when an unexpected error occurs in the system.
“Eh, uh, yes ! I’m sorry……I’ll cover the cleaning costs and the T-shirt costs, of course…”
“Hmm…no, it’s okay. Please don’t worry about it, Minato san. If anything, the stain looks kind of stylish. It’s like a logo, right?”
Tsukishima san peered at her T-shirt and lightened the mood with a joke.
Then, as if nothing had happened, she began eating her pasta. Her cool response caused the frozen atmosphere around her to shift into a different kind of awkwardness, where no one knew how to react.
◆
That night.
I headed to the usual coin laundry, reflecting on my guilt and Tsukishima san’s strange behavior earlier that day.
Surprisingly, she was already there. She was standing in front of the washing machine, frowning as she looked at a white T-shirt. On the chest, there was a tomato sauce stain that was slightly lighter than earlier, but still clearly visible.
“…Tsukishima san.”
When I called out to her, she turned around and sighed.
“Hey, Minato san. It’s surprisingly hard to get it off. Is your shirt okay?”
She showed me the T-shirt. The stain was still there. She didn’t need to worry about my clothes at this point.
“…I’m sorry, Tsukishima san…it’s my fault…”
When I bowed my head again, she shook her head weakly.
“It’s not your fault, Minato san. It was an act of God. The pasta had a mind of its own. It was ‘Chef’s Whim Self-Aware Pasta.’ Still, stains are an interesting phenomenon, aren’t they?”
“Eh? Interesting…?”
“Yeah. Unintended data is irreversibly written onto a physical object. Once it’s written, it’s almost impossible to completely delete it. The log remains forever.”
I was a little confused by Tsukishima san’s unique perspective, but I agreed.
“That’s true…coffee or soy sauce…especially when it gets on a white shirt, the sense of despair is overwhelming.”
“Yeah. I mean, white clothes are basically meant to get dirty, right? Just like humans eventually age, white clothes eventually get dirty too.”
Tsukishima said this with a slightly melancholy expression. It didn’t seem like she was just casually discarding clothes, despite her words.
“Hey, Tsukishima san. Was that….your favorite?”
Tsukishima san looked away from me, nodded, and said, “Hmm.”
“…I see. That’s how it is…..I’m really sorry. I’ll compensate you. I’ll buy you the same T-shirt.”
When I said that with genuine guilt, Tsukishima san smiled softly.
“We’re busy, aren’t we? Buying sofas and T-shirts.”
“That’s true…”
“But I didn’t buy the same sofa. So I want Minato san to choose one too.”
“T-shirts?”
“Hmm. It doesn’t have to be a T-shirt, anything is fine. I was rotating my work clothes on a weekly basis, but now there’s a vacancy. I plan to wear it on the day I have a meeting with Minato san and the others.”
“That’s a big responsibility…”
“Fufu…right? And here, I’ll give you this.”
Tsukishima san said that, then skillfully folded the stained T-shirt and handed it to me.
“As a reminder?”
“Haha…no. It’s for loungewear…or rather, to keep in Minato san’s room.”
“…Just the top?”
When I said that, Tsukishima san smiled.
“You want some undies?”
“Pants ! P a n t s !”
“Hmm. Indeed.”
Tsukishima san said that, then took a pair of shorts out of the laundry basket and tossed them into mine.
“Well, maybe I’m letting Minato san get away with it because it’s him. If it were someone else, I’d be hacking their phone right now to expose their kinks.”
“You’re trying to socially kill them !?”
“Fufu….just kidding. But…this stain is also an important log…or rather, a memory. Since Minato san is tagged, I guess I want to cherish both the good memories and the bad ones.”
Tsukishima san said that, sat down in a chair, and opened a book. It seems she was separating the T-shirts from the other laundry.
“So, I’ll be waiting for your invitation and schedule adjustment.”
“Sure, sure. But you’re probably busier than me, so I’ll adjust to your schedule…”
I said that while sitting next to her.
“Hmm…thanks. Then, tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow !?”
“Hm. Tomorrow.”
“Okay. Tomorrow.”
“Hm. Tomorrow.”
Tsukishima san muttered while reading a book, “If I get my clothes dirty every week, can I go out with Minato san a lot?”
“That sounds like a psychopath diagnosis !”
“A wife who fell in love at first sight with her husband’s colleague at his funeral—what did she do to meet him again? Like, she killed her child thinking she could meet him again at another funeral.”
“She’s too willing to use any means to achieve her goal…”
“Well, we’re the same, but we should just buy a washing machine already.”
“Well…that’s true. But there are various purposes here.”
“For example?”
Tsukishima san asked me, looking up at me.
“Well…there are various things.”
I said that while looking away to hide my embarrassment.
“Hmm. There are various colors.”
“Well…various things. So we don’t have to get our clothes dirty every week.”
“Hmm. Then from next time, I’ll invite you without a reason.”
“I guess that’s how it is. Everyone.”
“Hmm…I see.”
Tsukishima san closed the book. Then she poked my arm repeatedly.
“Huh? What?”
Tsukishima san tapped my arm repeatedly without saying a word.
“W-what’s wrong?”
“Let’s go out tomorrow? No reason, just to look at clothes.”
“U-uh…okay.”
Seeing Tsukishima san smile and blush, I couldn’t help but feel my own face getting hot.
Maigetsu