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
Late Friday night, as I watched Tsukishima san from behind as she took out her warm laundry from the dryer at her usual laundromat, she suddenly pressed the laundry against her face.
“…Hmm. No good. It smells damp.”
She sniffed her white T-shirt, which she had folded, and frowned slightly.
“Oh…maybe there’s something wrong with the machine?”
“The drying time should have been sufficient. Maybe the filter is clogged… Everything smells. Sigh…we’ll have to start over.”
She turned toward me and held a small white cloth up to my nose.
“Just smell this. I need objective data. If I rely on my sense of smell alone, there’s a chance that the placebo effect is making everything smell damp.”
Saying that, she didn’t wait for my response and pushed the cloth even closer to my nose.
I looked at the cloth and my thoughts froze for a moment.
It was clearly not a T-shirt.
It was a smooth, lustrous fabric like silk, with delicate lace trim along the edges.
No matter how I looked at it, it was…
(…U-undies !?)
My brain instantly overheated, and I felt my face flush. Why, why would Tsukishima san give me something like this…!?
“N-no, I’m fine ! It’s okay ! It’s probably just my imagination ! Yeah, it doesn’t smell, definitely !”
I leaned back so hard I almost fell off the chair.
“Why? Just hurry up. I need you to determine whether this smell is a minor error within acceptable limits or a critical bug that requires retrying the entire washing and drying process. My nose is a bit off today.”
Tsukishima san, completely unable to understand my extreme rejection, continued to hold the fabric toward me. Her eyes were filled with pure technical curiosity.
“No, no, no ! The smell of someone else’s laundry, especially something so delicate that you wear it…”
I blurted out a series of incoherent excuses, not even sure what I was saying myself.
“Eh? Isn’t this normal? It’s just been washed. Minato san, are you surprisingly a clean freak?”
In her logic, whether it’s underwear or a shirt, it’s just a ‘cloth object.’ But my sense of ethics won’t allow it.
A mysterious standoff ensued between us for a few seconds. Finally, Tsukishima san seemed to give in to my stubborn resistance and let out a big sigh.
“Well, there’s no helping it…Minato san, you’re so stubborn in the strangest places.”
She stepped back from me and said with a look of exasperation.
“It’s just a handkerchief—you don’t have to avoid it like that…”
“…Eh?”
Handkerchief.
I froze at that completely unexpected word.
“H-handkerchief…? Oh, right…that’s right ! Haha, haha ! It’s a stylish handkerchief with lace, right? Of course, I thought it was a handkerchief from the start ! I just thought the fabric was a little rich !”
Relief and intense embarrassment at my misunderstanding. I stammered awkwardly, torn between the two.
“Minato san, did you maybe think this was underwear?”
“No !? I thought it was a handkerchief from the start !”
“Your voice is coming from your stomach…”
“I’ve been taking a training course lately ! See, I have to speak in front of people a lot !”
“Hmm…”
Tsukishima san seemed to have figured out why I was acting so strangely and asked, “Are you going to wear it?”
“I’m not going to wear a handkerchief or underwear !”
“Well, this is a handkerchief, though.”
Tsukishima san spread out the lace-trimmed cloth in front of me, as if scolding a disobedient child and proving her own righteousness.
“See, it’s just a handkerchief…”
Tsukishima san’s confident words suddenly stopped mid-sentence.
The unfolded fabric was clearly not a square handkerchief. It was a rounded inverted triangle with two holes, presumably for the legs.
It was undeniably a pair of women’s lace-trimmed underwear.
The coin laundry fell silent.
The only sound was the distant hum of someone else’s washing machine, which seemed unusually loud.
Tsukishima san compared the object in her hand to my face repeatedly, like a broken machine.
And in the next instant, her pale face flushed bright red as if it had suddenly boiled over.
“Ah…ah…aaaah…”
She let out a muffled scream, then crumpled the undies into a ball at breakneck speed and stuffed them into the deepest recesses of the laundry bag, into the pitch-black darkness like a black hole.
Then she collapsed to her knees, covered her face with both hands, and crouched down.
That scene was so shocking, yet so adorable, that I couldn’t find the words to say. I could only stand there, my face as red as hers, frozen in place.
“Tsukishima san…you’re tired, aren’t you…”
“Yeah, maybe…I’ve been getting a lot of double takes when I use this handkerchief…the design really does look like underwear…enough to mistake it for the real thing…”
Tsukishima san said that and took out a similar piece of cloth from the washing machine and spread it out. That one was definitely a square “handkerchief.”
It had almost the same design, so if you called it a handkerchief, it was a handkerchief, but if you called it underwear, it could also be underwear.
“This is…a handkerchief, right?”
“Hmm. Do people at work think I’m the kind of person who wipes their hands with underwear?”
“CPO?”
“Chief Panties Officer…fufu…”
It seemed like Tsukishima san had added another title to her list.
Maigetsu