The Day After My Girlfriend Cheated on Me, My Female Friend Suddenly Started Seducing Me. ~The Protagonist’s Struggle Begins With a Revenge Drama~
There is no such thing as an unchanging daily life. Daily life is always changing. It is the same for everyone. Time does not wait for us, and the world is constantly moving. In such a world, I was looking for an unchanging daily life.
I was afraid of change. The people around me were constantly changing. I was afraid that they would go out of my reach.
But change doesn’t wait for me. If I stop moving forward, change will mercilessly leave me behind. It was a few years ago that I realized that in order to live in this world, I must not be afraid of change.
Well, there is no need to talk about it now. I woke up in a quiet space, dreaming a bit of the past. I must have slept a little too much.
The library is quiet during lunch break. Students gather in the cafeteria, so this classroom is inevitably quiet. It’s time to use the library, but I’m probably the only student who uses it at this time of day.
I sit up, rubbing my sleepy eyelids. I look up to see Kaori smiling at me.
“Good morning, Rei kun. You were grunting something, were you having a weird dream?”
Kaori is a member of the library committee. Whenever I’m here, she’s usually with me. I don’t know how it happened.
“…..Nothing. I just had a dream about the past.”
“Heh. Rei kun, are you traumatized by your past?”
“The right to remain silent.”
“You’re so uptight〜”
Kaori didn’t dig into it too deeply. The way she looks at her from above is a bit off-putting, but it’s probably typical of her.
A strange silence envelopes the library. I throw a question to Kaori to get rid of it.
“You’re always in the library, aren’t you? Are you free all the time?”
“If I’m on duty during this time, I don’t have to work, right? Besides, I get to see Rei kun’s sleeping face.”
“Ah, my sleeping face..! When did you…”
Kaori ostentatiously showed me my sleeping face on the screen of her smartphone. I let her have my weakness in an unexpected place. Rumors and information spread quickly among girls. It would be bad to leave something like that…!
“Rei kun, you can’t expose your sleeping face so easily in front of women.”
“It would be a good thing if you didn’t take the picture. I wouldn’t have let my guard down at all…”
“Fufu, Rei kun has a surprisingly cute face.”
Kaori gave a gorgeous smile, like a flower blooming. I’d understand if I had a crush on Kaori and found her cute, but I found it a bit annoying to hear her say that to me.
“S-stop. Don’t call me cute.”
“You’re cute, so I don’t blame you. Look, you look like a baby here.”
“Don’t treat a guy your age like a baby. If you’re gonna do it, do it to someone other than me.”
“I won’t.”
Kaori responded to my words with a biting smile and walked out from the counter to sit next to me. Then she brought her face closer to me as if to threaten me.
“I won’t do it. I only do this to people I’m interested in. I don’t do this to just anyone. You hear me?”
“Eh, y-yes…”
Somehow pressured by Kaori’s energy, I replied.
She sometimes looks serious. When I see that expression, I can feel an intensity that is incomparable to what I usually see, and I can’t resist it. I felt that she was the Kaori I didn’t know. I feel like she is someone I’m not allowed to know. My brain cuts off any further inquiry. I guess this is another part of my timidity, my fear of change.
Seeing me freeze, Kaori’s cheeks puffed out in disapproval.
“What’s with that reaction? You should be more embarrassed.”
“H-huh? Why should I be embarrassed?”
“I don’t like it. Rei kun, you’ve been freed for a while, but all you do is make a sour face.”
Kaori seemed to be dissatisfied with my lack of change in facial expression.
Indeed, Ririko’s incident ended unexpectedly, and one of my worries disappeared from this world. I’m not sure if I should be taking it easy now that my worries are gone.
“I worry when Rei kun is not smiling. I don’t wanna see the pained face of the person I love.”
“…? Why are we talking about the person you like? Is there someone you like?”
Kaori puffs out her cheeks even more as I tilt my head slightly. She jerked her shoulders closer to me with an accusatory look in her eyes.
“Hm ! That’s the point, Rei kun !”
“W-what is it? Did I say something bad?”
“It’s not that ! You should think a little more about other people’s feelings !”
Kaori and I are so close that I can feel our breaths, our shoulders touching. Kaori’s eyes were shining crimson as she looked at me from a close distance.
I have been in the same class with her since junior high school. At first, I didn’t talk to her because I felt a gap between her as the most popular girl in our grade, but after talking to her, I found out that she is just an average high school girl. She seems to live in a different world, but that’s just me isolating myself from my own world; we really live in the same world. Even she, who always smiles brightly and is always in tune with her surroundings.
That’s why I felt strangely close to her when I saw her angry.
“It’s not a boy’s place to ignore a girl’s affection ! …Even I have someone I like. Someone I like and can’t stop liking.”
Kaori’s blushing cheeks were a destructive expression that was appropriate for a popular girl in her class. The shock that there are people in this school who can drag her down into the swamp of love, and the shock that this brings her, a high school girl, into the spotlight, hits me twice as hard.
(…Huh? I don’t know, I…)
My heart beats faster.
My cheeks gradually heat up. An itchy fever that seemed to permeate through me. I can’t take my eyes off the woman in front of me.
Someone once said. The profile of a maiden in love is beautiful. I understand it at this very moment.
“…Ignorance is a sin, Rei kun.”
Kaori spat as if running away and ran out of the library. I was left alone in the library with silence. Left alone, I was immersed in the lingering heat.
(Could….this….be…?)
I was tormented by the heat and misunderstanding for the remaining minutes of the day.
Maitoshi