Morning bled through the classroom windows in strips of pale gold, chalk dust drifting in the light like snow in a Makoto Shinkai frame. Yūto Shō pushed the door open just in time to catch Sato Ruri and Kirei Ryu walking out hand in hand, heading for the bathroom — two silhouettes moving in that easy, practiced synchrony best friends develop after years of orbiting each other.
They noticed him at the same moment.
One let out a nearly inaudible hmph — a sound so quiet you'd miss it if you weren't listening for it. The other gave him a slow, deliberate wink, the kind of wink that could carry a whole conversation.
Yūto Shō took them in, standing shoulder to shoulder in the corridor light. Two flowers competing on the same stem — the kind of pairing that makes a boy's chest do something stupid without warning. His heart kicked once, twice, and before he could talk himself out of it, he threw them a casual, "Morning."
"Good morning, Yūto Shō." Kirei Ryu smiled, all soft edges, her voice warm as steeped tea.
"...Mm. Morning." Sato Ruri got the greeting out through her teeth, then immediately tugged Kirei-chan by the wrist and hauled her off down the hall like a tsundere protagonist who'd been caught in a fluster.
Yūto Shō watched their backs until they disappeared around the corner — the sway of pleated skirts, the flash of pale calves, Ruri's ponytail bouncing with each irritated step. Then he turned and slid into his seat.
The chair hadn't even stopped creaking under him when his deskmate leaned over, grin twitching like a rat that had just smelled cheese.
"Yūto Shō." He dropped his voice into that low, conspiratorial register boys use when they think they've uncovered someone's secret. "Which one do you like?"
The little bastard had seen everything.
Yūto Shō shot him a flat look. "'Which one do you like' — what kind of question is that? We're all classmates. Don't say weird shit like that, someone's gonna get the wrong idea."
"Heh heh. Drop the act, dude. My money's on Sato Ruri."
"Why couldn't it be Kirei Ryu?" Yūto Shō asked, genuinely curious.
His deskmate blinked at him like he'd just admitted to putting pineapple on pizza. "I mean, Kirei-chan's cute, sure. But when she's walking next to Ruri? Bro. There's no contest. Your taste okay or what?"
Yūto Shō chewed on that. He had to admit — clinically, objectively — the guy had a point. Kirei Ryu was pretty on her own, more than pretty. But side by side with Sato Ruri, most boys' eyes would slide right past her like water off a windshield. Ruri was the kind of pretty that made rooms rearrange themselves around her.
But Yūto Shō wasn't most boys. Why choose one when the correct answer was clearly both?
An idea occurred to him. "At school in general — is Ruri more popular?"
"Yeah, definitely." His deskmate scratched his chin. "I've heard about guys confessing to her a bunch of times. Kirei-chan? Never once, at least not that I've heard."
Ah.
Yūto Shō leaned back in his chair and something clicked into place — one of those satisfying puzzle-piece moments where a whole character motivation snaps into focus.
Now he understood why Kirei Ryu harbored that quiet, simmering resentment toward Sato Ruri. Kirei-chan's entire school life — what should have been her main-character arc — had been demoted to background scenery. The supporting girl. The green leaf whose only purpose was to make the red flower look redder.
Walk into any room together, and every eye locked onto Ruri. Kirei-chan became wallpaper by default.
It wasn't that Kirei-chan lacked shine. Alone, she'd absolutely turn heads. But the world runs on comparison, and Kirei-chan had spent years losing that comparison to the same person. Grind that down long enough and something inside a person starts to twist.
He'd heard they'd been close since elementary school. Which meant Kirei Ryu had been playing the supporting role since she was seven, eight years old. Half a childhood spent being the other one. No wonder something had gone crooked under all that soft-spoken sweetness.
And now he understood the seduction angle too. That night outside Ruri's place — he and Ruri must have slipped, given something away. Kirei-chan had caught the tremor of it, sniffed the affair out with that quiet radar of hers. Getting close to him wasn't romance. It was revenge. A backdoor route to hurt Ruri through the one person Ruri couldn't publicly claim.
Plus the teacher-resigning incident from before probably made Kirei-chan misread him as some kid with a shadowy family, connections, money. A boy like that could serve double duty — payback for Ruri and an upgrade to her own life.
Of course, all of this was speculation. He'd need to confirm.
The bathroom door creaked, and both girls returned, laughing softly at some private joke. From the outside, everything looked perfect. Two best friends, matching bracelets, shared secrets.
But Yūto Shō could see it now — the hairline fracture running right down the middle of them, spider-thin and spreading.
---
Lunch, he ate alone in the cafeteria.
There's an old saying: once the belly is full, the loins get restless. Yūto Shō chewed through a bowl of stir-fried pork with peppers, the grease glazing his lips, chili oil biting the back of his throat, and by the last bite he was already scheming about how to torment Sato Ruri for the afternoon.
He didn't get the chance. His phone buzzed first.
Where are you? — from her.
He thumbed back: Just finished eating. You wanna hang?
Sure. Come find me. I'm at the pavilion by the school lake.
Yūto Shō stared at the screen. Was Ruri experiencing a plot twist? Did the events of that night flip some hidden switch, unlock a masochism route he hadn't known she had? Was she a secretly-broken-by-the-scumbag protagonist now, one of those doujinshi archetypes where the ice queen melts because someone finally cracked her open?
Curiosity dragging him like a leash, he pushed away from the cafeteria table and headed for the lake.
He'd timed lunch to avoid the crush, which meant he was late now. Day students had already drifted home; boarders had retreated to their dorms to nap. The paths through campus lay empty, dappled in high-noon light, cicadas droning somewhere in the plane trees. Just the sound of his sneakers on the tiles and the far-off clatter of a groundskeeper's rake.
The artificial lake sat at the campus's back edge — a kidney-shaped pond ringed with willows, lotus pads floating fat and green across the surface, a few pale pink blossoms cracked open like sleeping mouths. Dead center on the near bank stood a small pavilion, red-lacquered pillars, upturned tile roof, the kind of postcard-perfect setting a school posts in its brochure.
Sato Ruri stood inside it, facing the water.
She was a picture. A bud on the verge of blooming — and the moment she entered the frame, every lotus on the water looked like set dressing beside her. Her uniform skirt caught a slow breeze and lifted an inch off the back of her thighs. Her hair, that black-silk fall of it, drifted around her shoulders. Her face in profile was carved out of something cold and expensive. And there was a tightness at the corners of her mouth that told him she'd been thinking hard about something.
Yūto Shō paused at a distance.
The old him — the Yūto Shō from three weeks ago — would have taken one look at this scene and backed away, terrified of disturbing something so far above his pay grade. That kid was gone. What ran through this Yūto Shō's head instead was, how am I gonna wreck her tonight?
He walked up. Ruri heard his footsteps and turned, watching him approach in silence, her dark eyes flat and unreadable.
He glanced around, playing it light. "Wanna change locations? There's a new cafe that opened outside the gates. Heard it's decent."
She rolled her eyes so hard it nearly snapped her out of her aloof-goddess aesthetic entirely.
"Don't even try. You're not luring me anywhere," she said, voice cool. "Here's fine. The girls' dorm is right across the water. You try anything, I scream, everyone dials the cops, you spend the night in a cell."
Ahh. So she'd chosen the location like a strategist picking terrain. Bet the pot on him not daring to move on her in public.
"So you didn't invite me because you missed me?" Yūto Shō mimed a wounded expression, hand to chest. "Cold, Ruri. Cold. Alright — what's up? You needed something?"
Ruri hesitated. Her fingers laced together in her lap, knuckles paling.
"That video. Can you delete it."
Yūto Shō smiled slow. "Depends on how well Miss Sato performs."
His gaze slid down her, deliberate — collar, chest, waist, the pleats of her skirt, the smooth stretch of thigh below the hem. He let his eyes linger just long enough to be rude.
Her cheeks flushed a soft pink, and a warmth bloomed low in her belly, an unwanted flicker between her thighs that made her shift her weight. But her face — her face went disappointed. Not angry. Disappointed, which was worse.
She dropped her gaze to the toe of her shoe, silent for a long beat. Then, in a small, tight voice: "Can't you just delete it? For me? You said you like me, but I don't feel it. You keep threatening me, forcing me to do things I don't want to do. I don't like this — the way you like me."
Yūto Shō's brain did a small hiccup.
Was she saying — if he changed his approach, dialed back the coercion, she'd actually let him in? Like some redemption-arc romance shoujo?
But he remembered the before. Before that night. The Ruri who wouldn't have wasted a single glance on him if he'd set himself on fire in the hallway. If he'd tried the wholesome route — flowers, love letters, standing outside her window in the rain like a whipped-puppy simp — she would have looked at him with pure contempt and kept walking.
He shook his head, smiling. "Can't. Because I really enjoy messing with you. If I can't mess with you, what's even the point?"
What surprised him was that she didn't get angry. She just looked at him with a resigned kind of pity, the way you look at a dog that keeps eating its own vomit.
"You're beyond saving."
"Thanks for the compliment." He'd shed his shame a long time ago. You can't be a proper scumbag with your dignity intact.
Silence stretched between them, thick with the buzz of cicadas and the wet, green smell of the lotuses. Then Ruri did something unexpected — she sat down on the stone bench inside the pavilion, tucked her skirt neatly under her thighs, and lifted her chin.
Her cheeks had gone that soft rose-pink again. "Yūto Shō. Do you know why I went through Egawa Mitsuki's schoolbag that day?"
Of course I know, Yūto Shō thought. But he shook his head, arranging his face into curiosity.
Her lashes lowered. Embarrassment feathered across her expression, delicate and unpracticed.
"The truth is... I have this really strong, kind of shameful curiosity about other people's private lives."
To understand him, I have to let him understand me first.
Yūto Shō performed a small, believable gasp.
Ruri's eyes lifted, soft and searching. "That's my biggest secret. My most private thing. And you found it out. So — can you tell me one of your secrets? Just to make me feel less exposed?"
Classic move. Weaponizing her softness, her girlness, the fragile intimacy she and he had accidentally built — turning all of it into a lever to pry a secret loose from him. Anime protagonist behavior, honestly. He almost respected it.
He shook his head. "I don't really have anything worth hiding."
"I don't believe you." Her voice sharpened, a needle sliding under the silk. "Everyone has secrets. If you really don't, then let me see your phone."
"Sato-san." Yūto Shō raised an eyebrow. "You're not trying to trick me into handing over my phone so you can delete the video yourself, are you?"
"You don't need to make excuses. Just admit you were lying." She looked at him with the kind of gentle, forgiving eyes reserved for coaxing a confession out of a guilty child.
Yūto Shō snorted. Went straight for the throat. "Fine. Phone's yours. But you promise me tonight."
Her brows knit. That pink in her cheeks deepened into something warmer, spreading down her neck, disappearing beneath her collar. She took a slow breath in — chest lifting, uniform blouse straining faintly against the buttons — and released it.
"...Okay."
Yūto Shō's grin split wide. He unlocked his phone and passed it to her. There was genuinely nothing damning on it.
Ruri cradled the phone in both hands and bent over the screen, hair falling forward in a dark curtain. She started with WeChat, thumbing through the chat list.
Nothing.
Yūto Shō had a habit of scorched-earth message deletion. Every conversation with her, every conversation with Egawa Mitsuki — vaporized. Not even a ghost of the timestamps left.
She moved on to his shopping apps. Wanted to know what he bought, how he lived, what a person like this filled his cart with. But his order history was thin. Clothes. Shoes. A pair of headphones. Nothing incriminating, nothing weird, nothing that painted him as a rich kid with a secret family.
Ride-hailing app: he took cabs occasionally.
Food delivery app: he ordered in constantly. Like, alarmingly often. Bowl after bowl of takeout for one.
Her brow creased. That night she'd gone to his place — she hadn't seen a single family member. Not a parent, not a sibling, not so much as a photo on the fridge. She'd wondered about it then. She wondered again now.
She kept scrolling, but nothing surfaced that felt like him. Then again — she wasn't really looking for a secret. She was looking for him. The person underneath.
To change someone, you have to understand them first.
That was her plan. Simple. Straight out of a shoujo redemption arc — the transfer-student heroine who reforms the school delinquent through the sheer power of insight and moral clarity. Before that night, Yūto Shō had been a stranger, a face in a classroom. Now he'd taken something from her she couldn't get back, and all she had to characterize him with were the words bastard and pervert. She refused to believe a person was that flat. There had to be something else. A crack. A soft spot. A weakness.
Then her thumb slid across his home screen and caught on it.
Reading apps. Several of them. Downloaded, opened often.
She tapped in.
His bookshelf was — oh.
Harem novels. All of them. Every last one. Rows and rows of covers with three, four, five girls fanned out around a smug-faced male lead. The kind of trashy isekai wish-fulfillment shelves that were basically Shokugeki no Souma except the protagonist was collecting girls instead of recipes.
She kept scrolling.
Oh.
Not just harem novels. Yūto Shō was a specific breed of harem reader. She could tell from his review history — long, ranting reviews he'd left across half a dozen platforms. He hated cuckold plots with the fury of a thousand suns. Hated heroine-death arcs. Absolutely could not tolerate a female love interest being touched by any man who wasn't the protagonist. The moment any book veered near those tropes, he detonated in the comments sections, dropping paragraph-long screeds calling for the author's head.
According to the little red banners on his profile, his account had been muted on multiple platforms — one of them for fifty years.
Ruri stared at the screen. And slowly, slowly, a smile crept onto her face. The first real smile she'd worn all afternoon — small, private, sharp as a paper edge.
Found it.
Your weakness is right here. And I'm going to be your heroine.
She closed the app, tucked her hair behind one ear, and lifted her eyes to him — those same dark eyes that used to look through him like he was glass, now watching him with a whole new kind of attention. Predatory. Patient. The look of someone who has just picked up a controller and figured out the button combo.
Yūto Shō, oblivious, leaned against the pavilion pillar and grinned back at her, already thinking about what he'd make her do tonight.
Neither of them noticed the lotus on the water tilt in the breeze, its pale pink petals opening one more degree toward the sun.