Chapter3
. Faces and Rooms Turn Red (1)
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Rika Sōkoku and I, Yūgo Dōkai, have lived next door to each other since we were born. From as far back as I can remember, she’s always been right there beside me.
In fact, even my very first memory is of playing with Rika.
My parents run a small factory, and Rika’s parents run a chain of about ten restaurants. Maybe because they’re both business owners, they’ve always gotten along well.
There are tons of photos left from when we were little — me, Rika, and both our moms together.
By the time we started junior high, maybe thinking their kids no longer needed them as much, both our moms returned to the front lines of their companies, coming home late.
So instead of spending evenings alone, we started having dinner at one or the other’s house almost every night. We’d do our homework together, or watch movies and dramas.
Thanks to Rika, I never once felt lonely, even as an only child with parents who were often away. We told each other everything.
We studied together for high school entrance exams too, in one of our rooms every night. I often tutored Rika, who was terrible at math.
I think the first time I became conscious of her as the opposite sex was when she looked up from wrestling with a difficult subject, smiled at me after saying “I get it now!” and my heart skipped a beat.
We went on to the same high school. Our friends treated us like an old married couple, and neither of us ever got a boyfriend or girlfriend. We had a great three years together. There was never anything romantic or “dating-like” between us, but we went everywhere together and spent almost every evening side by side.
We’d always be trading silly stories or our thoughts about the movies we’d watched, laughing together. We’d shop for our parents’ birthday presents together, and in summer we’d go to the pool and fireworks together.
Men on the street would turn to look at Rika as we walked past, and at school she was said to be one of the top three beauties. It made me weirdly proud too.
Some guys probably envied me, but it never reached our ears. People had gotten so used to seeing us together that it just felt natural.
Even though she was bad at math and physics, Rika was determined to get into medical school. She studied hard and got accepted into a slightly less competitive university out of the prefecture.
I helped her study as hard as I could, so I was thrilled too. But since I’d decided to go to an engineering faculty at our local university, I suddenly became scared of being separated from her.
We’d always seen each other directly instead of chatting on the phone — it was faster to just meet up than to text or call. If we were free, we’d just show up at each other’s houses without notice and hang out.
That was going to end. We’d be separated by pure distance. And suddenly, the thought of Rika becoming “someone else’s girl” welled up inside me, and I couldn’t suppress it.
I wanted her to be my girlfriend. I wanted to be hers. Deep down, I’d probably always felt that way.
“Well, even if she rejects me, it’ll just be another funny story to tell later,”
I told myself desperately, trying to find an excuse not to bottle up my feelings.
And so, at the very end of high school life, after graduation, I called Rika out. I told her I wanted her to be my girlfriend. She cried, apologized, and rejected me.
A crushing sense of guilt — like I’d betrayed her somehow — hit me, my vision went white, and then— I was summoned to another world.
…Wait, isn’t that last part kind of weird?
That’s what I was thinking, lying on the bed in the room I’d been shown to—when Shia-Yun, with her long black hair and crimson eyes, started climbing on top of me in “a state of undress” after removing her dress.
“Hey, wait a second…! What are you doing!?”
The dawn light filled the room with a pale glow. I could see Shia-Yun’s face clearly as she crawled toward me on all fours, eyebrows drawn together, cheeks flushed.
No, well—actually, I could see a lot of other things too…!?
