153) Chapter 22. Because It’s Summer! (1)
A semester had come to an end.
It had been a period of time that felt long if you called it long, and short if you called it short.
From the perspective of someone still in their teens, the two and a half years that remained ahead would feel incredibly long, but once you actually entered society and started working, no matter what workplace you went to, you would always meet people who had been doing that job for ten or twenty years.
And when you looked back on it later, that short period would feel like the fastest and most intense stretch of time in your life.
Maybe it was because I had those kinds of thoughts, but the feelings I had toward a period called “vacation” were a little different than before.
When I was working, I used to wish that office workers could at least get something similar to a school vacation.
Work was just so boring, and if you did it without thinking too much, it was difficult to feel any real sense of accomplishment.
People like bosses and company owners would talk about having a sense of ownership or moving with a little more purpose.
But would they raise my salary because I had goals? Would they pay me like an owner because I had a sense of ownership? In the end, weren’t those things just said to squeeze more labor out of me—or, more accurately, to make me do more than what I was being paid for?
So I had always lived with the mindset of using every bit of paid leave I was entitled to, leaving work the moment I was allowed to clock out, and believing that the best place in the world was my own home—
Well, that wasn’t to say that my home in this life wasn’t the best place either.
It was just that the feeling was a little different, I guess. When I was actually going to school, I hated getting up in the morning and spent all week waiting for the weekend, but once I stopped going, I found myself missing it a little. A subtle sort of emotion like that.
Mm, no, more than anything.
“......”
When I opened my eyes in the morning, my back felt hard.
Sure enough, my back was pressed firmly against a wall.
I hadn’t noticed it at all while sleeping, but whether I had moved in my sleep or someone beside me had kept pushing me until I instinctively retreated backward—
And then there was the regular, gentle sound of breathing.
...A faint breeze brushing against my face.
No, it wasn’t a breeze. It was breath.
“Mm.”
This was troublesome.
Usually, Soi and Chae-yi were packed tightly on either side of me, leaving me no choice but to sleep flat on my back, but the bed I was lying in right now wasn’t a dormitory bed.
Final exams had ended, and the semester was over, so we had come back home as well.
Chae-yi seemed like she would have liked to live at our house during vacation too if she could, but naturally that would have been a little difficult.
If it was just coming over to play and spending a night or two, that would be one thing, but Chae-yi still had her mother, after all.
So, during vacation, it had become just Chae-yi and me sharing a bed.
...Ah, no, wait. Did that sound strange? No, it was definitely true, so I was only describing it that way, but somehow it felt like it could be interpreted differently.
“......”
Anyway, because of that, I felt a strange sense of loss from Chae-yi no longer occupying one side of me.
The soft sensation I used to feel on my arm when I woke up in the morning, the breath that used to brush against my ear—they were gone, making things feel a little empty—
Ah, no. That also sounded strange. We had just shared a bed as friends.
Though sharing a bed with a friend was kind of strange too.
We were friends, but also something like sisters? Of course, if you looked at it that way, Chae-yi probably wouldn’t go so far as to call me her sister, but we were close, right? I think either Soi or Chae-yi once said that girls who were close shared beds together.
No, no, no.
That wasn’t important right now. Um.
Right.
I was lying with my back against the wall.
And the one who had driven me into that corner was Soi.
Her golden hair, which she normally tied back behind her, had been let loose and was hanging down. She was wearing pajamas much looser than the ones she wore in the dormitory, and she had even undone the second button.
Neither Soi nor I wore bras when we slept. They were uncomfortable.
And she was pressing that body against me, pushing me until I was completely trapped in the corner of the bed.
With her body.
One of her hands was holding mine. If someone prayed with only one hand, maybe it would look something like this. Unlike me, who was lying stiffly with my back against the wall, Soi had her head slightly lowered forward.
Facing me.
A distance where our foreheads felt like they would touch if either of us moved even a little.
Naturally, other parts of our bodies were touching too. Especially the parts that protruded so far forward they were impossible to avoid—they weren’t merely touching; they were being firmly pressed together.
When I looked ahead, I could see Soi’s thoroughly disheveled face.
Soi probably didn’t intend it that way, but unlike the dormitory, where the presence of “other people” made her at least somewhat conscious of herself, at home she lived without worrying about anyone watching.
I never paid attention to it normally, but after spending time in the dormitory and briefly forgetting what she was like at home, seeing it again was...
Mm.
And if I lowered my gaze instead, what I saw below was even more embarrassing.
...To the point where simply remaining here made me feel guilty in various ways.
An even more terrifying fact was that Soi’s other hand was somewhere outside my field of vision right now.
What happened if you put a body-sized pillow in front of someone who slept on their side? Wouldn’t they naturally end up hugging it?
Of course, Soi knew very well that hugging me would be a problem. Even in her sleep she didn’t do it. The fact that the habit itself had become ingrained into her body was something I found a little bitter, but—
The position of her hand.
I couldn’t see it with my eyes.
But I could feel it with my body.
That hand was...
Well.
It was on my butt.
Since she wasn’t exactly embracing me tightly, my body hadn’t frozen up completely, but in a different sense, it was still rather...
And since she had touched it simply because we were sleeping pressed together, it didn’t feel right to blame her either.
It was in one of those positions where I didn’t even know what to say.
Normally, when my arms were trapped on both sides, I had developed a technique for slipping free.
But what was I supposed to do in a situation like this?
Soi’s body blocked the front, the wall blocked the back, and Soi’s arm blocked the side.
“H-huet?!”
And more than anything.
“Mnya.”
As Soi shifted in her sleep, her hand moved. Naturally sliding along the curve of my butt toward my thigh.
My body stiffened for an entirely different reason.
Soi’s hand caught lightly beneath my leg, and then—
“......!”
She pulled my leg over and placed it on top of her body.
You know those scenes in Western movies where a woman in a dress and a man in a tuxedo dance passionately, and the woman hooks her leg around the man’s body?
My leg ended up draped over Soi in exactly that kind of pose.
“......”
No, wait a second.
That very “specific” action suddenly cleared my head.
My eyes narrowed as I looked at Soi.
...Wasn’t she awake?
This seriously felt like she was just messing with me.
But even as I stared at her suspiciously, Soi kept her eyes shut and continued breathing quietly for a long while.
Then—
Flutter.
She finally opened her eyes.
For someone who had supposedly just woken up, they were remarkably bright, round, and beautiful eyes.
Our eyes met, and without looking surprised at all—
Grin.
Soi smiled.
A few strands of golden hair hanging carelessly across her face.
A face slightly flushed, perhaps because she was pressed so closely against me.
And an expression so happy that it looked like she had just met someone she loved dearly.
I couldn’t bring myself to question her.
“Sleep well?”
Soi asked.
“...Yeah, I slept well.”
I answered in a small voice.
For a moment, we simply looked into each other’s eyes.
Thump. Thump.
This had happened before.
Had I really forgotten because of only one semester of dormitory life?
My heartbeat wasn’t being transmitted through our touching chests, was it?
That would be a little embarrassing.
...Then again, even if it wasn’t my heartbeat, there was no way to hide the fact that my face had already turned bright red.
*
It wasn’t as though I couldn’t see Chae-yi at all just because it was summer vacation.
If anything, even before vacation started, Chae-yi had said, “I’m going to come play every day!” several times.
Since it was only the first day of vacation, there was no way of knowing whether she would actually keep that promise, but at least I knew she had meant it sincerely.
And honestly, Chae-yi did have a history of this.
Whether in elementary school or middle school, she always came to our house whenever vacation arrived.
So often that at one point, if Chae-yi didn’t show up, Auntie Yujin would get worried.
Even after I quit middle school, Chae-yi would come over whenever vacation started, roll around in Soi’s room, lounge on the sofa with us while watching movies, or grab my hand and drag me off somewhere.
And—
“Um, uh, Soi?”
Auntie Yujin and Uncle Dohyun had gone to work.
And Chae-yi hadn’t come over yet.
Soi was lying almost directly on top of me.
If I had to describe it, it was like a carnivore pouncing on a herbivore.
Soi and I had been sitting side by side on the sofa, but she kept inching closer to me, and I kept retreating little by little until I finally reached the armrest and had nowhere left to escape.
Then Soi ended up pinning me down.
She was still strictly following her rule of “not hugging.”
But wasn’t this basically a wall slam? No, a sofa slam?
“Why? Don’t you like it?”
“N-not that I dislike it.”
Because I liked Soi very, very much.
Enough that I didn’t want to hand her over to anyone else.
...Though it wasn’t as if she belonged to me in the first place.
“Then it’s fine, isn’t it?”
Soi said that, rested her cheek on my shoulder, and watched TV.
Um.
Well.
Yeah.
I guess if Soi liked it, then it was fine.
In the end, I stopped thinking about it any further and quietly remained pinned beneath Soi until Chae-yi came over to visit.