124) Chapter 19. M-Me Too……! (2)
Actually, until I confirmed that Jinwoo was a girl, I thought I’d probably feel kind of unsettled and uncomfortable once I found out her gender.
Because it meant that the harem web novel I had read had actually drifted into yuri territory.
……Well, I mean.
I’m someone who reads yuri too, so it’s not like I’d be deeply shocked or anything, but it’s true that I couldn’t help thinking, “Wait, it goes this way here?”
It also felt like evidence that the author hadn’t taken the novel all that seriously. I mean, however you looked at it, it basically meant they hadn’t really considered what the readers would think.
Maybe that’s why they made the heroine like this too.
But now that I had openly confirmed it here, I actually felt refreshed.
Why was that?
After thinking quietly for a moment, the conclusion came quickly.
Because this world, no matter what, wasn’t “inside a novel.”
What is a novel, really? In the first place, it’s just text written on paper, isn’t it? Out of every “medium that tells stories,” it’s the most primitive and fundamental one. Even with the exact same description, every reader imagines something different. That’s what novels are.
In other words, a novel is “a description of a certain world,” but it can’t become “that world itself.” Well, maybe it would be different if this were some incredibly open-world game, or at least a comic or movie where every tiny detail had been thoroughly established, but even if I thought “this is a world inside a novel,” it didn’t really resonate with me.
More importantly, the story itself had already diverged a lot from what I knew. At the very least, it was very different from “that novel I knew,” yeah.
“…….”
“…….”
Just like I suggested, we headed to a café first to comfort Jinwoo’s sadness.
Even while ordering an absurdly sweet menu item as usual, today Jinwoo didn’t add things like tapioca pearls.
Her eyes were still slightly bloodshot, and the area around them was still somewhat red, but somehow, the way she drank her beverage looked cheerful and happy.
……For reference, there wasn’t really anything I could do about the liquid on my chest. I just wiped it as best I could with a handkerchief and left it alone. Thankfully it didn’t take very long for the moisture to dry, so even though it felt a little uncomfortable, it didn’t really attract people’s attention or anything.
“…….”
Normally, even when sitting at the same table as us, Jinwoo gave off a strangely distant atmosphere, but right now she didn’t.
Thinking about it again, before this she might have even subtly pulled her chair slightly away to physically maintain distance too.
Maybe because she no longer intended to hide that she was a girl. Somehow, she looked a little less withdrawn than usual.
And the way the others looked at Jinwoo also seemed a little better than befo—
—No, not really.
Huh?
Soi and Chae-yi were staring at Jinwoo with narrowed eyes.
Their expressions still looked pretty suspicious, so I couldn’t just let it slide without asking.
“What’s wrong? You still don’t trust Jinwoo?”
When I whispered into Soi’s ear, she trembled and looked at me with a startled expression.
Was my question really that shocking?
Her face even looked a little red somehow.
“Ah, no, it’s not that.”
Soi hurriedly shook her head.
“It’s not that I doubt her gender, okay? But separate from that, how do I put it… there’s something kind of suspicious.”
“Suspicious?”
“……No, it’s nothing major, just.”
That is absolutely not the expression of someone saying it’s nothing.
Well, if I had to classify it, it wasn’t exactly hostility, but you know that kind of look.
The kind of look she gives when she turns away for a second and then sees Chae-yi clinging to me.
Jealousy?
No, but isn’t that way too fast of a change in attitude for jealousy?
And Chae-yi had the same kind of expression too. After I whispered into Soi’s ear, this time Chae-yi directed that look toward Soi instead.
I silently moved to put my mouth back on my drink straw—
“Aren’t you going to ask me too?”
“Hweh!?”
A sudden voice tickling my ear startled me so badly that I practically jumped out of my seat.
“Uh, uh?”
“You asked Soi.”
She even whispered that and then made this tiny little whining sound like she was about to cry, which left me flustered.
Um, your expression does not look like you’re about to cry at all.
More specifically, she lowered the ends of her eyebrows slightly to make her expression look convincing, but her eyes themselves were strangely glossy, almost consumed by jealousy and desire.
I can understand jealousy over a friend, but what’s with the desire part?
“W-What should I ask?”
“…….”
“Ah, no, um, I-I’ll ask.”
“Mm. Into my ear. Like we’re sharing a secret.”
Chae-yi, who had been pressing her face close to mine, pulled back slightly.
I leaned a little toward her and hesitated before—
“W-What are you thinking about?”
I whispered quietly into her ear.
“Hng.”
No, isn’t it a little unfair to make a sound like that when you were the one who suggested this and were already prepared for it? What kind of noise was that all of a sudden?
“Thinking about Rua.”
“Hweh.”
But before I could pull back, Chae-yi quickly whispered softly into my ear in return.
The breath tickling my ear startled me again.
It wasn’t unpleasant, but still.
It wasn’t just my ears that felt ticklish, it was like the sensation climbed all the way down my back.
“…….”
And the gaze staring fixedly at us.
It was Hyeonji.
Expressionless, lightly biting the tip of her straw, she rested her chin on the backs of her folded hands and stared directly at me with one eyebrow slightly raised.
“Ah, um.”
For some reason, I felt like I needed to say something to Hyeonji too.
“Hyeonji, do you want me to do it too?”
“Do what?”
“Um, the whispering thing.”
“……No thanks.”
Her expression looked like she was wondering what nonsense I was talking about, so I couldn’t bring myself to continue and just blushed instead.
“Um…….”
I had barely managed to put my straw back in my mouth when Jinwoo, who had been quietly drinking until then, suddenly spoke.
“M-Me too.”
“…….”
But at the same time, the gazes of all three people gathered onto Jinwoo.
“Ah, it’s nothing.”
In the end, Jinwoo shrank right back into her usual timid state and focused on her drink again.
Apparently burying her face in my chest and crying earlier had left a pretty huge impact on her.
She was also the first person to soak my chest like that.
……No, phrasing it like that sounds weird.
But there’s not really another way to say it.
If I kept thinking about it any longer, it felt like I’d just keep coming up with increasingly strange thoughts, so I quickly stopped and focused on drinking my beverage instead.
……The combination I copied from Jinwoo because I wondered if it tasted good was seriously unbelievably sweet.
At this rate, would I even be able to eat dinner?
*
Even Soi and Chae-yi, who had been glaring at Jinwoo in the café as though heavily wary of her, apparently couldn’t bring themselves to make those expressions in front of someone eating.
After all, they had already realized she was a girl living alone in the boys’ dormitory.
To avoid getting exposed as a girl, she would naturally have no choice but to minimize contact with boys as much as possible.
Gender wasn’t something you could perfectly disguise just by hiding your appearance alone, so the more contact you had with people, the exponentially higher the chance became of being discovered.
She ate lunch with us, but she would probably often eat dinner at the dormitory instead, and if she was skipping even that—
Adults could say they skipped dinner because they were lazy, sure, but teenagers are at the age where missing even one meal feels genuinely miserable.
“Hey.”
Maybe because she still wasn’t ready to call Jinwoo by name even after learning she was a girl, Soi still addressed her like that.
“Ah, y-yeah.”
Jinwoo, who had been busily slurping up her extra-noodle udon, stopped eating and hurriedly answered.
Maybe because she looked a little pitiful like that, Soi spoke with what seemed like a bit of guilt.
“Why don’t you just eat dinner with us from now on before going back?”
We had never explicitly agreed on it, but there probably wasn’t anyone here who would disagree with those words.
Not Chae-yi, and not Hyeonji either.
At Soi’s words, Jinwoo’s face brightened for a moment before clouding over again.
“Um…….”
“Why, you don’t want to?”
This time, I asked.
“No, it’s not, um, not that…….”
Nam Jinwoo dragged out her words terribly.
As though there was something extremely uncomfortable she had to say.
And I immediately realized what that meant.
Because there’s one thing that’s the most uncomfortable to talk about in front of friends, isn’t there?
Money.
Almost everyone else had parents who were heroes, so they probably didn’t really have money problems. Even though this was a government institution, scholarships were still fairly limited and there were many facilities inside the grounds that still charged money, probably partly because they considered “relative deprivation.” Plenty of people would hate seeing rich kids receiving everything for free too.
But there should definitely also be systems for the small number of students who weren’t like that.
Even if Jinwoo received those benefits, they probably only covered “school meals,” meaning if she kept buying food outside, she would obviously end up strapped for cash.
……It wasn’t like I guessed all this just from Jinwoo’s attitude alone.
In the original work, even though Nam Jinwoo’s family situation was never described precisely, she had definitely been portrayed as having less money than the others.
I thought that was just to emphasize how rich the academy students were, but maybe she really was someone with a lot to worry about in that regard too.
“Just stop worrying about it and stay with us.”
I said.
“And don’t worry about anything else.”
“Ah, ahh, okay. Th-Thank you…….”
Jinwoo lowered her head deeply.
Even her ears had turned completely red. Hmm, maybe I shouldn’t have gone that far.
Still, thankfully she didn’t seem like she disliked it.