by Nisioisin
She did maintain an odd distance.
“Did you just say ‘you and I’?”
“Yes,” replied Senjogahara. “You and me both. Just as Hanekawa and I might look similar to you─I think she looks at you and me as being on the same level.”
“Really?”
“Really. It’s highly humiliating.”
“Oh, so that’s humiliating…”
Highly, too.
She really did like putting me down, didn’t she?
“Still,” I said, “it’s not like Hanekawa always gets perfect scores, right? Well, I guess she almost always get perfect scores…”
“When Hanekawa doesn’t get a perfect score, it’s because a test question was faulty… I don’t know, though. When I think about how much pressure that must put on her…I can’t honestly say that I’m jealous.”
“Pressure, huh?”
“Or maybe stress.”
“Stress.”
Tsubasa Hanekawa.
A girl with a pair of mismatched wings─
“At the same time, we’d be wrongheaded to commiserate with her on that account.” In any case, Senjogahara brought our conversation back on point. “Araragi, you who’re crawling and writhing at the bottom, far from the real deal, just need to grind it out. So. You’re studying at my place every day.”
“Yes, yes…I will.”
“You need to say yes three times, Araragi.”
“Yes, yes, yes! …Wait, why do you want me to sound so excited?!”
“That’s just how much motivation I want to be seeing from you. Because I’m offering my home to you as a study spot.”
“You are?”
“If you prefer, I could come to yours.”
“My place isn’t a very good study environment… My little sisters are loud.”
“Kanbaru’s house might work out, too, from time to time.”
“Why are you bringing her up now?”
“Just as I have to help you study, I need to go and play around with that kid once in a while. I promised her,” Senjogahara said, her tone markedly flat.
I could tell that the flatness was marked.
With me, she was an awful person through and through, but at least you could honestly call her a tsundere when it came to Kanbaru…
Well, to the hostage.
Suruga Kanbaru.
“The kid seems to be doing fine in the academic department,” Senjogahara said, “but am I the only one who wants to hang around with Kanbaru?”
“Well, sure. She’s fun.”
A little too fun.
Not to mention.
“She admires in this excessive way, and I don’t even know why… I think she sees me in too good of a light.”
“I may be partially responsible for that,” Senjogahara explained. “I did tell her that you saved a drowning child and that you spend every Sunday volunteering at a retirement home.”
“So you’ve told her nothing but lies!”
“Just kidding. I told her the plain truth.”
“Huh…really?”
“When I say the plain truth, I mean badmouthing you, so Kanbaru admiring you is entirely her own decision.”
“…………”
Badmouthing me, eh?
I’d rather you didn’t, Senjogahara.
“Even if I’m talking to a junior and a friend,” she said, “it’s embarrassing for me to praise my own boyfriend. It’s my way of hiding my feelings.”
“Well, you could also just tell her you feel embarrassed… Oh, that’s right, Senjogahara.” Lowering my voice so her father in the driver’s seat wouldn’t hear, I brought up a new topic. “There’s one more thing about Kanbaru…”
“Dad? Araragi wants to tell you a secret─”
“Miss Hitagi!”
God, she never missed a thing!
She never let an opportunity to torment me get by her!
“What about Kanbaru?” she asked.
“Why is she so pervy?”
I spoke concealing my mouth with my hand.
It was like I was a pitcher trying to communicate with my catcher, but I had no choice because Daddy Senjogahara might read my lips in the rearview mirror.
“Pervy? Kanbaru?”
“Yeah. Was she like that in junior high, too?”
“Hmm. You’re asking about the past…but is she, to begin with?”
“You’d say otherwise? Even Oshino sees her as a pervy rather than sporty character.”
“I don’t know about that. Maybe it’s only from a male perspective that seeks chastity in women that she looks that way to you and Mister Oshino? It’s guy thinking. She’s simply true to herself, that’s all. I don’t think she ever goes too far.”
“I see…”
Is that how it was?
I wasn’t sure.
“If you have a chance, Araragi, try reading boys’ love novels and manga for middle schoolers and up. You’d never call someone like Kanbaru ‘pervy’ again.”
“Okay… Uh, I don’t think I’ll actually read any, though.”
Especially not BL fiction.
I’d be doomed, for good.
“Fine,” Senjogahara said. “But I can’t allow myself to sit back and let my adorable little junior get maligned as a perv.”
“What exactly are you going to do, then?”
And malign?
I actually saw myself as a sort of victim… This wasn’t working. Senjogahara was going to side with Kanbaru unconditionally and unlimitedly no matter how long we discussed her.
A hostage though she was…
Hold on, wasn’t I the hostage here?
“You want to know what I’m going to do? I’m going to undermine your standards and values. That way, you’ll start to see Kanbaru as a positively innocent girl,” Senjogahara said, leaning toward me.
Instead of just lowering her voice, she brought her lips right next to my ear, as if to conspire openly.
Cupping her hand over her mouth.
“─#@&$.”
“……!”
Gah!
What did she just say to me?!
“I’ll @&~* that $&#~ into #&@~ so #&─and *@ with #&^&─~&@ in @&─”
“U…urk!”
Hitagi Senjogahara…
Wh-What an embarrassing, indecent thing to say!
~&@ in @&?!
Of all the combinations, that?!
And she was saying it all in such a flat, businesslike voice!
I couldn’t believe it…how could someone find their passions so ignited by nothing more than words?!
“S-Sto─”
Ack… No, I couldn’t yell!
Daddy Senjogahara was right in front of me!
I had to seem natural!
“^#~─and $&# while @%%─”
“Nkk…”
B-But the faint tickle I felt on my ear on top of it from her breathing… Hold on, what was this situation?! My girlfriend was caressing my thigh and whispering dirty things into my ear─in front of her own father! This wasn’t practically torture, it was literally torture! What did I have to confess to in order to make it stop?!
I don’t know anything!
Really, I don’t!
I see…I see it now, mystery solved─you were Kanbaru’s master in the ways of perversion all along! All I needed to do was think about it, given how much of an influence her senior, Senjogahara, once had on her… Dammit, my standards and values were being undermined and were collapsing… Ah, Kanbaru isn’t pervy, she isn’t a perv at all…
“Haumph.”
She bit my ear!
Like, between her lips!
No, no, no! Now she was doing something unmistakably erotic!
“So like that,” Senjogahara said, backing away as though nothing had happened, calm and collected. “What do you think, Araragi?”
“Have your way with me…Miss Hitagi.”
I was no good anymore.
This was, in no way, the date that I�
��d wanted to go on… My hopes, dreams, and fantasies─she really was going through them and smashing them one by one…
Time had flown all the while.
We’d gotten off the highway, I noticed. As far as I could tell from looking out the window, we were in an even more rural area than the remote town we lived in.
Where was I?
Where had they taken me?
While I was having a stupid conversation…
“We’re almost there,” Senjogahara said, likewise looking out the window. “About thirty more minutes─I think? The timing seems…just right. I feel like complimenting myself.”
Whatever was just right, shouldn’t the credit for anything time-related go to Daddy Senjogahara, and wasn’t she going to thank him?
Hmm.
Maybe they didn’t get along very well.
Speaking of which, Senjogahara and Daddy Senjogahara hadn’t really exchanged words apart from a simple back-and-forth before our departure.
But─they couldn’t be on bad terms. She’d raised Oshino’s hundred-thousand-yen fee for his assistance with her aberration by helping out at her father’s job.
Well.
Parent-child relationships were going to be complicated at our age─it was the same for me, and Senjogahara had unusual family circumstances to deal with, too.
Even Hanekawa.
……
Oh, now I remembered.
Hanekawa’s headache… It’d gotten lost in the brouhaha over the volleyball shorts and school swimsuit, but… (and I didn’t know about it getting lost over that, but…) Her headache.
Her head ached.
I wondered if I should talk to Oshino.
True, it wasn’t good for me to be so quick to rely on Oshino─just as he’d told me, it wasn’t as if he was going to be living in that abandoned building forever─
One day he would leave.
I didn’t know when, but in the near future.
“Hey, Senjo─Miss Hitagi.”
“Silence.” Rather than applauding me for noticing halfway through and correcting myself, Senjogahara smacked me down. “You just keep going on about this, that, and the otter.”
“O-Otter?”
“We’re almost there, so try staying quiet for at least a small bit of this trip?”
“……”
Where was this coming from…
“Araragi, I’m neither the kind of idler or fiddler who would bother putting up with your idiotic talk.”
“So you’re saying a fiddler would?”
And where were we almost?
It didn’t seem like it would hurt if she told me already.
If she wasn’t so that I’d be excited, I hoped she knew that I’d already had my fill of excitement.
But while I say that, I was also starting to reach the end of my rope when it came to this torture chat in front of Senjogahara’s father. In a sense, her words were exactly what I wanted to hear. Got it, I slumped into my seat.
“Ugh, you’re so loud.”
“What? But I didn’t say anything?”
“I’m talking about your breathing and your heartbeat.”
“Hold on, what you’re doing is telling me to die.”
And with that conversation.
Senjogahara stopped talking, too.
I wondered why.
She was nervous for some reason─or at least it looked that way.
Was she taking me somewhere worth being nervous about?
Our car seemed to be going up a mountain road.
A mountain─and not a small mountain like the one I had climbed with Kanbaru yesterday and the day before, but a full-blown mountain. The jeep made use of its horsepower as it climbed the large, spiraling path. The road was properly maintained, another difference from the earlier mountain.
Were we headed for the summit?
Another shrine?
A shrine visit as our first date…
She had to be kidding.
“I feel like I’m asking this too late,” I said, “but…where exactly are we going?”
“Somewhere really nice.”
“……”
“Somewhere. Really. Nice.”
“………”
She could say it seductively all she wanted…
She had to be lying.
“And anyway, Araragi, forget about where we’re going. We’ve already arrived. Look, right over there. That’s the parking lot.”
I did as she said and looked ahead. She was right.
We arrived.
It was now close to ten…which meant we’d been on the road for over two hours. It was a breathtakingly terrifying trip, and I was able to at last take a regular breath. Daddy Senjogahara displayed some impressive parking technique to stop the jeep in the corner of the deserted parking lot. Sheesh, I thought as I tried to get out of the car, but Senjogahara stopped me. She didn’t stop me by grabbing my hand, but astonishingly, by stabbing her fingernails into the thigh she’d been rubbing.
What was she, a wild animal?
Or some cat?
“Y-Yes?”
“You wait here a second, Araragi,” Senjogahara said. “I’m going to go by myself first and get ready.”
“Get ready…”
It involved getting ready?
And wait, Senjogahara, if you go ahead on your own in this situation and make me wait here─
“You have a friendly little chat with my dad, okay?” she uttered the unthinkable words in a throwaway tone.
Then she really got out of the jeep alone.
She was gone…
I never thought the day would come when I’d describe myself in this way, but there was no other description…I felt like a dog that had been abandoned by its master.
I couldn’t believe her.
Leaving me in this predicament…
I felt crossed and double-crossed.
Even crisscrossed!
…I was in such a panic that I didn’t know what I was saying anymore.
But this was no betrayal because Hitagi Senjogahara had been dragging me into this predicament from the very beginning.
Even so, I couldn’t believe it…
I was stuck in a cramped car with my girlfriend’s father…
It wasn’t even torture at this point.
It was a sentence.
You would search all of Japan in vain for high school seniors going through an experience as cruel and harsh as mine, probably? What a plain and real misfortune.
A f-friendly little chat?
Keeping my mouth shut felt awkward in its own way…but I didn’t want Senjogahara’s father to get a bad impression of me. Still… outside of relatives and teachers, I’d barely had any opportunities to speak with someone who was easily twice my age…
Then.
As I sat there hesitating, lo and behold, Daddy Senjogahara was the one who got the ball rolling.
“Araragi─is that your name?”
“……”
That was my name…
It felt like he was starting the bar high…
He really did have a nice voice, though, like an actor… It’s surprisingly rare to meet someone whose voice strikes you as cool.
“Y-Yes…my name is Koyomi Araragi,” I replied.
“I see.” Daddy Senjogahara nodded. “Take good care of my daughter from now on.”
Excuse me?!
What was this dude saying all of sudden?!
“Just kidding.”
That’s how he continued.
…Just kidding…
A dad joke?
