Inside the pitch-black cabin, Shikime Natsu said nothing.
He simply watched the girl in front of him — her breathing coming faster now, unsteady with nerves — and then, slowly, he raised his arm and reached his hand out toward Morishita Ai.
In the darkness, she watched that distinctly-knuckled hand drawing closer and closer, and Morishita Ai, acting almost entirely on instinct, squeezed her eyes shut with all her might.
Her heart slammed against her ribcage, the sound thundering loud enough to deafen her.
Unbidden, her mind flashed through a cascade of scenes she'd once glimpsed in certain... unspeakable manga, and she recited a silent, tragically solemn farewell to herself: it seems Officer Morishita Ai meets her end here today. Her purity, lost. A great calamity, truly.
Never mind that in everyday life — in class, or even when facing Shikime Natsu — Morishita Ai always came across as breezy and unbothered, as though nothing in the world could faze her. She could rattle off a raunchy joke without so much as blinking, her 'airhead delinquent' act performed to perfection.
But when it actually came down to it — a boy and a girl, alone in a room, and the other party clearly about to make a move — the purity buried deep in her bones laid itself completely bare. She was, beneath it all, genuinely shy. Frightened, even, to an almost absurd degree.
Every last drop of that unguarded shyness and flustered panic played out in full view before Shikime Natsu's eyes.
Watching this girl — who ordinarily tried to cover everything with a flat, casual tone — looking for all the world like a startled little rabbit, he found himself thinking, with some amusement: she's actually kind of adorable like this.
She had pressed both hands tightly against her chest, as if bracing for one last futile struggle. Her expression, meanwhile, had taken on a tragic, almost noble cast — the face of someone about to march bravely to their doom for a great and worthy cause.
Those tightly shut eyes. The faint trembling of long lashes. The soft pink lips pressed firmly together.
She looked for all the world like Morishita Ai was making a gallant self-sacrifice in service of some grand ideal.
Seeing this, the corner of Shikime Natsu's mouth curved into a quietly wicked smile. He stifled a silent laugh — and then his outstretched hand didn't land on her body the way she'd imagined at all. Instead, it moved directly into the soft strands of Morishita Ai's hair.
His touch was gentle. Two fingers pinched lightly, and he pulled free a single fallen leaf that had somehow ended up tangled in her hair at some point.
"There we go."
His unhurried voice drifted through the darkness.
When Morishita Ai sensed that his hand seemed to have moved away — and no terrifying sensation had followed — she cautiously cracked her eyes open.
The first thing she saw was Shikime Natsu's face, right there, barely an arm's length away, wearing a not-quite-smiling expression. Those pale golden eyes of his were brimming with undisguised amusement.
Then her gaze drifted slightly downward — to the perfectly ordinary leaf pinched between his long fingers.
Only then did Morishita Ai finally understand: she had wildly, completely misread the entire situation. That whole internal monologue about marching nobly to her doom? She'd been playing the clown from start to finish.
A tidal wave of humiliation crashed over her in an instant. The colour that flooded her fair, delicate face was entirely beyond her control — a vivid crimson that spread all the way to the tips of her small ears and down the pale curve of her neck.
Between the overwhelming tension and the mortification that followed, those violet eyes of hers — clear as amethysts — slowly began to shimmer with a faint, watery mist. She looked devastatingly pitiful, and yet there was something achingly soft about it, too.
But Morishita Ai was a girl with very high standards for self-composure. There was absolutely no way she was going to let her embarrassment show so easily.
She drew a deep breath, forcibly wrestled the frantic drumming in her chest back under control, worked to steady her breathing, and then rigidly rearranged her expression — doing her level best to look as though nothing had happened at all.
Her gaze settled back on Shikime Natsu. She lifted her chin ever so slightly, fell back into her signature expression, and addressed him in her most authoritative tone.
"Suspect Shikime Natsu, I'll need you to watch your conduct. I don't recall granting you, a criminal, permission to lay hands on the distinguished Officer Morishita Ai."
She paused, apparently deciding that wasn't quite stern enough, and pressed on.
"Removing a leaf from Officer Morishita Ai's hair without consent is a serious violation of her personal boundaries. Therefore, Shikime Natsu, you will be held accountable for this reckless trespass."
Watching her double down — bristling with affronted pride while desperately trying to look composed, turning the whole thing around on him — Shikime Natsu's smile only deepened.
He tossed the leaf aside with a flick of his wrist and regarded her at his leisure, the picture of ease.
"Oh? And what exactly does Officer Morishita intend to make me pay, I wonder? I didn't actually do anything, you know. In fact, I went out of my way to preserve Officer Morishita Ai's impeccable image — you'd have been walking around with a leaf in your hair otherwise. I'm a model citizen, practically a hero. Surely Officer Morishita isn't planning to do something unreasonable to a law-abiding good Samaritan like me?"
That shameless, utterly brazen rebuttal made Morishita Ai's expression immediately sour into a full-on pout.
Those already slightly round cheeks puffed up like an indignant little pufferfish.
She glared at him, privately seething. Shikime Natsu obviously didn't mean a single word of that 'model citizen' nonsense. This guy had been planning to mess with her from the very beginning.
And on top of everything, he'd deliberately closed the cabin door — when she'd specifically and sternly warned him not to when she came in.
That was exactly it. He'd engineered the darkness and the panic on purpose, step by step, all so he could watch her make a fool of herself. He was toying with her.
Shikime Natsu was, without question, an absolutely infuriating individual. Truly insufferable to the very last degree.
That said, Morishita Ai was not the type to give in easily. There was no way she was going to bow her head in front of Shikime Natsu over something like this.
She tilted her chin up slightly, let out a soft, disdainful scoff through her nose, and spoke.
"Hmph. Officer Morishita conducts her investigations swiftly and decisively. She has no need to explain herself to anyone — least of all a suspect like you."
Watching her dig her heels in with that perfectly sulky, die-hard tsundere act, Shikime Natsu gave a helpless shake of his head and laughed.
"Officer Morishita really is an unreasonable person. Here I am, the one who did her a favour, and she's still coming at me like this."
The moment Morishita Ai heard that, she lit up as though she'd just found the fatal flaw in his argument, her eyes brightening at once.
"Caught you! Shikime Natsu, how dare you speak so disrespectfully to Officer Morishita — publicly slandering her as 'unreasonable'! That kind of vile behaviour warrants immediate arrest!"
Watching her look of smug triumph — delighted at having finally found a legitimate excuse — Shikime Natsu played along perfectly. He extended both arms, pressing his wrists together and offering them to her, his golden eyes glinting with amusement through the dark.
"Very well then, Officer. And just how does Officer Morishita plan to arrest me?"
His compliance caught her off guard — she blinked, startled — but she recovered quickly.
"Ha! Who knew the criminal Shikime Natsu would be so brazen even facing his own capture, openly challenging the dignity of Officer Morishita Ai like this. You leave me no choice but to bring down the full force of the law upon you."
With that, Morishita Ai reached out her two small, pale hands and grabbed for his offered wrists.
She didn't try to take his hands, of course — his palms were simply too large for her to wrap around properly. She settled instead for gripping his wrists, which her own hands could just barely manage to encircle.
But the instant her cool fingertips made contact with the warm skin of his wrist, Morishita Ai felt as though a current had shot straight through her.
A powerful masculine presence, mingled with the warmth that was distinctly his, surged through the point of contact and flooded through her entire body.
Her already racing heart immediately, traitorously, accelerated further — thump-thump, thump-thump — the sound reverberating through her chest.
Was this what her heart really felt?
After closing her fingers around his wrist, Morishita Ai slowly raised her head and let her gaze settle on Shikime Natsu again, at this distance that was almost none at all.
She wasn't sure if it was her imagination, but even here in the near-total dark, Shikime Natsu seemed to be glowing somehow — radiating a pull she couldn't look away from, magnetic and inexorable.
In this profound quiet, Morishita Ai felt like she could hear her own heartbeat with perfect clarity — thud, thud — like it was beating against a drum she had no name for.
She drew in a slow breath. His scent surrounded her entirely.
And in that moment, she understood something, with sudden and irrefutable clarity. The body never lies.
She had, undeniably and completely, fallen for this infuriating man — the one who never stopped teasing her, yet somehow, without ever trying, kept drawing her in.
Right here. Right now. In this small, dark cabin.
Just the two of them.
No interruptions. No Horikita Suzune. No Sakayanagi Arisu. No Yamamura Miki trailing along beside her. None of his three famously beautiful girlfriends.
In this tiny space, at least for this one moment, there was no one in the world but the two of them.
That extremity of solitude stirred something nameless and strange in the depths of her chest.
And then, Morishita Ai simply stood there, staring at Shikime Natsu's face — those clean, sharp features made somehow more defined by the dark — her mind gone entirely, perfectly blank, not quite sure what she was thinking anymore.
She seemed to have drifted into some strange, enchanted stupor.
She kept staring at his face. And somehow, without quite knowing when it started, his face seemed to be getting closer.
No — perhaps it wasn't him moving toward her. Perhaps it was her own body, slowly, involuntarily, leaning forward.
And then — when Morishita Ai finally surfaced from that hazy, spellbound state — she discovered, with a shock, that her lips — soft and warm — were already pressed flush against Shikime Natsu's cheek.
Even through the darkness, that sensation — real, and warm with body heat — struck her brain like a bolt of lightning.
BOOM—
Morishita Ai's mind crashed completely.
The moment she processed what had happened, she recoiled as if she'd been electrocuted — she released his wrist immediately, lurched backward, and put as much distance between them as she possibly could.
She stumbled back so fast that her shoulders lightly knocked against the cabin wall.
Her chest heaved violently. Her face, already flushed past red, was now burning hot enough to fry an egg.
To smother the panic and humiliation threatening to spill out of her, Morishita Ai deployed her most reliable weapon: going on the offensive first.
Face a picture of barely-contained hysteria, she jabbed a trembling finger toward Shikime Natsu and unleashed a dramatic accusation.
"Shikime Natsu! You — you absolute scoundrel! How dare you do something so outrageous to Officer Morishita while she was off-guard!"
At this reversal of the facts, a flicker of genuine surprise crossed Shikime Natsu's pale golden eyes — followed by a silent, somewhat exasperated sigh.
This is... textbook throwing the first punch to avoid the blame.
It had unmistakably been Morishita Ai who, moments ago, had been staring at him in a daze and then kissed him of her own accord. Now that she'd snapped back to reality and realised what she'd done, she had the gall to declare that he was the one who'd done something outrageous.
That said — surprise aside — he genuinely hadn't expected that the Morishita Ai who was all talk in day-to-day life would, at the critical moment, turn out to be this bold.
They hadn't even started going out yet. There hadn't been a single proper confession between them. And yet here she was, in this situation, losing herself staring at him and then kissing him on the cheek entirely of her own initiative.
Quite the audacious girl.
Of course, it also made one thing plainly, transparently clear: Morishita Ai's genuine feelings toward him.
Even if she never let it show on the surface — even when she hid everything behind her airhead-delinquent act — Shikime Natsu had always known. With his charm running at capacity, something like this was only natural. If anything, the girls at this school had all been remarkably restrained up until now.
Shikime Natsu recovered his composure in an instant, that irresistibly wicked smile sliding back onto his handsome face — the kind of smile that made you want to take a bite out of him.
He deliberately took one small step forward, voice laced with teasing warmth.
"Officer Morishita, you really should watch what you say. I didn't move a muscle. I didn't do anything outrageous to you whatsoever. On the contrary..."
He drew the last word out, and those eyes of his locked onto the girl backed against the wall.
"...it was Officer Morishita who, under the guise of making an arrest, did something rather out-of-bounds to this entirely innocent suspect."
He let that hang for a beat, the amusement in his voice thickening.
"My, my. I never would have guessed — Officer Morishita, who presents such a proper front, is actually quite a bold girl when no one's looking. Or perhaps... was that a special punishment that Officer Morishita administers to every criminal she takes into custody?"
After that merciless counter-attack, Morishita Ai's already-scarlet face burned hotter still.
She wrung her hands together anxiously, squirming against the wall, her gaze darting everywhere except his eyes, and managed to stammer out an excuse in a voice that even she didn't find convincing.
"Th-this was entirely an accident! Yes, that's right, an accident! The magnetic field inside the cabin experienced a sudden disturbance, causing Morishita Ai's physical equilibrium to be compromised, resulting in an unavoidable, involuntary act of contact due to forces beyond her control!"
Watching her flounder for excuses, Shikime Natsu put on an expression of supreme scepticism, tilted his head slightly, and said,
"Oh? An accident, you say? That magnetic field disturbance had awfully specific targeting, don't you think?"
Morishita Ai knew those flimsy excuses weren't fooling anyone — least of all this man. Not that she'd expected them to.
She needed to change tactics, and fast.
Morishita Ai abruptly straightened up, cleared her throat, and assumed the solemn air of someone imparting great wisdom to a naive student.
"Shikime Natsu, listen carefully. In the etiquette of relations between men and women, pressing a girl about an awkward moment caused by a momentary slip of hers is extremely ungentlemanly behaviour. It is the sort of thing that makes girls not like you. Due to your conduct just now, your score in Morishita Ai's internal rating system has irrevocably dropped by ten points! No — twenty points!"
However, the threat of a lowered score had never once made a dent in Shikime Natsu's composure.
He didn't bother engaging with the lengthy lecture she'd just deployed as a distraction. He simply held onto that wicked smile.
"Since it was a slip... may I ask, Morishita-san — would Morishita Ai ever kiss the cheek of a boy she didn't like?"
Without so much as pausing to think — pure instinct, in defence of her dignity as a girl of immaculate purity — the words were out of her mouth before she could stop them.
"Of course not! Morishita Ai has extremely high standards and absolute personal limits. There's no way she would ever just go around kissing someone she didn't—"
She stopped dead.
The moment the words left her lips, her brain finally caught up.
Wait.
If she would absolutely never kiss a boy she didn't like — and she had, without question, just kissed Shikime Natsu's cheek...
Wasn't that... practically a confession that she'd fallen for Shikime Natsu?!
It was a logical trap!
In order to salvage the very last shred of her dignity, she activated her most reliable defensive mode: the 'intellectual airhead' persona.
Morishita Ai drew herself up to her full height, assumed the expression of someone vastly experienced and widely knowledgeable, and addressed Shikime Natsu with a tone that somehow managed to be equal parts pitying and condescending.
"Heh... Shikime Natsu, you really are young. Something as ordinary as a Western-style greeting kiss on the cheek, and it's sent your imagination running wild — even made you flustered, has it? It seems that even with three girlfriends, Shikime Natsu is still quite the innocent at heart."
This statement was, to put it plainly, absolutely shameless.
She was the one who had kissed him. She was the one who'd panicked and retreated into the corner. She was the one right now with a pounding heart and a face on fire. And yet Morishita Ai had the audacity to take all of her own panic and confusion and, through this clumsy sleight of hand, foist it entirely onto the unfazed Shikime Natsu.
That stubborn refusal to admit anything — that die-hard, face-saving tsundere act — was, in Shikime Natsu's eyes, genuinely entertaining. It only made him want to tease this stiff-lipped girl a little more.
He didn't argue back. He simply stopped talking, and in the darkness, watched her with that quiet, half-smiling gaze of his.
That silent stare made Morishita Ai deeply, profoundly uncomfortable.
What is that look for...?
This guy is definitely doubting every word she just said. He's laughing at her inside, she can tell.
Unacceptable. The distinguished Morishita Ai would not stand for a suspect looking at her like that.
As she frantically racked her brain for some manoeuvre — any manoeuvre — to get herself out of this excruciating situation—
The figure in front of her moved.
Without giving her any time to react, Shikime Natsu stepped forward, closing what little distance had remained between them in one stride.
His tall frame loomed over her in an instant, casting her in a shadow dense with presence. The warmth and weight of him, distinctly male, washed over her like a tide.
And then Shikime Natsu reached out a hand.
That large, warm hand slid through her hair and settled, steady and deliberate, at the back of her head.
"Wh-what are you doing..."
The last of Morishita Ai's composure evaporated. Her voice came out barely above a whisper.
But before the words were even fully out, she felt it — a gentle, firm pressure from that large hand cradling the back of her head.
That pressure tilted her face upward, and drew her, inexorably, toward him.
And then Morishita Ai felt it.
Against her cheek — warm with nervous heat — a soft and unmistakable warmth suddenly pressed itself into her skin.
Those were... Shikime Natsu's lips, planted firmly against her cheek.
His presence — that scent, that heat — detonated through the contact point on her skin and exploded straight into Morishita Ai's brain.
In that instant, she felt as though her very soul had left her body.
Her pupils blew wide. Her senses — already sharpened beyond normal by the dark and her nerves — now amplified that warm impression on her cheek into something enormous, consuming.
BOOM.
If what happened earlier was a small storm in her mind, then this — this was a full volcanic eruption.
She could feel clearly the brush of his breath against the shell of her ear, that tingling, electric sensation cascading through her entire body in an instant, making her knees go weak.
The furious thump-thump-thump flooded her entire skull.
Wh—what is this?!
Shikime Natsu... he actually kissed her?!
How dare he?! She hadn't agreed to be his girlfriend yet! And this was basically a closet!
But... why didn't she feel the slightest bit of revulsion? Why did her body harbour, to her great shame... a tiny, traitorous thrill?
[Morishita Ai.jpg]
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