My Childhood Friend And The Foregone Conclusion

According to my childhood friend, “A trip isn’t over till you’re home — heck, it’s not over till you’ve gotten home, put away the souvenirs you bought for yourself, and cleared away your bags,” apparently.

Apparently senior Hotaru told her as much once, back when she’d come home from some trip and left her own souvenirs strewn around her room.

And that same childhood friend of mine, Sakura Ayuri (whose room, arguably, stays tidy in no small part thanks to our nagging)… well, as for her right now…

“Maaan, that was fun, huh.”
“Yeah, it was.”

The sleepover had ended without a hitch.

Hina’s parents had gotten back around three, and once we’d said our goodbyes, Ayu and I set off, just the two of us, each headed for our own place.

“We even got souvenirs, huh~”
“Where’s this one even from, I wonder.”

I’d come away with a boxed set of manju from who-knows-where. According to Hina’s parents, they’d “gone all over the place and bought all sorts of things,” and they’d gone so far as to tell us, “We can’t really remember where we bought what, so just help yourselves to whatever’s in here,” so I’d just grabbed something at random without really looking. Ayu, meanwhile, had picked out a T-shirt with some yuru-chara mascot on it that I couldn’t for the life of me place.

You couldn’t tell where the thing had been bought, couldn’t tell what it was even supposed to be modeled on, the design wasn’t much to look at, and on top of all that it ran a touch too big for Ayu to wear.

Was getting your hands on something like that even cause for joy? I genuinely had to wonder.

Ayu said she’d “picked it ‘cause it’s kinda funny,” but to Hina’s parents it apparently came across as her holding back, settling for something she didn’t really want. So they pressed an extra box of baked sweets on her besides, which meant Ayu alone walked away with two souvenirs.

…Then again, if one of those two was that T-shirt, I wasn’t the least bit envious.

“…”

“…”

Even so… this was a little awkward.

After making such a spectacle of myself in all sorts of ways in the bath the night before, I was a little stuck now on what topic I ought to raise. As for Ayu… I couldn’t quite tell how she was feeling. She looked like her usual self, and yet I got the sense our eyes were meeting a shade less often than they normally would. Then again, that might just have been me avoiding her gaze without noticing, and not being able to tell which only left things a little stilted between us after all.

“…Come to think of it, you gave in pretty easily to sleeping next to Hina last night, huh.”
“Ahh…”

In the end, the only topic I could dredge up had to do with the very sleepover we’d been in the middle of moments ago. Well, awkwardness aside, we’d been under the same roof for more than two days running, so there simply wasn’t much left to talk about.

“Well, I mean… before that, I took a bath with you, didn’t I, Gin?”
“Yeah.”
“So after that, well… I figured sleeping in the same futon was, like, no big deal by comparison…”

Did she just pin that on me in a roundabout way? …No, surely not; her senses had simply gone numb, plain and simple.

“…”

The moment I thought it, the feelings from back then came flooding back, the sensation of Ayu against me. My whole body went hot in an instant, my skin flushing all over, and it hit me that what I’d done back then was more embarrassing than any shared futon…

“…Perv.”
“That’s harsh, isn’t it? The first one to cling was Gi—”
“Say that one more time and I’m getting mad.”
“…Yes’m.”

Mmh, unreasonable of me, I’ll admit it. Still…

“…”

Hot. Blazing hot. Damn hot.

Under this boiling, just-gone-three sun, the kind where just standing in it won’t stop the sweat, I was getting even more parboiled and lightheaded than I had in last night’s bath. In that sense, at least, I’d managed not to repeat the pathetic display from before, so you could say I’d done a little growing overnight. I am a growing girl, after all.

◆◆◆

After we’d walked a while, my house came within spitting distance, and that was when I spotted someone standing at my front door, as if waiting for something.

“…Huh, is there someone at my front door…?”
“Your front door, Gin? …Wait, isn’t that… Hotaru?”

Ah, right; now that she said it, that was unmistakably senior Hotaru’s figure. She seemed to have noticed us too, and was waving over with her usual beaming smile.

“Why’s she at my house…”
“Beats me…”

If it were Ayu’s house I could still have made sense of it, but seriously, what was this about? As we drew warily closer, this time our senior came to meet us instead. Maybe from standing out in the heat, her forehead was damp with sweat and she looked thoroughly cooked.

“Heyy~ welcome back, you two. Hot again today, huh.”
“What’re you even doing here, senior?”
“Yeah, Hotaru, if you’ve got something to see Gin about, you could just have her let you inside…”
“I actually did get let in until a little while ago, but I figured you two would be back any minute, so I’ve been waiting out here!”

How the heck would she know that?

She seemed to have read our unspoken question clean off our faces; our senior held her phone up for us to see.

“See? Hina’s social-media post — ‘My friends went home~ so lonely~,’ it says.”
“Ah, so that’s it.”

On the screen was a post Hina had apparently put up just moments ago, with a photo of the room where we’d all bedded down.

“Hina really doesn’t hold back, huh — these past few days of posts are what you’d call ‘hint-dropping,’ aren’t they.”
“You’re the only one who’d take that as ‘hint-dropping,’ senior.”
“No fair, all of you! I want to have a sleepover with Ayu too!”
“…Straight-up jealousy, that is.”

So then this has nothing to do with me. It’s not my place she should be waiting at, it’s Ayu’s ho…

“I wanted to see Ayu even a second sooner, so I had them let me wait over here~”

…See, that’s the thing. Seriously, why does this woman keep reading my mind?

“…sneeeak…”
“Ayu!”
“Eep!”

Sensing what was in store for her, Ayu had tried to creep off toward her own house while our senior and I were talking. Naturally, our senior wasn’t one to let that slide, and the instant Ayu moved she was nabbed in a flash.

“And so — how about we make my place next up for a sleepover, Ayu!”
“W-well, I’d kind of like to head home at least once, y’know… I want to drop my stuff off and take it easy, change clothes and everything…”
“It’s fine! I’ve got all that at my house! In fact, there’s even an outfit I want you to wear!!”
“Scary.”
“Why would you even have that…”

In the middle of all this, Ayu was being carted off. Watching it unfold, the look on my face right then must surely have been the proverbial “eyes of someone watching a pig led off to the fattening farm.” Maybe I ought to sing Dona Dona, though that one’s really a song about a calf.

“G-Gin, save me! We’re together the whole time we’re in high school, right?!”

“…”

“Gin!”

“…Sorry. Rescuing you from our senior in the state she’s in right now is… honestly kind of a hard pass.”
“Gin!!!”

Ayu, hauled off practically bodily… ah, now she’d gone and started singing Dona Dona herself, but she got carted off all the same, not a thing changed.

“…Guess I’ll head home and play some games!”

Alas, poor thing… well, it probably won’t turn into anything too strange. Probably.

And so the sleepover came to a close, the curtain falling on it as an ending for me, and as an extension for Ayu.