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A Truly Fearsome Little Sister
That day, the two of us had gone out for yakiniku to reward Brian after the magnificent performance she had shown in her previous race.
I’d known she liked meat, but we had only eaten together a handful of times before, and this was actually our first time coming out for yakiniku like this.
“Order whatever you like,” I told her.
“............”
Even though I had braced myself for an expensive lunch budget this month and brought us to a place with truly eye-watering prices, Brian had been doing nothing but silently glaring at the menu this whole time.
“Do you like kalbi best, Brian?”
“...I don’t know.”
“What?”
Startled by that utterly unexpected answer, I watched Brian, looking faintly embarrassed, begin speaking in a low mutter.
“My sister always cooked it, so... I don’t really know the names of the different kinds.”
I knew I shouldn’t laugh, but my mouth still twitched.
Narita Brian—the same girl who always showed such ferocity and brilliance on the racetrack—apparently didn’t even know cuts of meat because her older sister always grilled them for her.
The gap was so ridiculously adorable that I covered my face.
“Don’t laugh,” she said.
“Sorry... it’s just... you’re so cute.”
“Hah?”
I hadn’t meant for that to slip out, but it did. Before I could say anything else reckless and destroy Brian’s mood, I hurried to place our order, choosing a few things based on what she usually ate and what I thought she might like.
While we waited for the meat to arrive, I asked what family yakiniku outings were like for her. Brian, who was usually so quiet, ended up talking surprisingly well as long as the topic was her older sister.
Her sister always grilled the meat perfectly. Her sister always put the best pieces on Brian’s plate. From the way she described it all, it became very clear just how much care Biwa Hayahide had lavished on her.
At the same time, one suspicion took root in my mind:
Wasn’t Brian, despite appearances, maybe actually incredibly spoiled?
And the moment the meat we had ordered arrived, that suspicion proved true.
“Here.”
Today was supposed to be my treat, and I’d fully intended to do the grilling myself. Yet Brian handed me the tongs as though it were the most natural thing in the world, then folded her arms and stared at me.
Her bearing was so imperiously composed—like she was standing in the paddock before a race—that for a second I forgot we were in a yakiniku restaurant at all.
“Hey. Hurry up.”
“Ah, okay. ...Um, how done do you like it?”
“As long as it tastes good, I don’t care.”
She watched me with eyes that all but said just get grilling already, and even though I grew a little anxious about whether I’d do it right, there at the edge of my vision I could see her ears standing perked with almost alarming energy and her tail occasionally tapping the chair.
The sight was so absurdly cute I nearly lost the ability to speak.
Her running could be so overwhelmingly cool that it was easy to forget, but—no, there was no if about it—my trainee was incredibly adorable.
“It’s done.”
“Mm.”
Under Brian’s intense scrutiny, and feeling a mysterious pressure the whole time, I somehow managed to grill the meat and place it on her plate.
The moment I did, one of her ears gave a tiny bounce.
She was obviously starving and obviously very excited to eat, and yet she still properly put her hands together and said itadakimasu before taking a bite.
It really did make me feel that she had been raised in a good family.
I watched nervously as she lifted the sauce-coated meat to her mouth.
And for a moment, I thought the corner of her usually still mouth lifted just the tiniest bit.
“...Well?”
“Mm. Not bad. The texture and the doneness are just right. You eat too.”
“Thank goodness!”
At Brian’s urging, I tried some myself—and it was so delicious I immediately felt justified in splurging on this place.
“It’s so good!”
“Mm. Trainer, order that cut too.”
“Okay.”
From there, everything fell entirely into Brian’s pace. Before I knew it, I was grilling everything she said she wanted.
It wasn’t as though I minded. I was getting to eat delicious meat too.
Still, the fact that I could be swept so naturally into spoiling her like this was almost frightening.
After a while of grilling for Brian nonstop, I realized the vegetables that had come with the set still hadn’t been touched at all.
“Brian, the vegetables too—”
“................”
“Um...”
“I don’t need vegetables.”
“No, but...”
“................”
This extreme hatred of vegetables was another of Brian’s unexpected sides.
Tomatoes and peppers were out of the question. Even leafy greens needed to be cooked down until the vegetable flavor had all but vanished before she would eat them. There had even been times when the cafeteria menu leaned too heavily toward vegetables and she would skip meals entirely, losing a worrying amount of weight.
To be fair, Brian had been trying lately. Before races, she’d been working hard to stay in condition—drinking carrot juice she didn’t really like, even voluntarily ordering soups with vegetables in them.
Today was supposed to be a reward day for her. It made me wonder whether maybe, just this once, it would be all right to indulge her.
Caught under that unwavering golden stare, I held several frantic internal committee meetings in the span of a second.
In the end, naturally, I was the one who gave in.
“All right. I’ll eat the others, so at least eat the carrots, okay?”
“...Hmph. Fine.”
Even while internally despairing over the fact that I’d done it again, I still wound up spoiling Brian.
Surely her sister and parents must have felt the same way.
I didn’t know whether Brian herself was aware of it, but she was terribly, terribly good at being spoiled.
Not in the sense that she actively asked for it. It was more that the people around her simply found themselves doing as she pleased.
And the girl herself, utterly unconcerned, happily enjoyed the yakiniku. Her expression barely changed as usual, but her ears and tail were rejoicing with their whole beings.
Which is to say, she was simply adorable.
Staring at that unexpected side of Brian—and the terrifying power of little-sister privilege—I resolved to be more careful.
A few months later, that resolution would be utterly shattered by things like letting her use my lap as a pillow and being left defenseless before her ever-accelerating clinginess.
But that was another story.
Apparently That Girl Is Loved by Cats Too
One afternoon, just as I was standing up from my desk and stretching while thinking maybe it was about time for lunch, my phone chimed.
When I opened the screen, the sender was—astonishingly—Brian.
It was rare enough for her to contact me of her own accord that I immediately worried something must be wrong. But when I checked the message, it contained only one brief line:
Come to the back garden.
For a terrifying second I imagined that she had fallen out of the tree she liked to nap in and gotten hurt. But if that were the case, Brian would surely have included that in the message.
Shaking off the creeping worst-case scenarios in my head, I grabbed the first-aid kit just in case and sprinted for the garden.
And what I found there was beyond belief.
“Brian! What on earth happened— ...huh?!”
“You’re late.”
There she was, surrounded by kittens.
Several tiny kittens were mewling around Brian, who lay sprawled out on the ground, while others sat right on her stomach and lap. It was a vision so absurdly adorable that it looked like paradise: adorable kittens surrounding adorable Brian.
“Th-that’s so...”
“Hey. Don’t just stand there. Do something about them.”
Brian’s ears drooped slightly, and she looked a little wilted. If I remembered right, she wasn’t good with small animals. If she’d just been peacefully taking a nap and then abruptly found herself surrounded by a whole crowd of kittens, that would absolutely count as an unforeseen disaster for her.
“Um...”
“What.”
“Can I take just one picture?”
“................”
“...Sorry. Kidding.”
“You’re taking one anyway.”
“Sorry! It’s out of my control!”
But they were just too cute.
Really, truly too cute.
I quietly sent the photo to my computer before Brian could delete it, then slipped my phone back into my pocket and turned my attention to the situation.
“Brian, can you maybe hold one for a second?”
“...No.”
“Aw...”
The kitten in my hands gave a tiny, disappointed mew. Somehow, even that sounded crestfallen. Still, I didn’t want to force Brian to do something she hated. However sad the kittens might be, maybe we really ought to give up.
“I see...”
“...Aaah, fine already. Just hand the thing over.”
“...!”
Brian finally caved.
I stroked the kitten and murmured, “There, there, lucky you,” before passing it over.
The kitten gave a delighted little cry.
“Here you go.”
“...Mm.”
“It’s okay. Support its little bottom gently and hold it softly.”
When I passed the kitten to Brian, she held it with a level of tension I had never even seen in her before a race.
The kitten, meanwhile, rubbed itself happily against her.
“Hey, Trainer.”
“What is it?”
“This thing’s tiny, but its belly stretches weirdly. Is that okay?”
“They do say cats are liquid.”
“You’re absurdly carefree.”
Apparently Brian was worried the kitten might fall while it squirmed around trying to climb all over her.
Really, Brian was such a kind girl.
Maybe the reason she was bad with little animals was precisely because she worried about hurting something so small and fragile.
After holding it for a while, she seemed to get used to it a little and carefully began stroking it.
The kitten that had been so energetically clingy quieted down almost immediately, then dozed right off.
“It fell asleep.”
“It does whatever it wants.”
“Well, cats are moody.”
“What a nuisance.”
Brian gently set the sleeping kitten down on the grass.
She was looking at it with such a tender expression that, for just a moment, I felt a tiny bit jealous of the kitten.
Before I could get too lost in that unworthy thought, something heavy suddenly dropped onto my lap.
“Wah—”
When I looked down, Brian had placed her head on my lap and lay there.
“B-B-Brian-san?”
“The cats kept me from sleeping. Lend me your lap for a bit.”
“But what if someone comes by...?”
Ignoring my panic completely, Brian had already begun breathing softly.
Looking at her like this, she really did seem almost like a large cat herself.
“Your hair’s so silky...”
I combed my fingers through it while removing the bits of grass and flower petals caught there. Her lowered lashes were long, and the sleeping face she wore made her look even younger than usual.
There was a stillness around her that felt so comfortable, I could understand why kittens gathered around her so easily.
As I stroked her hair, I began to feel sleepy too.
“Maybe I’ll just nap a little too...”
The patch we were in lay perfectly in the shade, making it an ideal place for a nap. With tiny kittens all around us and this large cat using my lap as a pillow, it didn’t feel like a bad arrangement at all.
Letting the drowsiness take me, I closed my eyes.
A few hours later—
“Ah...! I overslept!”
“You’re finally awake.”
“Wahhh!”
“Quiet down. You’ll scare them.”
The moment I opened my eyes, Brian’s face was right there in front of me.
There was no way not to yelp.
The kittens were still scattered around us too.
“Ah—sorry. Wait, no—my arm!”
“Yeah. When I woke up, your neck was bent at an awful angle.”
“Oh... thanks... Um, does your arm hurt?”
“It’s fine.”
Apparently somewhere along the way, things had reversed. I had fallen asleep while Brian was on my lap, but by the time I woke up, I was the one using her arm as a pillow.
I was mortified that I’d slept that hard, and having Brian’s face so close didn’t help either.
“Sorry, I’ll move right away—”
“Too late. Give up.”
“What?”
When I tried to get up from her arm, Brian used her free hand to push my head right back into place.
Before I could ask why, a loud little meow sounded from somewhere behind me. Apparently there were still more kittens in places I couldn’t even see.
“What are we supposed to do now...?”
“How should I know?”
“That’s awful...”
Brian already looked as though she had resigned herself to the situation, but I was very much not okay. My heart could barely take it.
I squeezed my eyes shut, and Brian lightly rested a hand on my head.
“...This isn’t bad.”
“Um, what exactly do you mean by that...?”
“No. Nothing.”
In the end, we remained stuck there until the now-hungry kittens finally wandered away from the back garden.
The one mercy was that nobody happened to pass by.
The kittens were wonderfully cute, but it had been a truly outrageous ordeal.
Some days later, Brian coming into the trainer room with a now somewhat larger cat perched on her head was, once again, another story.
A Bite of Kindness Served on a Plate
Tracen Academy trainers are always buried under work.
Especially during racing season, when we become fully occupied with training our girls, it isn’t unusual at all for documents left unfinished in the morning to pile up across the desk in the evening.
At this time of year, trainer rooms with their lights still on late at night after training are hardly uncommon.
Mine was one of them.
The trainer room I used had poor heating at night, and if I worked late under the kotatsu I’d prepared for Brian, there were times I would realize dawn had arrived before I ever made it home.
My daily rhythm had collapsed completely.
Thankfully, there were enough chances to rest at key moments that I was at least getting sleep.
But I was fully aware that my eating habits had become the kind of thing no one should ever see in a person responsible for guiding Umamusume.
First, the cold and the ridiculous comfort of the down comforter I’d impulse-bought during a late-night shopping spree had claimed breakfast as a casualty.
Lunch had become whatever nutrient jelly and supplements I could grab quickly enough to keep me fueled for the afternoon’s training, because I never felt like summoning the energy to go to the cafeteria or school store.
Dinner was mostly instant food I could shovel down while still working in the trainer room.
The little fridge that used to contain sweets and vegetable juice now sat packed wall-to-wall with boxes of energy drinks.
I knew perfectly well this was bad.
But habits are hard to break.
So when I had once again lined up the self-mockingly named “dystopia lunch” set—energy drink, jelly pouch, and supplements—on my desk, the trainer room door opened.
“Brian? You’re early today.”
“...Mm.”
The moment she entered, Brian shoved her legs under the kotatsu.
It must have been freezing outside. She was eating a yakisoba bread she’d bought at the school store, skillfully removing the cabbage, peppers, and onions one by one as she did.
“You really are good at that.”
“If you want them, I’ll give them to you.”
“No, shouldn’t you be eating those yourself?”
“........................”
I knew very well that I was hopelessly weak whenever Brian stared at me like that, ears drooping slightly.
“Oh, honestly... all right.”
Usually I settled things with vegetable juice. Since Brian refused to drink anything green, I made sure to stock carrot-heavy blends.
Scolding myself for once again spoiling her too much, I opened the fridge—only to remember, too late, that it was now filled with nothing but energy drinks. I hurriedly slammed it shut.
“Sorry. I’m out of vegetable juice.”
“Hey. What did you just hide?”
“I’m not hiding anything.”
“You won’t fool me.”
“Really, I’m not. There’s no meat in there, and no sweets ei—wah?!”
I tried to block the fridge with my body to keep Brian from seeing inside, but my effort was utterly meaningless. She simply picked me up and moved me aside.
And thus she saw my apocalyptic refrigerator.
“What is this?”
“Ahaha...”
As Brian stared at me, I laughed weakly.
She let out a huge sigh.
“Did you eat today?”
“I did.”
“What.”
“................”
“Hey.”
“..............Ah! Look, it’s almost time to start training! Hurry and get changed!”
Brian glared at me—the same Brian who had been painstakingly avoiding vegetables only moments before—but I still managed to steer the conversation toward training by physically pushing at her back.
She didn’t say it aloud, but she was definitely worried about me.
I felt guilty. I knew I needed to get my act together if I wanted to set an example.
But when you get swallowed up by being busy, actually doing something about it is harder than you’d think.
◇
After we finished that day’s training and our post-training meeting, and were just about to head our separate ways, Brian spoke first for once.
“Hey.”
“What is it?”
“After this.”
“I’m probably going back to the trainer room to work.”
“Then come with me.”
“What?!”
She grabbed my hand so I couldn’t escape and marched off with me.
When I followed her, she brought me not to the trainer room but to the academy cafeteria.
Given the time of day, it was admittedly exactly the right moment for dinner.
Brian ordered me to sit, and while I obediently waited, she returned almost immediately carrying enough food to overflow the tray.
One plate after another appeared on the table: beef stew, hamburg steak, steak—an absurd amount of meat dishes.
“Um... Brian-san?”
“Eat.”
“...Pardon?”
“I said eat. Don’t leave any.”
“There is no way I can finish all this!”
“I’m eating too, so don’t worry. At this rate, you’re going to collapse.”
“Brian...”
It was an outrageous demand, but it was obviously kindness in Brian’s own way.
And since it had been so long since I’d eaten a real meal, the sight of all that proper food made my stomach rumble before I could help it.
“All right. Then I’ll gratefully accept.”
“Mm.”
We put our hands together and began to eat.
The moment I tasted the food, I nearly burst into tears.
“Delicious...!”
I had always known the Tracen cafeteria food was good, but I couldn’t remember the last time a meal had moved me this much.
I really did need to start eating properly again.
As I spooned up my beef stew, I glanced at Brian—and realized she’d barely touched her food.
Even though her beloved meat dishes were lined up everywhere, she seemed oddly stalled.
Looking closer, I realized she was glaring at a piece of broccoli on her plate.
“Brian, if you want, you can just put it on my—”
I had been about to say that today of all days I’d let it slide. After all, she’d been the one to bring me here.
But before I could finish, Brian stuffed the broccoli into her mouth.
For a while, she chewed in silence. And as she did, her ears drooped lower and lower.
Apparently plain boiled vegetables with no seasoning were still a bit too advanced a challenge.
Even so, the fact that she had made herself eat it instead of simply pushing it aside in silence showed real growth.
“You did great.”
“...If I don’t go this far, you’d keep skipping meals.”
“Urk... Sorry for making you worry. I really will start eating properly.”
“Mm. See that you do. It’d be a problem if you collapsed.”
If Brian was trying this hard to eat vegetables, then I, as her trainer, had no excuse to keep wrecking my own diet.
And more than that, I found myself deeply happy.
Back when we had first made our contract, I never would have imagined Brian inviting me to the cafeteria after training on her own.
That alone was enough to make me feel how much I had become someone she could truly relax around.
“What?” she asked.
“Hehe. I’m just happy. You used to never go along with it when I invited you out to eat, so I never expected you to be the one to ask me.”
“...You’re my trainer.”
“Mm.”
Watching Brian avoid my eyes while eating her hamburger steak made me feel so achingly fond of her.
At first, she had never opened up to me easily.
But the more I learned about her, the more I realized just how kind she really was.
“Next time I’ll treat you in return. I found a restaurant that serves really good meat. I think you’ll like it, Brian.”
“...Mm.”
That day, instead of staying late to work, I went home with Brian.
Maybe it was thanks to having eaten a proper meal, but I slept better than usual and woke up earlier the next morning.
It really did drive home just how important a regular routine was.
And the fact that, for quite some time after that, Brian would appear in the trainer room the moment lunch break started and drag me off to the cafeteria again was—naturally—another story.
It’s All Your Fault
It happened during lunch break, while I was eating alone.
At this time of year, the cafeteria menu was stuffed with vegetables, and no matter what you picked, there was no avoiding hateful greens. Aman-san, who often made me boxed lunches, had apparently gotten busy recently, so the only thing I could get down was a single bread roll from the school store.
The quiet back garden had recently become my favorite hidden spot. It let me avoid the lunchtime noise, and if I wanted to nap, nobody bothered me there.
As I was about to throw away the empty bread wrapper, my trainer’s face suddenly came to mind.
You only had one piece of bread again? If convenience-store food is okay, I’ve got an onigiri.
At first I had found the way she persistently tried to shove food at me annoying.
Now it was the exact opposite.
What was she doing right now?
Was she once again skipping lunch and working through the break?
Before I knew it, my feet were carrying me toward the trainer room.
Until recently, I only ever went there when I wanted to be alone or needed someplace quiet.
Now it was different.
Brian, you’re early today. Is something wrong?
The image of my trainer lighting up the moment she saw me floated into my head, and my hand stopped just before it reached the door.
I suddenly realized I didn’t have a reason.
Why had I come?
What exactly was I hesitating over?
The trainer was inside. I wanted to see her. I shouldn’t need a reason for that.
I knew that.
And yet the idea that I had simply wanted to see her made me feel oddly itchy with embarrassment.
Clicking my tongue at myself for thinking such unlike-me thoughts, I turned to leave—
and the door opened right in front of me.
“Ah—so it was you, Brian!”
The trainer’s voice rang with even more delight than the one I had imagined.
And yes, it was true: no matter how furrowed her brow was while glaring down paperwork, the moment I arrived, her face would brighten.
The truth was, I didn’t dislike that.
“Why were you standing in front of the door?”
“No reason...”
I couldn’t exactly say I had been thinking up an excuse to come see her.
While I fumbled for an answer, my trainer had already wandered back into the room.
At times like this, I found my own clumsy inability to speak intensely irritating.
“Oh, right! Brian, I bought ice cream. Which kind do you want? I got a bunch of them.”
Completely ignoring my internal struggle, she beckoned to me from in front of the fridge like a child luring someone into mischief.
“The usual.”
“Here. This is the one you like, right?”
“Mm.”
On hot days like this, sherbet was easier to eat than anything creamy.
My trainer knew that perfectly well, which was why she always bought a whole selection.
When I had once asked why, she had said, “If Brian ever feels like having a different flavor, it should be fun to let her choose.”
A ridiculous person, as always.
“Brian.”
“What.”
“I’m really glad you came to see me.”
She gave me one of those hopelessly soft smiles, and all the thoughts I had been working myself up over suddenly seemed stupid.
Lately, whenever my trainer was involved, something about me always went wrong.
Worse, even things I had never cared about before now made me think of her for no reason. That snack she liked. That habit of hers. Her face would surface at the strangest times.
Where had the sharp, forceful gaze she wore during training and races gone? Here she was instead, grinning foolishly while eating some ridiculously sweet melon bread topped with whipped cream.
For some reason, I found that irritating.
And so I shoved her a little further toward the edge of the sofa and put my head on her lap.
“Wah.”
“I’m sleeping. Wake me when it’s time for training.”
“Uh... okay.”
The truly infuriating part was that while she kept upsetting my pace like this, my performance in training only kept improving.
It made no sense at all.
Even if I took out my frustration in such childish ways, this trainer would probably just keep smiling at me in that silly, fluffy way.
And that, too, was entirely her fault.
promise you
The relationship between Brian and me—once just trainee and trainer—had changed yet again after Brian graduated from Tracen Academy.
The one-room place where I had lived alone until then had become too cramped for two people, so we moved into a slightly larger apartment near the academy.
By now, our life together had already gone on for a long time.
And yet the label lovers still made me feel just a little shy.
It wasn’t as if anything dramatic had changed once the name of our relationship did. Well, I suppose there had been an increase in the sort of skinship teacher and student obviously shouldn’t have while she was still in school. Even so, the feelings I had kept tucked away in my chest ever since the days when Brian was still my trainee had simply grown too large to contain.
When we say goodnight in the same bed.
When the first thing I see each morning is the face of the girl I love most in the world.
When we exchange a kiss along with I’m home and take care.
Each little moment makes me think all over again how deeply I love her.
That was why, if this happy daily life could continue, I truly needed nothing more.
Still, I had reached what people like to call “marriageable age,” and invitations to the weddings of my old school friends were becoming more and more common.
Whenever they told me, “I hope you find someone you love soon too,” it left me with feelings too complicated to describe.
After all, I had already been with the girl I loved for years.
It wasn’t that I was hiding it, exactly.
I just didn’t feel it was the sort of thing to announce openly.
So my friends had no idea I had such a wonderful girlfriend.
They’d gush about being taken on drives, or being proposed to in restaurants overlooking the night skyline—but none of that thrilled me in the slightest.
I already knew riding along on an electric bicycle while chasing after Brian on her runs was far more fun, and that yakiniku with Brian tasted better than any expensive date-night meal.
Which meant that no matter how romantic the situation, it simply couldn’t compare.
As a result, when my friends bragged, the best I could do was offer bland responses like, “That’s nice, I’m glad you have such a lovely partner.”
Somehow, that had led everyone to conclude that I had no interest in romance at all.
When I told Brian this, she barely looked interested, poking at a baumkuchen from a wedding gift package while drinking cocoa.
That particular baumkuchen had come from a friend who’d married recently, and we’d been slowly eating it on lazy mornings like this.
At first Brian had looked at my habit of pairing sweet cake with ridiculously sweet cocoa as though I were deranged. But eventually, probably because preparing two separate drinks was a hassle, she started having cocoa too.
Maybe she had simply gotten used to the taste after all the winters she had spent drinking the cocoa I made for her since our academy days.
I had once thought I ought to get better at cooking too, but between work being busy and the fact that so many talented cooks already surrounded Brian, things turned out such that she became the better cook instead.
Since moving in together, my old energy-drink-and-supplement diet had improved drastically.
That said, hearing a girl as hopelessly anti-vegetable as Brian mutter, “I’m gonna beat your rotten eating habits out of you,” still felt a little rich.
It was in the middle of one of those perfectly ordinary mornings, both of us still in pajamas, that Brian called out to me just as I was about to bring our used dishes to the kitchen.
“What is it?”
“Here.”
The moment I saw the small box placed on the table, the plate and mug slipped from my hands.
Brian caught them both with frighteningly quick reflexes.
“Hey. That’s dangerous.”
“B-b-b-because... that...”
While I stood there gaping like a fish, Brian calmly set the rescued dishes back on the table and spoke in her usual utterly unruffled tone.
“We’ve finished moving, so I figured now was as good a time as any to give it to you.”
“No, no, no—there’s supposed to be timing for these things!”
“You never cared much about that kind of thing.”
“That’s true, but still!”
We kept exchanging rapid-fire protests like that, and before I realized it, I had retreated all the way onto the bed—with Brian advancing right after me until she had chased me to the wall.
A beautiful face closing in like that first thing in the morning was simply too much for my half-awake brain.
“Hey. Don’t run.”
“It’s just way too sudden!”
“Did you not want it?”
“No! Of course not! But...”
Truthfully, from the instant I saw the ring, all I had wanted to do was throw my arms around Brian.
And yet at the most important moment, I still managed to falter.
“What.”
“I’m not exactly young anymore...”
“Everyone gets older.”
“I also mess up cooking all the time.”
“You do.”
“You didn’t even deny that.”
“You’re also a terrible drunk.”
“Hey!”
“But sometimes I really crave that absurdly sweet cocoa you make. And I don’t dislike the time I spend watching you grin with that soft, loose, unguarded face while saying my name.”
With that gentle voice, saying something like that—how was I not supposed to fall harder?
The fact that Brian loved me as much as I loved her was so overwhelming I thought I might cry.
“From now on as well,” she said, “I want to remain with you.”
As she spoke, she wrapped one hand around my left hand and held it tight.
“So. Will you answer me?”
It was unfair.
She knew perfectly well there was no answer I could possibly give except yes.
I held her hand back firmly, feeling the two separate rhythms of our hearts pounding together between us.
“I know I said I didn’t need some particularly special proposal, but... I’m still in my pajamas.”
“That’s because you were still sleeping.”
The smile she wore as she said it was the gentlest expression I had ever seen from her.
“I’m not even wearing makeup, and my hair’s a mess.”
“Yeah.”
“...But you know, even like this, I want to make you happy, Brian.”
“Mm.”
“So... please stay with me forever.”
Brian’s eyes glistened just a little when she heard my answer.
We tightened our grip on each other’s hands, then kissed as though it had happened naturally.
The white curtain lit by the morning sun looked exactly like a wedding veil.