Vol 1 Chapter 7 – Unless She Marries Someone, I Suppose【Volume 1: The Road to Romance】

“Wait — is your face red?”

“N-no it’s not…”

Shino’s smile had caught him completely off guard, and the reflexive embarrassment had taken hold before he could stop it. He couldn’t get a proper word out.

And then Shino, watching him fumble, smiled a little wider — and flushed herself faintly — which caused a strange, almost syrupy atmosphere to settle over the two of them like a warm fog.

(What is this…)

Sandai had no idea what to do with any of it. He just endured it.

They made it to school eventually, passed through the school gates — and the surrounding stares snapped him back to himself.

“Hey, isn’t that—”

“Those two again, seriously…”

“Oh my god, are they walking together? That is so couple-coded.”

“There’s no other way to read that, right?”

“Yuizaki with a boyfriend… and that boyfriend being him of all people… I can’t go on.”

So the rumors, which had been starting to die down, had just been revived in full.

He’d been through it before. The stares still felt unpleasant, but they no longer rattled him the way they once had.

What he didn’t know was how Shino was handling it.

He glanced sideways at her. She was blinking in mild confusion — aware that people were looking, but genuinely uncertain as to why.

“Hmm… I feel like people are staring more than usual. Something like this happened a little while ago, too. I wonder why~”

Completely oblivious.

At this rate, she was going to be the last person to realize when the gossip had spiraled somewhere truly inconvenient.

“…We should probably keep some distance at school. From each other.”

One way or another, something had grown between them. He knew she wasn’t a bad person. And he wasn’t the kind of person who could watch a girl he liked — someone decent, someone who’d done nothing wrong — walk into an avoidable mess and shrug it off as not his problem.

So he said it as a precaution.

Shino stared at him blankly.

“Why would we keep our distance?”

“…You have friends here. Stick with them while we’re at school.”

“That’s kind of cold out of nowhere…”

“You gave me your contact info. We can talk outside of school now. No reason to force it while we’re here. …I’ll message you tonight.”

He said it quietly, scratching the side of his nose.

It was — without him quite realizing it — the first time he’d ever explicitly said, of his own accord, that he intended to keep something between them going.

Shino seemed to catch that. A small look of surprise crossed her face, and then, just as quickly, it softened into a shy, pleased smile.

“You said you’d message me. I heard it. I’m holding you to it — no backing out~”

Sandai nodded.

Shino gave him two light pats on the back and took off at a jog.

☆

She kept her word. At school, she didn’t come near him — she fell back into her usual rhythm with her friends, talking and laughing as if nothing had changed.

Thanks in no small part to that, the revived attention and resentful sideways looks sputtered out almost immediately.

Before long, Sandai was having a perfectly ordinary day.

By the time after-school rolled around, he was heading for the door, ready to go home — when a voice stopped him.

“Hey — Fujiwara! Get over here in a minute!”

A woman in a white lab coat was standing by the school entrance, calling him over. Her way of speaking was brusque and direct, despite her being a woman — she was Sandai’s homeroom teacher.

Nakaoaka Kayoko, if he remembered right. Reportedly, in her early thirties this year.

“…What is it?”

“Need you to help me with something.”

“Help you?”

“You’re not in any clubs, right? Figured you’d have time. Come on.”

“…Sure.”

And just like that — based on you seem free — he found himself half-conscripted into helping before he’d had a chance to object.

☆

The job turned out to be sorting documents.

A stack of papers nearly fifty centimeters thick, to be sorted one by one into their respective categories.

“Would’ve taken me until evening on my own. You’re a lifesaver.”

Tedious work was always worse alone, and she wasn’t wrong about the timeline.

In any case, Sandai’s honest preference was to get it over with and go home. He worked through the stack methodically.

Then, without particular warning, Nakaoaka brought up Shino.

“…So, I’ve been hearing you and Yuizaki have gotten close lately. It’s actually come up among the staff too — one of the other teachers mentioned it in conversation just today.”

Word had apparently reached the teachers as well.

He’d spent all day keeping his distance and had assumed the rumors had been properly extinguished. It seemed there were still embers smoldering in corners he couldn’t see.

“I wouldn’t call it close. We sit one in front of the other. …Anyway, let’s just get through these documents.”

He tried to deflect and change the subject. Nakaoaka ignored the attempt entirely.

“Don’t brush me off. …What I’m getting at is — it’s unusual to see Yuizaki engage with a guy. She tends to avoid men. Not just male students — she’s notably distant with male teachers too. My read on it is that the moment anyone looks at her as a woman before they’ve gotten to know her, she shuts down and pulls back. She doesn’t seem particularly self-conscious about much, but on that specific thing, she’s almost hypersensitive. …Not that I can’t understand why, given how she looks.”

The way she was building to it made it fairly obvious she’d wanted this conversation from the start. The document sorting had been the pretext.

The subject: Shino’s wariness around men.

Sandai already knew this about her — not because anyone had told him directly, but because he’d happened to overhear a conversation he wasn’t meant to hear. The reason behind it remained unclear.

“That said. The world has men in it, and always will — she can’t avoid them forever once she’s out in it. …Well. The one exception would be if she found one man she could genuinely trust, and ended up marrying him. That would be a different story entirely. She could avoid everyone else, and it wouldn’t much matter.”