When I Told the Most Beautiful Girl in the School That My Confession Had Failed, She Suddenly Started Coming at Me With Unbearably Heavy Feelings

Chapter 39: Mother and Pretense

My parents got along poorly.

I realized that fact early on; by the time I had become aware of the world around me, I had already understood it instinctively.

My mother was the president of a certain IT company. My father was a producer at a certain entertainment agency.

I had never heard how they met, but they must have encountered each other at some drinking party where the rich just showed off their status—something like that.

Because of my birth, my father had his affair exposed to the family and was thrown out of the house. He and my mother had somehow managed to maintain the facade of a family, but no love existed there.

My father apparently did not think well of me, the child he had created in a single night’s mistake.

If I thought about it, since I was the cause of his life’s collapse, it might not have been so strange for him to harbor that misplaced resentment.

My mother was indifferent toward me.

Was she uninterested from the start, or had she expelled her love from her body along with giving birth to me? Either way, she had subjected me to an attitude that made me question why she had bothered to have me at all.

Whenever the two of them ran into each other at home, they would argue, and I wanted them to get along.

I understood even as a child that it was hopeless. But they were my only family, the only ones I had.

If there was anything I could do, I chose inoffensive words and made an effort to hold their frayed relationship together for even one more second.

But reality was merciless. No matter how earnestly I tried as a young child, it did not change my parents’ personalities.

Before long, the family fell apart.

I still kept in touch with my father, but I had not seen him in ages.

My mother showed up at home occasionally, but we did not converse. I no longer wanted to, and she probably felt the same.

Even so, I think some part of my heart had not yet given up.

If I achieved excellent grades at school or did something praiseworthy, perhaps they would finally look at me.

I held onto that ideal and put in the effort, but the results never changed.

No matter how outstanding my grades were, all I got back from my mother was a curt “I see.”

The reality that kept betraying me wore me down, and right when that harassment-like frustration had plunged my mood to its lowest point, a single ray of light pierced through to me. That was the man named Renji Hinate.

He was the only one who had reached out to me and dragged me from the depths of despair.

He had given love to me, who had been tormented by loneliness.

He was the destined partner who might never appear again in my life.

Loneliness is a terrifying thing. It erodes a person bit by bit with ease and strips away all their will to live. It is a kind of curse.

I am afraid of returning to being alone.

No matter how diligently I study or how much I polish my appearance, if there is no one to acknowledge it and praise me, I cannot fly anywhere.

I do not want to lose him.

I want him by my side for life.

I do not want him to go to anyone else.

I will not let him.

Even if ruin awaits me ahead, I do not want to let him go.

I will make it so he cannot leave me, whether he likes it or not.

I no longer have the composure to control the pitch-black emotions swirling in my heart.

With this mad love, I will make him mine.

—

Chapter 40.1: Desires and Weight

The first day of summer vacation.

Following the address Rinne Kisaragi had given me and using a navigation app to guide the way, I stood frozen before the imposing mansion that loomed ahead.

I had suspected something was off when the buildings I passed started looking neater and grander, but I never imagined she lived in a place like this…

I had heard that environment shapes a person, and if someone told me this setting had molded Rinne Kisaragi’s beauty, I would have believed it.

With trembling fingers, I pressed the intercom, and her familiar voice responded. Soon after, Rinne Kisaragi appeared from inside.

“Good work coming all this way. The station was pretty far, right? Come on in.”

Rinne Kisaragi was beautiful no matter when I saw her. Her radiance made me squint involuntarily, she was that stunning.

But today, she seemed different from usual somehow.

I lacked the confidence to describe it well, but there was this unnatural forced brightness about her, like the artificial aftertaste of a juice that claimed to be naturally sweet.

In any case, I decided to step into the Kisaragi residence.

The tiled entryway already set it far apart from my own home.

As I walked down the wide hallway, paintings that I could not even begin to guess the value of caught my eye.

The cleanliness was so pristine that it made me wonder if dust had vanished from the world entirely, and it left me with an itchy, uncomfortable sensation.

The Kisaragi home was terrifyingly beautiful. Yet instead of finding it appealing, I felt a distant sense of dread.

(…It’s terrifying how devoid of life it feels. It’s like I’m in a museum.)

“It’s a ridiculously spacious house, isn’t it? Even I get fed up with it sometimes.”

I could not read the expression on Rinne Kisaragi’s face as she walked ahead. But from her words, I picked up on a faint weariness.

We climbed the stairs and headed to the back, to Rinne Kisaragi’s private room.

Entering the room of someone of the opposite sex always made me tense, no matter how many times I had done it. And when that person was the one I had feelings for, it was even more so.

Inside, a neatly arranged room greeted me. It had feminine, cute furniture, yet the space was astonishingly tidy. The faint sweet scent wafting through felt somehow illicit.

The organized desk for studying. The bed without a single wrinkle. The familiar school uniform. It was filled with only the essentials, and nothing else.

“Hehe, are you that interested in my room?”

“It’s such a clean room… It makes me embarrassed to think about showing you mine.”

“There’s no need to be embarrassed. Soon enough, this will be a room you’re familiar with too.”

She was operating at full normalcy today too, or so I did not say.

I did not miss the torrent of emotions hidden behind her words.

Something was surely going to happen today. That vague premonition would prove not to be wrong, and I would learn that soon enough.

“…By the way, Hinate-kun, have you ever thought something like this? ‘If it means getting what I want, I don’t care if other people hate me.'”

The sound of the lock clicking shut echoed through the room.

…I had been had.

No, locking the door was something any teenager might do at least once. I was not saying it was strange, nor that it held any deeper meaning.

But I had seen it. The ambition lurking in Rinne Kisaragi’s downcast eyes. In that instant, I realized the worst scenario I had dreaded was upon me.