All Right! Fine! I’ll Take You! – Zaimokuza Gaiden – Chapter 21

“So… she’s staying the night?” Sister asks, lifting her glasses to rub the bridge of her nose as she leans on the wooden doorframe of her bedroom.

“I mean… she insisted she wouldn’t leave until she finished, and… it’s a whole novel… so…” I try not to fidget as I answer her, with about as much success as I get when trying not to feel jealous at the way her glasses keep turning glaringly opaque as they move up and down above her pinched fingers.

“Right. And when you say ‘novel,’ you mean, like… a sanely sized novel?”

“The contest was very strict about the maximum word count,” I say, not resentful at all.

‘Snerk.’

… You just said “snerk.” You can’t say “snerk.”

‘I just did.’

You’re despicable.

‘Praise me more.’

“Right. So it’s at least possible she’ll finish sometime this decade—”

“Oi.”

“Yoshi, not to be mean, but as much in love as the girl may be, this is a test of endurance.”

I glare at her. She stops rubbing, allows her glasses to effortlessly fall into place, and beams.

… Why is everybody better at doing tricks with their glasses than I am?

“Anyway… can you—”

“I’ll cover for you both,” she says, kindly agreeing to my request. “For now,” she adds ominously.

…

I really should have expected this.

‘I don’t know what to tell you other than: no shit, Sherlock.’

“I refuse to try to divine in which way you’re going to torment me and, in so doing, inadvertently clue you in to my weaknesses,” I tell her, crossing my arms and jutting my chin up, hopefully catching some of the light on my glasses.

‘Shoot for the stars. If you miss, you may still drift in the void of space until you die of inanition.’

“They grow up so quickly,” Sister says, lifting her glasses yet again to wipe a tear away.

…

“I’m going back to my room,” I declare with aplomb and even a hint of actual backbone.

Hopefully.

“You do that while I come up with an excuse so Mom doesn’t get worried about you skipping dinner.”

“It’s not that unusual of—”

She arches an eyebrow.

My shoulders slump in defeat.

And then I go back to my room, finding Minami has occupied my bed and is lying on her stomach while browsing the pages of…

Of my book.

Mine.

She… she hasn’t said anything since she read the first chapter, the one written from her fictitious point of view as she was approached by her fake friends with an outrageous proposal that would set in motion…

Everything.

Everything that I now am. Everything that I’m trying to be.

It’s… I won’t go so far as to say I would never have reached… No. No, I wouldn’t have. I may have arrived at some of the same developments, but I would’ve done it differently. At other times, in other ways.

And… A writer knows this better than everyone: it’s the journey, not the destination.

It’s not about the heroes defeating the Dark Lord, because they almost always will. It’s not about the boy getting the girl, because it’s very rare that he doesn’t. It’s not about the underdog winning the championship, because that’s what underdogs are for.

It’s about how they do it. The path they take to reach such lofty goals.

We don’t identify with the triumph, with the achievement: we identify with the struggle. Because victory is something that may or not be there, but trying? Everyone knows about trying. Everyone understands what it’s like to want something more, to reach for it, to pour everything into a dream, an ambition, an aspiration.

And… That sometimes ends in failure, even if that’s unusual in stories. Even if it isn’t in real life.

But that’s not what matters.

At the end of the day, what matters is…

The story of how we got to where we are.

And Minami is reading such a story. Our story.

And I can only take my swiveling chair, the very same in which I’ve written the book she holds and I hurried to print the last pages of before she got here, the chair in which we had our second time, the one in which she has so often teased me and distracted me just to try and bribe me into letting her peek at our story before it was ready for her eyes…

I sit on this chair and silently turn around to look at her as she reads without sparing me a single glance.

And she’s so beautiful I don’t dare to blink.

***

I don’t know when I drift off. Which is kind of shameful when I remember my last thoughts before falling asleep, but, in my defense, seeing the Lady Minami intensely immersed in her reading is a surprisingly soothing experience, and one I wouldn’t mind witnessing in—

She just finished.

She… She’s just staring at the last page lying on my pillow, beneath her face held aloft by arms firmly set on my bed. I can recognize it just by the length of the two paragraphs and the stretch of blank paper below.

And she isn’t saying anything, and I don’t dare—

“You were awake,” she accuses, not moving her face from that page she’s now glaring at.

“What?” I ask, maybe slightly sluggish due to the late hour, or maybe as unprepared as ever to deal with the bewildering moods of my girlfriend.

“You. Were. Awake,” she grits out, eyes blazing as she turns to glare at me, tarnished silver gleaming in the cone of yellow light of my desk lamp.

She almost looks feline with the way those eyes of hers seem to shine, to hold the darkness at bay around her.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I confess for what I always hope won’t be the last time.

“That night. At the love hotel. The night I gave you my first time—”

“I seem to remember you doing your own taking—”

“You were awake!”

“Of course I was awake! I was having sex with the most beautiful girl—”

“Not that!” She turns back to the mattress, frantically turning the pages until she finds some she had set apart, and thus, wouldn’t have needed to search for if she wasn’t being so… Minami about whatever this is. “This!” she exclaims in triumph as she holds whatever it is aloft as if expecting the Final Fantasy fanfare to signal her victory. “You were awake for this! And I just kept acting like a moron, and you didn’t say anything—”

Already fatigued due to sleeping for a couple hours on a chair that’s very definitely not suited for such a thing, I quickly get up and take the pages out of her grasp as she indignantly protests my doing so, even though she obviously meant for me to take them and read…

Oh.

That.

“I… wasn’t awake,” I tell her, voice as steady as I can keep it.

“Bullshit! All that talk about me hotboxing myself with your smell beneath the covers? Hesitating and rubbing up your body when I came up for air? Feeling your… your thingagainst me, poking between my thighs, and then, and… and then telling you I… I lo—”

I kneel down beside my bed, laying the pages aside as I hold her face between my hands, turning her to fully face me after she’s bashfully looked down.

Her cross glints as it sways, the silver catching the light, the garnets glittering.

“I love you,” I tell her, with the same broken, raspy, frail tone of voice I imagine she told me that night, when she seemingly woke up between my arms just like I dreamed she would have.

She looks into my eyes, searchingly, and then smiles.

“I love you too. Now come to bed.”

I hesitate, wanting to speak more, but she sits up and takes her uniform off unceremoniously, only pausing to shoot me an inquisitive look, so I…

I follow her lead and strip down, and then go to get my pajamas—

“Not tonight,” she whispers, grabbing my wrist. “I… I don’t feel like having sex, no matter how horny you seem to think I always am,” she comments, with a tone that promises retribution. “But I… But, tonight, I want you to hold me. I want us both to sleep naked, like we did our first night, and I want to wake up in your arms.”

I look at her, just look. At perfect lips, at tarnished silver beneath thin eyebrows, at fiery hair that looks almost black with the poor lighting.

At…

At my girlfriend.

And we get in bed together, huddled on top of a mattress that’s definitely too narrow to hold us both unless I follow her request and hold her between my arms.

Just as expected, Minami. Just as expected.

***

We keep waking up through the night. I think it’s both because of the lack of space and because of the sheer excitement, the… the exhilaration at my book being finally done, our story told.

And sometimes we just exchange brief kisses, some mutters, a few whispers that almost always revolve around three words we keep saying over and over.

And then, at around five in the morning, both of us bleary-eyed… I finally ask her the damn question.

“Did you… like it?”

Minami blinks at me in confusion before she finally starts laughing, trying to stifle her giggling against my naked chest.

“Sorry! Sorry!” she says.

“Sorry? Do you mean you—”

“No! No, I loved it; it’s just… I didn’t even think to tell you, after all that… thing,” she answers, looking up, her head lying on my arm, her chin digging on the spot her mouth just vacated.

There’s no light; I can barely make out her profile as a vague shadow in front of me, and yet…

And yet, I remember that smile she gifted me when she read my compass story, and I can hear it in her voice.

So, relieved, happy, and exhilarated, I hug her to me despite her brief protest about my trying to smother her, and we just lie in silence for a while until I feel I can finally drift off to a restful sleep—

“Of course, you aren’t sending this to the contest,” she mutters.

And I freeze.

“Why would you think so?”

Minami stops for a moment until she shifts around my arms in a way I would usually enjoy very much. And then she finally manages to switch my desk lamp on, and I hiss at the yellow glare assaulting my eyes.

After I get used to it, I have to contend with another glare though.

“You described in exhausting detail how I lost my virginity, Yoshiteru. That’s not something I want others to read.”

“I… I changed the names! Nobody will think that’s real!”

“Except everybody who knows us? You can’t tell me Mika won’t put two and two together—”

“We’ll tell her that’s embellishment! Who would be foolish enough to be entirely truthful about such things, after all?”

The more dreadful glare of the two I’m contending with narrows.

“You. You would.”

“Ah… Right. But does the Lady Saotome know?”

She points with her thumb at my manuscript on the desk behind her in a way that makes me regret having my own back cornered against my room’s wall and thus having no escape from her ire.

“Yes. Given that you obviously interviewed her about the damn park scene, she would.”

“Ah…”

And faced with the terrible opposition of the Lady Minami’s fierce disapproval, I resort to my ultimate technique. One the very same Lady Saotome inspired.

Puppy eyes.

“… Stop that,” Minami protests, uncomfortably looking away from me

“But I… I put a lot of effort into it.”

“I know that…” she mutters.

“And I… I did it because… Because of what you told me.”

I can only see the top of her head, the light just barely enough for me to distinguish the crimson sheen of her locks as she burrows her face in my chest in a manner that makes me hope she may find her ire untenable.

“What… What does that mean?” she asks with an almost tremulous voice.

And I close my eyes as I tighten my hold on her, pulling her closer to me, needing to feel her warmth.

“When… When you critized my earlier novel? When you told me it wasn’t mine? That’s… That’s what changed everything. What pushed me to be… real. Genuine. To tell a story that mattered to me, that carried a truth only I could share with the world. And… And you’re that truth, Minami. You’re the most important thing I can tell the world about.”

I shut up, letting my words echo in the silence of the almost morning, just feeling her close to me, her warm breath on my skin, her heartbeat mingling with mine.

And then she shuffles, sliding up until her face is in front of mine, her eyes blazing as she looks for something in mine.

And she kisses me.

As ardent as ever, as consuming, as demanding.

As Minami.

“You’re going to crushthem,” she tells me, her smile wide, showing her sharp canines.

And I smile back, trying very hard not to think about the General’s Blade standing in triumph.

***

I sent it.

I put it in an envelope and sent it.

My… manuscript.

Mine.

She squeezes my hand, reassuring me just by being there. By existing.

“It’s… It’s beautiful, Yoshiteru. You’re gonna win this.”

I squeeze back.

***

Time goes on, and I…

I write.

Because that’s the thing: it’s about the journey, not the destination.

It doesn’t end when you reach one goal, some arbitrary point. Stories do, but life doesn’t. Life goes on, and you keep finding new goals, new things to strive for, new things to work toward.

“I… Really?” she says, sitting at my side on my desk and glaring at the computer in front of us.

“What? I thought it was an interesting setting—”

“The ostrich girl, Yoshiteru. The damn ostrich girl.”

Ah.

“To be fair, there could be plenty of sources of inspiration for a tomboyish martial artist who—”

“You’re forbidden from being alone with Mika.”

“I—”

“Forbidden.”

***

And you don’t stop. You can’t stop when you accomplish something, because that just means you’re on the right path, and that’s when you want to forge ahead, to see what else is there to find.

To walk beside the ones who want to share the journey with you.

“You have absolutely no clue what you’re doing,” Minami states.

Not at me.

For once.

Is this what NTR feels like?

‘I thought you said it was netorase?’

That only applies to the Lady Saotome!

“Of course I don’t. I just asked Zaimokuza for dating advice; that should tell you just how desperate I am,” Outer Hachiman strikes back with his usual lack of mercy.

“You advised him on our first date!” Minami protests, throwing her arms in the air. “That was a whole thing! It was the reason he got pissed off at me!”

“I… I wouldn’t say I was ‘pissed off’…”

“You fled from me and pretended I didn’t exist for a whole day!”

“I already apologized for that! Thoroughly!”

“Not enough times! You didn’t even kneel properly—”

“I feel like you two are going to make out any moment now, and if that’s the case, I’ve got better sources of trauma to poke at. I’m pretty sure Yukino—” Outer Hachiman tries to interject.

“You will stay right thereuntil I’ve taught you how not to scar for life that poor girl unfortunate enough to go on a date with you!”

“Minami, mayhaps you’re being too cruel with Hachiman. I’m pretty sure he would only traumatize her without meaning to—”

“That’s not any better!”

Yes. The company is also an important part of the journey.

***

Still… there aredestinations. Moments in which you just stop, contemplate what you’ve reached, what you’ve accomplished.

Be they triumph or defeat.

“Open it,” Minami says, her voice as soft as the side of her face on mine as she leans over my shoulder while I remain seated on my chair. As soft as her touch on the back of my trembling hand.

The hand that’s holding an envelope with a very official-looking seal.

“I… What if—”

She, as is her wont, stops me from speaking.

By kissing me.

It’s tender, delicate, probing, sweet.

And when she finally stops, my lips tingling with the phantom of her touch, she smiles.

“It’s a beautiful book, Yoshiteru. They know.”

I smile back, not managing even an ounce of what she’s offering me so freely and generously, but trying to.

And I tear the envelope open.

Then, with tremulous fingers, I take out the very expensive piece of crème paper and... read. Out loud.

“Dear Yoshiteru Zaimokuza, we would like to thank you for your submission to our contest and to congratulate you on the quality of your manuscript. It has impressed a lot of the members of the jury, and it’s been a breath of fresh air among far too similar entries that—”

“Yes! Yes, what did I tell you! You crushed all those plagiaristic fucks!” the Lady Minami interjects with her usual… exuberance.

I spare a nervous smile at her, and go back to reading the letter, trying not to have my voice tremble with all the overwhelming emotions running through me.

“Unfortunately—”

“What?! No! No ‘unfortunately!’ You’re reading it wrong!”

“Minami, I’m pretty sure I—”

“Give me that!” Her hands tear the letter off my hands, and she glares at it until she finds my stopping point and then blinks at it, first in surprise and then in horror.

“Minami? What’s—”

“Unfortunately,” she reads, her voice slightly tremulous, “we’re afraid that, due to the explicit material involved in your narration, it could not be legally sold to our target audience.”

I blink at her.

And then she blushes.

“I don’t even know what I expected,” she mutters as my world crumbles.

Then she walks around my chair and sits on my lap, her back resting on my chest.

“Well?” she asks after a moment of silence.

“Well?” I answer in complete disorientation.

And she grunts, poking at the mouse on my desk to wake my computer up before she clicks on a certain document that’s always on the lower right corner of my desktop.

“You have a story to write. Get to it,” she demands as the first, incomplete draft of my own isekai novel opens.

And, when I hesitate, she looks at me, back over her shoulder, an arched eyebrow imperiously asking me to—

The eyebrow drops. Her gaze softens.

“Yoshiteru… It was good. It was beautiful. I’ll always remember it. And… And maybe someday you’ll publish, or maybe you won’t, but… But that’s not what matters.”

She turns around, over me, until her legs are crossed on top of mine, beneath the armrest.

“It was good. You wrote it beautifully. It made my heart race. And… And so will everything you write from now on. So… Write. Write the next one. Finish it. Win the next thing.”

She smiles, as softly and tenderly as she then kisses me.

“But…” she hesitates to add as her lips leave mine before her eyes harden. “But if I have to suck your balls dry just so you won’t add porn of Mika, I swear that’s what’s going to happen each and every day—”

I hook one arm beneath her knees as I snake one around her shoulders and interrupt her by standing up, effortlessly lifting her into a bridal carry that makes her let out a surprised “eep” as I take her to my bed.

“My Lady Minami... I don’t think you understand how threats work,” I whisper against her as I lay her on top of my sheets and slowly start to unbutton her blouse as she squirms beneath my touch, her cheeks tinted with a rosy—

“I told you he had a girlfriend!” my sister’s voice exasperatedly claims from my door.

And I turn around to find my parents there, gaping at Minami and me.

…

I think I preferred the emojis.

The End

Author’s Note:

This has been quite a ride.

I’ve… I’ve finished many projects over my writing career, but a novel isn’t one of them. I’ve always had something pulling me back whenever I reached the point where it may get done, where I could see it taking shape, the ending in my mind nearing the day where it would be written.

And then I stopped.

Because… Because it’s scary. Terrifying. Because the moment you write “The End” is the moment where all those hours and hours of work become something you can no longer fix, something that will forever be imperfect, rather than that magnificent thing you dreamed about while it was just a beautiful idea marinating in your mind.

And yet…

And yet, over the past few months, almost a year already, I’ve been writing continuously, learning about my craft, improving, discovering how readers react to my writing and…

And interacting with all of you.

And I’m grateful.

I’m grateful, not only because of all that I’ve learned, but because all that you’ve given me. All the encouragement, all the support. All… All that’s made me believe that I really have something to offer beyond some witty jokes and erotic trysts. And, well, I know it’s a trite thing to say, but, honestly?

This couldn’t have been written without you.

It started as a joke, as a passing remark on my Oregairu fic, and then aj0413 turned it into a commission, and I just tried to think about the two main characters, who are so secondary in the original story they may as well be originals, and…

And I know this is a fanfic, yes, but, really, what I feel? It’s that this is my first novel.

And I couldn’t be more grateful for the chance to have written it. To have finished it. To have written those two scary, terrible, awful, wonderful words.

To say this is The End.

Because it’s imperfect, and bittersweet, and in dire need of an editing pass.

But it’s also, to continue the leitmotif, genuine.

And I’ve loved all of it.

So see you around, chuuni readers. And my Platonic love for all of you.