“…Okay, regrouping. Crush talk.”
“Fine.”
“For starters, tell us about your first love. Riona and I want to know.”
“There was one, sure, but it stayed a one-sided crush, so there’s literally nothing entertaining to say.”
I wasn’t excited about discussing my first love and was looking for an exit ramp.
“That’s okay, I want to hear it.”
“Ryouya-kun, what was your first love like? Specifics.”
But they were committed. Apparently we were doing this in granular detail. What did they actually get out of this? Whatever. I started talking.
“It was sixth grade. Childhood friend, lived nearby. I had a crush on her for a while, but in eighth grade she got a boyfriend, and that was that.”
The “first love is the childhood friend” structure shows up a lot in LNs, but in reality it almost never works out. While I was thinking that, Riona spoke up.
“First love being your childhood friend is a pretty common pattern. Just doesn’t generally result in marriage.”
“Yeah. Childhood friend basically just means kid you happened to know. There isn’t anything inherently special beyond that.”
“Cases like our parents — childhood friends who actually married each other — are statistically rare.”
“Wait — Reona, Riona, your parents were childhood friends?”
That detail caught my interest. I’d met their parents exactly once, during the hospital stay.
The thanks they’d given me for saving Reona and Riona had been… intense. The private room was paid for by their family, in fact.
“Making Ryouya-kun do all the talking is unfair, so it’s our turn now.”
“You don’t actually have to…”
“No, no — go ahead.”
Honestly, I did not want to hear Reona and Riona’s crush stories. Because I was, in fact, starting to fall for both of them.
When a low-spec, never-popular guy like me gets a tiny amount of kindness from a girl, he falls for her immediately. It is a known design flaw and it is annoying.
Hearing about their previous flings would involve hearing about previous guys, and I absolutely did not want that. But Reona and Riona had no way of knowing my feelings, and they just started.
“To be honest, Riona and I don’t have a lot to put under ‘crush talk.’”
”…Huh?”
“Neither me nor Nee-chan has ever had a boyfriend.”
That came out of left field and floored me. I had assumed they both had a respectable amount of dating history.
“Are you surprised, Ryouya?”
“Yeah, knocked over. I knew you guys got plenty of confessions, so I figured—”
“So yeah — Riona and I have never had sex. We’ve never even kissed.”
I had been mentally certain that at least one of them wasn’t a virgin. Discovering they both were — you can’t expect a guy to not be shocked by that.
“Then how come you never dated anyone?”
“Probably because there was no one I wanted to date.”
“Going out with someone you’re not into is a waste of time for both parties.”
I had been expecting some grand reason; turned out it was simply that none of the candidates had registered. After all those confessions, none had cleared the bar. I almost felt sorry for the guys who’d faceplanted out there.
“But when Riona and I do fall for someone, we are completely devoted to that person.”
“Mm. Not even a single strand of hair gets handed off to anyone else.”
“R-right.”
Riona had casually dropped something extremely heavy and I felt a small chill. If I ever, somehow, ended up dating one of them, this was going to be a lot. Then again, sadly, I’m not someone they could ever realistically date.
“So — Ryouya, what’s your type?”
“Wait, we’re still going?”
“Of course. The real interview starts now.”
What followed was Reona and Riona interrogating me on my exact preferences in women. Every answer was followed up with a why, in detail, until it felt less like crush talk and more like a police interview.
I ended up trapped there for nearly two hours. Was that technically crush talk? It really, really wasn’t.
“It’s getting late. Let’s sleep. You guys can use Mio’s room, it’s fine.”
“Already that late? A lot happened today, I’m tired.”
“H-hold on—!?”
Reona and Riona were unceremoniously climbing into my bed, and I yelped.
“Why are you yelling?”
“Why am I yelling? — why are you both casually getting into my bed?!”
“To sleep, obviously.”
”…No, no, that’s not okay.”
They were so unselfconscious about it that for a second I wondered if I was the weird one. But no — they were the weird ones.
“We’ll leave enough space for Ryouya.”
“So don’t worry.”
“Not one element of this situation is reassuring.”
They were really planning to all sleep in here. Even using someone else’s bed was already a stretch — sleeping next to a guy they weren’t even dating was on a different level.
“Okay, I’ll sleep in Dad’s room.”
“Aww, why? Come on, Ryouya-kun, sleep with us.”
“You’ll have nice dreams.”
They grabbed my arms and dragged me back as I tried to leave the room. One-on-one, I’d have probably been stronger; two-on-one was unwinnable. I lost a brief tug-of-war and was hauled into bed.
“Caught.”
“You can’t run now.”
“O-okay, fine, fine — just, don’t press up against me quite so much.”
I was sandwiched between Reona and Riona, immobilized. Worse, both of them had their chests directly against my body, and the softness was getting transmitted to me with disastrous precision for my lower half.
“Goodnight.”
“Ryouya, see you tomorrow.”
“Are you for real…”
While Reona and Riona dropped instantly into peaceful sleep, I — needless to say — was not falling asleep anytime soon.