“Glad we found Ryouya-kun safely.”
“He’d snuck out of the hotel at some point — I was rattled.”
“Right? GPS is a blessing.”
After tracking Ryouya down outside the hotel and getting him safely back to his room, Nee-chan and I were debriefing. Without the stealth-installed remote-monitoring app on his phone, finding him would have been extremely hard.
“But his core insecurities are still very present.”
“His past has shaped his values, and that doesn’t reset quickly.”
“Cute that way though.”
For the record: poking at Ryouya’s insecurities today was on purpose. I had known in advance that Nee-chan would be confessed to on the bamboo grove path at that timing.
To remind Ryouya — for whom being-with-us was sliding into normal — of urgency, I deliberately led him to the confession scene. The cold-water effect was strong.
The primary aim was to make him feel that we might end up as someone else’s, and apply pressure. Of course, in reality, neither Nee-chan nor I would ever pick anyone except him.
I had also planned to engineer a confession scene for me, with Nee-chan’s help, to show Ryouya — but he’d gone AWOL before that could happen, so I skipped it.
I don’t know what happened between dinner and bath that triggered the hotel-exit, but we’d been the ones steering hate toward Ryouya behind the scenes, so today’s behavior was within tolerances.
“If we push too far his brain might break, so I should be careful.”
“NTR is a bad culture, we only accept pure love.”
A pity for Ryouya, but to make him ours, he has to suffer along the way. That suffering is the necessary cost of the happy ending.
“If Ryouya-kun isn’t ours, I don’t need anything else.”
“Ryouya will absolutely be mine and Nee-chan’s.”
For that, I had been working with Nee-chan for a long time. The festival after the school trip is where I check him. There I’ll convert and checkmate.
———
After this interlude, the trip enters day two.