Chelia

It was in the evening, three days after the award ceremony, when Itsuki Hashima was suddenly called to his tax accountant Ashley Ono’s office. “We need to talk,” she’d said over the phone.

“So you’re finally here, Itsuki…”

Opening the door, Itsuki found Ashley seated on an orange chair, wearing a flashy red dress. Her voice, and her expression, indicated some pressing issue at hand.

Itsuki reared back a little. “Um, hello, Ashley. Is something wrong with you today?”

“…Does it look like it to you?”

“Well…yes, honestly.”

“…You’re right. I’m in a bit of a bad mood right now.”

Itsuki broke into a sweat. “Wh-what happened?”

“…Today,” she dully replied, “Makina came to visit for the first time in a while.”

“Uh-huh…”

“…He brought along some younger writer. He said the guy was in tax trouble, so he wanted me to talk to him.”

“Oh… Was it Tadashi Kamo?”

“Mm-hmm.”

Itsuki expected as much. The “really good tax accountant” Kaizu mentioned was indeed Ashley. He must’ve really cared for Kamo’s plight, taking him personally to her office and everything.

“…So here he is, seeing me for the first time in ages, and he wants me to deal with this other guy instead? It was awful.”

“Well, you make it sound cruel, but I don’t see the problem. All he did was introduce a new client to you.”

“Tsshh!”

“Ah…!”

He was telling the truth, but Ashley shot an irritated glare at him. “And what’s more,” she continued, “the moment his errand was done, he just left. Shouldn’t he have at least invited me to dinner? It’s just good manners!”

“…So basically, you were glad to see Kaizu again, but he was just here for business, and that pissed you off?”

“Huhhh?!” Ashley’s voice cracked a bit, her face red. “You’re making it sound like I was dying to see Makina or something, aren’t you?!”

“Weren’t you?”

“Of course not! I’m just talking about good manners here!”

This girl is such a handful, Itsuki thought.

Ashley, maybe picking up on his exasperation, composed herself. “…But, ah, who cares about Makina? Here’s what I really want to talk about.”

“Oh?”

“He happened to mention… You’re in a big work slump right now, huh?”

“…! …Yeah.”

Itsuki scowled as he nodded. Apparently Chihiro had never told Ashley about his writer’s block.

“So just to be sure, the book that was due out October is now delayed indefinitely, and it probably won’t come out this year? Do I have that right?”

“…Yeah.”

He gravely nodded as Ashley sighed.

“Ughh… So we’ll have to round your estimated income for the year downward a fair amount, won’t we?”

“I guess so.”

“…That’s a shame. I heard the anime went better than expected, so I actually prepared some articles of incorporation for you, assuming you’d keep up your income. I found a good insurance offer along those lines, so… But I guess that’s all in the trash now.”

“You did all that? I’m sorry…”

Yet someone else I’ve disappointed, huh? Itsuki hung his head down as Ashley stared at him.

“…Ahh, it’s not your fault. Hopefully you’ll be able to write again soon.”

The unexpectedly kind encouragement threw Itsuki for a loop.

“…Why’re you looking at me like that?” she asked.

“Oh, um… I thought you’d berate me more.”

Ashley snorted. “…Well, I called you here so I could, yes, but if you’re gonna break down on me, it’s no fun to bully you.” She stood up and opened the door to her private apartment. “I don’t even feel like doing any more work today. Here, why don’t you join me while I drown my sorrows?”

“All right,” Itsuki said, smiling.

Chihiro was coming in every week to clean Ashley’s apartment, so it was in decent order, but between the discarded dress and lingerie in one corner and the convenience store bag and plastic bottle lying on the floor, there was still no hiding the carelessness of the owner.

Itsuki felt an odd sort of affinity with her along those lines. He was certainly in no position to criticize. This was, in fact, the first time he had ever entered the home of a woman living alone, but there was nothing tense or exciting about it. Chihiro had given him a general idea of Ashley’s place, so the gap between here and her office didn’t surprise him.

“I’ll go make something, so sit here and wait, all right?”

“Um, okay.”

Itsuki sat down on one of the pillows placed by the room’s low table. Ashley was off in another room, so he looked around a bit. There was a laptop computer on the floor, some work-related files and papers next to it. On top of it was a single paperback book; there was a paper cover on it, so he couldn’t see what it was.

Ashley’s personal reading?

Curious about what kind of stuff she read for fun, he surreptitiously picked up the book and opened it. It was called Kasumi and Chelia, published by GF Bunko, and the author was Kasuka Sekigahara.

This was a familiar title to Itsuki. In fact, he owned a copy. He’d bought it in middle school and read it several times since. It was a favorite of his, a quick sort of four-volume series, and this was Volume 1. A few of the pages were dog-eared, so maybe this copy had been read and reread as well.

Recalling the story, Itsuki flipped through the pages. The passages and illustrations he came across made him vividly remember the tale.

Kasumi and Chelia, or “Kasulia” to its fans, was a yuri story, depicting the love shared between two young women going to an all-girl boarding school. It featured Sekigahara’s trademark charming characters and unpredictable plot twists, topped off with her daring, sensual, but still elegant erotism. It became pretty popular; even readers not into the genre rated it highly. As a middle school student, Itsuki wasn’t much interested in lesbian romance, but once he began reading, he was hooked.

As the title suggested, the protagonists were named Kasumi Mikagezaki and Chelia Featherstone. Kasumi was a second-year in high school, a prim Japan-style beauty and model student who also had her eccentric, prank-pulling side. Chelia was in her first year, a petite, blond, blue-eyed girl with a haughty attitude; she never shied away from confrontations with students older than her, which earned her a bit of a reputation. The two met, grew attracted to each other, fell in love, lost themselves in passion, and overcame a number of obstacles to find happiness.

There was a large cast of other charming characters, but Itsuki was a huge fan of Chelia. She was moody and unsociable at first, but after getting closer to Kasumi, she started calling her “big sis” and loving her like a cute little puppy. As she grew infatuated with Kasumi and their relationship took a romantic angle was truly exciting—she went from a puppy to a werewolf between the sheets, and Itsuki had called upon her “assets” for many a solo bedroom session of his own.

Chancing upon a favorite scene of his, Itsuki began to read it thoroughly.

Ahh, Chelia is so cute…

Ever since he learned Chihiro was his sister, he could find no love for his own work and subconsciously avoided other little-sister novels…but what he loved in the past, he still loved now. It gladdened him to see that. Chelia had a “little sister” personality, but at the root of it, she was “the younger girl at school”—and maybe that was why he still had the hots for her. But either way, it still worked.

“Sorry to keep you.”

Ashley came back in, holding a tray with some dishes. Itsuki was amazed by what she wore. The dress from before was gone; she was in glasses and sweats, and her hair was tied back in a ponytail that had been segmented with hair ties along its length. He knew from Chihiro that she dressed pretty sloppily when she wasn’t working, but actually seeing it for the first time was a shock.

Placing the tray on the table, Ashley turned her eyes toward the stunned Itsuki’s hands.

“Oh…?”

“Ah, um, s-sorry… I just kinda started reading this.” He quickly closed the book and put it down.

“Oh, that’s all right,” replied Ashley, not showing much concern.

“Does this belong to you, Ashley?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“It looks pretty well loved. Do you like Kasulia?”

Ashley gave Itsuki a lonesome smile. “Well… It’s a special series to me.”

“Oh, it is? I like it a lot, too!”

Itsuki’s voice rose at finding an unexpected kindred spirit.

Ashley replied with a pleased smile, “Are you a fan of Kasuka Sekigahara?”

“I—I am! I’ve read all her work, not just Kasulia. A Sister’s All You Need! is like a bible to me.”

“Ahh… Come to think of it, Kasuka saw a lot of talent in you, didn’t she?”

“I… I don’t know if I’d put it like that, but she did praise my debut novel a lot. She even wrote the obi quote for it.”

A smile came to Itsuki’s face. He still remembered what a rush it had been.

“Hee-hee-hee… But let’s have a drink, all right?” Ashley handed Itsuki a pair of chopsticks, a small plate, and a wineglass, filling it and her own with sake. The label on the bottle read “Ninki-ichi: Gold Ninki Junmai Daiginjo,” from the Ninki (“Popular”) Brewery.

“Ah… Thanks very much.”

Itsuki took the glass, while Ashley took up her own.

“Hee-hee-hee… Well, cheers.”

“Cheers.”

They clinked their glasses together, and Itsuki took a sip. The drink was refreshing, and it had a nice amount of acidity and sweetness mixed in, making it worth a glass. It reminded him of a white wine; he could see why Ashley served it in a wineglass instead of a traditional ochoko sake vessel.

“Ahhh…”

Ashley took a sip, then let out a beguiling sigh, enraptured by the taste. Then she put down the glass and reached for a bowl on the tray with her chopsticks.

“Is this…ryukyu?” Itsuki asked, looking in.

“That’s right,” Ashley replied. Ryukyu, a traditional dish from Oita Prefecture, consisted of fish cut into sashimi, then steeped in a mix of soy sauce and mirin cooking sake.

“Did you make this, Ashley?”

“Mm-hmm. I loved the ryukyu I ate during our cherry blossom picnic, so now I always have some on reserve.”

“Huh…”

Impressed, Itsuki placed some pieces on his plate and tried them. The fish was springy in his mouth, bursting with a sweet, salty flavor, and it couldn’t have been a better match for the sake. The shallots and sesame seeds in the mix also added a nice accent.

“It’s really good.”

“Hee-hee! Thank you.”

“What kind of sashimi did you use?”

“Hmm, what was it? Two white fish, anyway.”

“…”

That was one of the charms of ryukyu—even if you weren’t using the best ingredients (or didn’t know what they were), you could still make a nice meal out of them.

“I don’t drink sake usually, but if it’s paired with this, I think I could go at it all day.”

“Right? And all I did was buy some random sashimi and dump some stuff on it. …And after I went at it all day back then, too…”

“?”

Itsuki looked quizzically at the suddenly gloomy Ashley. She finished off her glass in one gulp, then quickly poured herself a second one.

“By the way, Ashley, what character from Kasulia do you like the most?”

“…Kasumi,” she replied, a faraway look in her eyes. “Who do you like, Itsuki?”

“I’m all about Chelia. She’s so cute.”

“Hmm…”

Ashley gave a mischievous smile.

“Chelia was me.”

“…?”

Itsuki stared at her, failing to comprehend.

“…???”

After a few more moments of thought, he still wasn’t getting anywhere, so:

“Hmm… I think one of these was hamachi. The other one might be sea bream, I think? Or maybe kampachi?”

“Can we not double back to what kind of fish is in the ryukyu, Itsuki?” Ashley looked a bit upset. She puffed out her chest. “I’m saying that I was the model for Chelia Featherstone from Kasumi and Chelia.”

“…Um, I’m not sure I understand what you mean.”

“Kasuka and I were a couple. She wrote Kasumi and Chelia using what I was like back then as inspiration.”

“……………………………………”

Itsuki spent a healthy amount of time scrutinizing Ashley’s words.

“…Ah-ha-ha!” After interpreting them as a joke, he choked out a laugh.

“What are you laughing about?”

“Oh, I thought you were kidding.”

“I wasn’t.”

“Ha-ha-ha!”

“I’m gonna get angry at you.”

“…Wait, really?”

“Yes.”

Itsuki tensed up his face as Ashley nodded. “You know,” he said, his tone dropping, “I really love Kasulia. If you don’t knock that off, I’m gonna get angry.”

“I can’t help you there. It’s the truth, so…”

“……Whaaa……?”

His face scrunched up, as he peered intently at Ashley. Her face was as dead serious as ever. The alcohol hadn’t made her incoherent.

“……Um……So…… Really?”

“Really.”

“……No way… Chelia… The best little-sister-slash-young-girl-at-school character…” Itsuki slumped over from the sheer shock of it.

An offended Ashley pouted. “You don’t have to act that depressed about it.”

“But, I mean, when I was in middle school, I used Chelia to get off a bunch of times!” he shouted with tears in his eyes.

It filled Ashley with a wicked joy.

“Hee-hee-hee… Well, why worry about it? You’re free to keep imagining me while you touch yourself in the future.”

“Never! …I mean, you’re a lesbian, Ashley?”

“No. Kasuka was the only woman I went that far with.” She gave him a sad smile. “Well, let me correct myself. She didn’t use me as a model for a character in Kasumi and Chelia. It’s more like she became a couple with me so she could write Kasumi and Chelia, if you get me.”

“Whoa, do you mean…? That’s just crazy…”

“She never hesitated to do crazy things for her novels. That’s the kind of ‘big sister’ she was.”

From the pure nostalgia in Ashley’s smile, Itsuki had to conclude this was the complete, unaltered truth.

“This Ninki-Ichi sake was Kasuka’s favorite, you know,” she said, refilling her empty glass. The brand name meant “most popular.”

“Oh, was it?”

“Mm-hmm. It’s a good brand, and good for the price, but the real clincher was the name—Ninki-Ichi. I remember she said, ‘I’m the most popular, most talented girl there is! This sake’s perfect for me!’”

“Yeah, I’m sure it brought her good luck.” Itsuki helped himself to a second serving. “So what was Sekigahara like?”

He had only met Kasuka Sekigahara twice—once at the party for GF Bunko’s 10th New Writers Contest that he had placed in, and once at the same event the following year. She was too ill to attend the 12th New Writers Contest party, and then she died on Christmas Eve that year. Itsuki had been too nervous to say much of anything to her, so he didn’t know a lot about her personality. With his experience, he knew full well how the afterwords of novels and interview responses on websites never necessarily reflected the author’s actual nature.

Midway through his question, Ashley reached for the bottle, only to realize it was empty. She stood up and took bottle number two of Ninki-Ichi from the fridge. Once her glass was full, she finally spoke again.

“Kasuka was… Hmm. If I had to use just one word, it’d be ‘sadistic.’”

“S-sadistic…?!”

It wasn’t at all the word he expected. In his mind, she had been a sensible, caring, mature woman—a genius, but not like Nayuta or Setsuna; the kind who treated her novels with care, worked as a novel contest judge, and contributed to cultivating the new generation of authors, right up to her death. Even looking back at the few moments he’d spent with her, “sadistic” wasn’t at all the impression he had.

“You look surprised.” Ashley laughed at his reaction. “What kind of impression did you have of her?”

“My impression was more of this…serious, caring, mature woman, I guess?”

“Pfft!” Ashley’s eyebrows shot up as she sputtered. Her shoulders shook, like she couldn’t contain her laughter. “Oh boy, you’re killing me. You think Kasuka was a…mature woman…? What kind of avant-garde joke is that? You could never find a more childish girl than her.”

She struggled to hold back the laughs as she drank her sake and gazed at the perplexed Itsuki.

“You know, Itsuki… If I was Chelia, then Kasuka was Kasumi. She loved picking on people. All the time. She’d be mean to me, she’d cause me trouble, and she’d act so genuinely gleeful about it. She’d get a lot nicer once I got genuinely mad at her, but she’d forget all about it overnight. And whenever I wanted to sleep with her, she’d deliberately leave me alone.”

“…”

The relationship Ashley described was exactly as depicted in Kasumi and Chelia. Itsuki’s mind was clouding with fog.

“Um…so how much of Kasulia is a true story? You guys weren’t in high school or anything.”

“Yeah, the school scenes were Kasuka’s invention…but whenever the two of them were flirting, most of that wasn’t fiction.”

“…So, like, the scene where Chelia is licking Kasumi’s leg…”

“Well, that much intimacy is a given between ‘sisters,’ right? Or couples,” she casually replied.

Itsuki, floored by this, recalled an even spicier scene.

“Ahh… Then how about when Kasumi was busy with schoolwork, and Chelia took off her panties to get her attention, so then Kasumi locked her outside on the balcony with no underwear on?”

“…Oh yeah, that did happen, didn’t it? Except it was novel writing, not schoolwork…” Ashley’s cheeks reddened.

“What about when Chelia lost a bet and had to act like a dog for a whole day?”

“…I’m amazed you remember parts that were only, like, a few lines in the books. Well, woof to that, I say.” She accentuated the revelation with a few more staccato barks.

“…Um… How about when they were both playing in the bathtub until the heat got too intense for Chelia and she had a nosebleed?”

“Ahh, I was so young back then. I was too out of it to remembermuch… The novel depicted it as this really touching, beautiful thing, didn’t it? And really, it was just a huge nosebleed, but when I read about Kasumi licking Chelia’s ‘crimson-stained bosom’ and all that, I have to admit, it made my heart race. That was the first time I thought ‘Wow, novel writers sure are something.’” She was talking in a torrent as her face reddened further, and she tried drinking to disguise it.

“…But she had to have made up that scene where they snuck into school and went skinny-dipping in the swimming pool, right?”

“Of—of course. It was actually a hotel pool, and we didn’t sneak in.”

“You’re not denying the skinny-dipping part…?”

“Well, I mean, nobody else was there, and Kasuka was all like ‘Oh, I always wanted to try this,’ so…”

“What’s it like, anyway? Swimming naked in a pool?”

“Oh, this happened in the winter, so it was cold. A swimsuit wouldn’t have made a difference.”

This scene was described in the most romantic of terms in the novel, including an illustration of the two lovers sharing a fantasy moment naked under the stars.

“This wrecks so much in my mind…”

“Hee-hee-hee! Sorry about that.” Ashley emptied her glass once more, taking bottle number three out of the fridge—not Ninki-Ichi this time.

“…You know, there’s another scene she wrote about that got cut from the final draft. I really liked it, too.”

“Oh, what was it?”

Itsuki, ever the curious fan of Kasuka’s work, couldn’t help but ask.

“It was a scene where Chelia goes on a date with Kasumi with a remote-controlled vibrator in her. Kasumi held the remote, of course. She’d press the button whenever Chelia was talking with a store clerk, or during a quiet scene in a movie or whatever, so I had my hands full keeping my voice down… Ah-ha! ”

“I’m glad that was cut!!”

These memories were starting to make Ashley all hot and bothered, if her breathing was any indication. Itsuki had to raise his voice to stop it. A high school girl—any girl—going on a date with a vibrator “installed” was inconceivable to him.

But here she was, recalling that episode with glee.

“…Ashley… Are you actually a complete masochist?”

The question had bothered Itsuki for a while now. He decided to come out with it.

“Hee-hee-hee…” The sake had clearly taken effect; she was looking drowsy. “Oh, I’m only an obedient little puppy for Kasuka, you know…” She sounded glad for it, although the sadness was still palpable.

“Really…? Because I’m starting to have second thoughts about Chihiro working for you…”

“Oh, it’s fiiiiine… Whenever she’s cold to me, it doesn’t get me excited at all! ”

“You sure…?”

Ashley kept up her drinking pace for some time to come, rambling on pointlessly in classic late-night fashion. Then, about four-fifths into bottle number four, her head finally fell on the table with a “fyaahhh…”

Itsuki, pacing himself much more sensibly, ate some more ryukyu as he watched her, a bit concerned. He had learned some things about Kasuka Sekigahara that’d be a revelation for any fan, as much as they wouldn’t want to hear them, and it came from a very unexpected source. He never thought his favorite character in one of his favorite book series was modeled after someone close to him. Masturbating to Chelia was never going to happen again in his life. It sucked.

“…”

He was sure there were more stories between Kasuka and Ashley, things not covered in Kasumi and Chelia. Itsuki probably wouldn’t learn about all of them, and he didn’t feel he had the right to. Ashley had her own story—one vital to her; one where she was the heroine. And not just her. Somewhere, somebody unknown to Itsuki—and thousands more like them—were engaged with their own shining tales. Just like Itsuki had his own to experience.

…What happened to “I want to be the hero”?

And once his slightly alcohol-dulled brain reached that thought—once he began to have serious, lethal doubts about the dreams that had supported him up to now—he left Ashley’s office.