Nayuta Kani, Hard at Work

It was the evening of Nayuta Kani’s third day at the hotel her publisher’s editorial department set up for her. Miyako Shirakawa was paying a visit after Nayuta had invited her over for some dinner.

This was a “business-plus” room inside a hotel about a five-minute walk from the nearest rail station. Whenever a writer requested (or was forced into) an isolated room to focus on a deadline or other issue, this was usually where the publisher put them.

As hotels go, it was a notch below five-star but not by a long distance. The kinds of rooms publishers reserved for such things was said to represent the company’s position in the industry; Nayuta’s was a solid performer in the light novel market, certainly, and her hotel room reflected that. If she worked for a real first-class industry leader like Shogakukan Gagaga Bunko , she could’ve expected a swanky penthouse suite [Not true.—Editor].

This service wasn’t provided to just any writer, though. It was reserved for the big guns, the novelists who would impact finances for the whole year depending on whether they produced a new book or not. Writers who didn’t fall into that category would be brushed away—“Garbage like you should know that they don’t deserve the ritzy hotel life on the publisher’s dime! You wanna hole up in a room, we got the perfect spot for you!”—and tossed into a basement cell under the editorial office, equipped with a desk, a sleeping bag, and a camping toilet. There, they would live out the rest of their natural lives or until they had a manuscript to submit.

Miyako, wholly ignorant of all this, was impressed. The publisher gives them a hotel to live in? Writers sure have it pretty good! she marveled as she walked past the fairly fancy front desk and stepped into the fairly fancy elevator.

In another moment, she was down the fairly fancy hallway and knocking on a fairly fancy door. They had stayed in a cramped low-budget hotel during their Okinawa trip a while back, and during her high school class trip they all piled into a bare-bones Japanese-style ryokan, so even less-than-five-star was an unfamiliar world to a college student like her. It made her nervous.

“…?”

Several knocks in a row produced no response. Checking the room number one more time, she tried again. Nothing.

“Nayu? It’s me!” she called, knocking a bit more loudly. After a while, there was a click and Nayuta popped out from the door—completely naked.

“Oh, hey, Myaa; c’mon in.”

“Huh?! Um, okay,” Miyako said as she hurried inside. “Nayu! Why aren’t you wearing anything?!”

“I was in the middle of work,” Nayuta reported.

“Oh… Wait, so what does that have to do with it?! Why’re you naked?!”

“Didn’t Itsuki tell you? I can’t write novels unless I’m in the nude.”

“Huh?!”

Miyako’s look of horror indicated she had no idea what this was about. Nayuta pouted, frowning at her.

“It’s thanks to this curse that I can’t live with Itsuki right now…and there’s nothing else to do in here, so I’m working.”

“Oh…okay…”

She was aware that Nayuta wasn’t exactly normal, and she also knew that Nayuta loved finding any credible excuse to take off her clothes. She didn’t comprehend any of it, no, but Miyako decided Nayuta probably wasn’t making this up.

“I’ll get to the end of this part I’m working on in a moment, so could you give me just a little bit more time?”

“Um, sure…”

The naked Nayuta stretched her legs out in the middle of the double bed, placed her Pomera in the space between her knees, hunched in front of the keyboard, and pecked away. Her face was resolute, serious, nothing like the spaced-out look she usually sported. Combined with the lack of clothing on her, it formed the basis for a work of fine art. Now Miyako understood why knocking didn’t do anything. The level of focus was obvious even to an external observer.

So this is how Nayu works…

Miyako stood there for a while, taking in the sight. The only sound that echoed in the room was the brisk noise of the keyboard—and then, out of the blue, Nayuta stopped and looked at her friend.

“Myaa!”

“Oh, sorry if I broke your concentration.”

“Huh? No, not really. But I wanted to ask…”

“Sure, what?”

“Let me fondle your boobs for a second.”

Nayuta stared solemnly at her.

“Whaat? Wh-why?!”

“I’m writing this scene where boobs are being fondled, so I wanted some reference.”

Miyako’s face instantly reddened. “N-no way! Plus, don’t you have your own? Like…way more impressive than mine…?”

Nayuta took that cue to immediately start rubbing and kneading her own breasts. “Mine are too jiggly. It’s not the right feel for the character on the receiving end in this. But yours are just right, Myaa.”

“Oh…”

Miyako approached Nayuta, still looking incredulous.

“…Well, go ahead. Have at it.”

“Oh, um, not with your clothes on. Au naturel.”

“Au naturel?! That… That’s, like, not allowed, even!”

“Please, Myaa?”

Nayuta never looked more earnestly serious in her life.

Those blue eyes, betraying not a grain of ill intent, bored into Miyako, making her reconsider. They were both women; they had both gone to the public bathhouse together. Plus, Nayuta was nude already. Maybe a little hands-on wasn’t any kind of big deal after all. That—and considering how many readers Nayuta had and how much she had to care for all of them, there were likely hundreds—maybe even thousands of people out there willing to do anything to help Nayuta Kani with her novels.

Perhaps Miyako had no great talent, but now, she was being asked to help Nayuta with her work over several hundred thousand of her readers. And she hated to admit it, but it filled her with a masochistic sense of ecstasy.

Face red, she murmured, “O-okay… Fondle away, then…”

“Thank you so much!” Nayuta smiled broadly.

“Well…let me get this off…”

Steeling her resolve, she tossed off her top, followed quickly by her bra.

“I like how you just whip it off, Myaa.”

“…Look, just for a little bit, all right? And not too rough, either!”

Miyako straightened up, chest out, hiding the nerves that were making her tremble.

“Right. Here we go.”

She grabbed both of Miyako’s breasts at the same time, hard, and began violently massaging them this way and that.

“Nh…!”

Greeted by the unfamiliar sensation of having her breasts handled by someone else, Miyako kept herself from speaking out loud as she looked at Nayuta. The novelist was experimenting, adjusting her force and prodding from assorted angles, sometimes just pushing down with a flat palm. Then, she nodded to herself.

“Hmm… All right. I think I understand.”

And then she went back to writing.

“You understood what…?”

The confused Miyako, still topless, looked down at Nayuta. She was back in a trancelike state, tapping away at the keyboard—but after a couple of minutes, she stopped.

“Whewwww,” she sighed deeply, her reddened cheeks giving her a bit of a coquettish look.

“N-Nayu…? Are you done?” Miyako timidly asked.

Her friend burst into a contented smile. “Um, yeah. I’m finished describing the boobs part of it. It turned out really great, I think, so thanks, Myaa.”

“Yeah…? Well, great. But…the boobs part?”

Miyako had a bad feeling about what Nayuta would say next.

“Next up is your butt.”

“Y-you’re really going too far now! I’m not going to show that to you!”

“Please. You’re the only one I can turn to for this, Myaa. Please let me fondle your ass.”

“Ugh…”

It was hard to resist when Nayuta asked like that.

“Do…do you want that au naturel, too…?”

“…Would that be bad? Can you do au naturel…?”

Nayuta looked at her like an abandoned kitten.

“Uggghhh… Just this once, all right?!”

And so Miyako undid her skirt and shorts.

“All right! See?”

Nayuta stared intently at the lower half of Miyako’s body, almost wholly naked.

“…Myaa, if we’re going this far, we might as well go all the way. Can you take off your socks?”

“What d’you mean, ‘might as well’?!”

Miyako was greeted with a quizzical look from Nayuta. “No, I mean… Being totally naked except for your socks? It just feels like a halfhearted effort. It’s gross.”

“…Oh, right, you were a fan of Itsuki’s books, weren’t you…?”

Whenever characters in Itsuki’s books went naked, they always went 100 percent of the way. Off went their socks, their gloves, and any other equipment they might’ve had on. Miyako pointed it out to him once, remarking that he could at least leave the socks on, but he had been seriously adamant on this point: “No, that’d be superfluous… Actually, it’d be downright barbaric. Like drowning a grade-A steak in sugary syrup.”

Occasionally this would earn Itsuki criticism on the net, with reviewers writing things like “This author doesn’t understand the concept of fetishism at all.” It made him fly into a rage every time: “These people don’t understand what being fully nude truly means! Being fully nude means being fully nude! The complete picture, with nothing left missing! The concept of ‘fully nude’ while wearing socks or gloves cannot logically exist! These idiots need go to back to kindergarten and figure out how language works, goddammit!!”

“So what about nude except for a hairband?” Miyako then asked.

“Oh, that’s fine,” he replied.

“How is that different?”

“Um… When it comes to 2-D characters…if you change their hairstyles, it gets hard to tell them apart a lot of the time…,” he had shamefully admitted.

“You writers really are a bunch of sex-obsessed crazies, aren’t you…?”

Back in the present, Miyako had just removed her shoes and thigh-highs, making her fully nude for the first time.

“Here I go, then,” the equally nude Nayuta said as she grabbed at her rear end and wordlessly started to feel it up. This time, there wasn’t that weird pleasant feeling Miyako felt with the breast attention—just a bare realization that Hmm, yeah, someone’s bouncing my ass around.

What am I even doing…?

Having her rear end groped and prodded was beginning to raise serious questions in Miyako’s mind about her life.

After around half a minute of this simulated molestation:

“……………Hmm…”

It ended, much more quickly than the breast workout.

“…?”

Is she done? Miyako wondered, puzzled.

“…I guess I didn’t need the butt after all,” Nayuta whispered, her voice frigid.

“Didn’t need it? You stripped me naked…!”

“Oh, no, I didn’t mean I had any complaints about your ass, Myaa. It just didn’t feel all that different from me groping my own ass, so I guess I didn’t need to do research on you, too, is all.”

“Oh…”

Miyako wouldn’t have known. She hadn’t engaged in comparative ass-groping so far in her life.

“Oh, well. Hey, Myaa…”

“…?”

Nayuta’s eyes turned elsewhere, as did her hands.

“Oof!”

“…Angh?!”

Suddenly, she began touching Miyako’s legs.

“Ooooh… Look at this…!”

“Wh-whoa! What are you doing, Nayu?!”

“Your legs sure are pretty, Myaa. They’re so thin, but healthy, too. All bursting with energy but no extra meat on them. Do you play some kind of sport?”

“…Well, sort of, yeah.”

“What do you do?” Nayuta asked, briskly petting Miyako’s legs. It made her restless. She wanted to make noise, but she resisted.

“Anh… U-umm, I did karate as a kid, up to age fourteen, and then I played tennis…nh…and then basketball in high school.”

“Wow. Pretty athletic girl, huh?”

“…I wasn’t really good at any of it,” Miyako said with a self-deprecating smile. She had been pretty passionate about the karate she’d learned, starting in elementary school. Her sensei said she had a talent for it, so she kept it up in middle school, but she quit after the friends in her clique said a girl who did karate would seem too violent to be popular. So she followed them to the tennis club—she didn’t care that much about being popular, but getting kicked out of their little group scared her. Then, when she went into high school and got a new set of friends, she was invited into the basketball club by some fellow beginners.

She had always been fast on her feet, so both tennis and basketball came naturally to some extent, but never up to the level of someone who dedicated themselves fully to it. Whenever she went to a tournament, it’d be full of people even better than the best people in her school. So she gave up on that, reasoning that reaching their level would be impossible for her. Instead, she just sweated it out with her own friends, having a decent enough time at it.

And it wasn’t that she regretted her choice. But she couldn’t but think every now and then about what she’d be like right now if she listened to her sensei and didn’t quit karate all that time ago. Maybe she’d be a full-fledged athlete by now, appearing in national tournaments. Or maybe she’d have given up the moment she faced an opponent with more talent and ability than her.

…Or, faced with that disadvantage in talent and ability, maybe she would’ve kept moving forward, unwilling to give up.

Miyako had no way of telling now, so she had no way of understanding Itsuki, either. He was surrounded by dozens of authors with more talent, ability, and profit-making skills than him, but as a professional writer, he never threw in the towel. It was hard for Miyako to imagine what kind of heart that took.

What am I even doing…? Miyako thought again.

“…Hyah?!”

She was brought back down to earth by Nayuta, who had gotten out of bed in order to walk up to Miyako and lightly nibble at one of her nipples.

“Wh-what’re you…? What’re you doing?!”

“You looked kind of down, so…”

“…I was just thinking about something for a second. Don’t worry about it. And how does looking kind of down connect to biting my nipples…?”

She tried to change the subject, realizing that her face was starting to feel hot.

“All right, Myaa, can you lie down on the bed for a second?”

“…?”

Miyako did what she was told, relaxing on her back. It was comfortable, much softer than the bed from that Okinawa hotel.

“Is this good?”

“Yeah.” Nayuta nodded, before jumping on top of her.

“Wh-whoa?! What’re…?!”

Miyako struggled as she felt herself being pushed into the bed. Nayuta’s ample breasts took up most of her vision. “Mee-yow,” she sweetly cried as she got even closer.

Legs, stomachs, hips, arms, breasts—flushed skin touched against flushed skin as they basked in each other’s temperature. To Miyako, it felt almost like she and Nayuta were melting into the same consciousness. She began to wonder—if just connecting body to body made her like this, what would happen if they were more deeply connected? It made every part of her ache.

“Nha…nn…!”

“Ah, I see, so this is how it feels…”

Even as Miyako started to lose her breath, Nayuta remained perfectly calm, as if on the edge of a great discovery.

“Okay, could you go on top of me next, Myaa?”

She removed herself from Miyako and lay down on her back. “Come on,” she said, spreading both arms wide to invite her in.

“M-me…?”

She took the invite, willing to do just about anything now as she went on top of Nayuta.

“Aha… This really does make your heart speed up.”

Nayuta observed the blushing Miyako’s body.

Being studied like this was embarrassing for Miyako, so she brought her face as close to Nayuta’s as she could. Her friend’s beautiful eyes, pale skin, and moist lips were right before her eyes. Just another couple inches, and their lips would be touching. What did someone else’s lips feel like…?

“Um, Myaa…”

Nayuta moved her head back, a bit bashfully.

“No kissing, um… It’d be my first, so…”

“I’m not! I’m not kissing!” Miyako stammered as pulled her head back. “…Hey, this is a situation you need for your novel, right? Don’t middle schoolers read those? It’s kind of too graphic for them, isn’t it?”

“This isn’t for that, no.”

“Huh?”

Nayuta gave a bashful, but cute smile. “This is just a simulation for whenever I get to have sex with Itsuki.”

“…! Don’t use me for that!”

Miyako practically shot out of the bed.

Nayuta sat up and started fidgeting with embarrassment.

“Aw, but Myaa, you’ve got so much experience, and I’m still a virgin, so whenever Itsuki decides to push me into bed, I don’t know if I could keep from going crazy.”

“…I swear…”

Miyako sighed.

Here was this girl, bewitching thousands of readers with her overwhelming story talents, stirring up the emotions of Itsuki and so many other, less gifted people around her (Miyako and friends included), but she still sometimes acted like a totally sheltered little girl. It was so cute, she could hardly stand it. Maybe, she thought, this was why the little-sister trope was so popular.

You really wanted to give a girl like this something. Not because Miyako felt inferior to Nayuta, but because she had a real, pure fondness for her. Or so she wanted to believe.

“Myaa, how was it when you had sex for the first time?”

“Wehh?! M-me?!”

“Yeah,” the curious Nayuta asked her flustered friend.

“W-well… I mean, the first time, I was really nervous…but, you know, things kept going along, and it turned out okay, I guess?”

“Oooh… That’s how it works out, huh…?”

“Yeah, um, you’ll know what I mean when it happens to you, Nayu…heh… Ha-ha-ha…”

“I see. Fascinating.”

Nayuta gave the borderline-incoherent Miyako a look of sincere respect. It only made Miyako feel guiltier.