Genius and Perversion

Itsuki Hashima’s apartment was on the second floor of a three-story building built ten years ago, your standard concrete-slab job with a kitchen, a bathroom, a single living area, wood-laminate flooring, and a washing machine. It was packed to the gills with a work desk, a foldable bed, a TV, a rather large kotatsu table, and a multipurpose metal bookshelf packed with books, CDs, video games, DVDs, board games, and figures, all organized with tender care.

The sheer volume of stuff made the place feel cramped, but for a man living alone, it was fairly clean and free of clutter. That was 100 percent thanks to the tenant’s brother, of course.

Being just a five-minute walk from the publisher of his novels (as well as ten minutes from the nearest train station) made this residence a popular hangout for the other authors who worked for the company. When he first moved in, Itsuki purchased a much larger kotatsu than he needed, and while he regretted it at first, figuring it’d be in the way, it was perfect for entertaining guests.

The writer visiting Itsuki’s apartment was using it right now, in fact, snuggling in to enjoy the heat it provided.

Nayuta Kani was silently reading a novel, face totally bereft of emotion. She was eighteen years old and beautiful, with silver hair and blue eyes that made her look like a sprite from a fantasy realm, and despite her diminutive height, her chest was fairly well endowed.

Nayuta Kani was her pen name. Not even Itsuki knew her real one. She’d made her debut a year ago, after placing in the same contest Itsuki had once won, making him a kind of mentor to her. Her first published title was The Silvery Landscape, an instant hit, and her popularity (and sales) rose with every new entry in the Landscape series. It consisted of four books by this point, and already they had sold well above everything Itsuki had in print put together. Taking your “mentor” and leaving him in the proverbial dust happened all the time in this business.

Nayuta and Itsuki first met at the awards party for the new-author contest, not long before she made her published debut. He had been talking with a few other writers, and Nayuta, aged seventeen at the time and one of the stars of the evening, was led over by her editor. Her lovely features blushed wildly as her eyes welled with emotion. Those eyes were planted squarely upon Itsuki, and the first words out of her mouth were:

“…I love you.”

Itsuki, along with everyone else in the group, did an immediate spit take.

“…Your work, I mean,” she continued.

“Say that first!” everyone commented at once. She didn’t let it bother her, at least not externally. Itsuki studied her face, a little dubious, as her fair skin gradually began to take on an even paler hue, and then:

“Hrgghhhhhhh…”

A reversal of fortune.

It was, for Itsuki, his first experience with an anonymous girl coming up to him and immediately heaving all over him. Or an anonymous anyone, really. Apparently, as he learned later, running into an author she respected so much sent her nerves into overdrive, along with her stomach.

Nayuta and her editor paid a visit to Itsuki’s apartment two days later with a box of chocolates and enough cash to cover the trip to the cleaners. He gladly accepted both. She’s got a good eye, he thought, appreciating the work of someone like myself. I’ll be a good mentor for her. I could write a nice blurb for the cover of her novel, or maybe we could have a little private writers’ workshop… Ah-hah-hah-hah-hah!!

He had believed he had the upper hand back then, and yet…

“I’m kinda hungry, Itsuki.”

Nayuta sounded totally indifferent as she lobbed a comment at Itsuki, who was sitting at his work desk. The clock showed seven in the evening.

“Yeah, maybe it’s about time for dinner. Anything you in the mood for?”

“I want your hard cock.”

“Oh, hey, there’s some leftover shrimp and fried rice Chihiro made for me yesterday. How ’bout we go with that?”

“…If you’re gonna ignore me, why’d you bother to ask?”

Itsuki took care not to look at the sullen Nayuta as he stumbled into the kitchen and moved a couple of plastic containers from the refrigerator to the microwave.

Soon, the two began eating around the kotatsu. Nayuta huffed and puffed to cool the fried rice down as she nibbled at it—almost like a cat, Itsuki thought.

“Hff, hff… All this delicious homemade food I get to eat by the kotatsu whenever I come to visit… Will you marry me?”

“Shut up, Kanikou. I didn’t even make this. Don’t you have a family to live with? If you want a home-cooked meal, go to them.”

“My mom’s out of the house a lot. She hasn’t been making food for us too much lately.”

“Oh? So learn to cook for yourself.”

Nayuta stared squarely at the once-again-overbearing Itsuki.

“…Like you know how to cook anything.”

“…Oof.”

Itsuki felt a bit pained at the idea of relying on his younger brother for the rest of his life. He thought he’d like to take over a bit of the cooking, and while he’d never actually do it, it was the thought that counted.

“Hey, look, if I had a god-tier sister like Kobato from Haganai or Komachi from My Youth Romantic Comedy, I bet I’d seriously wanna learn to cook for her, all right?”

“…You’re still that obsessed with little sisters, huh? How about someone a little bossier, like Kirino from Oreimo?”

“Yeah, sure. I’d love to cook a whole spread for her, but I wouldn’t. I’d much rather she pointed at me and went like, ‘You can’t even cook? You really are totally worthless!’”

Nayuta sized up Itsuki, rather impressed at the instantaneous reply.

“…You’re sick, you know that?”

“I’d like nothing better than a sister to infect me! …But seriously, my lack of a little sister pretty much lies at the core of my inability to cook or clean. Life would be totally awesome, twenty-four hours a day, if I had one. Where did I go wrong, I ask you?”

“…I guess you’ll have to ask your parents for a favor or two.”

It was the most realistic option, Nayuta figured. It made the normally loquacious Itsuki turn awkwardly mum.

“…That’s getting kind of…real, don’t you think? Could we, like, steer away from that?”

His father and Chihiro’s mother had been married for three years. They had a fine relationship; the wife was still in the prime of her thirties, and from a biological standpoint, it was entirely possible they could conceive a new son or daughter. But what if that did happen? How should he react? Itsuki wasn’t sure.

“You are such a pain sometimes,” Nayuta said, smiling gently as she shook her head a little. “How’s the work on your new series coming along? The one where your heroine isn’t a little-sister stereotype for a change?”

Itsuki had asked Nayuta to read through chapter 1 of Demon Hunter in Scarlet (final title TBD). She had loved it, begging him to let her see more as he progressed. But Itsuki just frowned in reply.

“Hmph… I wound up trashing it,” Itsuki replied moodily.

Her face flushed with surprise, Nayuta exclaimed, “Trashing it…? Why?”

“I finished chapter two, and that asshole editor of mine insisted that I do a rewrite. I wasn’t that enthusiastic about it in the first place, but if I have to do his bidding to keep my plotline going, I figured I might as well go back to square one.”

“…That’s a shame. It was neat, too.”

Nayuta looked honestly disappointed. It made Itsuki feel a tad guilty.

“…But if you look at it another way, I guess I’m the only person besides your editor who ever got to read that, aren’t I? Makes me feel like I’m someone very special to you.”

“Nah, I had Miyako and Haruto read it, too.”

These were both acquaintances of theirs.

“…So that manuscript was seeing other people? That skank.”

Nayuta pouted to herself a bit again before going back to her fried-rice-nibbling mission.

After hanging out and doing nothing long enough to miss the last train home (on purpose), Nayuta wound up spending the night in Itsuki’s apartment.

…I can’t believe how much I love Itsuki. Man, I wanna get down and dirty with him so bad. I wanna just…

She let her consummate powers of imagination as an accomplished author go hog wild as she took a hot shower, conjuring up images far too erotic for publication (or to even say out loud), and let out charming little panting noises as her face melted. It was no expression she’d ever dare to show anyone.

Nayuta had first become smitten with Itsuki at the age of fifteen, when she entered high school. She had been the victim of some vicious bullying at school, which kept her away for extended periods of time. Sometime around then, she happened to pick up his first book. Its story was a complete mess, a giant run-on mishmash scribbled off at breakneck speed, but it was packed with an unmistakable energy. From cover to cover, you could tell that the author truly loved his characters, believed in his plot, and was having too much fun writing it—and living life, for that matter.

The fact that the author was still in high school, revealed in the afterword, came as a shock to Nayuta. One sentence in particular had resonated with her: I’m not that gifted physically or academically, and I don’t have too many friends, but I have this habit of continually daydreaming during class, and eventually it led me to write a novel. It was a pretty innocent, artless thing to say, something Itsuki would never write now, but he brought honesty and modesty into that first piece of work.

In his own way, Itsuki Hashima taught Nayuta that even if you can’t find a place of your own at school, there’s a whole other world out there for you. It made her wonder whether she could turn out like him, too—and if she could, she wanted to, deeply. And thus, well before they met or even knew what the other looked like, she was smitten with him.

She then wrote her first novel, submitted it to the contest just like Itsuki, and won a prize, just like him. And that was all the motivation she needed to drop out of high school—a formality, really; she hadn’t attended in a long time anyway. The prize money, along with the royalties that came streaming in, she handed over to her parents, a token of thanks for all the trouble she had caused them. Even with her current string of hits and monthly paychecks reaching frankly unthinkable figures, Mom and Dad were still handling all her finances. Money didn’t matter to Nayuta—being together with Itsuki was what filled her with joy.

And if there was one great wish she had in the world, it was for Itsuki to finally accept her, fully and truly.

“…And instead all he cares for are these trite little-sister girls from his novels.”

Leaving the bathroom naked, her face buried in Itsuki’s boxer shorts as she took in the smell and the feel of the fabric, Nayuta sighed.

The noise from the running water made it hard to focus on writing, so Itsuki put on his headphones and cranked up the music to high volume. That, too, wasn’t very conducive to his creative juices. But it certainly beat imagining Nayuta naked.

Nayuta had first confessed her love to him on the occasion when she visited his apartment right after hurling on him.

“Ah, don’t worry about it. Everyone makes mistakes if they get butterflies in their stomach like that. I’m not the kinda small-minded man who holds a grudge over that stuff, ha-ha-ha!” he’d said after her apology.

Nayuta breathed a visible sigh of relief, then took an even deeper breath.

“Also, I love you, sir. Could we maybe be a couple?”

“Hyah! Hah…hah…urrp. Krpbbbhh?!”

The mask of the broad-minded published author peeled itself off as Itsuki completely lost all presence of mind in the most pathetic of fashions.

“Wh-what are you talking about, Ms. Kani?!”

Nayuta’s editor looked just as surprised at this turn of events. Nayuta didn’t let it faze her.

“Ever since I first saw your work,” she began, “I’ve always been in love with you. When I got to meet you at the awards ceremony, that made me realize how real that feeling truly was. It’s not that I love your work or that I love you as an author—I love you, Itsuki Hashima, in the romantic kind of way. I am infatuated with you. I need you to be my lover.”

Every piece of her body language indicated she was telling the unadorned truth. It made Itsuki fall into a panic. “…Um, um, l-let me think about it? A little…?” he managed to stammer as Nayuta was all but dragged out of the room by her editor.

Then he rolled into his bed and pondered over it, mind racing. This was the first time a woman had done anything like that to him. He’d never had a girlfriend before. To him, this was as life changing an event as winning that award. Nayuta wasn’t the little sister he wanted, strictly speaking, but she was beautiful and buxom, and being told by her that she loved him certainly wasn’t a depressing thought.

So, as he regained his composure over time, Itsuki’s mind quickly became tinted with shades of red and pink.

“Ohhhhhhh, maaaaaaaannnnn, what am I gonna dooooooo?! I mean, I know I don’t wanna lose my V-card to anyone except the person I marry, but… Pfft-hee-hee-hee-hee! We don’t really even know what we’re like or anything yet, toooo… It’s not just about your face or your body, riiiiight? There’s also, like, personality and stuff? It’s not like we can go out and, and, and start p-p-playing a-roouuund or whatever? We take it slow, get to know each other, and gradually get closer, right? That’s how it uuuusually works, um…?”

His eyes fell upon a paper bag on the kotatsu table with his publisher’s logo on it. It contained the box of chocolates and a single book from Nayuta—The Silvery Landscape, her first work, due out wherever books were sold the following week.

…I’m not a big fan of the cover art. The title’s pretty plain Jane, and based on the back-cover blurb, it doesn’t have a little-sister heroine or anything, so I’m not exactly thrilled about it. But maybe reading this will teach me a little about her…?

These were the types of feelings Itsuki had as he began reading through The Silvery Landscape. They didn’t last long.

“This… This is on a totally different level…,” he said, voice shaking, after finishing the book in a single sitting.

He then replied to Nayuta’s offer three days later.