The narrow lane cut between aging apartment blocks like a scar through concrete, leading toward a squat public restroom tucked into the corner where two alleyways met. Fluorescent light buzzed behind frosted glass above its entrance, casting a sick yellow rectangle across the pavement. The air carried the mineral tang of old pipes and wet stone, layered beneath the fading grease-smoke from someone's dinner drifting out of a cracked kitchen window three floors up. Cicadas had gone quiet. The whole backstreet sat empty—residents sealed inside with their evening rice and evening television, leaving the lane to shadows and the two of them.
Sasaki stopped a few meters from the restroom entrance and turned.
Ruri stood behind him with her thighs pressed tight together, jaw locked so hard the tendons in her neck stood out like wires. Her face had gone a shade of red he'd only seen on festival lanterns—deep, humiliated crimson spreading from her cheeks down past her collar. Both hands balled into fists at her sides, knuckles pale.
She's been holding it since school ended. That's almost forty minutes.
Sasaki tilted his head, studying her with the kind of expression a cat might wear watching a mouse try to squeeze under a door. "Sato-san… don't tell me you already—"
"I did NOT!" She nearly shrieked it, voice cracking at the peak before she caught herself and dialed down to a furious hiss. "You—you pervert! I'm just tired! Who told you to drag me that fast?!"
Her denial landed about as convincingly as a confession.
"Because I was worried you couldn't hold it much longer," Sasaki said, spreading his hands in a gesture of pure, selfless concern. The smile on his face told a different story entirely.
If I don't stop rising to his bait, I'm going to have an aneurysm before graduation. Ruri sucked a breath through her teeth, held it, and released slowly. Her legs hadn't unclenched once.
"Hmph. Garbage in, garbage out.." She lifted her chin, mustering every scrap of composure left in her body. "I'm going to the restroom. Don't follow me, or I'll scream and someone will call the police."
She genuinely suspected he might trail her inside. The warning felt necessary.
Ruri turned and took one step—then froze.
Heat flooded her face all over again. She looked down at her right hand, still wrapped inside his left, fingers laced together so naturally she hadn't even registered the contact. His palm was warm and dry against hers, slightly calloused along the base of his fingers.
She whipped around, glaring. "Let GO!"
Sasaki didn't release her hand. Instead, his expression shifted to something studiedly serious—brows level, mouth set in a thoughtful line, like a teacher about to deliver an important life lesson.
"Sato-san, this is technically our second date, and neither of us has given the other a single gift. Don't you think that's a little strange?"
Ruri blinked. Her urgency battled her confusion and lost by a narrow margin. "We're just classmates. You don't need to give me anything."
"Give you—?" Sasaki looked genuinely baffled for half a second, then laughed once, short and bright. "Sorry, I think you misunderstood. I wasn't talking about me giving you a gift." He pressed his free hand flat against his chest. "I meant you haven't given me one yet."
Ruri's whole body went rigid.
He's… asking ME for a gift?!
The audacity hit her like a truck—like one of those absurd Isekai scenarios where the hero gets obliterated by a speeding vehicle, except instead of being reborn in a fantasy world she was stuck in this miserable alley with him.
Shameless. Absolutely shameless. He's worse than every scummy protagonist in every harem manga ever printed.
Her expression cycled through disbelief, outrage, and a grudging, exhausted pragmatism in the space of three seconds. She'd spent two days learning how Sasaki Fuyumi operated. He never let go of something once he bit down. Compared to whatever other humiliation he'd cook up, buying him some token felt like a bargain-bin escape route. And she was about thirty seconds from a catastrophe.
"Fine," she bit out. "What do you want? I'll buy it."
"Anything at all?" His eyes lit up. Bright. Eager. The gleam of a fox who'd just heard the henhouse door click open.
Ruri didn't catch the cunning buried in that shine. Her bladder screamed louder than her instincts.
"ANYTHING! Just say it fast!"
Sasaki's lips curled upward at the corners—slow, deliberate, savoring.
"Well, since you insist, I won't hold back." He squared his shoulders and adopted the solemn tone of a man making a formal request. "What I want… is Sato-san's panties."
The word detonated in the silence between them.
"…What?"
"You didn't hear me? I'll say it again." He leaned closer, voice dropping to a murmur that was somehow worse than shouting. "I want Sato-san's panties. Right now. The thought that they've been pressed against your skin all evening, still carrying your warmth and your scent—" His gaze locked onto hers, dark and unwavering. "—I can barely contain myself. Hand them over."
As long as I'm not the one embarrassed, the embarrassment belongs entirely to her.
Ruri saw something in his eyes she couldn't dismiss as a joke—raw, focused want, steady as a held breath. He meant it.
This absolute DEVIANT—!
Her entire body trembled. Crimson swallowed every visible inch of her skin from hairline to collarbone. Shame pressed against the inside of her ribs like a hot iron.
What does he even want my underwear for? He's not going to—do something with them, is he?
Unbidden, images flickered through her mind—Sasaki pressing fabric to his face, inhaling, eyes half-lidded—and her brain short-circuited so violently she nearly bit through her own tongue.
"ABSOLUTELY NOT!"
"You literally just said 'anything,'" Sasaki countered, tone mild, reasonable, infuriating. "panties qualify as a gift. Unless you're going back on your word?" His grip on her wrist tightened—not enough to hurt, just enough to remind her it existed. "Because if you are… then I suppose I can't let you use the restroom, either."
Every hair on Ruri's body stood on end.
He wouldn't.
She searched his face. He absolutely would.
He's holding my bladder hostage for my UNDERWEAR. This is—this is a war crime. This violates the Geneva Convention. This violates basic human decency. This—
A savage cramp rolled through her abdomen without warning. Ruri gasped, knees buckling inward, thighs clamping together so hard her calves shook. The pressure behind her navel reached a white-hot crescendo that turned her vision spotty at the edges. Sweat prickled along her hairline, and the chill night air made it feel like ice water.
Sasaki watched her with open, fascinated amusement. "Getting tough, isn't it? Just agree to give me what's mine and you're free."
"You're—despicable—" The insult came out strangled, half-sob, half-snarl. She tried to wrench free and couldn't. Her eyes stung. Her lower lip quivered once before she crushed it between her teeth. "FINE! I'll do it! Just—let me GO—please—!"
The instant his fingers loosened, Ruri shot toward the restroom like a bottle rocket—sandals slapping concrete, arms pumping, hair streaming behind her in a dark ribbon. She vanished through the doorway so fast the fluorescent light above it swung on its bracket.
Sasaki exhaled and scratched the back of his neck.
…Okay. Maybe that was a little much.
Guilt pricked at him—faint, quickly rationalized. The alternative route had been to follow her inside the women's restroom and sample what the system's tooltip had delicately called her "holy water." If he'd done that, Ruri wouldn't just hate him. She'd have flung herself off the nearest bridge.
Every choice the system offered sat somewhere on the spectrum between "terrible" and "catastrophic." All he could do was pick the option that left fewer psychological scars. And ignoring both routes entirely? He didn't dare test what kind of punishment that triggered.
---
Several minutes passed. A moth orbited the fluorescent tube above the restroom door in dizzy loops. Somewhere distant, a train horn lowed.
Ruri emerged.
Her expression was complicated—a dozen competing emotions fighting for control of her features and none of them winning. She walked toward him with the careful, measured steps of someone navigating a minefield in house slippers.
Sasaki extended his open palm.
She stared at it. Then at him. Then back at his hand.
I can't believe I'm doing this. I genuinely, sincerely, from the deepest pit of my soul cannot believe I am doing this.
Her jaw tightened until the muscles jumped. She raised a clenched fist, held it over his waiting palm, and opened her fingers.
A pair of panties dropped into his hand—black fabric patterned with delicate butterfly embroidery, the material impossibly light against his skin. Warmth radiated from the cloth. Faint, unmistakable warmth, carrying the subtle, intimate scent of her body—something clean and slightly sweet beneath a whisper of soap, threaded with something earthier, private, undeniably her.
Sasaki glanced at them once. He didn't inspect them, didn't lift them closer, didn't linger. He folded the garment with careful, precise motions—once, twice—and slipped it into his jacket pocket without ceremony.
Ruri watched every movement with an unreadable expression, her lips pressed into a bloodless line. But something in her shoulders loosened by a single, barely perceptible degree.
He didn't look. He didn't… do anything weird with them. At least he left me that much dignity.
"All done." Sasaki's mood had visibly brightened, a satisfied ease settling across his features like sun breaking through overcast. "Let's go. I'll walk you home."
Ruri remembered, with a start, that she still needed to get home. She drew a long, steadying breath, pushed every shred of the last fifteen minutes into a locked compartment at the back of her skull, and fell into step beside him.
They left the backstreet and returned to the main sidewalk. Streetlamps pooled amber light across the pavement at even intervals. The evening air had cooled further, carrying the green smell of trimmed hedges from the residential lots and the distant, metallic bite of the rail yard. Their footsteps fell into an uneven rhythm—his longer stride, her shorter, quicker steps—and neither spoke.
---
[Residential avenue, approximately 100 meters from Sato Ruri residence,]
After roughly another kilometer, Sasaki recognized the row of mailboxes and the low stone wall marking the approach to Ruri's neighborhood. Less than a hundred meters remained.
He stopped walking.
Ruri drifted another half-step before halting too, gaze distant, thoughts clearly elsewhere—replaying the evening's indignities in some endless, masochistic highlight reel behind her eyes. Lamplight caught the curve of her cheek, the slightly parted line of her mouth, the loose strands of dark hair stirring against her jaw in the breeze.
Sasaki opened his mouth to say goodnight.
The system pulsed behind his eyes.
「Route One: Steal a kiss while she's distracted.」
「Route Two: Produce the panties in public, wear them on your head, and shout a confession at full volume.」
This poor girl. Truly, the universe has it out for her.
Sasaki offered a single, silent moment of entirely insincere sympathy—then selected Route One without a flicker of hesitation.
He stepped forward, closing the distance between them in one fluid motion. His fingers found the underside of her chin—thumb and forefinger framing the delicate bone—and tilted her face upward.
Ruri blinked. Her eyes were wide, glassy, still half-lost in whatever spiral she'd been drowning in. She stared at him the way a deer stares at oncoming headlights—frozen, uncomprehending, lips slightly parted on an unfinished breath.
God, she's beautiful.
His heart slammed against his ribs hard enough to bruise. He could smell her this close—the clean warmth of her hair, the faint sweetness of her skin beneath cheap floral shampoo, the ghost of something sharper where exertion and adrenaline had mixed. Her lower lip trembled, still damp where she'd bitten it minutes ago.
Sasaki clenched his jaw, leaned in, and pressed his mouth to hers.
Her lips were soft—impossibly, achingly soft—like the skin of a ripe peach, faintly cool from the evening air but warming instantly under the pressure of his. He kissed her without gentleness, without asking, claiming her mouth with a rough, consuming hunger that surprised even him. His thumb pressed into the hinge of her jaw, holding her still, and he felt the tiny, involuntary sound she made vibrate against his lips—a stifled "mmph—!" that was equal parts protest and something she'd never admit to.
Her first kiss. Mine too, technically. Neither of us is going to forget this.
Ruri's eyes blew wide open—irises contracting to pinpricks, every muscle in her body locking rigid. His lips moved against hers, tasting her, and the sensation crashed through her nervous system like a surge of electricity shorting every circuit at once. Outrage detonated in her chest. Terror followed a heartbeat later. And beneath both, coiling low in her belly like smoke—something warm, something startling, something she refused to name.
Her fingers curled into the front of his jacket, knuckles white, and she couldn't tell if she was trying to push him away or pull him closer.