"Uh…"
Oi oi oi — I'm a guy too, you know!
Shinomiya Shion! Don't push your luck!
The protest nearly clawed its way out of Kuroha Akira's throat — but right as his lips parted, Shion's bare foot descended into the narrow gap between his knees. A single, deliberate placement on the porcelain floor of the tub, toes curling against the slick surface, the arch of her foot grazing the inside of his thigh close enough that Akira flinched so hard the bathwater sloshed against the rim.
A warning shot. The unspoken message rang clear as a struck wind-chime: Move again, and the next step won't 'miss'.
Shion's expression in that instant mirrored Asato Hitomi's from earlier , where the curve of the mouth told you nothing about what lived behind the eyes.
"Akira-kun, you said it yourself, didn't you?" Her voice came out velvet-wrapped, every syllable enunciated with the precision of a seiyuu reading from a script. "'A Producer absolutely cannot lay a finger on the talent he's responsible for — that's the bare minimum. If you can't even manage that, you don't deserve to call yourself a Producer.'"
Word for word. Not a single particle out of place.
Her line-memorization had become frighteningly polished.
Even with the steam rising off the bathwater in lazy curls, even with the cedar-scented bath salts perfuming the air, Akira felt the temperature in his chest plummet. Goosebumps prickled along his forearms where they rested submerged. The contrast was almost dizzying — water hot enough to flush his collarbone pink, air cold enough that his breath fogged faintly when he exhaled.
"…Hai." He bit the word out through clenched teeth. They were his words. He had no escape route.
Shion shifted forward on her knees in the center of the tub, water rippling outward in concentric rings, lapping against Akira's chest. Her hands lifted from where they'd pinned his wrists and migrated upward — palms settling on his shoulders, fingertips cool despite the heat, leaving five small points of pressure on either side of his neck. Then she leaned in.
Her hair — that obsidian waterfall, damp at the tips and curling into spirals where the steam had gotten to it — slid forward and draped on either side of Akira's face. A curtain. A literal black-out curtain dropping over the world, sealing his field of vision down to a single subject: her.
Shion's beauty at this distance wasn't the kind that registered as a single feature. It was a layered assault — the faint flush spreading from her cheekbones down her throat, the way her dark lashes still held a few unshed beads of water, the small mole just below her left ear that he'd never noticed before, the soft puff of her breath against his upper lip carrying the faint mint of her toothpaste. Her lips, parted just enough to suggest a smile that wasn't quite innocent, were close enough that Akira could count the chapped flecks at the corner of her lower lip.
He swallowed. Audibly. Gulp. The sound echoed off the tiled walls like a sound effect cued in by a sadistic director.
"In that case…" Shion tilted her head, her hair sliding across his cheek in a slow, deliberate caress. "Even in a 'really, really bad-looking situation' like this — as long as the person with me is Akira-kun, then I'm 'absolutely safe', ne?"
"…I won't do anything to you. I swear it."
A vein ghosted up at Akira's temple, pulsing visibly. His eyelid twitched once, twice. He was clamping down on something with every ounce of mental discipline a his former adult-life had taught him. Form is emptiness, emptiness is form, the Heart Sutra exists for a reason, Buddha please lend me your strength right now—
Enlightenment was, frankly, within arm's reach.
"Mm. And I believe in Akira-kun — my responsible, dependable Producer." Her smile sharpened a few millimeters. "So why are you trying to scoot away?"
"…"
She knew. She knew why, and she was asking anyway. This was the classic onee-san trap — the cat batting the mouse around for sport, even though the cat in question was, technically, still a maiden untouched by anyone but her own hand on a bottom bunk.
"Ara-ara… could it be…" Shion lifted one hand from his shoulder and pressed it theatrically to her mouth, eyes going wide in mock-realization, the gesture lifted straight from a third-rate josei manga. "Akira-kun, are you scared? Scared you won't be able to hold back? Scared you'll do naughty things you shouldn't? Fufu~"
The fufu was the killing blow. The fufu had teeth.
"H-haha, no way! Don't be ridiculous!" Akira forced out two dry laughs that sounded, to his own ears, like a cicada dying in August.
Self-inflicted wound. Hoisted on my own flag, like a doomed side character in episode three.
The phrase rang in his skull with the clarity of a temple bell.
Somewhere in the last forty-eight hours, Shinomiya Shion had molted. The shy, kuudere-flavored girl who used to hide behind her bangs had cracked her chrysalis open and emerged as something else entirely — a full-bloom, nine-tailed temptress in human skin, the kind of character who'd headline a late-night anime with a content warning before every episode.
"Now, before I scrub your back, please stay right there, Akira-kun." Shion settled back onto her heels, the water rising and falling around the curve of her hips. "The tub isn't too small for two people, is it?"
"…"
She was, technically, exercising restraint. Only her hands were on him — palms light on his shoulders, thumbs resting in the hollows above his collarbones. Her hair brushed his cheek with every small shift of her head. That was it. That was the entire surface area of contact.
But it was enough. The strands of her hair were soaked at the tips and they kept dragging tiny wet trails across his jaw — sssh, sssh — like a brush teasing ink onto paper. Each pass sent a current down his spine that pooled somewhere it absolutely should not have been pooling.
Shion knew exactly what she was doing. She'd run the calculations. Going full throttle right now would trigger Akira's defensive instincts and send him bolting out of the bathroom in nothing but a towel and shame. So she was nibbling. Mini-bites. Death by a thousand soft strokes.
Her love-drunk brain, now augmented with cold rational calculation, was producing tactics that would've made Sun Tzu close the book and applaud. Akira was a high-INT, high-WIL target — straightforward seduction would bounce off him like a Level 1 spell off a final boss. Half-measures were useless. Shion had logged enough hours observing him to know this.
So instead of trying to swallow the whole fried tofu in one bite — instead of risking the cooked duck flapping off the plate — she would inch forward. Convert his own words into ammunition. Use his philosophy against him, jujitsu-style.
If he refused to touch her — fine. She'd simply maneuver him into letting her touch him.
She'd already memorized the script. Every line. Every comma.
"Akira-kun, I remember you said this once." Shion's voice took on the cadence of a recitation, eyes half-lidded with that infuriating little smile. "'A Producer is someone who steps in whenever you need them. Pouring tea, fetching water, massaging your feet and legs — whatever you need, I'll do it. Treat me like your servant if you have to. Your health and condition come first, before anything else.'"
Verbatim. Down to the rhythm of the pauses.
"…You really remembered all that, huh."
Of course I did. Every word you've spoken to me, I've kept in here, where it can't escape.
Shion had figured out Akira's deadliest weapon long ago — his mouth. She couldn't out-argue him in a fair fight; she'd lose every time and come away convinced she was wrong. The only person capable of cornering Kuroha Akira was Kuroha Akira himself. So she'd turned him into her ventriloquist's dummy. His own words, boomeranging back to smack him in the forehead.
"So, Akira-kun… right now, my body has a spot that's feeling really uncomfortable. Could my Producer help me with it?"
"Eh? You're not feeling well? Where? What do you need me to do?"
The naive idiot actually leaned forward an inch in genuine concern, brow furrowing. He thought she meant a cramp. A sore shoulder. Maybe a headache from the heat.
He had no idea he'd just bitten down on the lure.
"You see, Akira-kun…" Shion's voice dropped half an octave, the smile curling slowly at the corners. "Girls have desires too. Stronger than boys', actually. Bottling them up all the time… it's really bad for the health."
"Wa— wait wait wait wait! You can't— this isn't— this is going somewhere weird—!"
Akira's pupils were visibly vibrating. The girl in front of him was radiating an aura that registered, in his lizard brain, as a Class-A predator alert. Somewhere along the line the roles had swapped. He was no longer the producer babysitting his talent. He was the bunny in the headlights.
"Fufu, relax, Akira-kun, don't get so worked up." Shion's tongue darted out to wet her lower lip — a tiny pink flash that nearly broke him. "I'll preserve my 'value' as an idol-artist. I won't cross the final line. As long as the outcome is that I remain a virgin, it's fine, right? Results-only — wasn't that your favorite philosophy?"
"Uh…"
Results-only theory — his own go-to fallacy, the one he wielded like a katana to justify all manner of operational shortcuts. He could not, in good conscience, deny it now.
"And… don't think I don't know." Her smile widened, took on a glint that was equal parts mischief and genuine want. "Akira-kun, when you suddenly get up to use the toilet — or when you take a long shower — you're handling your own urges too, right? It used to be once every two days. Lately it's been once a day."
"Hi-!" Akira sucked in a sharp breath through his teeth, a chill skating from the nape of his neck all the way down to his tailbone. Shit— she's been counting?!
And then — terror compounded — Shion tipped her chin up, eyes glittering, and self-detonated.
"Don't be embarrassed. I do it too. On the bottom bunk. And I, ah… I borrow your pillow. And your blanket. Sometimes both."
"Y-YOU—!"
"Akira-kun has no right to criticize me, you know? Because you have a 'collection', don't you?" Her voice was honey now, but her eyes were laughing. "And recently you added another piece. Compared to the white one I borrowed from you before — the new one is the same color, but the cut is much plainer. Has Akira-kun's taste gotten… more wholesome lately?"
"Gu—!"
Akira made a sound that wasn't a word in any registered human language. The two pairs of panties stashed in the shoebox under the bottom bunk — those existed in a Schrödinger's-box state of plausible deniability, and Shion had just collapsed the wave function with surgical precision.
"So right now, I urgently need a 'body pillow' to suppress these increasingly inconvenient urges of mine." Shion leaned closer, her breath fanning warm across his collarbone, her hair sliding down to curtain them both as her thumb traced a slow, devastating circle over his pulse point. "My dear, dependable Producer-san… won't you please help me?"
"…"
Akira could not produce a single syllable. Could not assemble vowels into a counter-argument. Every rhetorical move he'd ever made had been pre-loaded into Shion's chamber and was now being fired back at him in rapid succession — pan, pan, pan — each shot landing in the exact same hole.
Having cracked his character open like a soft-boiled egg, Shion was now seasoning him with his own salt.
She was just too good at this. The girl had read the entire instruction manual, highlighted the important sections, and was running the speedrun route.
Shion's free hand drifted down beneath the waterline. Akira felt her fingertips skim the side of his ribcage — light as a moth — and then settle, palm flat, against the taut plane of his stomach just above his navel. The muscle there jumped under her touch, an involuntary twitch that betrayed everything.
"Mm," she breathed against his ear, low and delighted, "Akira-kun is so honest down here."
Her hand slid lower by one fingerbreadth. Just one. Stopped. Waited.
The bathwater rippled around them, lapping rhythmically against the tub's edge — chapun, chapun — and somewhere in the distant living room the wall clock ticked over to midnight, a soft chime cutting through the steam.