Chương 236: 93. Obvious Romance 1

By the time Maki and I actually showed up at the mess hall entrance, I had entered a state of near-transcendence. Not calm. The kind of thing that happens after social death — your soul briefly vacates the body, hovers three meters overhead, looks down at you, and thinks, with perfect serenity: Ah. So tonight I'm here for a public execution.

Maki walked beside me, pace steady as always, expression as flat as always, uniform collar impeccably straight — like the person who had pressed me into the mattress and kissed me until my brain shorted out, and had come within half a minute of being walked in on in the middle of something considerably worse, was simply not her. I looked at her once. Then again. Finally I gave up.

"How are you this calm?" She didn't even turn her head.

"Because running now would look more suspicious."

"... You call this calm? This is called going down with the ship."

"Not the same."

"How is it not?"

"I'm managing my expression." Right. She wasn't even pretending to be unaffected. She was just managing it well. Which was somehow more infuriating than if she'd actually been fine. I was still trying to come up with a response when the doors slid open. And I immediately understood what a coordinated group hunt looked like. Because that table had been arranged with intent.

Not "happened to sit together" — they'd claimed the longest table in the center of the room and very thoughtfully left the two most conspicuous seats open. D was on the outer edge. The second he spotted us, his eyes lit up like someone had just wheeled out an endangered species for his personal viewing. Harvey had been mid-soup. He looked up, then immediately looked back down, shoulders shaking with the same rhythmic frequency as an engine-room cooling pipe. Roy was the cruelest of all. He didn't laugh.

He just patted the two empty seats beside him with a solemnity that was somehow worse than open jeering. And Jess — Jess hadn't said a word. She didn't have to. That smile had already written an entire novel's worth of mockery. Not an ordinary smile — the corners curved at exactly the right angle, the eyes bright at exactly the right level, and nothing said yet, but the message perfectly clear: She is not letting me leave tonight intact. I stopped at the edge of the table and genuinely considered turning around.

"Is it too late to bail?" I muttered to Maki.

"Yes," she said, flat.

"How do you know?"

"Because Jess is waiting for you to sit down before she fires the first shot."

"... You can predict that too?"

"Is it hard?" I closed my eyes. No. It really wasn't. Because the second I sat down, Jess smiled.

"You made it." Two words. Nothing else. Delivered with all the energy of welcome, newlyweds, please take your seats. I set my tray down, trying my hardest to look like a person with basic social functionality intact.

"Where else would I be? You came to get us for dinner, didn't you?" Jess propped her chin on her hand, smiling with a gentleness that had clearly been weaponized.

"I was worried you'd be too busy and forget to eat." D immediately choked on his water. Harvey buried his face in his hands. Roy quietly bent over his plate and started cutting his meat, radiating I am not participating, but I know everything. My temple throbbed.

"Jess. I'm warning you right now."

"I'm being perfectly restrained," she said, entirely without shame.

"I even knocked before I asked if you wanted dinner." D finally gave up and collapsed onto the table, laughing.

"That was not knocking — that was walking in to inspect the results—""Shut up!" Jess and I said, at the exact same moment. D blinked. Then laughed harder.

"See?! That kind of sync rate is exactly—" Roy shoved a piece of bread in his mouth.

"Eat." Harvey made a valiant attempt to restore peace, and immediately made it worse.

"I mean — it's fine, we're all friends, and these things happen—" I turned to look at him. He went quiet for two seconds, then said, with genuine contrition, "Sorry. Pretend I didn't say that."

"That pause sounded a lot like you were about to say 'walking in on that kind of thing is completely normal.'" His ears went red.

"That's not what I meant." If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

"Then what did you mean?"

"I meant — at least you two have good, um — communication—" D swallowed his bread and jumped in on cue.

"Very efficient communication." My fork nearly bent in half.

"Are all four of you trying to die tonight?" D clutched his chest, looking wounded.

"Why am I included? I didn't do anything." Roy, serene: "You're the ringleader." Harvey, very quietly: "And you laughed the loudest." D spun to look at him.

"You're betraying me?"

"It's not betrayal," Harvey said, pushing his cup aside, voice extremely honest.

"It's survival." Ash, from further down the table, had been quiet the whole time. Now he added, light but precise:"Honestly, you two still have some conscience. Jess is the actually dangerous one." Jess raised an eyebrow and finally let her gaze drift from my face to Ash, slow and unhurried.

"I haven't even said anything."

"The smile is enough," Ash said. Lan added, without looking up:"And the quieter she is, the worse the next line usually is." That was accurate enough that I almost wanted to applaud. Unfortunately, I was currently the crime scene. Applause felt inappropriate. Maki, through all of this, was actually eating. Not performing calm — genuinely eating. Picking up food, drinking soup, cutting her meat, unhurried, even sliding the salt shaker a little closer to me when it drifted out of reach.

As if the whole table was throwing a bonfire in my honor, and she was simply enjoying the warmth from beside it. I turned and glared at her.

"You could say something." She finally looked over.

"What would you like me to say?"

"Anything that gets these people to shut up." She thought about it for one second. Then, perfectly level: "Talking too much while you eat is how you choke." The table went quiet for a beat. D exploded first.

"Hahaha — Maki, that's not a rescue, that's holding someone underwater and telling them to learn to swim—" Roy didn't bother with bread this time. He just hit D on the back.

"Laugh any louder and you'll be the first casualty tonight."

"I'm not wrong!"

"You haven't been right since we walked into that room." Harvey tried very hard to steer things back to neutral ground and drove straight into the fire pit instead.

"Actually, what I'm curious about—" he started, then stalled, apparently realizing too late this wasn't safe either, but unable to abort now, "—is whether you two... after we left... did you—" I raised my head slowly. His voice shrank.

"... finish whatever you were doing, before dinner?" Dead silence. Then D slammed the table.

"Excellent question! That's exactly what I wanted to—""SHUT UP!!" Not just me this time. Roy shouted it too. Caught between the two of us, D finally had the sense to close his mouth, even miming a zipper across his lips. The problem was that even with his mouth shut, his face kept talking. Loudly. That was when Jess finally moved. Or rather — struck. She set her fork down gently, smiled with particular softness, and looked at me.

"Shimo." My scalp prickled. If she used my full name, I could brace for it. Going straight to Shimo meant she wasn't after ordinary damage. She was aiming for the head.

"... What." Her eyes curved.

"I'm actually a little disappointed."

"In what."

"I thought," she said, pausing, sweet enough to be poisoned, "you'd at least be too embarrassed to show up for dinner." I gritted my teeth.

"Why would I be embarrassed? I didn't do anything wrong." She raised an eyebrow.

"Oh?" D leaned in with a tone entirely unsuited for a dinner table.

"So you're saying this was fully justified conduct?"

"D, say one more word and I'm pouring this soup on your head."

"See," D said, spreading his hands at Roy, "that reaction usually means I hit the core of it." Roy, expressionless: "No. That usually means you're about to die." Harvey looked like a man who wanted to intervene but couldn't bring himself to step into the ring, his whole face reading I should not be at this table. Ash maintained a very healthy spectator's posture, sipping his soup, dropping the occasional line with unsettling efficiency.

"I think Shimo's actually showing a lot of restraint," he said. I started to nod. His next line sent me straight back down.

"If it were me, walked in on like that, I'd have already filed for a cabin transfer." Thank you. That understanding was entirely unnecessary. Jess kept smiling. Infuriating, but not pure malice — more like she knew exactly how badly I wanted to disappear into the floor, and kept poking at me with a small stick anyway, watching for the moment I'd finally snap. The worst part was she wasn't only watching me. She was watching Maki. The whole time.

Waiting to see if she'd crack, explain herself, or let the table's noise shake something loose. But Maki was infuriatingly, almost abnormally steady. No denial. No explanation. No snapping back. No deliberate distance between us. She just sat there, ate, drank, and when I nearly dropped my fork in agitation, slid the napkins toward me without being asked. That kind of steadiness didn't read as avoidance. It read closer to a quiet admission. The dangerous kind. Right as I reached for my glass, Jess spoke again.

"Still," she said, slow, "I have to give you credit." I looked up, wary.

"You've got more nerve than I expected tonight."

"... Meaning?" She propped her chin on her hand, gaze direct.

"I figured after getting walked in on, you'd spend at least three days too scared to sit next to Maki." The table went a shade quieter. Not because it was loud — because it landed too accurately. Even D, chronic interrupter, just looked at me without cutting in. My hand stopped on the glass. Maki turned to look at me then. Just a glance. Brief. But it still landed somewhere in my chest. Because Jess was right. I really had expected I wouldn't be able to.

At least to want to hide, to avoid it, to shove tonight into the deepest drawer in my head and pretend that if I didn't touch it, it would somehow become less real. But here I was. Maki was here. We were even sitting side by side. I set my glass down.

"I thought I would too." Jess blinked, like she hadn't expected that answer. Honestly, neither had I. But once it was out, something in my chest loosened a notch.

"But hiding wouldn't have helped," I said.

"It's not like any of you were going to let it go anyway." D nodded immediately.

"That's true."

"You should nod less right now."

"I'm supporting you this time!"

"Your support gives me the same blood pressure spike as an incident report." Roy finally bent his head and laughed, quietly. Harvey exhaled, visibly relieved this particular public execution wasn't going to escalate into an actual homicide at the table. Jess watched me, and her smile thinned just a little. Not gone — just carrying something else underneath the deliberate poking now. Something like confirmation. Something like relief. Something like a reluctant admission of whatever she'd just seen.

That was when Maki delivered the most lethal line of the night. She set her fork down and said, completely level:"Besides — Shimo's skin was never that thin to begin with." I froze. Jess burst out laughing. D slammed the table. Harvey folded over his plate. Roy gave up trying to look serious and covered half his face with one hand, shoulders shaking visibly. I turned to stare at Maki.

"Whose side are you on?!" She gave me a mild look.

"I'm just stating a fact."

"You've been on a truth-telling campaign tonight!"

"Mm."

"You're admitting it?!"

"Because everyone else was too." She was broken. Something had genuinely come loose in her today, and whatever the usual emotional compression was, she'd apparently decided she didn't feel like sealing it back up. That was more terrifying than any amount of table-side ribbing. I wanted a hole in the floor. Preferably one that led straight outside the hull, so I could weld myself back into place afterward.

The second half of dinner stopped being about food entirely and became a shared project in poking at me without getting stabbed. D and Harvey ran a two-man act — one talking nonsense, the other landing cuts with excessive honesty. Roy intervened sometimes, gave up other times. Ash and Lan were the type who rarely struck, but never missed when they did. And Jess kept that infuriating, precision-honed smile the whole time. Glancing at me. Glancing at Maki.

Occasionally dropping one lazy line that dragged whatever shame I'd just managed to bury right back out into the light. The most absurd part was that somewhere in the middle of it, I noticed something: for all the fire Jess kept throwing, she never actually pushed it all the way over the edge. She always stopped half a step early — like it was deliberate, like she wasn't actually trying to break me, more like she was waiting for me to say something myself.

And Maki, beside me, stayed unnervingly calm the entire time. Calm like an accomplice. By the time dinner finally ended and I stood up, my legs were unsteady. Not from exhaustion — from surviving something harder than a zero-G repair bay: a full-table psychological welding session. Right as I got my hands on my tray, ready to flee the scene, Jess called out behind me.

"Shimo." I turned. She was still in her seat, chin in hand, watching me. The smile had gone a little softer. Still irritating. Just — softer.

"What." She blinked, slow.

"If I walk in again tomorrow, at least lock the door first." The table went silent. The next second I had my tray in hand, fully intending to introduce it to her skull.

"JESS!!" She laughed and ducked back. D nearly fell off his chair. Harvey grabbed his cup and shrank sideways. Roy dragged people back, muttering that she really did save the worst line for last. And Maki, standing beside me, laughed. Just once. Low and brief. Short enough to be an illusion. But I heard it.