My girlfriend was looking frightful, almost like she was trying to shoot sers with her eyes at the locker she was using to store her things for PE.

  Today she had a heavy set of dark circles under her eyes, was uncomfortably flushed while her lips looked quite pale, and despite being clearly tired, she had her eyes so open, you could see the whites of her eyes around the whole iris. Even I was reticent about talking to her, but there were other matters contributing to the fact.

  “It really sucks, huh?” Mathilda said in a louder than normal voice. “Having to do PE in one of the hotter days of the year.”

  Violet finally blinked before looking at her for a moment as if she was only now catching up what our friend spoke.

  “Yeah,” she agreed, pausing unbuttoning her shirt to rub one of her eyes with the back of her hand. “I’d sit this one out if it wasn’t the first real css of the year.”

  I too would prefer it, but with how things were between us, I didn’t want to risk annoying her. Especially because it was mostly my fault that things were like this. It was already Friday after all…

  “Don’t get mad at me for saying this, but wouldn’t it be better if you did?” Mathilda asked, reaching out and touching Violet’s forehead. “You think so too, don’t you, Abby?”

  “Yeah,” I said, taking the chance to express my opinion on the matter. “You were walking a bit wobbly as we got here too.”

  “Haah, I’m fine,” Violet said as she removed Mathilda’s hand from her forehead. “Nothing that a good night’s sleep won’t fix.”

  “Is the heat still getting to you?”

  “Not as much the heat,” Violet said with another sigh. “The fan Abby got me is doing wonders at keeping me retively cool and doing so in a quiet way… I just seem to not be able to get a wink regardless…”

  Because she was missing me. So was I missing her. If only I was brave enough to call out to my sister while at home. I probably didn’t even have to say all that much to start, a simple “how’s your report going?” should be enough to show sis that I was open to talking. Such a simple thing, and yet…

  “…How about we have a girls-only sleepover?” Mathilda suggested with a smile. “At my pce of course. You could share a bed in a room with AC!”

  Violet looked at Mathilda as she tried to see if she was teasing us or actually being serious. She was being honest in her suggestion.

  And while I looked to the right in her direction, something caught my attention from the corner of my eye. Looking at it, I was just in time to see the girl Violet had bumped into gring at my now naked girlfriend before realising my stare and turning forward.

  What’s her deal against Violet anyway?

  Could it be that Violet once did something to offend her? I could see it happen. Like, maybe that girl—Vanessa by the way, tried talking to Violet and caught her in a foul mood or just got an awkward answer that came out as aggressive. Violet certainly didn’t know who she was. In fact, I don’t think she even remembered Vanessa being in the same css as her, a fact that made Vanessa’s antipathy towards her somewhat comical.

  Maybe Mathilda knows her?

  She was the Miss Socialite of us, her table always surrounded by people in the morning as we arrive.

  …My girl’s hair kinda works as a sensor bar from the back.

  We didn’t have time for me to braid it, so she came with her hair loose. Beautiful to look at, but once she sat down, it’d be midway into brushing the floor and being a general nuisance to her.

  “I guess that’d be fun,” Violet said. “But not this weekend. Abby and I are to spend the weekend together to make up for the rest.”

  I nodded at Mathilda from the background and feeling butterflies in my stomach. You see, to make up for all the time and crap Violet had been putting up with, I made huge pns to make it big! If things went my way, by the end of Sunday, I should have provided Violet with enough rexing, love and amusement to st for the whole other week.

  “Aww, that’s so nice!” Mathilda fawned as she swayed around. “I can’t way to do stuff like that! You’re going to tell me all about it on our sleepover, right?”

  “We’ll… we’ll think about it…”

  “Girls, listen!” a cssmate shouted from the entrance of the changing room we were in. “At least two girls passed out from the heat, so the school decided to put PE csses on hold for now!”

  Some girls cheered while a few protested the fact that we were only told after many of us had changed. My girlfriend was in the tter group.

  “Tsk! Couldn’t they have told us sooner!?” she grumbled as she pulled her t-shirt colr to make some air pass through. “I dirtied it with sweat for nothing.”

  “Well, since we have to get naked again, might as well take the opportunity and take a shower,” Mathilda suggested.

  “…I don’t have a towel though…” Violet told her, sounding like she was menting it.

  That wasn’t a problem because Mathilda had a spare one she could use while I had the one I used at the gym, a bit tiny, but it’s not like I’m a big girl, so it was more than enough.

  Violet voiced a couple of conditions though, and I think you can guess what they were: the other girls had to have already left before she stripped into her birthday suit and Mathilda couldn’t look at her without a towel on.

  “Oh, but Abby can?”

  “Remind me again, which one of you is my girlfriend?” Violet asked, showing that she wasn’t enjoying the joke one bit.

  Normally, Mathilda would have joked that she had already seen Violet only in her knickers, so what was the problem in seeing her without them too, but she saw that would be dangerous and that I too was giving her clear signs not to let her eyes drift or linger where they shouldn’t. Not that I minded Mathilda taking an innocent gnce. It can happen after all, Violet is very pretty and has many eye-catching features. What I’d take issue with was if she kept staring.

  The room quickly vacated, and we got to it. Turns out, Violet didn’t have to worry about Mathilda because I was the one who ended up staring at her. All it took was the brief moment of Violet moving her hair to the front so she could wrap the towel around her back for my eyes to lock on her butt… and stay there even after it got hidden under the towel and her hair.

  She sure is pretty.

  A strange realisation to have about someone I loved for basically a whole year, but there I was, thinking that while staring at her rear like a perv.

  “You’re staring too much,” I heard Violet say as her hand touched my chin and lifted my head up. “We are still at school too.”

  “…Sorry,” I said, probably turning beet-red.

  She looked over her shoulder to see if no one could see us before leaning down and nding a super nice kiss that made my body fre up and chest to flutter.

  “Let’s keep the rest for tomorrow’s date, ok?” she told me with a soft, purring voice.

  It wasn’t just me eager for the weekend. I knew that very well even before she kissed me and said that, but seeing her show it despite how tired and out of sorts she was made me really happy.

  “…You two kissed, didn’t you?” Mathilda asked as we joined her in the showers after taking a quick gnce of our faces, always the eagle-eye when we are talking of these matters.

  “W-what of it?!” Violet said, far more embarrassed for having been caught than actually being mad at Mathy.

  “Speaking of what-of-its,” Mathilda said, now taking a more serious tone as she looked at Violet with a hand raised to obscure everything that wasn’t the face. “What’s up between Vanessa and you?”

  As to be expected, Violet frowned and asked who that was. And to be as expected even further, not even being described how Vanessa looked in painful detail was enough to spark any recognition.

  “The girl you bumped into,” I told Violet, doing my best to not get distracted by her charm. She was rubbing her fingers into her scalp, making it look like a model from one of those shampoo commercials.

  “The girl I bumped into…? Ah! You mean, that girl I bumped into on the first day?”

  My poor girlfriend’s brain is all fried up from the heat, isn’t?

  “Yeah, that one.”

  Knowing now who Mathilda was talking about wasn’t enough for her to shed her confusion. Somehow, she was both super self-aware of others’ stares and being completely oblivious to them.

  Both of us were just as confused as to why Vanessa would be disliking Violet that much and shared that confusion with our friend who told us she’d ask around to see if she could dig up anything.

  “You really don’t have to,” Violet told her before leaning her head back and letting the water hit her face. The sigh she let out was very simir to the ones she does when she’s had a bad day and gets to snuggle me. It wasn’t just her body healing from the heat, it was her soul too, huh?

  “Fufu! You’re looking a lot better already,” Mathilda giggled as she observed her. “Or is it just wishful thinking?”

  She changed her attention towards me, not bothering to obfuscate her field of view she simply looked straight ahead, letting my head exist in her peripheral vision and nothing else. I agreed with her, but even after that, she still looked down directly to me and kept her eyes on my face. I think she was aware that things weren’t super great between me and Violet. She certainly was acting like she was trying to get us to talk more, which made me realise that we haven’t talked all that much during the past week.

  I’d like to say that wasn’t a bad thing, but… Is it pessimistic if I say otherwise? Not that we argued when we did talk, but… yeah, something was missing. A certain sense of… proximity?

  She looked worried and interested, so maybe I could just give Mathilda a call tonight?

  …Yeah, I think I will.

  Mathilda would love to lend me an ear, and getting these feelings out of my chest would help me in giving Violet a better time on tomorrow’s date.

  It was dinner time, and I was staring bnkly at my dad after he asked me something I was too distracted to hear.

  “Is everything ok between you and Violet?” my dad asked a second time. “I haven’t seen her around her this past week.”

  “Yeah, things are fine,” I told him as I tried to act normal. “We’ve just decided to try not to be so clingy with one another.”

  “…Is it because of your sister?”

  I tensed up, momentarily forgetting that she wasn’t with us at the table but locked inside her room instead, just like in the past couple of days.

  Then, I rexed and decided to expin him what was really going on. About the part of Violet not coming over I mean. I didn’t feel comfortable in sharing my retionship issues with my dad when he was best friends with my girlfriend’s dad too.

  “Hmm… While I think that might be a good idea, I can’t say that I agree with the application,” he told me before putting a slice of stake in his mouth and chew, me waiting for him to swallow and hear the expnation I was going to get. “While I agree that it’s best that Sophie doesn’t see you… acting like you do, all the time, I also think that not seeing you two together at all will help.”

  “You don’t?”

  “I don’t,” he said with a headshake and leaning over the table, elbows on its surface and hands csped in front of his face. “I think it’d be good for her to see that you two have a very good retionship and how happy you are around her. How else do you expect her to grow accustomed to your retionship?”

  Violet and I had thought that by not rubbing it in her face, we’d show her that we were normal and it wasn’t just a physical thing, but none of us thought about it the way dad did. Have we been going about it in the wrong way?

  “…Don’t you think I should ask Sophie if she’s comfortable having Violet around first?”

  My dad got back to his usual sitting position to resume eating. He told me that, even if Sophie weren’t, he very much doubted she’d tell me not to bring Violet over.

  “…”

  I knew that much, but a part of me wanted to hear something different. Even so, I was thankful for hearing his opinion, and his words gave me food for thought. Maybe when Sophie and I had our first proper conversation, I’d ask her if Violet could come over a few times a week. Perhaps even, if she could stay the night when she came? That’d do wonders to both our morales while giving sis and Violet plenty of time to get to know each other. The question then would be if Violet could bury the axe because I knew full well that she wasn’t a fan of Sophie.

  Since dad and I were done with dinner, I told him I’d take care of the dishes, but he told me to go rest or do something fun instead. In response to that, I hanged from one of his arms until he took the hint and lowered his head so I could give his face a smooch. Kinda prickly, the complete opposite of Violet’s skin, and when I commented that, he compined that he almost had to shave twice a day.

  “You could always try waxing,” I told him as a joke.

  “Is that the good you wish your dad?” he chuckled, leaning into the joke. “Are you going out?”

  I was, but just outside our apartment door. Since Sophie was staying right next to my room and the conversation I wanted to have with Mathilda was sensitive, I thought that was the best choice.

  Once outside, I pulled out my phone and took a seat on a step before calling her. After three rings, I heard her voice on the other side being silly.

  “Good evening! You’ve just called the erotic line ‘Velvet Fantasies’, how can I help you?”

  “Your sexy voice sounds too nasally,” I told her in a deadpan way, reminding me of how Violet would react to this. “It sounds more like you’re with a heavy cold.”

  “Tsk! And here was I thinking I had it nailed. Anyway, what’s up girlie?”

  To begin with, I asked if she was free to talk right now. Not only she was, but Mathy was also dying to know why I had called her and urged me to spill the beans.

  I told her about my problem, going into more detail than with dad, Mathilda interrupting me here and there when she felt like she needed more details or something better crified.

  “Hmm, no wonder you two looked so down tely. That situation really sucks.”

  “It sure does. Any idea what I could do to make things better for Violet?”

  “Dunno… Maybe tell her the same you told me and ask her to also share her thoughts and feelings? Also… is it really necessary to be so strict? I mean, spending little more than an hour together after csses hardly sounds like enough, especially if the two of you are always worried about the time.”

  Yeah, I fully agreed with her st point. We, Violet and I, thought of it as a necessity so Sophie wouldn’t think we were neglecting school over dating, but it was proving incredibly hard to enjoy our time together when we were always checking the clock. It had also been feeling worse and worse because the feeling of unfulfillment was growling with each passing day. Maybe with tomorrow’s date things would normalise, but a voice inside me told me that I should know better. This hasn’t been all that different than the time mum grounded me after I defied her and forced me to only have a couple of hours free each weekend to be with Violet.

  “Haah… the more I think about it, the more stupid I think we were,” I grumbled as I rubbed a clenched fist against my forehead.

  “Well, for now just focus on having a nice date tomorrow. Depending on how you two are feeling after that, maybe talk with her about making adjustments to your current pn.”

  “Yeah, you’re right… thanks for listening to me.”

  “Fufu! You’re welcome! As payment, hmm, let’s see… Ah! I know! Sent me a pic of you two tomorrow! A cute one!”

  I’d see what I could do, but I crified that it mostly depended on Violet’s willingness to getting her picture taken. I had a good feeling she would, but I’d only be sure once I id my peepers on her.

  I tried asking her if she made any progress with Stephen, but she told me not to worry my head about stupid boys and to go do whatever it is people do the day before a date and kinda finished the call abruptly afterwards. Not to worry, I thought, we were going to have a girls’ sleepover next week so I’d grill her over the details then.