Accidentally in Love (Complete) [Hikigaya x Miura] [OreGairu]

Bribery Is a Kind of Love, Too

We continued to show up to the Planning Committee meetings after that, with Yukinoshita having seemingly tamed the Three Stooges since last time, but to no avail. We never found anything that might've shown Yukinoshita and Hayama shared any kind of special relationship. During the meetings, they didn't treat each other favourably over anyone else, and they never really gave off the impression that they were even particularly good friends. Outside of meetings, the two of them behaved exactly as we expected. Yukinoshita didn't have much time for the Service Club anymore, but she still dropped by our classroom occasionally to say a few words to Yuigahama and berate me for my dead fish eyes—or just my entire face, really—when she had the chance. Hayama was doing Hayama things as usual, and spent practically all of his time outside the Planning Committee with his clique of asshole friends. Neither of them went out of their way to talk to one another when they didn't have any cultural festival business to discuss. We never saw them spend much time together alone.

In other words, Miura's plan proved to be a total waste of time. She'd forced me to spend my otherwise peaceful afternoons sitting through boring Planning Committee meetings and filling out useless forms I didn't care about, all so we could learn that there was, actually, nothing going on between Hayama and Yukinoshita at all. That didn't faze her though, because she kept insisting that there was something we were overlooking, and that we needed to stay in the Planning Committee to find out what.

And that's how we ended up in the local Chiba library that weekend to work on the script for the performance Miura was in charge of. I originally didn't want to come, but Miura insisted that I was a loner with nothing better to do with my life so following her for a day was at least not a total waste of my time. I was sure she was wrong, but I didn't have any friends to prove it, so that's how I found myself sitting down at one of the tables in the middle of the library as I watched Miura get to work.

The library was mostly empty that day. It was small for most libraries, but large enough that you thankfully didn't have to sit near anyone when you wanted to sit down to read a book. There were probably seven other tables around us in the desk area. One of them was occupied by a boy and a girl sitting practically right next to each other while reading from the same textbook. They were also occasionally whispering things to each other and giggling about it. I designated that table in my mind immediately as the Danger Zone, because every time I looked over at that table I grew more and more tempted to strangle the two of them and anyone else who tried to sit there for daring to think they had any right to act like a couple in public.

Miura was unfazed. She worked on the script that day slowly, but gradually, demonstrating the kind of focus and self-restraint I didn't think was even possible from her up until that point. She would look up occasionally to ask me what I thought of this or that, but it never seemed like she paid any attention to anyone or anything else around her. After a while she handed me the script she'd been working on to hear my thoughts. It was a story of this pink dinosaur who somehow found himself transported to modern day Japan. The dinosaur never liked how pink he looked, and always wanted to be as big and scary as the other dinosaurs he grew up with. The story recounts his attempts to scare the children of a local daycare centre but failing because they find him too adorable to be scared by. Eventually, he realises he enjoys playing with the children more than trying to scare them, and enrolls at the daycare as their resident pink dinosaur mascot to put his talents to better use in cheering the children up every day. All in all, it was a nice story with a sweet ending.

"So? What... do you think?"

"I hate it."

"H-Huh?! What?! Why?! What's wrong with it?!"

"The dinosaur is too nice. And the ending is too happy."

"What does that, like, have to do with anything?!"