Date Her Instead Vol. 1

Chapter Eleven: A Study Of The Heart

It was a couple weeks later when a dreaded announcement was made to all of the students of Iwanai Municipal High School: the following week, Monday, June 3rd to Friday the 7th would be midterms. Groans, worry and panic sounded off in every classroom, filling the hallways with a very dampered mood.

However, while some students felt confident in their abilities and others wondered how they would squeeze a half-term's worth of information into a few days of study, Chiyo's mind was somewhere else entirely. It had only been recently that she had been able to have a thorough conversation with Akio, to which she had had every single one of her questions answered. Once her curiosity had been sated and she understood Akio's true motivations, Chiyo was more than happy to help in his efforts to get Kanako and Haruna to not just fake it, but to actually date.

The only condition that had been placed upon Chiyo was that she wasn't allowed to tell anyone about the real reasons for Akio's deal with Kanako and Haruna. As long as she didn't say, she had free rein to do anything she thought would help move things along.

It was certainly a situation that Chiyo had never found herself in before. In the past, it hadn't been uncommon for girls to ask her to set up mixers or to introduce one of them to some guy she knew. Chiyo had enjoyed her little role of matchmaker, so she had been looking forward to high school so she could continue her efforts. Unfortunately, it was during junior high that Chiyo quickly gained a reputation as someone who would sleep around, so by the time high school came around, the only true friends Chiyo had were Haruna and Jasmine.

It wasn't like this reputation that she had garnered was anything new to her. In fact, Chiyo's sex life ended up being one of the main reasons she was dragged from her hometown of Tokyo all the way up to Iwanai.

Chiyo had known that Iwanai (and Hokkaido as a whole) was much, much smaller than Tokyo, but she hadn't quite grasped how different they'd be until she was living there. While living in the big city, it was near the end of her middle school days that she had been tasked setting other girls up with guys due to her social skills. Through those times, Chiyo discovered how much she enjoyed sex from some of the guys she left with. When some other girls at her old school found out about her actions, they called her names and tried to bully her. Chiyo's other friends didn't do much to help her out either, and it didn't take long before the situation in Tokyo escalated so much that Chiyo's parents were called. When they found out what was going on, they were furious, and immediately had Chiyo sent as far away from Tokyo as they were capable of. And that, happened to be Iwanai.

She had tried to do some of the same things that she had done in Tokyo, but it was within weeks that Chiyo found herself isolated from all of her other classmates. There was no having fun and going out together and there certainly were no mixers with her involved.

But now, she had finally been given a chance to help bring two people together, and not just any two people. Two girls. It was a type of relationship Chiyo had never really given much thought to, but she didn't find any problems with it. And in the case of Haruna and Kanako, it just made sense to her after hearing Akio's full explanation.

There was one problem though: the two girls weren't even on speaking terms. It was a similar situation to what they had been in before, but it used to be that whenever they ran into each other, an argument would burst out. Now, whenever Haruna and Kanako even saw each other, they just went different ways, and if that wasn't an option, they avoided each other's gaze entirely. "I understand Kana-chan's actions, but who would've thought Haru-chi would act so tame?" Chiyo thought.

It seemed to Chiyo that after Kanako had told Haruna she hated her, it was as if a switch had flipped inside Haruna. Sure, she still was insulting toward Kanako, but they lacked the same bite that they used to have and certainly lacked frequency. On top of that, it almost felt like Haruna was fixated on trying to find some way to mend the damage that had been caused. Chiyo had asked her about it recently, but Haruna insisted it was only so she could restore her chances with Akio.