Tennis no Ojou-sama: A Prince of Tennis Fan Fiction

CHAPTER 136: The Problem of Secret Dating

Flashback on the night after Ryoma and Ryouko went to Den's tennis dome and commemorated the fateful beginning of their 'formal dating' period, Ryuzaki Sakuno had went to her bestfriend, Osakada Tomoka's home for a sleepover. The sleepover was requested by Tomoka for she had been dying for company after spending day in and day out caring for her younger brothers, sending and picking them up from daycare and keeping watch on the house and store for three days straight.

Right after the disaster of Ryoma refusing to take Sakuno's bentou during one of the days that Fujioka Ryouko went missing, Tomoka's mother had a minor accident while working in their small grocery store and ended up hurting her back. She had to be hospitalized for several days for stabilization and better recovery. To compromise to her absence, Tomoka had to stay at home to care for her younger twin brothers and tend to the store while her father works in the office and her older cousin accompanies her mother in the hospital.

Tomoka had missed a lot of the happenings in school and she had been dying to hear what had been going on especially after she caught the news of Ryouko returning to school. Sakuno had been downright depressed after Ryoma had flatly refused to take her home-made lunch and Tomoka felt a bit responsible for encouraging her friend to make the meal. She never thought of the possibility of her Ryoma-sama rejecting a girl's good-natured act of kindness especially when it was made out of concern for him. And she certainly didn't expect a boy to refuse good food when it's being handed to him for free. She believed that the saying 'the way to a man's heart is through his stomach' is pretty foolproof...

Tomoka pondered about it but she just couldn't understand why Ryoma-sama didn't take the lunch. It wasn't as if it would hurt him to receive it... Even after she had all that free time idling away in the counter of the store and thinking about it over and over, she still couldn't think of a reason for the rejection.

But it wasn't just for Tomoka's sake that she asked for Sakuno to come over to her house. As she was away from school for three days, there was no one to give Sakuno the comfort she needed to recover from the bentou-rejection incident. Sakuno is the type of girl that always needed a push to step forward and with the kind of personality she has, she doubted that her timid friend made any other attempts to get closer to Ryoma-sama during the days of Fujioka Ryouko's absence.

"I just had to be away from school at such a bad timing..." Tomoka thought and sighed. It would have been a good opportunity to push Sakuno closer to Ryoma-sama since there's no bishoujo-best-friend hanging around him, but now, it seemed that the opportunity had completely slipped from their fingers. Fujioka Ryouko is back at school and from what she heard from the fanclub members, she and Ryoma-sama became even more inseperable compared to before she went missing. She could just imagine what Sakuno is feeling since she was present in school to witness it all.

Upon receiving a message from Sakuno that she is on her way, Tomoka did what she can to force the twins to bed before she arrived and the two of them had a few peaceful moments as Tomoka replenished her stamina. as she rested, they had tea with yokan jelly while watching a movie that Sakuno brought with her.

After the movie ended, Tomoka asked her friend about the latest happenings in school and chose the right timing to bring up the matter about Ryoma. At the mere mention of his name, Sakuno looked downright gloomy.

"Seriously Sakuno... What are you gonna do if you're always like that?" Tomoka said in exasperation.

"But it's not as if I know what to do... I keep on finding reasons to approach Ryoma-kun but I couldn't find anything..." Sakuno answered in a tiny voice.

After hearing her friend's pathetic excuses, Tomoka went straight to a scolding. "Look here, you simple-minded girl... Not everything has to have a reason... So what if you approach Ryoma-sama with no particular objective? The reason why your progress is so slow is because you always look for excuses to meet him. Why don't you just say the truth, that you want to have a conversation with him or you want to get to know him better..." she said matter-of-factly.