"AH!? Is that the only thing you have to say about that?" All this was to surreal. Why would Tsuruga-san order something like that? It doesn't make any sense to Kyoko and she felt dizzy trying to wrap her mind around this. And the only person that could give her any kind of explanation sat there staring dumbfounded at that and only said Ah? His eyes flicked to her and back to that. His lips were shivering, seemingly forming silent syllables, before answering in a hoarse voice.

"A ... present."

"A present? For who?" Her confusion rapidly shifted to anger at that answer.

"For you, of course!" He replied in a heartbeat. A nervous smile darted over his lips. "Who else?" He added with a forced laugh.

"Me?" She stared at him in disbelief. "And why would you want to give me something... why would I want something like THAT? For crying out loud!"

His tongue ran over his dry lips before he responded.

"Well, you see, it's like this, because as your mentor, I thought, this," he talked slower and with more breaks between the words than necessary, "would be a good idea, because you have a, ehm, low self-esteem. And that's a problem as an actress, if you would wrongly belief yourself not beautiful or alluring enough for any kind of role. And it's my duty as your mentor to help you to overcome this obstacle. So this is for you to see yourself as others do and see the really good and beautiful features you have, by forcing you to look at it and not hide behind a character of some kind." The longer he talked, the more secured his voice became. "I admit, maybe I should have talked to you about the plan and not just go with it in my drunken set of mind, but it's not a reason to overreact about it."

"You didn't actual belief that rubbish, do you?", Kanae violently shook her best friend as she retold the events of the morning, that leaded to her being in possession of that special shower curtain. Kyoko has tried to hide it, but the other two LoveMe members had found it by accident and obviously demented an explanation. Kanae continued to shake and scream at her. "Why did you even take that thing?"

"I couldn't really leave it there, could I?" Kyoko relied weakly, while her body limply bounced back and forth in her friends arms.

"Good point." Kanae stopped for a short moment, before continuing with renewed effort. "Why the hell, did he even had the time to come up with this ridiculous rumbling? Why didn't you do the sensible thing and ran out of that apartment screaming like a banshee as soon as you saw that?!"

This whole time Chiori had stayed silent and examined the picture with a critical look. "Hmm."

"What 'Hmm'?", Kanae snapped at her.

"I just thought that's a really pretty picture. It shows Kyokos sweet and innocent side in contrast to Natsus cruel and seducing character. But is in an naively alluring way sexy. The photograph did a fantastic job and it's the original unedited picture, you could see some of the goosebumps in this format and the sea in the background is a bit too rough for a magazine picture.", Chiori explained to her colleagues in a thoughtful way.

"Seriously?" Kanae stared at her disbelieving with an open mouth. "That's what you think about? For real?"

"Oh, I just though, that's interesting. I mean, there shouldn't be many people, who could have leaked this picture. I mean, I know that they sometimes leak pictures as a promotion stunt, but that would be the edited pictures. The unedited are normally only seen by the photograph, the managers and the models. Sometimes some of the staff, but they don't get any copies of it. And I mean, my manager only got my pictures, so where did Tsuruga even get that picture to put it on a shower curtain?", she answered with a small smirk and a raised eyebrow. "Considering that you, Kyoko-san, didn't send him the pictures, or did you?" Kyoko shook her head rapidly. "And I'm really not sure if he would be careless enough to ask the photograph and risk some serious rumors, I would like to ask, who is your contact manager for this?"

"Sawara-san."

A couple of floors up, Sawara sat at this desk, when he violently started to shiver all over.

"Everything ok with you?", his colleague asked him with concern in his voice.

"It felt like somebody just walked over my grave..."


A.N. You ask me for Rens explanation and here is the best I could up with. What do you think of it? Do you have any other idea? And Ren is totally ready to fed Sawara and Yashiro to pink wolves, if means that he would get a tiny bit less blame for it. Please leave a review, what you think about it.