🌸Cherry Blossom Palette🎨
🌸Chapter 38: The Sakura Puzzle, Part Seven🎨
Written by EmtenDew
Edited by P. serrulata
Author's note:
PS: This lengthy "Puzzle/Pathos" slice of the pie enters its endgame! Finals Week is nigh!
ED: Next week will be a break for the story. I have a big project due in April for work, and PS is setting up for his spring planting. He can't start for at least a month, but he's already pulling 16-hour days just getting ready and doing other things he needs to do. It shocks me how much goes into farming. He's taking a few days to vegetate, since he finally caught a break. He seems to be a little worn out.
We're behind schedule by a few chapters from where we like to be, and an extra week would help with catching up. Then, I had to fix a number of issues with last chapter and this chapter and a couple following it, so that also took up a lot of time.
Things have been a little hectic, so please forgive the lateness of this chapter. I didn't want to have a break, especially when you had to wait a few extra days for this chapter. I don't like leaving readers hanging.
Look for a new chapter the week of March 28.
Please look at the Q&A section I set up at the end of the chapter. Ask us anything, and we'll add another section in the next chapter. I would be happy if you ask questions.
Please enjoy what I wrote.
Thursday, July 11, 2018
"Damn it, Senpai-kun," Sakura Inori scolded. "Stop squirming. And stop looking! It kinda gives me the heebie-jeebies…"
"I'm not looking," he dissented, already averting his eyes to what she was doing. "And it's hard to stand still when you keep staggering around!"
"Hey, I need something to lean on, Asshole-kun," she shot back. "I'm a little top-heavy, over here~."
Her senpai protested, choosing to overlook her statement about her own shapeliness, "I'm not a something, Sakura-san… and you think you can keep getting away with calling me an asshole for no good reason…"
"Hey, c'mon," she snickered. "You know that I know that you know that I know that we both get a laugh out of it~."
Can't disagree!
At the park, Sakura had finally abandoned her sandy footbath beneath her favorite swing and was, at present, using Naoto Hachioji as a brace as she rinsed the grit off her legs.
The park's water-spigot, rather than sourcing from the wall of the utility building, just sort of stood by itself, a curved pipe with a valve and threaded end sticking out of the ground, and there wasn't even a decent jamb to use as support.
Naoto wasn't the most coordinated fellow, and Sakura was having a difficult time to begin with, balancing on one leg and handling the business end of the hose, blasting water between the toes on her other foot.
The young artist complained, unsteady, "Myeh…"
"Hold still, you…" Sakura reprimanded, readjusting her grip on his shoulder as she switched feet. "If I fall over, you're coming along for the ride~!"
"Hey, watch the water! Watch the water!" Naoto wanted to edge away from the stream, but—as the gal had said—they'd both take a spill; he had an inkling that she'd make sure of it.
"Oh, stop bitchin'," she chided. "I'll have you know that Hana-chan and me had no problems doing this~."
Well, maybe your both being big on top "balanced things out" somehow! The uncharacteristically sacrilegious comeback ran through Naoto's head, and he was very glad he'd not said it aloud.
Not a few hours before, he might've wanted to punish himself for such thinking, but he was beginning to come to terms with the idea that everybody had nasty thoughts they never voiced. It was a staple of life, really.
Occasionally, it could even be fun to think of the worst thing to possibly say and not say it.
Naoto allowed himself a little smile, chuckling, "I'm trying, Sakura-san."
This slightly amusing scene had followed something far more captivating.
…
…
…
Sakura had quickly convinced Naoto to play a little "game" with her, leading him to admitting he'd place her in no less than second place out of Nagatoro, Gamo-chan, Yoshi, Nekoba, and the gal herself in the area of swimsuit awesomeness.
Unbeknownst to Sakura, her senpai had placed the girls—from last to first—as follows:
Yoshi
Nagatoro
Nekoba
Sakura/Gamo-chan (tie)
Whether it was in fact a "tie" or not, Sakura had stopped him just short of admitting a winner. As she'd said, "It's just I know you'll give an honest answer… I think it'd piss me off if I wasn't on top, but I'd also be too embarrassed to know I was~."
Naoto couldn't say he'd ever seen Sakura go that red in the cheeks before, but maybe she had. She'd been over-the-moon /mortified, totally unready for his seriousness on the issue.
Even so, he hadn't decided on a winner. It was too difficult and something he'd have to give some actual thought.
Quick to recuperate from her flustered, self-conscious, joyous wriggling, Sakura had opted to guess the order he came up with, still unwilling to hear a victor declared, meaning she had four girls to place, minus herself.
The stakes were high for Naoto:
If Sakura indeed guessed correctly, he would wind up buying both Sakura and Hana (and himself) an udon bowl at the swell, little restaurant Sakura had taken him to on Sunday. And, given, she'd know how he ranked each girl, for better or worse.
Things weren't as bad for the gal, seeing if she failed to guess, she'd merely need to provide the snacks at their next study session with Hana.
As things fell, Sakura would be supplying sweet potato cakes to go with Naoto's juice for Friday.
But she'd given it a good go, guessing Nagatoro for last, then Yoshi, Gamo-chan, with Nekoba and herself on top.
He'd really kept up a good poker face, confounding her attempts at reading him, but it wasn't that dire of a loss.
Regarding [Naoto - 7] [Sakura - 0], the gal had earlier told her friend that every girl wished to be thought of as pretty, and he'd inadvertently hit another mark on the "what women want" list.
Naoto had told Sakura—crimson in the face and finally able to let his guard down, the game having ended—that he could "respect" the way her mind worked. It had been a hoot to hear her thoughts, and he thought her brain was interesting, if a little twisted.
She was interesting, and not interesting like "Bebe's Boobs Destroy Society" interesting, but the real kind.
(I never watched South Park, but I watched this episode at my editor's behest, and it may take me some time to forgive him. JK, PS, I was nearly crying with laughter.)
And she'd told him of his conquest, flushing just as red as she'd been that day:
Girls loved to be thought of as genuinely interesting. And smart! It was even more gratifying than being thought of as pretty.
It was also fun for Naoto, Sakura's vain attempt to get him to break his stoicism and give her something to work with in getting him to reveal something to help get that gigantic bowl of chicken tempura udon yumminess securely into her tummy.
In regards to her guessing Naoto's ranking, in her honest words, Nagatoro simply wasn't as "physically impressive" as the other girls. It sounded harsh, but she considered height, bustiness, and visible maturity to be factors worth considering. They were looking at the physical, and she suspected Naoto felt the same way.
She wasn't wrong… though he thought Nagatoro looked "mature" enough.
He had to remind himself to not be surprised that Sakura reasoned Nagatoro took last place on his own list, especially that she'd say it in front of him using such detail.
After all, it's not like she or anyone else knew that he truthfully had a major crush on Nagatoro, so he figured that his secret was still safe. He still knew something she didn't.
Yoshi's place, second-to-last, boiled down to "wisdom". She had the ripeness but not the maturity (because of the frills, mostly).
The only thing that surprised Naoto was that the gal had seated Gamo-chan as third. Gamo-chan had both the ripeness and maturity, Sakura feeling that Nagatoro lacked both and that Yoshi lacked one of them.
But he could really get behind her deduction for putting Nekoba with her on top:
Nekoba did have a classic, conservative beauty about her, her distinct features eye-catching (not making a joke about her strabismis, the crossed-eyes), her height, and her slenderness a boon. This didn't even include her sensibly modest getup of "functional" bikini and beach skirt tying everything together.
"Arresting but chaste" were the exact words that Sakura had used to describe the whole picture of Nekoba, and those words fit just as easily as Naoto's "striking".
He was even second guessing himself as to not placing Nekoba higher, though he decided to be firm in his own listing. That said, he wondered what Sakura figured she herself might have on Gamo-chan.
He liked both Sakura and Gamo-chan (physical-wise) for different reasons. It was why they were "tied" for first. It was why he was struggling with awarding the gold-medalist.
If Sakura, with her version of Naoto's list, had given any suspect to whether she or Nekoba won, she gave no indication, but he felt it could go either way in her mind.
And he had plenty of reasons to think that she might lean in either direction.
Sakura had gotten not one of the spots correct, but her "logic" had been sound.
With all that said, if Sakura, Gamo-chan, and Nekoba were suddenly all vying for the top-spot, Naoto's decision-making would've become rather muddied. Either Sakura or Gamo-chan would be bumped to third, and that wasn't a thing he fancied.
Truly, faced with Nekoba for firsties, both Sakura and Gamo-chan would clobber her, cementing the gal and the Amazon for tops.
But it was all just for fun!
It seemed dumb to overthink and think himself in circles over something like that!
…
…
…
Back to present, having rinsed off all the sand, Sakura was sashaying unshod through the grass, enjoying its soft greenness.
"Oh, that was fun~!" she enthused, spinning on a heel and walking backwards. "And thanks for the 'support' back there, Senpai-kun~!"
Naoto, faced with the gal, chortled in spite of himself, "Sure, Sakura-san."
Somehow, he'd avoided getting sprayed with the groundskeeper's hose, and he'd held up fine, serving as a meaty, makeshift fencepost.
He also was surprised at how ungainly Sakura could be, nearly pulling him over!
But any "normal" person would have difficulty in that position, so meh.
And she'd said it herself…! The stuff about burdensome bazooms…
Sakura did another 180° and strolled along, humming to herself, "~…~"
Watching her traipse around, Naoto found himself wondering what made this girl tick.
He did this rather frequently, trying to discern what was going on in the gray matter behind those big, soft, brown eyes of hers.
On the dubious night they'd wound up sharing at the Hachioji residence, it hadn't taken him more than three minutes to figure out there was more to Sakura than merely the boy-crazy, scheming gyaru that even her closest gal-pals assumed her to be.
Really, Naoto had seen this truth far earlier, the day he ran across Sakura and her father in town the previous year.
Now, he knew her to be a pensive, insightful, and fascinating girl who was very possibly a closet geek of some kind. On top of that, there was something downright odd with her, and he couldn't begin to figure out what it was.
Sometimes, she'd just go all "childlike" on him, something he was coming to realize only he and Hana seemed to have license for viewing.
The next moment might see Sakura as forbidding as a cancer diagnosis.
She could be sweet.
And she could proceed to tear a hole into you the likes of which Nagatoro and Gamo-chan wouldn't even begin to know how to start carving out.
Every time she and Naoto were together, sometimes alone and sometimes with Hana around, he saw more and more pieces of the "Sakura puzzle", and they were strewn all over the place!
The 25-piece children's puzzle he'd constructed surrounding her had become closer to 500 pieces.
Then, after locating every one of them, some pecker had come along with a leaf-blower and sent them flying off the table and to all four corners of the room.
Finally, just when he thought he'd regathered the pieces, they kept falling through his hands, dividing into even smaller pieces, becoming all the more numerous, maybe a 2,500-piece puzzle.
His parents had put together a puzzle of that magnitude when he was a kid… a windsurfing scene. It had taken them four months to finish it!
Forgetting that crap about windsurfing… shoot, all the girls Naoto had gotten to know had graduated in his head from kids' puzzles to at least a couple hundred pieces each, but Sakura's was proving by far to be the most intricate.
Still, good luck with putting ANY of them together!
However, he was perhaps thinking too hard… Sakura was a normal young woman by most stretches of the imagination, just as Gamo-chan was. And Nagatoro. And Yoshi. And Hana. Yeah, and even the Prez.
Senpai-kun…
Actually, everyone was complicated! Even the simplest of simpletons had plenty going on! It just wasn't worth a yen and about as compelling as a bag of unwashed radishes (I ain't talking about Yoshi, so you know).
But it was still there!
Even with all of her stratums, Naoto thought he understood Sakura better than he understood Nagatoro. It was amazing how a little bit of openness and mutual respect could make a person seem that much more approachable.
Hey, Senpai-kun…
Naoto wished more than most things that Nagatoro would give him some genuineness. Even Gamo-chan—whom he'd never expected to drop her guard—had willingly shown him some vulnerability, and Sakura had as well, though saying this was possibly understatement.
And as he'd rationalized prior, he might see the inner-workings of Yoshi before getting much else from Nagatoro.
He wasn't asking for Nagatoro to abandon all dignity and spill every last bit of her guts to him, but it felt good—really, it was a privilege—that a couple of girls riding near the top of the social-ladder trusted him enough to bare their troubles to their senpai.
Senpai-kun?
Nagatoro just didn't seem to trust him all that much, and he really wanted her to.
Be that as it may, he had a difficult time trusting her; she'd shown him very little earnestness.
Yo, Senpai-kun!
…
Naoto blinked, coming to a stop, his eyes coming back into focus. "Huh? Sakura-san?"
One hand holding her loafers at the heels, she pointed the toes at him, jabbing at the air.
"There you go, drifting away again~…" she chuckled, accentuating her words with each prod.
He'd promised himself to try harder to not fall off the edge of reality so much, and a lot of good that had done.
"Sorry…" he offered.
"Ah, it's okay…" she said. "It's not like I was yakking and being ignored."
"Like on Sunday…" he recalled. "Did I ever apologize for that?"
Sakura cackled, lowering her shoes to dangle at her side, and resumed walking.
"Not really, but it was an understood thing, so it's fine," she gave him. "They never did find that kappa, did they~?"
"Yeah, the golden-haired gremlin it must've been…" Naoto, now moving again, went along with it, hoping to see that smile he so enjoyed.
And he did get a laugh; he got a good one.
The gal shook with it, caught off-guard; she smirked and said, "I really wish I'd just gotten your attention in a nicer way. I'd be pissed if someone did that to me… might not talk to them again for a while."
To Naoto, it had been more of a surprise, only smarting slightly.
"I was just numb that day…" he sighed. "But it got better after that. It was nice… driving with Dad… grilling out…"
"I'm glad," she murmured. "You looking forward to your driving test?"
"I wouldn't say I'm looking forward to it, but I think I'll be ready," he answered. "I'm scheduled to take the test on August 5th."
"Gamo-chan seems to have it in her head that you'll drive us somewhere a little more interesting than our local beach~." Sakura was amused at the prospect. "That'd be nice, but…"
"She said that to you?" Naoto wondered.
"I think she's only half-serious," she opined. "It would be fun though."
"It would be, but I don't see my parents lending me a car for that." He really doubted it. "If someone else can round up a vehicle, it could happen."
"That's the trick, eh?" She left it at that and took a deep breath. "You feel that, Senpai-kun? In the air?"
He could tell she was talking about the changing weather. "Temperature's dropping. Humidity's starting to rise though."
"But the gentle wind is nice." Sakura added. "Feels good~…"
It did feel good, the cooling breeze… Naoto wouldn't disagree. Even so, smells like the storm's closer.
His kohai turned to him. "Senpai-kun… what time is it?"
He pulled out his phone, and it read as follows:
"7:15 p.m.?!" he exclaimed.
Sakura fidgeted. "Oh, no… I did keep you."
"No, no," he assured her. "I just didn't realize how late it was already."
"…"
"…?" Naoto sensed something was up. "Sakura-san?"
"…" She wrung her hands, staring at her toes, restlessly scrunching into the lawn. "Hey, uh, Senpai-kun…?"
"Yes?"
"If you're really not in a hurry… I'd like to hang out a little longer."
Naoto had been ready to leave, but the tenor of Sakura's voice inundated his senses.
It was almost like she was begging for it!
Naoto was—not strangely, perhaps—a bit apprehensive. The gal had been in pretty good cheer the whole day, but now… something was up.
On top of that, if he wasn't careful, he might get caught in the rain. They wouldn't see for another hour, but it was on the way, and it might take 15 minutes to get home.
He was barely thinking about it, and the words all but fell from his mouth, "Do you not wanna go home for some reason?"
Crap! He hadn't been able to stop himself, hardly aware that he was even talking. That might've been a mistake!
His words jarred her, but not in a way that rang truth; she quickly said, showing her hands, "Nope! No… Definitely nothing like that. I just wanted to bum around for fifteen or twenty minutes while I dry off… And if you weren't chomping at the bit to leave… I'd rather not just sit here by myself."
"Oh…" he understood.
"But if you've had enough, then…" she trailed off.
Naoto couldn't let her think that!
He spouted, stepping forward, "No, I haven't had enough!"
"Eep?!" Sakura yipped, pulling her hands to her breast and taking a step back.
He jumped back himself. "…?!"
"Uh…" She eyeballed him. "What was that…?"
He realized how that had sounded.
"That came out wrong…" he commented sourly. "Whoops."
"…Yeah…" She relaxed, a crooked smile crossing her face.
He attempted to remedy, "So… what I meant to say was…"
"That you're not sick of me~?" she offered, close to laughing, her smile broadening.
"No, no, no…" he quickly remarked, ill at ease. "That's what I didn't want you to say… But… no, I'm definitely not sick of hanging out with you. I told you: I'm not 'putting up' with anything; this is good… I told you that… Please don't say things like that."
Fresh rosiness crept into Sakura's cheeks. "So… is that a 'yes'~?"
Naoto stood straight, his shoulders back. "It is."
Why am I being so serious…?! He wished he knew.
She only simpered at his demeanor, "Okay… I'm happy to hear that. Thanks."
"Yeah." He tried to appear at ease.
"C'mon," Sakura crooned, beckoning. "I'll show you where Hana-chan lost her sock up a tree. There's a spot I really like around there~."
"Alright." He began to follow her, the gal already on the move.
Viewing her hips swing back and forth, the top of her just as attractive as the lower-half, Naoto pushed any lascivious thinking from his mind.
This was no time to stare at his friend's heart-shaped heinie or the rest of her.
He knew.
Sakura hadn't stood there, asking him, all twitchy, shuffling and rummaging her feet in the grass, just because she didn't feel like being alone for a little while.
He knew.
There was more to it.
Q&A Section
Please tell us about yourselves.
ED: I'm originally from Utah, and I absolutely love my home state. I'm an "office lady"/numbers-cruncher at a civil engineering firm. I'm 25 and only a couple years out of school.
I didn't really know much about anime or manga until I went to college, and a bunch of my roommate's friends sort of dragged me into it, and now I cannot escape. My favorite series is definitely One Piece, and it's the only series where I own all the copies of the manga.
I LOVE volleyball. I've been playing since I was five. It seems like I've been 5' 11" (181 cm) since I was 13, so my height helped. I dreamed of playing women's volleyball for BYU when I was younger, but I was never THAT good. I had to settle to play local and nearby league games, but it was still fun.
PS: To copy/paste from my Reddit:
I'm a Minnesota farmer. I enjoy manga, anime, good cartoons, mechanics, beer, politically-incorrect humor, and shooting sports.
Please look forward to the next chapter! Thanks for reading! Questions and comments are welcome!