It was said that boys had a strange mindset when they were young.
When facing someone they cared about, such as a girl they liked, they would deliberately tease her and make her angry.
They might throw stones at her, purposely dirty her clothes, or make faces at her on purpose.
In short, they had all sorts of strange behaviors.
But in the end, all of those actions led to the same goal.
They wanted to get the other person’s attention.
They wanted the person they liked to notice them.
Matsuzaka Satou had experienced something similar before.
The boy who sat behind her often threw paper balls at her, and her friend Hida Shouko had explained it to her exactly like that.
But Ayanokouji Ren’s behavior was completely different from what those boys had done before.
He had gone so far that Satou did not even think of that explanation right away.
So…
“You like me?”
Satou took two steps forward, her pink eyes staring straight at his face.
Ren: “?”
What kind of insane logic was that?
Seeing that Ren did not answer, Satou instinctively took it as confirmation.
She puffed out her cheeks and thought for a moment.
“Mm…
Then I’ll just call you Ren.
Ren, I’m your auntie, you know.
There’s no way anything can happen between us…
No, wait, we aren’t related by blood, so maybe it’s fine.”
Satou stared at Ren and kept talking.
Then, all of a sudden, she changed direction.
“But your personality is terrible.
You’re not the type I can accept, so please allow me to reject you.”
He got rejected before he could even confess.
But Satou was not wrong.
Even without the system’s collection mission, Ren admitted that his personality really was rather awful.
After all, in his previous life, he had been a surgeon.
On top of that, because he was a transmigrator with a mature soul, and because his filthy-rich capitalist family had far too much money, Ren had always found it hard to get along with people his own age.
That made him somewhat solitary.
He was always self-centered, doing whatever he wanted, however he wanted.
Of course, being solitary did have its benefits in many areas.
For example, when it came to certain matters, Ren was even steadier than his capitalist father.
But to his parents and the few people close to him, no one ever knew what he was thinking.
For example, at this very moment, Ren’s answer was to pretend to be shy and lift the sofa pillow in front of his face.
“Mm.
The first time I saw you, I really did fall for you.”
The child in front of her, who had been as aggressive as a lion, suddenly turned into a puppy.
“Hmph.”
Satou let out a rare little hum with her nose slightly raised.
I guessed right.
The aching feeling in her chest suddenly faded quite a bit.
She sat down beside Ren and was just about to reach out to pat his head.
But then she suddenly remembered something and asked, “If Auntie sits here, will I dirty your sofa?”
Satou was still bothered by that word.
“Yes.”
Ren answered instantly.
“?”
“So can you sit closer to me instead?”
“!?”
Satou pressed her lips together, her usually cool little face going blank.
But before she could refuse, Ren pulled her into his arms.
Feeling herself fall into a warm embrace, Satou’s body visibly trembled.
Ren, however, acted as if he had not noticed her reaction at all.
He held her close.
Ren leaned closer and took a breath beside her.
“What brand of perfume do you use?
Your neck is so slender, but your hands are so small.
Want to compare them with mine?”
“Don’t do that…
Ren, it tickles.”
Satou struggled, trying to stand up.
She disliked this kind of thing.
It reminded her of her aunt, the person who always brought men into the house to fool around.
But she realized she could not push him away at all.
Ren’s strength was far beyond what she had imagined, and even through his shirt, she could feel that he had trained muscles.
“Is that not okay?
I just want to hold your hand.”
Ren spoke softly beside her ear.
“Just holding hands?”
Satou slowly loosened her clenched fist a little.
People were always willing to compromise.
The strategy of asking for the moon just to get a star worked no matter the situation.
Ren nodded and answered, “Of course not.”
“?”
Ren held Satou even closer.
Then he lightly kissed her cheek.
“There are a lot of things I want to do, but right now, I only want…”
Ignoring Satou’s confused eyes, Ren tried his best to make his smile look pleasant.
“I only want to feel your heartbeat.”
Satou’s mind was completely thrown into disorder by Ren’s sudden change in behavior.
She had no idea how to deal with this.
She had never encountered anything like it before.
However, after kissing her cheek, Ren did not do anything else.
He simply held her quietly, resting his chin on top of her head.
That gradually calmed Satou’s originally panicked heartbeat.
She asked again in confusion, “Why?
You ignored me before, then insulted me so harshly earlier.
Now you’re holding me like this?”
“Because I like you.”
Ren threw Satou’s own words back at her.
But in truth, her question did remind him of something.
Since deliberately provoking her did not work, he might as well change his approach and start from the other side.
Ren roughly divided the seven emotions he needed to collect into three categories.
The first category was relatively simple negative emotions: anger and disgust.
From his recent collections, he had discovered that anger did not have to be extreme.
Simply being upset counted too.
Disgust did not necessarily have to be hatred either.
Dislike or aversion could also work.
So negative emotions were clearly the easier kind.
For some reason, however, they had become strangely difficult with Matsuzaka Satou.
The second category was the more difficult positive emotions: joy and love.
For a normal girl, joy was not hard.
The hard part was love.
But as long as he worked at it, that should still be possible.
However, Ren had already realized that Satou was completely different from women who were naturally capable of loving others.
He felt that [Love] was probably the highest difficulty for her.
The third category was neutral: desire and fear.
The difficulty of those two was about the same.
In short, Ren’s conclusion was this: since he could not collect anger and disgust, he would collect the other emotions first.
“You like me…?”
Satou stopped struggling.
Once an embrace became warm, it made people stop wanting to escape.
Besides, this was the first time in her memory that someone had held her like this.
The feeling of warmth was not bad.
She still had questions in her heart, though.
Satou asked shyly, “May I ask…
what does it feel like to like someone?”
Satou knew that asking such a question made her seem childish.
But Ren had explained anger to her earlier, so she still asked.
“Why does liking someone mean doing the things you did earlier?”
Satou wanted to hear an answer different from Hida Shouko’s.
Ren looked at Satou’s smooth chin and thought about how to explain “liking someone” in a way a yandere could quickly understand.
“Liking someone…”
He looked into Satou’s eyes, as if he could see straight through her.
“It’s like seeing a beautiful butterfly.
Your first reaction is to think it’s pretty.”
“And your second reaction is to catch it and pin it inside a specimen frame.”
“That way, it will belong to you forever.”
“That is liking someone.”
“?”
Satou’s pupils shrank slightly.
She suddenly turned around and stared straight into Ren’s eyes.
In her red irises, it felt as if chaotic darkness was slowly spinning.
Satou-chan.
“So you insulted me earlier because you wanted to do that?”
But Ren was not frightened by that look.
He organized his words.
“No.”
“?”
“Just like a butterfly struggles and flutters its wings after being pinned down, what I really wanted to see was you resisting.”
“That way, I could confirm it.”
“I could confirm that your disgust was born because of me, and that your anger belonged only to me.”
Ren held her a little tighter.
His right hand moved near Satou’s heart.
Although she was still young and had not fully grown yet, he could still feel the small, steady beat beneath his palm.
“I’m happy that it hurts here.”
Ren said.
Pressing his hand lightly near her chest, he continued.
“I want you to always think of me.”
“Anger is fine.
Disgust is fine too.”
“As long as you keep thinking of me, as long as I’m always in your heart, that’s enough.”
“That way, you’ll belong to me forever.”
Satou froze.
I see.
She suddenly understood.
The paper balls those boys used to throw at her and Ren’s cruel humiliation earlier were fundamentally the same thing.
A brand.
Pain and humiliation were both marks of being “special.”
A person branded with those marks would never forget the one who gave them for the rest of their life.
That was the conclusion Satou reached.
She felt as if she understood.
It was as if she had grasped the essence of something.
Her breathing grew a little hurried.
“Then what about love?”
She asked impatiently.