“More importantly, Konoe-san, aren’t you nervous anymore?”
Tsukasa Higashino turned his head slightly toward her.
He had a handsome profile—at least, Ryoka Konoe certainly thought so.
But the moment she heard the teasing note in his voice, Ryoka realized that the boy who had been bullying her had probably tricked her again.
Just a moment ago, she had been listening to what sounded like a deeply moving story about unspoken feelings.
How had it suddenly turned into something he had completely made up?
Ryoka stared blankly for a moment before her face flushed red.
She lowered her head and quietly shifted away from Tsukasa, undoing the distance she had unconsciously closed while listening to his story.
Since Ryoka had gone silent, Tsukasa didn’t tease her any further.
He had only talked so much because he found the timid girl rather entertaining to tease.
With Ryoka refusing to speak, Tsukasa turned his attention back toward the group of girls who had been gathered together earlier.
They had been chatting there only moments ago, but now every one of them had disappeared.
Where had all those girls gone?
“Fukushima-senpai usually goes downstairs around this time to buy a drink.
The other upperclassmen normally go with her…”
A timid voice came from behind him.
Needless to say, it was Ryoka.
“Fukushima-senpai?
You mean the girl who was surrounded by everyone earlier?”
Tsukasa turned around.
He had only glanced at the group before and hadn’t gotten a particularly clear look at her.
“Mm.” Ryoka avoided his gaze and lowered her head again.
She seemed to spend almost all her time looking downward, giving off an unmistakable lack of confidence.
“Fukushima-senpai is the best painter in our art club,” Ryoka explained softly.
“The best?”
Hearing that, Tsukasa leaned over and took a look at the painting the so-called Fukushima-senpai had been working on.
Then he smiled casually.
“It’s all right.
About what I’d expect from an ordinary high school student.”
There was no arrogance in his smile or his voice.
But the meaning behind his words was obvious.
Anyone hearing him would probably think he was bragging.
Ryoka lowered her voice, timidly trying to defend her senior.
“F-Fukushima-senpai is the best painter among all of us.
What makes you think you can say that about her?”
“Because I paint better than she does.”
“Huh?”
Tsukasa’s matter-of-fact answer was so shamelessly confident that every rebuttal Ryoka had prepared died in her throat.
She stared at him in astonishment, unable to understand where all that confidence came from.
“Fukushima-senpai already won the Silver Award in the student division of the Tokyo Youth Art Competition when she was only a first-year…”
“I can win the Gold Award.”
Tsukasa’s tone remained completely calm.
There wasn’t even a trace of arrogance in his voice, yet the statement itself sounded like outrageous boasting no matter how casually he said it.
Ryoka stared at him in disbelief and finally stopped arguing.
Perhaps she had decided that Tsukasa was simply the kind of person who could brag without even bothering to prepare a believable story first.
She turned back toward her own painting and sighed.
She wasn’t particularly good at painting to begin with, and unlike the other girls, she wasn’t good at flattering or ingratiating herself with people either.
So all she could do was sit in her corner and quietly keep painting.
Seeing Ryoka sigh so heavily, Tsukasa grew curious and walked over to glance at the work on her drawing board.
She was using gouache, a medium commonly used by beginners and students.
Its colors could have a light, airy quality quite different from the heavier feel of oil paint or the transparency of watercolor.
In practice, however, most people pursuing painting professionally tended to choose oils.
There were certainly masters who specialized in watercolor or gouache, but they were comparatively rare.
Ryoka’s painting depicted a grove of trees illuminated by the morning light.
The base colors were blue and white, with tree trunks alternating between pale whites and deep blacks.
A path stretched forward beneath them, bordered on both sides by yellow-brown shrubs.
However—
“Isn’t this black far too dark?”
Tsukasa couldn’t help raising an eyebrow as he pointed toward the trees in Ryoka’s painting.
The underlying palette was blue and white, and the surrounding atmosphere carried soft traces of pale and sky blue, giving the entire scene a cool, airy feeling.
But that delicate atmosphere had been completely ruined by the muddy, lifeless black Ryoka had mixed.
The lighter base colors simply couldn’t balance such a heavy mass of black, so naturally the entire painting looked wrong.
“Uu…”
Ryoka didn’t dare say anything.
She had actually noticed long ago that the colors weren’t balancing properly, but after painting for this long, she had no idea how to fix the problem.
And besides…
Ryoka turned her head and blinked at Tsukasa with a slightly dazed expression.
How had he spotted the problem the moment he arrived?
She had even asked Fukushima-senpai to look at the painting earlier.
Fukushima had glanced at it, said there was nothing wrong, and then walked away.
That was the only reason Ryoka had forced herself to keep going.
“How long have you been working on this?” Tsukasa asked.
“T-Two hours…”
Ryoka mumbled softly.
“Huh?”
“W-What are you doing?”
Ryoka froze and instinctively shrank her neck, looking as though she was afraid Tsukasa might hit her.
“Helping you salvage it.”
Forget it.
Tsukasa couldn’t be bothered to keep standing there with his hand out.
He simply took the brush and compartmentalized palette from Ryoka’s hands.
With a confident twist of the flat brush, he picked up a touch of blue on the tip, then added small amounts of grass green and black.
He tested the mixture along the edge of the palette, gave it a single glance, and immediately raised the brush to the painting.
What Tsukasa painted was still technically “black.”
But unlike the stiff, dead black straight from the tube, the shade he had mixed possessed a subtle liveliness.
The highlights of the tree trunks leaned toward a blue-black, while the shadows were a black tinged with blue.
With only a few effortless strokes, the relationship between light and shadow immediately emerged.
Ryoka’s mouth slowly fell open as she watched his relaxed, decisive movements.
He painted completely differently from her.
Whenever Ryoka mixed a color, she had to adjust it several times.
Even then, she placed every stroke with extreme caution, only to regret it immediately afterward.
She painted as though she were trying to carry a dozen plates at once without dropping any of them.
Tsukasa was nothing like that.
He simply started painting.
He mixed colors almost instinctively, and every movement flowed naturally into the next.
And annoyingly enough, it really did look good.
The lifeless painting gradually began to transform.
“With gouache, you need to get the color right in one pass whenever possible,” Tsukasa explained as he worked.
“It doesn’t penetrate the surface well, it isn’t great for repeated layering, and it dries quickly.”
As he spoke, he noticed an unopened set of high-grade oil paints near Ryoka’s feet.
Was this timid girl secretly rich?
Tsukasa gave Ryoka another look.
One large eye, visible beneath her side-swept bangs, was staring at him with complete concentration.
She was genuinely absorbed.
In fact, when Tsukasa paused his brush, she even let out a tiny “Ah…” of disappointment, as though she had been pulled out of a trance.
“Konoe-san?”
Tsukasa waved a hand in front of her face.
“Eh?”
Only then did Ryoka barely manage to snap back to reality.
She looked at Tsukasa.
Several moments passed before she cautiously glanced left and right, as though terrified that someone else might overhear her.
Then, in a tiny voice, she asked:
“Are you…
really better at painting than Fukushima-senpai?”