This is not a chapter, but I think it was worth to post here! :)
Firstly, this is a special of volume 13, many things have happened but Shall, Ann and co. are still together and now Shall and Ann are officially a couple.
You can find the raws here~(If you want to read them yourself), but if you’re too lazy to read or just can’t understand japanese, lemme share with you a little summary provided by our dear friend Icarus Bride.
This short story is by Shall PoV (the best PoV if you ask me!).
Ann’s exhausted and goes to sleep on the bed, even though there’s only one bed. Normally she’d take the couch since Shall’s too big for the couch, but she was too tired and forgot. But she fell asleep right in the middle of the bed.
Shall rolls her over once, but there’s still barely enough room for him. still, he can’t bring himself to wake her up so he takes off his jacket and slides in next to her
Mythrill is sleeping on the headboard.
So, he’s laying in bed but her head is really close to his shoulder and he can feel her breath on his neck, and he can’t sleep. He’s about to get up and make a try of it on the sofa but something about the way the moonlight is falling on her through the window makes him pause. Then there’s an interesting explanation of his thoughts
it says that she’s so tiny/delicate that normally he can’t help but regard her as a child, and the way that she’s always trying to act so grown up makes her seem even more childish. But then it says there are times when just for a second she looks so (adult) womanly that it takes his breath away.
So then, he says that the truth is, she really is a child. the “proof” of this is something she did earlier tonight: when ann came back to the room that night, Shall went to kiss her and she got all flustered and started talking nonsense the way all girls in manga do. Apparently she was saying something like “this will make ____ times we’ve kissed” or “we already kissed ___ times already” or something, and in the end she ended up running away and he wasn’t able to kiss her. Remembering this now, as he’s in bed looking down at her sleeping face he feels irritated and reaches out his hand to flick her on the forehead, but his hand stops just before touching her, so now it says that he feels her soft, even breathing on his finger (which is near her face because he had been about to flick her) and it “feels as if (her breath) is inviting him in”.
So then he justly touches her lips with that finger, and she doesn’t wake up, doesn’t move an inch, even her eyelids don’t twitch. He takes his finger away then rises up and puts his arms down on the bed on both sides of her, and it says “the impulse to get closer to her is becoming stronger and stronger, like a butterfly draw to a sweet-smelling flower”.
So then he whispers her name and she still doesn’t wake up. Then he says “I’m going to kiss you” and she still doesn’t wake up. Even though he tries to tell himself she refused to kiss him earlier, he can’t convince himself so he finally give in and kisses her. The kissing is very descriptive for like 2 whole lines~~~
The way he kisses her is described as “completely covering her lips with his” and he describes the warmth of her body and the softness of her lips in great detail
so after he’s done kissing her, he holds her in his arms. Through the thin fabric of her nightgown he can feel how delicate her shoulders, arms and hips are, and is struck by the impression that if he handles her too roughly she would break. However this thought makes him overcome with desire to hug her with all his might. He resists, lol
he has some complicated feelings just then, because on the one hand he’s not satisfied just from kissing her while she’s asleep (he’d rather she be awake) but on the other hand her defenselessness is very adorable to him.
He feels all his anxiety slip away while holding her and smelling the scent of silver sugar from her hair. he knows she’ll be really flustered if she wakes up in his arms like this, but he decides it’s punishment from running away from his kiss earlier, and decides to fall asleep like this, holding her.
Then he gets peeved again and thinks that he doesn’t have to go along with this silly childishness of her wanting to keep track of how many times they’ve kissed. So he decides from now on to kiss her so many times she won’t be able to keep track no matter how hard she tries. He gets started immediately, and kisses her 3 more times, bringing the total number of kisses in their history to 7.
He seems to finally be satisfied after kissing her these 4 times while she’s asleep and thinks evilly to himself that the next time they kiss (while she’s awake) she’ll be thinking “this is number 5!” but it will actually be number 8, but Shall will be the only one who knows it.
In the end he decides it might not be all that bad after all having a lover (恋人) who counts the number of times you’ve kissed.
Because he feels it’s a great joy/blessing to be able to play silly pranks like this on a person you love!
AQUA Scans 