Erogenous Beauty Salon by Succubus Girls F: Prologue - An Unplanned Reunion

The long summer break was over and it was time for the students to begin the second term. The second term included the athletics festival, the school festival, and for the second years, the school grip.

Juri’s Harunomiya Academy also had smaller parties planned for Halloween and Christmas, so the students could sometimes feel like they were only studying in the brief gaps between their preparations for those events. And that may have been fairly accurate because the athletics festival had only just ended, but Harunomiya’s students were already preparing for the school festival and the school felt even busier than normal.

Juri felt swallowed up by it all as she worked to get her class ready. At the moment, she was out with some classmates to shop for supplies at a mall near the train station. They had already decided to do a café this year, so they needed plenty of ingredients to decide what they were going to make and they needed fabric for the costumes.

(We still have an entire month…but I guess it is best to get this done sooner rather than later.)

She sighed while following after her classmates. Her earnest personality meant she always worked hard on these school events and she was looking forward to this festival, but she still could not muster much excitement.

(We were still first years last year, so we only had to decorate our own classroom.)

She had been a lot more excited during the preparations back then. Her spirits had been high even when accounting for it being her first school festival, so she had enjoyed chatting with her friends while out shopping like this.

(So why aren’t I this time? …Okay, fine! I know why.)

Questioning herself was pointless when she already knew the answer: he was no longer here by her side. She had long since realized that his absence was messing with her mood. Koshigaya Kazuki had confessed to her twice early this school year and then more or less gone missing after temporarily leaving the school.

Koshigaya Kazuki. Simply thinking that name made her blush and filled her body with heat. He was a childhood friend and former classmate who had seemed like a permanent fixture in her life.

In the dozen or so years she had known him, she had learned that he was a hopeless pervert who was horny around the clock. And he also had the terrible taste to fall in love with a girl who disliked that sort of thing and tried to keep up an innocent appearance.

After that girl had rejected two confessions from him, he had disappeared, but only then had she noticed the faint feelings inside herself. Realizing how dense she had been had only led to regret for wasting that opportunity. If she were a boy, she doubted she would want a girlfriend like that.

(Whenever I try to look at my actions objectively, I end up insulting myself.)

The more she thought about it, the less she could figure out what about her he had liked, but the even greater mystery was why he had suddenly disappeared without telling her anything.

A lot of their classmates had asked her about it, but she had nothing to tell them. Every one of those questions was a reminder that he had vanished without telling her a word and she started to feel like it must be her fault, so she kept hurting herself more and more. The others had stopped asking her about it as a kindness to her and they had insisted on inviting her out during summer break, but she had never managed to shake free of this gloom.

(It isn’t like he never contacts me, but it’s only once a month at best.)

It was always by email and only to let her know he was safe and sound. He ignored all of her questions about where he was and what he was doing and, whenever he did respond to her questions in the next email, he would only give excuses about it being a company secret. He had not even returned home for the bon festival, so she had not seen him at all for several months now.

She had barely seen his face after what happened: she had rejected his confession twice, she had gotten in an argument with him after she saw him flirting with a younger girl, and she had argued him with a lot before all that as well. She felt even more anger toward him, disgust toward herself, and general awkwardness than ever before and it all came from the fact that she had refused to be the one to give in. So she felt like it was her own fault that she felt this way.

She understood all that. She really did. But…

(This is my fault, but…it’s his fault too. Are you really okay with this!?)

His feelings for her had been strong enough to try confessing to her again after she rejected him the first time, but did he not mind at all that he had been away from her for so long? She did not understand his feelings in the slightest. Unless…

(Could he really be with that other girl? Is he using an app or something to send her emails or letters or whatever every day?)

She shook her ponytail to reject that unpleasant thought. She had been with him for as long as she could remember, so she refused to accept that. She did not want to imagine all of that could have fallen apart in an instant.

“Okay, what else did we need to buy? Wait, where’s the list?”

“Ummm, I think you left it with Juri. Hey, Juri?”
Her classmates’ voices dragged her back to reality, so she raised her head and looked around in surprise. She found she had fallen a good bit behind her friends, so she jogged up to them.

“S-sorry. Um, what were we talking about?”

“That we should probably keep the shopping list with us.”

Her friend snatched the list from her pocket and breathed an exasperated sigh.

“You’ve really got it bad, huh?” “You were thinking about Koshigaya, weren’t you?”

“Wha-? I-I was not! Why would I be- wait, why are you laughing!?”
She picked up her pace to chase after the teasing girls as they ran away from her.

“Hey, you’re not supposed to run here! You need to sto- kyah!?”

She ran into someone who stepped around the street corner and fell back onto her butt.

“Ow, ow, ow, ow. S-sorry, I wasn’t looking.” “Neither was I.”

She apologized and frowned while rubbing her butt to soothe the sudden pain. Her friends noticed the accident and ran back over to apologize to the person she had run into.

“Sorry, that was our fault!” “Are you okay?”

From what she could see down on the ground, she had run into someone in a suit. So probably an adult man. But he did not seem to be a mean person because he stopped her from apologizing any further, slowly stood up, and reached out a hand to help her up like a gentleman.

“I’m- I am fine. And I must apologize for this.”

Relieved by his kind behavior, she realized it looked bad to stay down on the ground, so she quickly took his hand to stand up.

“N-no, it was my fault. Thank you very…much!?”
As soon as she looked up at his face to take his hand, her eyes widened in surprise and her expression froze in place.