Chapter 37
"Hehe... Minseo Oppa..."
She looked at me with a nearly vacant expression, picking up the strawberries on the table one by one and feeding them to me.
Of course, I had hands too, and accepting food with my mouth from a girl younger than me might have been a blow to my pride.
But I decided not to care about that anymore.
Honestly, it was a habit I'd picked up because Hyunwoo had me sit on his lap and fed me practically every day.
That doesn't mean I like being treated like a little kid, okay?
Maybe Hyunwoo still had some sadness over losing his pet lingering in his heart?
If I thought of it as me playing a role of sorts, I could accept it.
Besides, if I rejected Hyunwoo's touch or consideration, that frightening side I'd seen the other day might come out.
"Mmph..."
So I had no choice but to accept the role I'd already grown used to playing in this house.
That didn't mean I had any reason to let Hyuna do the same, though...
Precedents are a dangerous thing.
Once you start making exceptions, you can argue about them endlessly, so I decided not to treat Hyunwoo and Hyuna differently.
"Minseo Oppa...! Could I hug you just once, like Oppa does?"
Now that Hyunwoo had stepped out for a bit, she came rushing at me as if she were Hyunwoo herself.
The way she acts... even the way she thinks seems similar.
Siblings, after all...?
I didn't think there was anything to be gained from her hugging me.
"...No."
Still, I felt like I shouldn't make any exceptions for being hugged or sitting on someone's lap—not anyone but Hyunwoo.
An instinctive warning surfaced, without any input from my rational mind, and I started avoiding the Hyuna in front of me.
"Come on. Oppa hugged you, too! Since we're siblings, doesn't that mean I can hug you as well?!"
Hyuna raised her voice indignantly, acting as if she were asserting an obvious right.
...Is she crazy?
I never thought that thought I sometimes had whenever I looked at Hyunwoo would come up about a high school girl younger than me.
Had she already decided what she was going to do no matter what I said? Smiling slyly...? No, grotesquely, Hyuna came toward me.
Before I could even get up, she came close, slipped her hands under my arms the way Hyunwoo always did, and lifted me into the air.
"...Is this a trend?"
"You're cute like a cat. And you're tiny now. I wanted to try it."
"I didn't particularly need to know that..."
By chance, she'd given me a clue that let me infer why Hyunwoo always picked me up like this.
Maybe since they were blood relatives and had similar personalities, the reason was similar too?
Am I being prejudiced?
...Wait a second?
"Hyuna. Put me down. I never said you could."
Dangling limply in the air in a catlike pose, I did my best to pull myself together and asked her blankly.
Usually, if you wanted to do something to someone, didn't you ask them first and wait for permission?
Was there no intermediate step of getting permission for Hyuna?
It was definitely cozy.
Unlike Hyunwoo, Hyuna had a peculiar softness, and that felt nice too.
It felt like I was lying on something warm and squishy, and I could almost drift off into a happy dream.
Even so, at the same time, there was an inexplicable chill in my heart...
Flail, flail, flail, flail.
In the end, overcome by a bad feeling, I flailed in her arms as hard as I could, trying to escape.
A futile fluttering that didn't even manage to make Hyuna tense up.
I resented it. This world that had made me so helpless.
I couldn't survive on my own either way, so what would it have hurt to give me a body that was a little taller and didn't look so young?
...It is cute, though. It is...
"Phew... Ha! Hah..."
"P-put me down!"
Flail, flail, flail, flail, flail, flail, flail, flail.
About twice as much flailing as I'd done earlier.
To put it simply, I squeezed out every last bit of strength I had and twisted my body frantically.
She's weird... She really does seem like a weird girl...
Hyunwoo, save me...
"Ah, Minseo Oppa! Hold still for a second!"
"Eek..."
"Did I bully you? Did I hit you?"
More than that, what mattered to me was that I'd refused in the first place.
Apparently, Hyuna's priorities were different from mine.
No, maybe I should just say they were different from common sense?
Hyuna hugged me with such confidence, acting as if it were her right.
Even in the middle of all that, the sound of her burying her face in the back of my neck and seeming to sniff me was enough to make my skin crawl.
I felt like I was in a situation scarier than any horror movie released lately.
Of course, I wanted to trust her, since she was Hyunwoo's younger sister...
But it wasn't easy. Not at all.
"But you still can't... No. I don't want to. Please don't."
Since she didn't seem like she'd change her mind no matter what, I tried using the ultimate technique I'd learned in elementary school.
In reality, it was a foolish, ineffectual response born of armchair theorizing...
It wasn't that different from seeing school bullying and yelling, "Stop!"
"...If you say all that through to the end, I guess I can't do anything about it."
"Huh...?"
Surprisingly, she obediently lowered me back to the ground.
What? No, seriously, what?
That actually works?
"But next time, you have to sound genuinely desperate. You have to yell like I'm about to pounce on you any second before I'll let you go."
She grinned at me, chuckling.
...Uh, so this is...
"......"
I got tricked, didn't I?
Hyuna had been planning to tease me from the very beginning, and deliberately did that sort of... thing.
She's seriously awful. Just awful.
No wonder she's Hyunwoo's sister—tormenting me is her favorite thing in the world, huh?
"Hyuna. Bend down for a second...!"
"...Huh? Like this...? B-but why... Argh...!"
Still, if I let her get away with it without punishing her, I felt like my dignity as an elder would crumble,
so I gave her a light flick on the forehead and ran off to Hyunwoo's room.
...Ah, I got caught.
"You made fun of me first!"
"Still, a girl shouldn't resort to violence so carelessly."
Hyuna launched into a textbook scolding.
This is unfair.
I was the one who'd been treated like an idiot and subjected to pervy behavior,
so why was I the one getting scolded again?
The whole world really is out to get me.
...It's not like I'd try to die over that anymore, though.
"I'm not a girl..."
"You're a girl now, aren't you?"
I tried to avoid her as much as possible and get out of this situation.
But Hyuna was more on top of things than I expected,
and countered what I thought was a fairly logical argument with fairly logical bullshit.
It's true that my body is a woman's now...
But that's not the point.
My actions came from decisions made by my own mind, after all.
In other words, that flick on the forehead wasn't a childish tantrum, but a loving smack meant as a lesson from an adult.
...Let's go with that.
"Aren't you going to apologize?"
When I kept my dissatisfied expression and didn't answer,
Hyuna once again shamelessly demanded an apology.
At this point, I wasn't sure whether to call her impressive or crazy.
"Why should I apologize?"
"You hit me."
"You were being perverted...! Even though I said I didn't like it..."
"How could I? I did nothing but embrace you with love."
"The sniffing...!"
"Sniffing...? I don't know what Minseo Oppa is talking about."
Shameless.
Truly shameless, as if she'd plastered two layers of iron over her face.
By now, it was hard to see her as anything impressive, even if I tried.
If you act like that, you can ruin your image just as thoroughly even if you're covered head to toe in jewels and designer labels.
In the end, money can't completely polish a person's image.
"Anyway, if you won't apologize, I can't just let this go. I'll punish you, okay?"
"...Are you sure you're actually talking to me?"
"Of course. I've been listening carefully the whole time."
"I don't think so..."
Anyway, there was no reason for me to apologize.
Hyuna was the one who'd played a trick on me in the first place.
And it was that kind of... trick, too.
I'd learned that something sufficiently disgusting feels disgusting regardless of the other person's gender or status.
So I pressed my lips together and glared at Hyuna a little.
What are you going to do if I won't apologize?
"If you keep resisting like that, I'll give your butt a good spanking, okay?
"...?"
Did I hear that wrong?
A spanking?
That thing you hardly ever see in real life... the kind of thing that belongs in cartoons?
"Y-you think I'm scared?"
Even though it was a situation I'd only seen in kids' cartoons when I was little.
Since the overall atmosphere was comedic, it hadn't stood out,
but thinking about it now, the protagonist seemed to hurt a little more from that than from other punishments.
Though the real damage would probably be to your mental state.
If it actually happened.
"......"
But that wasn't reason enough to let go of my principles,
so I kept glaring at Hyuna and stood my ground, confident in my innocence.
"I'll smack it hard enough to make a loud sound."
"...!"
What she said next was terrifying.
You're going to hit me hard...?
This body, so frail and cursed by the world?
A threat that made me seriously question her humanity.
Still, I couldn't give in to violence like that...
"I'll lift your skirt and smack your bare skin. It'll hurt a lot."
"...Sorry."
In the end, I was the one who apologized to Hyuna first.
But I absolutely didn't submit because I was afraid of that punishment.
Thinking it over, that flick on the forehead might have been a bit much, so I'm just apologizing first like a mature adult.
Anyway, no. Anyway.
"Good. Don't use violence with such a cute face from now on, okay?"
...Even a kindergartener wouldn't be treated this way.
Hyunwoo, save me...