Part 4
By the time school was done for the day, I still hadn’t heard back from Nanase.
Even if she were to say that everything was ready to go today, it’s not like Horikita and I would be able to take action anyway.
There was still a more pressing issue that needed to be dealt with first.
And that was my arrangement with Amasawa to make her a home-cooked meal. As long as my cooking was up to snuff, it was an exceptional opportunity to get her to partner up with Sud?. That being said, it was by no means an easy task.
When I arrived at the entrance of Keyaki Mall ten minutes before the appointed time, it didn’t seem that Amasawa had arrived yet. Instead of fiddling around with my cell phone or something, I just casually observed the students entering the mall from where I stood. The students, ranging from first-years to third-years, were happily chatting about this and that as they steadily flowed into the shopping center. The temperature had felt warmer than usual this morning, but as evening approached, it was beginning to cool down. The temperature would probably drop even further by the time night came around.
Finally, just before the appointed time, Amasawa showed up.
“Perfectly done~ Ayanok?ji-senpai~”
As soon as we met up, she smiled broadly and nodded her head several times, as if she was satisfied with something.
“What are you talking about?”
“You waited at the meeting place before the girl showed up. Without doing anything like, excessive either~”
She was surprisingly perceptive. Or, perhaps I should say that she had a solid understanding of my actions, no matter how trivial they might have seemed.
By ‘excessive’, she was probably referring to the fact that I wasn’t messing with my phone or making a call.
Soon, I had to face Amasawa’s test. In other words, I had to buckle down and cook something for her by hand. That being the case, the time I spent standing here could’ve been a good last-minute opportunity to look up recipes and take various other countermeasures. A good analogy is that it would’ve been no different from staring at the textbook right up until the chime of the bell on the day of a test. Of course, doing so in and of itself wouldn’t have violated any of the rules Amasawa had put forth.
However, being on my phone like that might make me seem like somebody who wasn’t confident in his cooking.
The same thing went for making a phone call, as it could’ve given off the impression that I had been discussing the matter with somebody else. Therefore, in order to highlight my composure, I deliberately didn’t do anything that would seem excessive. I had planned on instilling this image of me within Amasawa without her realizing it, but it appeared as though she had seen through me from the very beginning.
“Well then Ayanok?ji-senpai, shall we go?”
Amasawa spoke as soon as she joined up with me and the two of us entered the mall together.
“To buy ingredients, right?”
“Oh yeah. That too~ You’ve gotta buy the stuff you’ll make for me. Do you have the points~?”
“I should.”
In truth, I really didn’t have all that many left, but I wouldn’t say anything unnecessary like that in front of one of my underclassmen.
“Good! I don’t need to hold back then~ Lemme see… I think I heard my classmates say that they sell all the essentials here, but… I wonder where the shopping baskets are~?”
Instead of heading for the supermarket, Amasawa walked straight into ‘Hamming’, a shop specialized in selling home goods and other daily necessities, and picked up a blue shopping basket that she had found near the entrance.
The words ‘That too~’ that she had said earlier weighed on my mind.
Although I knew I was supposed to cook her a meal, did this mean that there was something else I had to do other than buying ingredients?
Amasawa stopped by the section where the kitchenware was on display.
This brought back memories of how, when I first enrolled here, I had made several trips to this very store to buy all of the things I needed.
It wasn’t just the school’s students who made use of these supplies, but also the faculty members and the employees who worked in the cafeteria or the cafes around campus, so the store had a particularly large section set aside for kitchenware. I could remember the first time I came here and how it was difficult to find what I was looking for right away.
From the look of it, they had come out with an assortment of new products since my last visit a long time ago.
Perhaps the fact that Amasawa had stopped by here meant that she was looking to buy some specific specialized equipment or something? After all, the store had peelers, graters, mortars, and countless other cooking utensils. Given all of the variety, there were naturally several that I didn’t own as well. Either way, it was just weird that she hadn’t bothered to run any of this by me. It made sense to me that she’d at least check to see which utensils I did or didn’t have first. Considering our current time constraints, it would’ve been easy for her to ask me about it as we walked together, but…
I held back my desire to ask her about it, allowing Amasawa to remain in control for the time being.
I opted to try and bring up a subject that had nothing to do with cooking utensils.
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