NOVEL NEXT [Vol. 11.5 pt. 1]
Kris’s day started off like it did every other day, and that was by reaching his hand down into his pants to—no!
The misbehaving hand reaching for his sack was grabbed by his other hand, stopping it in its tracks.
After all, Kris was not only a man who was pursuing classy, feminine maids for love… but he was a man who was actually dating them now. Simply not smelling his hand after his morning ball pinching-and-rolling was no longer enough. He had to resist doing something that vulgar completely.
“Whew… that was close,” Kris said, letting out a relieved sigh before sitting up on his bed. Next, he grabbed his phone and checked the time.
Four in the morning.
“Good. It took a couple weeks… but I can finally wake up earlier than them without an alarm clock.” Of course, while he might have trained himself to wake up earlier than his girlfriends did, he still had a phone full of messages from them. Seeing as how they lived across the ocean from him and were several hours ahead… they woke up first to start their daily duties hours before Kris did, even when he woke up at four in the morning. “When I live with them… I’ll be able to surprise them by waking up first and making them breakfast.”
Next, as tempted as he was to reply to their messages, he didn’t. He didn’t want them to find out about just how early he woke up until he could surprise them with it in person. So instead of replying, he went about his new, morning routine.
Get up.
Pee.
Shower.
Wash face.
Comb hair.
Get dressed.
Make breakfast.
His girlfriends were flawless maids, after all, who seemed to always be perfectly prepared for anything and everything. They woke up early in the day and got to work almost immediately in service of Alice’s father despite just how relaxed he was with their employment. If Kris was going to date women like that, then he needed to be just as good as them at being proper adults!
And while he was in the shower, he couldn’t help but to lean his head back and sigh. “Ryou is right… hot showers are the best,” Kris said to himself, sounding equally tired and blissful.
Just the other week, he was looking up how he could be a better man for his girlfriends. It didn’t take long before he found himself inside a rabbit hole of self-improvement techniques targeting men, and some of them claimed that true men should always take cold showers. After sharing this information with his best friend, Ryouta… he received a slew of messages from Alice and Cassandra ganging up on him about how full of shit all those pandering, self-help “gurus” were.
Ryouta never paid any attention to that sort of stuff, though, and simply told Kris that hot showers were the best.
Of course, Kris did also take everything that Alice and Cassandra told him to heart. “Can’t forget to be careful about that stuff. Don’t want to let some jerks influence me and make me mess things up.” Then he recalled what the two women told him. They told him to just be himself because that was who his girlfriends fell in love with. It was difficult to put that in practice, though, when as far as he was concerned, he only started knowing how to properly interact with people after becoming friends with Ryouta and imitating him.
Ryouta had six girlfriends, everybody liked him, he had a bunch of friends, and never did anything wrong as far as Kris was concerned. If there was any man to be more like, it was him. Why wouldn’t he try to be more like Ryouta?
But Ryouta, Ryouta’s girlfriends, and even his own girlfriends, all told Kris to just… be himself.
The problem was that he himself wasn’t like Ryouta. When he used to just act like himself, he recalled how many people he upset, how women didn’t like him and were wary around him, and so on. There were a hundred reasons to not act like himself and zero reasons to act like himself aside from others telling him to.
“People always said getting my degree would be one of the hardest things I’ve ever done,” Kris said and sighed, “but knowing how to act around others is way harder.”
Once he was out of the shower and finished up in the bathroom, he left for his kitchen where he had several recipe books sitting out on the counter. After he told Ryouta about how he made himself boiled, frozen steak and eggs with ketchup, all in the same pot, Ryouta suggested—as kindly as he could, as hard as that was—for him to pick up some cooking books or to look online for recipes and to follow those instead.
“It says if you want to make scrambled eggs… you crack the eggs first. But do you crack them in the skillet?” Kris asked, looking at the preheated skillet in front of him and the eggs held in his hand. After all, all the recipe said was to crack the eggs and fry them in the skillet for a few minutes. It didn’t say where, how, nor why to crack the eggs. So, Kris ended up tossing the eggs into the skillet, cracking them with his metal spatula, and then mixed everything all together while casually scraping his spatula against the skillet’s surface.
A few minutes later and he had himself a plate of scrambled eggs, bits of shell included, and an even-more-scratched skillet.
Kris chuckled to himself as he looked down at his culinary masterpiece with overwhelming pride. “Heh. I’ve come a long way since college and eating powdered ramen. Wait… I think I just had a genius idea. What if I try cooking the ramen in water like spaghetti instead of eating it dry? I wonder if that would make the noodles softer. Oh man, I wonder if Ryou has ever tried that.”
Elsewhere in the country, Ryouta was in the middle of a nightmare that just kept on getting worse and worse for some reason.
“I should take a pic and send it to him. Maybe Alice can tell me if they would like it. If she says they would… then I can make it for them when they come here. Wait… I should put some ketchup and mayo on it before I take a pic. Gotta make it look all nice and fancy like those food bloggers.”
Kris wasn’t wrong to believe that people would post pictures of food like his to the internet, he was just horribly misled about what sort of blogs would be featuring pictures of his food. Just as there were blogs and forums dedicated to incredible food… there were also such platforms dedicated to the most horrifying of food, and that was where most of Kris’s food would end up if he ever tried to publicly share pictures of it.
“And they say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Wait… being a dog is my bro’s thing. Then what am I? If he’s a dog… and he’s got Rock, and I’ve got Shogun… then am I a fox? But is Shogun even really a fox? Shogun is like, a fox… with feathers… thing. Alright. If Ryou is the dog, then I’m the feathery fox thing who can still learn new tricks.”
Once he was done coating his scrambled eggs and shells with ketchup and mayonnaise, Kris used a spoon to bring some of it to his mouth… and his eyes went wide.
With joy.
“Oh… oh man, this is the best thing I’ve ever cooked,” Kris said as he crunched down on some of the eggshells. “This is the power of not scratching my balls every morning as soon as I wake up.”
Unfortunately, he didn’t get to enjoy his morning meal in total peace as his phone’s ringtone filled his kitchen with its obnoxious volume. It even made him jump from surprise.
“Why is somebody calling me this—oh, it’s Lucy.” Kris answered the phone and brought it up to his ear, still eating with his other hand holding the spoon. “Hey, something wrong?”
A feminine voice full of excitement drilled its way into Kris’s ear. The woman the voice belonged to, Lucy, had far too much energy in her voice for it being four in the morning still. “You won!”
“Won what?”
“S-seriously? You… you won.”
“Like… the lottery?”
Exasperation took the place of the woman’s energy in her voice. “Kris… I swear. The competition. You know, the biggest freaking architectural design contest in the country? The one where the winner gets their design built and they get to work alongside some of the country’s greatest architects and engineers to make it possible? You know, the thing you worked so hard on and—”
“But all I did was make a few sketches in a few hours when you told me about it for fun and submitted them. Didn’t really care or try hard.”
“Kris… please never tell anybody what you just said again. Anyways, you won! The announcement hasn’t been made yet, but an insider friend of mine told me that you won, and they’ll be announcing it later today!”
“Oh, cool.”
“You… you don’t care at all, do you?”
“I’m gonna be honest with you, not really. I care more about this breakfast I just made. I scrambled eggs and put ketchup and mayonnaise on them. Oh, I also got an idea for boiling ramen in water instead of eating it dry, but I haven’t tried that one yet, so I’m not sure if it would be good or not.”
A tired sigh left Lucy’s mouth. “I’m the only one putting any effort into maintaining the image of this generation’s prodigal architect… anyways, the award ceremony is going to be next weekend. There are going to be lots of famous experts there who will be expecting you to show up well-dressed and behaved. Can I count on you to—”
“Oh, I can’t.”
“Wha-what?”
“My girlfriends are coming over next week and they’ll be here for a couple of weeks.”
“Wait. Wait, wait wait. You said… girlfriend…s?”
“Yeah. Rachel, Iris, Emily, Abigail, and Anastasia.”
“Kris, you didn’t agree to some scam in an email that made you think you got a bunch of girlfriends or something, right? Did they ask for money to come here and plan on overstaying their visas? Did you order some brides from—”
“They’re just normal girls. I’ve met them before, too. Well… I shouldn’t say they’re normal. They’re too perfect to be normal. Honestly, I get why you don’t believe me, because I can barely even believe it myself, but yeah. Man… I’m so lucky.”
“You… the man who thinks it’s okay to ask a girl what color her underwear is just because you’re curious—”
“Hey, that was years ago. I know that’s inappropriate now.”
“The man who got drunk and horny during a party at college and took his dick out, making me pull your pants back up so that you wouldn’t randomly start jacking off during the middle of the party—”
“That was even longer ago, and I was drunk. You know I don’t touch alcohol anymore since I don’t like not being able to control myself.”
“You… you must be tired. I must have woken you up from a dream where you were imagining yourself with a bunch of girlfriends. Hah. Hah, hah. There’s… there’s no way that you could… after all these years of waiting for you…”
Kris blinked a few times. “Waiting for me? Oh, the debt. I thought I paid you back all of that already?”
“I need a drink.”
And with that, the call dropped, leaving Kris confused for a few seconds before finishing off his breakfast.
Once he was done with his breakfast, he realized that he forgot to take a picture of it to send to Ryouta, so he made even more of the eggs while scratching his skillet even more in the process.
While he ate, he glanced over at his living room wall where countless awards were framed, and there was even a display case full of trophies all in his honor.
Not that he cared about any of those. It wasn’t even him who decorated the room with those despite them all belonging to him.
Yet, no matter how many honors he might have had in his name, not a single one of those accomplishments could compare to the one that blew them all out of the water.
He unlocked his phone screen just so that he could see the wallpaper which was set to a picture of all his girlfriends together that they sent him.
“Man… I’m too lucky,” Kris said right before getting a piece of eggshell stuck between his teeth, cutting his gums. “Ouch. Maybe I’m not supposed to include the shells. Wouldn’t want the girls to accidentally get hurt.”