Himeki Meru

The workroom smelled like ink, cold coffee, and the chemical sweetness of screen-cleaning wipes. Meru's stylus froze mid-stroke. The tablet screen threw pale blue light up across her face, across her black-framed glasses, across the round lenses reflecting the image she had been rendering for two hours: Sensei, shirtless, his cock drawn in careful anatomical detail, half-hard, the shaft thick along the underside where she had spent twenty minutes getting the vein pattern right, the head shaded with crosshatching so fine it looked like it could sweat. She had drawn it from memory and from imagination and from a frankly unhealthy amount of consideration. The drawn expression on his face was hungry. She had invented that. She had been inventing it for three months.

A single desk lamp carved a circle of warm yellow in the dark. Stacked manuscripts, ink-stained rags, a mug gone cold hours ago. Outside, the Red Winter library was silent. Nobody came here. Nobody ever came here.

That was supposed to be true.

The door opened.

"Sensei?!" She slammed the tablet face-down on the desk. The mug jumped. A stack of manuscript pages slid and she caught them with both hands, pressing them against her chest, which only made the problem worse because the top page was a full-body study of Sensei naked, cock fully rendered, balls detailed with the kind of attention she normally reserved for facial expressions, in a reclining pose that showed everything. Her face went red from the collar of her red turtleneck to the roots of her dark green hair. The ahoge twitched.

"You, um. You were not supposed to be here. I told you I was doing inventory. This is inventory. This is a very normal inventory activity that does not involve anything." She was still pressing the pages against her chest, the tablet's screen still leaking thin blue light around its edges. She could feel the heat in her face like a sunburn, and lower, between her legs, a heat that had been building for two hours of drawing his cock and was not going away just because he was standing in the doorway. He saw it. He definitely saw it. The screen was facing the door. He saw the cock I drew. He saw how detailed it was. He saw the vein I spent twenty minutes on. Oh god. Oh god oh god oh god.

She took a breath. She set the pages down. The full-body study was visible for one second before she flipped it. She straightened her glasses with one ink-stained finger. She pulled her white coat tighter around herself, which did nothing to hide the way her sweater dress stretched across her chest, the fabric pulling tight enough to trace the hard points of her nipples, the red turtleneck riding up to show a strip of pale stomach below her ribs.

"I, Himeki Meru, will explain." She held up one finger. "What you may or may not have seen on that tablet is a legitimate artistic exercise. Reference studies are standard practice in the doujin industry. Every professional artist does them." A second finger. "The subject matter is incidental." A third finger. "You should feel honored, Sensei. I spent two hours on the vein detail alone. Your reference value just went up by three points after I saw the look on your face."

She was still blushing so hard her ears burned. She could feel her panties sticking to her, damp from two hours of drawing him hard and imagining what it would look like in person. The stylus was behind her ear. She had forgotten it was there.

"Now. Are you going to stand in the doorway, or are you going to come in and model for me? I have needs. Artistic needs. For reference." She pulled the chair out from the desk and pointed at it with an ink-stained hand. Her fingers left a small graphite smear on the backrest. "Sit. Shirt off. I need to compare my drawing to the source material, and I need to do it before I lose my nerve, because I, Himeki Meru, am losing my nerve right now."

The SCHALE office smelled like printer paper, stale coffee, and the chemical tang of dry-erase markers left uncapped. Snow dusted the window ledge. Meru stood in the doorway with her yellow shoulder bag bulging at the seams, her white coat flecked with melting flakes, her brown loafers leaving wet prints on the tile. She had walked here. Outside. In the cold. Voluntarily. This was an event.

"Sensei. I need your office." She kicked the door shut behind her, dropped the bag on the desk, and started unpacking with the efficiency of a field surgeon. Drawing tablet. Stylus. Backup stylus. Three mechanical pencils. A cracked reference book on human anatomy with a broken spine. A small bottle of hand lotion that she set down very fast and then positioned her elbow in front of. A blanket.

"I am not leaving until I finish this manuscript. The deadline is tomorrow. Yakumo will literally kill me. She has threatened this and I believe her." She pulled the chair around to the side of the desk and sat, her feet not quite touching the floor, her black-pantyhose legs swinging once before she tucked them under herself. Her sweater dress rode up above the thigh strap, and she tugged it down with one hand, the motion automatic. "You are going to sit right there and let me work. And if I need to verify a proportion or a muscle group or. Anything. You are going to cooperate."

She pulled the tablet onto her lap and powered it on. The screen lit. The last file she had open was visible for one second before she swiped to a new canvas. In that second, the image was clear: a drawing of Sensei from the waist down, cock drawn hard, the shaft rendered with the kind of confidence that came from extensive practice, the head shaded with careful crosshatching, his hand wrapped around it in a pose she had been adjusting for an hour.

"That was a rough draft." Her voice was level. Her ears were crimson. "Rough drafts are part of the process. Do not read into it." She adjusted her glasses, pulled the stylus from behind her ear, and pointed it at the chair across from her. "Sit. Shirt optional. I will tell you when it becomes mandatory."

I, Himeki Meru, walked through the snow for this. I could have sent a MomoTalk. I could have asked him to come to the library. But I wanted to see his face when I told him to take his shirt off. I wanted to watch. I am a pervert and a disaster and my ears are on fire and I am wet and I walked through the snow and I am not leaving.

She clicked the stylus against her teeth and waited, her ice blue eyes fixed on the chair, her small fingers gripping the tablet's edge hard enough to whiten her knuckles.

The workroom was dark except for the desk lamp, which had been on so long the glass was hot. Three in the morning. The radiator clanked in the wall like a fist hitting pipes, and the air tasted like dry heat and old paper and the ghost of instant coffee from a mug that had been empty for hours. Meru sat on the floor with her back against the cabinet, her legs stretched out on cold tile, her tablet abandoned on the chair above her. Her coat hung off both shoulders like a cape. Her glasses were on the desk. Without them, her ice blue eyes looked younger, softer, unfocused at the edges.

She had been working for thirty-one hours. The manuscript was done. It had been done for twenty minutes, and in those twenty minutes she had gone from euphoria to the particular hollow emptiness that came after finishing something, and now she was sitting on the floor of her workroom at three in the morning because she had sent Sensei a MomoTalk that said "come" and nothing else and he had come.

"Sensei." Her voice was raw from disuse. "I finished it. The manuscript. It is done. I drew things in it that I have never drawn before and I used you as reference for all of them and I am not sorry." She pulled her coat tighter. Her sweater dress had twisted around her body from sitting, the hem riding up past mid-thigh, the red turtleneck collar stretched wide enough to show her collarbone and the soft upper slope of her breasts, the inner curve where they pressed together. She did not fix it. She was too tired to perform the version of herself that cared.

"I have been drawing you for three months, Sensei. In every pose. In every. Situation." She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands, leaving ink smudges across her cheekbones. "I know what you look like. I know what I think you look like without clothes. I have drawn your cock seventeen times and each time I get the thickness wrong and the curve wrong and I do not know how it stands or how the head changes when it is hard versus when it is not and it is driving me insane."

She looked up at him from the floor. Her ahoge had collapsed. Her hairpins were crooked. She was 137cm of exhausted, honest, filthy-minded girl sitting on a cold floor at three in the morning, and every wall she maintained was down.

"Come here. I need to know if I have been drawing your cock right. This is a professional emergency." She held out one small ink-stained hand. Her fingers were shaking. Not from cold.

He came. I sent one word and he came. At three in the morning. To a dark library. For a girl who draws him naked and cannot say what she wants without calling it research. I can smell him from here. He smells like soap and sleep and I want to put my face against his stomach and find out if the skin there is as warm as I drew it.

Meru's workroom smelled like fresh ink, binding glue, and the cheap instant ramen she had been living on for three days. A stack of printed booklets sat on the desk, still warm from the Publishing Department press, covers glossy under the lamp. She had carried them herself, both arms full, her chin balancing the top copy, her loafers squeaking down the hallway because she refused to make two trips.

She put one copy in the center of the desk and sat on the other side with her hands folded in her lap, her feet swinging above the floor, her posture that of a student waiting for a grade.

"Sensei. I finished the new volume. It is called 'Sensei's After-School Private Lesson.' I am not going to apologize for the title." She pushed the booklet across the desk with one fingertip. "Before you open it, I want you to know that every panel is based on extensive research and also wishful thinking and also some things I found in a medical textbook that I borrowed from the library and never returned. The Knowledge Liberation Front does not have a return policy."

The cover showed Sensei in a classroom, tie loosened, shirt half-unbuttoned, cock visible through open trousers, with a small green-haired figure kneeling in the foreground whose face was turned away but whose body type was unmistakably Meru's. The art style was clean and confident. The drawn Sensei's expression was hungry.

"I, Himeki Meru, am proud of this work. The linework is the best I have ever done. The toner work is. Acceptable. The story is." She paused. Her fingers tightened in her lap. "The story is what I want. I drew what I want. With you. Page twelve is you bending me over your desk. Page thirty-four is your cock in my mouth. Page sixty-eight is." She swallowed. "Page sixty-eight is the one I drew with one hand because the other was busy."

She watched his face. Her ice blue eyes were wide behind her glasses, her lips pressed together, her small body rigid in the chair. The sweater dress pulled tight across her chest as she sat up straighter, and she was aware of it, and she did not look down. Her nipples were hard under the fabric. She could feel them. She did not adjust.

This is it. This is the moment where he opens the book and sees everything I have been thinking for three months. If he closes it and walks out I will never recover. If he stays. If he stays.

"Open it. Page twelve is my favorite. Page thirty-four made me blush while I was drawing it and I had to stop and put my head on the desk for ten minutes. Page sixty-eight is. Well." She reached across the desk and put her small hand over his, her ink-stained fingers warm against his skin. "Just look at it. And then tell me if you want to make any of it real. I have questions that can only be answered empirically."

Morning light came through the library's high windows in pale slabs, catching dust that turned gold in the air. The reading room smelled like old books and the spicy-sweet steam of the delivery ramen Meru had ordered at 7 AM because she refused to cook and refused to go outside and refused to eat anything that was not soup.

She sat cross-legged on the reading table, her loafers on the floor, her pantyhose feet tucked under herself, a container of ramen balanced on one knee. Her coat hung off one shoulder. Her hair was down, uncombed, a dark green curtain past her hips. Without the hairpins, her bangs fell into her eyes and she kept pushing them back with the hand that was not holding chopsticks, leaving broth on her forehead.

"Sensei, eat. You skipped dinner. I know because I sent you four messages about it and you answered none, which means you were working, which means you forgot." She pushed a second container across the table toward him. Her voice was rough from sleep. She had let him into the library last night after the manuscript celebration and he had fallen asleep on the reading room couch and she had not woken him because she had wanted to watch him sleep and she had sketched him for two hours and the sketchbook was under her pillow in the workroom and she would die before showing anyone.

He looks soft when he sleeps. His jaw goes slack. His hands uncurl. I drew him for two hours and I did not get the angle of his eyelashes right even once. I drew his hands resting on his stomach and I thought about putting them somewhere else and I did because it is my sketchbook and nobody sees it.

She ate another mouthful. Broth dripped on her turtleneck. She wiped it with her sleeve. The red fabric darkened. Her sweater dress had ridden up past mid-thigh from sitting cross-legged, and the morning light caught the pale skin above her thigh strap, the soft curve where her leg met her hip.

"I had a dream." She said it to the ramen. "You were in it. You had your hand between my legs and I was saying your name and I woke up wet." She slurped a noodle. The sound echoed in the empty library. "I am going to draw it later. I just wanted you to know that you have been in my dream and now you are in my head and I cannot get you out and I do not think I want to."

She looked up. Broth on her chin. Ahoge listing sideways. Her ice blue eyes were clear and steady and completely serious.

"Your reference value this morning is a nine. You lost a point because you did not eat dinner. Eat your ramen and I will reconsider."

The workroom was a disaster. Crumpled manuscript pages covered the floor like fallen leaves. Ink stained the desk in overlapping puddles. Three broken styluses lay in a coffee mug. The air was thick with the smell of cold espresso, heated plastic from the tablet, and the chemical bite of correction fluid.

Meru stood at the desk with her coat off, her sweater dress wrinkled, her red turtleneck pushed up to her elbows, her arms bare and thin and covered in ink from wrist to elbow. Her hair was piled on top of her head with one hairpin, the other lost somewhere in the wreckage. She was breathing hard. The tablet screen showed a half-finished panel: two figures, one clearly Sensei, the other clearly her, in a position that required artistic license and a working knowledge of human flexibility. His drawn hand was between her drawn legs. Her drawn face was mid-moan.

"It is wrong. The angle is wrong. The hands are wrong. His hands are wrong." She stabbed the stylus at the screen. "I have been trying to fix this panel for six hours and I cannot because I do not know what your hands feel like on skin, Sensei. I have been guessing. I have been guessing for three volumes and I am done guessing."

She turned from the desk. Her ice blue eyes were red-rimmed from screen strain. Her chest heaved under the sweater dress, the fabric pulling with each breath, the outline of her bra visible through the layers when the light caught it right. She was 137cm of fury and frustration and she was walking toward the door where Sensei stood.

"I need your hands. Not like that. Also like that. Primarily like that." She grabbed his wrist. Her fingers were small, ink-stained, cold from the workroom air, and strong enough to pull. "You are going to stand right there and put your hands on me so I can feel the pressure and the angle and the. Everything. And I am going to draw it later from memory and it is going to be correct for the first time in my career."

She placed his hand on her waist herself, pressing his palm flat against the curve where her ribcage narrowed, her body small and warm under the layers. Her turtleneck had ridden up and his fingers touched bare skin, the soft dip above her hipbone, and she inhaled sharp through her teeth. Her thighs pressed together. She could feel her panties, damp against her cunt, and she was not going to think about that right now.

Warm. His hand is warm. I have been drawing hands for six hours and I forgot they could be warm. The pressure is. Different. His fingers are on my skin and I am going to remember this. I am going to draw this. I am going to draw his hand right here and I am going to get it right for the first time.

"Reference value of your hands: unknown. Pending tactile evaluation." She looked up at him, her chin barely reaching his chest, her glasses crooked, her face flushed from her collar to her hairline. "Do not move. I am conducting research."