This thing was clearly made in Japan. It had Japanese washing instructions on the tag. But it couldn’t belong to Minori-san, could it? Could she possibly squeeze that giant rack into something this size?
Then—Myusel? The size was about right, but I couldn’t quite imagine her with Japanese underwear. Of course, she could have asked Minori-san or someone to get it for her...
“...Oh.”
“Shinichi-sama...” Myusel’s voice snapped me back to reality. She had finished gathering up the rest of the laundry and was looking at me. Or more specifically, at the white brassiere that I was clutching.
“Oh! U-Uh, it’s not what it looks like, Myusel! You’ve got it all wrong!” I exclaimed. “I just happened to pick this up! I d-definitely wasn’t standing here thinking, Gee, I wonder whose this is? Could it be Myusel’s? Could this bit of cloth have once been gently cupping Myusel’s chest? Woohoo!, or any perverted stuff like that!” As excuses go, it was a rather revealing one. “I—I’m sorry! Don’t look at me like that! I just... I...!”
I seemed to keep digging myself in deeper. I mean, it wasn’t like I was planning to just stick it in my pocket and walk away. Really. I swear! It’s true! Please believe me!
“P-Please, Shinichi-sama, calm down.”
“But I’m desperate for you to believe me! I swear to God I didn’t have the slightest perverse motivation for picking this thing up!” I was a little crazed.
“No—listen—Shinichi-sama?”
“And I even more never thought of smelling it, or trying it on myself, or anything like that...! I’m not one of those freaks that gets all pant-pant over girls’ underwear, I mean, for starters, I think what’s inside it is so much better—no! That’s not what I mean at all!”
I was completely failing to talk my way out of this. Flubs left, right, and center. Arrrgh, stupid, stupid Shinichi!
“Erm... Shinichi-sama?”
“I—I —!”
“That belongs to... Hikaru-sama...”
“You’re right! I’m sure if Hikaru-san were here, he would be looking at me with utter contempt, total disdain, complete—what?” I blinked and took another look at the bra in my hand. “It belongs to... Hikaru-san?”
“Yes, sir,” Myusel said, nodding. She set the laundry basket on the floor, came over, and took the clothes I’d collected, along with the article of ladies’ underwear. She calmly went back and returned them all to the basket. I watched her, sort of vacantly.
“So even his underwear is girls’ clothing...” I mumbled.
There was a very long pause as I pictured Hikaru-san in my mind. I was aware he was very beautiful, so much so that if nobody told you, it would be easy to take him for a girl. From his long, black hair to his impeccable Gothic-Loli outfit, there was no flaw in his look: all of it suited him perfectly. But it hadn’t even occurred to me that a predilection for wearing women’s clothes would extend to his underwear. I did recall him and me hiding out in the backyard once in our underwear—or really, in some swimsuits—but that had been because Minori-san had gone mad from BL withdrawal. It wasn’t anything from Hikaru-san’s personal wardrobe. In fact, they had actually been men’s competition swimsuits.
But this... Man, this was some commitment. Women’s underwear. Typically, when you were cross-dressing or cosplaying, nobody saw your underwear. Unless you had some reason to assume somebody was going to see your delicates, why go out of your way to cross-dress that stuff, too? What if somebody put on women’s underwear not because he expected anyone to see it, but just because he himself enjoyed dressing up as a woman? That would be understandable.
Hmm?
“Come to think of it, I never actually asked Hikaru-san,” I mused. “Does he see himself as a man who enjoys wearing women’s clothes? Or does he actually want to be a woman?”
“I believe he said once that he began doing it to make his parents happy, and simply continued,” Myusel said thoughtfully.
“Oh yeah, I guess he did. But wearing women’s underwear seems like a bit much if you’re just doing it for appearances. Maybe it, like, started that way, but now it’s something different.”
“I wonder...”
“There’s a lot of things I can’t quite figure out about that guy,” I said.
“What’s up?” someone asked. It was Minori-san, who had appeared in the hallway. I guess if I had seen two people standing next to a huge basket of laundry and whispering with each other, I would have been curious, too. “Anything wrong?”
“No, not really wrong,” I said with a half-smile. “I was just... wondering why Hikaru-san dresses as a girl.”
“What, Hikaru-kun?”
“Uh-huh. Like, does he see himself as a guy who enjoys cross-dressing—almost like a sort of performance—or is it maybe something more? Like, you know... uhh...” I looked for the most delicate way to put it.
Minori-san, though, after blinking behind her glasses for a second, beat me to it, asking bluntly: “Is it gender dysphoria, you mean?”
“I guess. I mean, I’m not looking to diagnose him or something.” Hikaru-san could feel like or be whatever gender he wanted inside; it wouldn’t change anything. “I was just sort of curious about why.”
“Mmm,” Minori-san said, crossing her arms. I guess she hadn’t given it much thought, either. It just seemed that natural, or that typical, maybe, for Hikaru-san to wear girls’ clothes. We never even questioned it. “If it were just cross-dressing, I guess gender dysphoria might be a strong possibility. But he likes to cosplay as anime characters, too, right? Remember how he did Suiren?”
“Now that you mention it, yeah, I do.”
Back when he had first met Petralka, he had gone out of his way to cosplay as a character from Rose Princess, a show the empress had been obsessed with at the time.
“People cross-dress for cosplay all the time without having gender dysphoria,” Minori-san said. “I dress in guys’ clothes, myself.”
“Oh yeah,” I said. Minori-san, I was given to understand, had gravitated toward cosplaying male characters because of
