My Strict Boss Is the Secret Artist Drawing Spicy Comics of Us novel · Chapter 2 of 24
Chapter 2: Straight Face
He decides to answer the artist anonymously and to act out the comic one panel at a time, and the chief's face holds for exactly forty-one seconds.
Sota shut the drawer with two fingers.
He had just enough time to sit down and look at page two of the Hirano report.
Chief Takamine came back down the dark aisle with a stack of copies.
He did not look at the drawer. He did not look at Sota's ears.
"Ichinose. It is ten twenty. Go home."
"Yes, Chief."
"Your figure is correct now. The font is not."
"I'll fix the font."
"Tomorrow."
He wrote in red in the margin, and turned the page toward Sota.
The word was Acceptable.
Sota took the stairs down fourteen floors, because he could not stand in a lift with his own face.
At home in Itabashi, he ironed a shirt he had already ironed, and then he sat on the floor with a notebook.
He was a man who filed things.
When his landlord raised the rent, he had filed a letter. When his phone broke, he had filed a claim with himself.
So he wrote at the top of the page, in his neat square hand, PROCEDURE FOR HANDLING THE CHIEF.
Step one was to verify.
Redpen drew the real office, the real coffee and the real Sota, and Redpen kept a pen tablet in the chief's bottom drawer.
The chief had walked past the fourth stall and stopped.
Sota underlined verified twice.
Step two was to decide whether to quit.
He looked at that for a while.
He thought about the salaryman in the comic, who was drawn with a careful, silly tenderness, and whose ears were always pink.
Nobody draws a man for two years if they hate him.
He crossed out step two and wrote, Do not quit. Reply.
Step three was to leave a comment.
He opened the app and found the comment box under chapter eighty-seven, which already had four thousand replies.
He typed, Thank you for the update, Sensei. The desk panel was my favorite. Please draw more of the chief.
He deleted please, because it was begging.
His handle was still a default string of numbers.
He changed it to StallFour, which was the truth and sounded like a code name, and he pressed send.
Step four he wrote slowly.
Act out what the comic draws, one panel at a time, and see how long the chief keeps a straight face.
He added a column to the page for seconds.
At eight fifty-five the next morning, Sota stood beside the vending machine on the fourteenth floor.
His phone was running as a stopwatch under his palm.
Chief Takamine came out of the lift in his perfect charcoal suit and stopped in front of him.
Sota had put his tie on crooked, on purpose, by a full ten degrees.
It was panel three of chapter eighty-two.
"Good morning, Chief."
"Ichinose. Your tie."
"I know, Chief. I couldn't get it straight."
The chief looked at the tie. He looked at Sota's face.
Then he reached out and took the knot between two fingers, and his knuckles settled under Sota's chin.
Sota pressed the stopwatch.
The chief tugged the knot left, tugged it right, and slid it up to Sota's throat.
His face did not move.
"You tie it too tight," he said. "Stop strangling yourself."
"Yes, Chief."
He loosened it, found it crooked, and began again.
The second time took longer.
Sota counted it with his thumb: twenty seconds, twenty-five, and the chief's knuckles still warm against his jaw.
The chief retied it a third time, with great care, a flawless Windsor, and left his hand flat on Sota's chest to smooth it.
Down the aisle, Nao was walking toward the coffee machine with her mouth open.
The chief's red pen clicked once in his breast pocket, by itself.
Sota stopped the clock.
Forty seconds.
"Done," the chief said. "Do not come to work dressed like a lost child."
He walked away down the aisle at exactly his normal speed, and his left ear was red.
Nao arrived with an empty cup. "Did he just dress you?"
"I'm filing it as grooming," Sota said.
That night he lay on his futon with the notebook on his chest and wrote, Forty-one. Ear.
At eleven fifty, his phone chimed.
It was not Thursday.
It was a bonus page, one panel only: the salaryman with a stopwatch under his palm, and the chief behind him with a red ear.
The caption under it said, To StallFour: thank you for reading.
← Chapter 1 · All chapters · Chapter 3 →
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend