My Strict Boss Is the Secret Artist Drawing Spicy Comics of Us novel · Chapter 24 of 24
Chapter 24: Comiket
The line for the Fourteenth Floor began at four in the morning outside Tokyo Big Sight, in the dark, in nine degrees of cold.
By six it went round two corners and the end of it was still invisible.
Nao stood at the front of it in a puffy coat.
Her cardboard sign said, in marker, THE FOURTEENTH FLOOR: PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE MAN IN CHARGE.
She had brought twelve hot cans of vending machine coffee and a thermos of miso soup.
She handed them out down the queue.
"Section Two," she said, as Sota passed with a box. "Section One. Reiji, Chief, whatever he's called now."
"He's called the artist," Sota said.
"He's called," said Nao, "the reason I won eleven thousand yen."
Inside the hall, under the white lights, the long rows of tables went on forever.
Maki had put them at the end of an aisle, between a circle selling fox-eared notebooks and a circle selling railway timetables.
The tablecloth was gray. The sign on the wall behind it said THE FOURTEENTH FLOOR in square black letters.
Two name cards stood on the front edge.
One said REDPEN. The other, in smaller print, said STALL FOUR.
Sota set them out with his hands steady and his ears red.
The chief sat down behind the table in his charcoal suit and put a stack of four hundred books at his elbow.
He uncapped his red pen.
"You don't have to write in all of them," Sota said.
"I do."
"It's four hundred bubbles."
"It's one bubble. Four hundred times."
The doors opened at ten, and the first person at the table was a girl in a school coat, holding her phone in both hands.
She looked at the cards, and she looked at Sota.
"Stall Four?" she whispered.
"Yes."
"Oh, my god. You're real. You're the one who said the desk was your favorite."
"It was."
"It was everyone's favorite!"
The chief took her copy, and opened it to the last page, and bent over the empty bubble.
He wrote three words in it, in red, in his small straight hand.
I love you.
He signed his pen name underneath, and turned the book round and handed it to her with both hands.
She read the bubble, and put the book against her chest, and cried.
"Next," said Sota.
They did it for five hours.
Each reader got a book, three words, and a small tidy signature.
Some of them got a hug from Nao, who was pretending to be security.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of My Strict Boss Is the Secret Artist Drawing Spicy Comics of Us are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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